by Unknown
“Oh Raife.” She whispered a prayer for the poor, dead man, burying her face once again against the wolf’s fur. She shivered, suddenly cold, even in all her velvet, even with the wolf’s body, flushed from its run, between her thighs. The animal slowed and she dared to open her eyes. She glimpsed a faint light as she peered around the wolf’s big head.
“Stad!” A voice echoed all around them.
She couldn‘t tell where it was coming from and Sibyl gasped, grabbing the wolf’s fur in her fists. They were underground—she knew that much. It was cold and no sun reached this place. Maybe they were in a cave? The thought of entering a wolf den with these two animals gave her a chill that went bone-deep, far worse than the chilly temperature making goose flesh rise on her skin.
But the voice that had spoken was most definitely human.
And as soon as the wolves heard it, they stopped.
The white wolf gave a quick bark and Sibyl felt the wolf beneath her growl. It rumbled through her body and the sound made her shiver. She held on tighter, even if she was afraid of the animal who carried her on its back. So far, it hadn’t done anything to hurt her—it had, in fact, carried her away from grave danger. The disembodied voice, while human, was far more unknown.
“Please,” she whispered, cheek pressed to the wolf’s soft pelt. “Don’t hurt me. Please.”
“A bheil a' Ghàidhlig agad?” the voice asked, closer now.
“I don’t understand,” she pleaded in the darkness, the figure of a man drawing nearer. “I’m an Englishwoman. I don’t—”
Beneath her, the wolf moved.
It didn’t so much move as change. The animal’s fur, thick and soft, grew sparse and then seemed to disappear altogether. One moment she was leaning forward over the wolf’s neck, nearly horizontal, and the next minute she was hanging on for dear life, her body almost completely vertical. She screamed, her cry echoing back at her, and let go, falling to a hard, rocky floor.
“Are ye hurt, lass?” The voice beside her spoke English. She understood it perfectly well. In fact, she could have sworn she recognized it. But that was impossible.
“Raife?” she whispered, feeling the man’s warmth as he knelt beside her. “Is it you? Can it be you? How…?”
“Come.” He lifted her in his arms and Sibyl put hers around him and sobbed against his neck in the darkness.
It was too much. The whole day had been too much, from her daring escape attempt to this very surreal moment as this strange man carried her past the sentry. She heard the guard say, “Siuthad!” the voice definitely male. “Càite bheil Darrow?” and the man who held her responded in Gaelic, but she was already slipping further into darkness.
She had a moment to chastise herself, knowing her father would have been appalled at such a feminine display of weakness, but her body had simply given up. She found herself disappearing down another deep, dark hole, cheek resting against the bare chest and beating heart of a man who, she could have sworn, was a giant, black wolf only moments before.
* * * *
Surely she was dreaming.
Sibyl woke on a mattress, looking around in the flickering light of an oil lamp, blinking up at the shadows and a man whose face was becoming increasingly familiar. She remembered the hunt first—her ride with Alistair into the woods, the revelation that the animal they were pursuing was a pregnant female locked in a convenient cage, her subsequent emancipation of that animal, her shooting of her fiancé, and her eventual escape—and then her capture.
Well, she didn’t exactly remember her capture, but she could only infer that it had happened. She remembered the dogs barking, the horses, the shouts of the men. She remembered huddling, trembling and sobbing like a child, on the forest floor. And then—
And then her mind had taken flight.
Surely she had been captured, taken down here into a cold, dank place with sheet rock walls that could only be in the dungeons of Alistair’s keep, and her imagination had done the rest. She couldn’t trust her memory—the wolves, the ones that had carried her to dubious safety, had been a dream. She was sure of it.
She had been sick with a very high fever once when she was a child and had dreamed all sorts of things. Her father’s huntsman had been twisted by her imagination into a bear, her mother into a vulture, her dear father into a barking dog. She knew the mind could play tricks that way.
This man, Raife—was he her jailer then? He sat beside her on a log-stump stool, still wearing only that wrapped tartan plaid, bare-chested in the dim orange glow as he pressed a cool, wet cloth to her head. She didn’t recognize him as one of Alistair’s men, but perhaps the master of the dungeon was little more than a prisoner himself, locked away down here taking care of Alistair’s mistakes, keeping her betrothed’s secrets.
“Where am I?” Her voice cracked. How long had she been asleep?
“’Ere lass.” He spoke English, but in her dream, he’d spoken Gaelic. So that must mean she really had been dreaming. Of course she had, because in her dream this man had changed from a giant, black wolf back into this human form.
“Yer wit me,” Raife reassured her. That cool cloth felt so good, and it made his hand feel even warmer as he brushed hair away from her face. “Yer safe.”
Maybe she was still dreaming, but somehow she knew this was true.
A low whine reached her ears and Sybil frowned, trying to sit up. Raife frowned his own objection but he helped her, grabbing onto her elbow and steadying her when her intention was clear.
“Easy,” he urged as she swung her feet to the floor. “You’re wounded.”
“Wounded?” She touched her head, an ache throbbing there, vaguely remembering something. Then it came back. The arrow stuck quivering in the tree. The blood trickling down her cheek. She touched her temple and felt a bandage there. It was real. That sudden realization brought a chill and she shuddered, meeting Raife’s eyes.
It was real.
It was all real.
“Wulvers?” she whispered, her lower lip trembling.
Raife gave a slow nod.
But it couldn’t be real. Her mind balked.
“Laina!” The shout echoed in the distance and Sibyl’s spine straightened.
The white wolf. Raife had called her Laina. Who was calling for her?
“Darrow.” Raife stood, glancing down at Sibyl, frowning.
Sibyl remembered that too. The sentry who had stopped them, he had asked about someone named Darrow. She didn’t know any of the other words in Gaelic, but she knew that was a name.
“Mo bràithair.” Raife took a step toward the door, that shout growing louder, calling the white wolf’s name.
“Your brother.” Sibyl stood, steadying herself against him. He was as solid and still as a tree rooted in place. “He owns the wolf?”
Her mind wouldn’t let her believe anything else.
“Darrow!” Raife called his brother’s name, opening the door. “Trobhad an seo!”
The shouting stopped but Sibyl heard footfalls heading toward them. And that low whine intensified. She located the source of the sound across the room and realized it was the wolf. She was still laboring, panting softly, and beside her was an older woman dressed in tartan plaid tending to her and a much younger word
“Laina?” Sibyl whispered the wolf’s name and her white head came up briefly. Those blue eyes locked with hers. And then she was laboring again, her side rising and falling quickly, the sound of her panting filling the room.
“Laina!” Darrow bellowed, bursting into the room. He was as tall as his brother, but lankier, not quite as broad. He had the same thick, dark hair, those piercing blue eyes that desperately searched the room for the sight of the wolf laboring on a mattress on the floor across the room.
The wolf howled and Darrow went straight to her side.
“Tiugainn!” the midwife muttered to herself, doing something Sibyl couldn’t see, but there was blood, plenty of it, on both women’s hands. The wolf actually snapped
at the old woman, but she didn’t actually bite her.
“Tha e cunnartach!” The midwife shook her head, removing a hand covered in blood from the behind of the wolf. Sibyl had seen enough calves and horses born to know what was happening, but she leaned in to ask Raife for sure.
“What is it?”
“The pup is facing wrong ways,” he murmured, his eyes on the scene before them. “She is trying to turn the bairn.”
“The pup…” Sibyl frowned. “But… shouldn’t there be… more?”
Horses and cows usually carried only one offspring to term, but wolves were like dogs—they had litters. She had played with lots of puppies in the warmth of her father’s castle kitchen where the bitch would give birth in a large crate, and then the puppies would crawl all over each other in it until they were big enough to let roam.
“Wulvers birth one.”
Wulvers. Not wolves, wulvers. Raife had corrected her again and again, but Sibyl had dismissed his insistence as a language barrier. In Scotland, wolves and wulvers seemed interchangeable. At least, that’s what she had initially believed. Now, watching the white wolf, Laina, give birth, she wasn’t so sure.
“Bidh curramach!” Darrow growled at the midwife as she did something that made Laina howl in pain.
“Wulvers birth as wolves,” Raife explained as Sibyl watched, feeling weak-kneed and weak-stomached. “She cannot change while she’s laboring. ’Tis why she could not free herself.”
“From the cage?” Sibyl watched as Raife’s brother bent to press his head against Laina’s furry one. She licked his cheek, whimpering softly, and the man whispered something in Gaelic that she couldn’t quite hear and wouldn’t have understood regardless.
“It is their first bairn.” Raife put an arm around Sibyl’s waist, perhaps sensing her uneasy footing. “Nature knows its own way. Wolves birth young far easier than humans.”
Raife had caught her just in time, too, because Sibyl felt her knees buckle as the wolf pup was born. The midwife exclaimed in triumph as the slick, dark-furred creature emerged covered in a bloody sac, headfirst, as it should be. And then for the second time that day, Sibyl felt the world begin to go dark as, right before her very eyes, the white wolf Laina changed.
Sibyl told herself she was dreaming. That the naked, blonde woman and the crying babe between her open thighs had always been there. Or perhaps, the wolf was still there, and Sibyl was in the grip of a horrible fever, imagining the wolf taking human form. Her vision went dark around the edges, but she saw it all anyway.
The wolf’s body arched and moved, its snout shrinking, mouth open in what appeared to be a wide yawn that swallowed up its whole face. The animal’s limbs stiffened, muscles moving underneath, as if something were alive beneath its flesh. Then its fur slowly vanished, as if it was being pulled into its skin from the inside. The skin was as pale as a baby’s beneath, pale as any human. Everything changed, everything about her, except for the color of her bright blue eyes. Those were the same, from beginning to end. Sibyl focused her attention there, her own eyes wide with disbelief and fear.
Her eyes were telling her truths her mind didn’t want to see.
Maybe the arrow that had grazed her scalp had taken her sanity with it?
“Balach!” the old midwife announced. The younger woman cleaned the child up with a cloth and handed it to the mother.
“Balach.” The young mother’s voice was soft, her blue eyes full of tears as she met Darrow’s in the light of the lamp. “Garaith.”
“It’s a boy.” Raife smiled, his arm tightening around Sibyl’s waist as he explained this to her in hushed tones. “The next in our line. They will name him Garaith, after my father.”
The woman—she was a woman now, full figured and lovely with the longest blonde hair Sibyl had ever seen—reached for her wailing child. Laina brought the baby up to her breast, and Sibyl saw the slash there beneath the woman’s collarbone as the midwife covered her with a sheet, a little late to protect her modesty. The wound had been tended, but she would have a scar there for the rest of her life.
A bloody souvenir from Alistair’s dirk.
Sibyl remembered the way he’d slashed at the white wolf, the one she had freed from the cage. The one who couldn’t free herself, because she was carrying young and couldn’t transform from wolf to human in order to undo the latch. The one who had run through the forest beside the black wolf, the wolf that had carried Sibyl to safety, down here into its den.
The black wolf who had changed in the darkness from animal to human right under Sibyl’s very own hands—that was the man, Raife, who stood beside her. And now this animal, Laina, had turned from she-wolf to human woman before Sibyl’s very own eyes. The young she had birthed had transformed from a whining pup to a wailing human child with thick, black hair like his father.
Like his uncle.
Raife hadn’t been mistaken when he corrected her use of the word “wolf” to “wulver.”
“What magic is this?” Sibyl’s voice barely escaped her throat in a whisper. “What devilment? Who are you?”
She looked up to meet Raife’s impossibly blue eyes, saw the man, Darrow, glance back at her and frown, the woman, Laina, looking between them, concerned.
“What are you?”
For the second time that day—only the second time in her entire life—Sibyl fainted.
Chapter Four
Darrow and Raife argued in Gaelic and she couldn’t understand a word of it—until her name was mentioned. Sibyl opened her eyes to find herself in an entirely different room than she’d been in before as she listened to the men fight. Sitting up on the mattress, she saw this room was much larger than the last, with a huge fireplace carved out of one wall, a warm, inviting fire lit there. A table sat near it, set with actual dishes, silverware and napkins, something she hadn’t expected in this strange place.
Just the sight of the set table made her stomach growl. She tried to remember the last time she’d eaten and then she recalled the food she had hidden under her dress. Listening to the two men yell at each other in Gaelic and glancing occasionally toward the door to make sure no one was coming, she lifted up her skirt and unpinned her satchel. It had come partially open and she frowned, digging through, hoping she hadn’t lost anything.
The bread she’d stolen was hard but she ate it anyway. The dried fruit and jerky was tough, but tasty. Sibyl’s stomach thanked her and asked for more, but she only ate a handful of her rations, not knowing when she might need them. She knew she would have to slip out of this place the first chance she got and head south, back to the village where they had left her ladies’ maid, Rose. It had been her original plan, and while she had been waylaid by these…
Wulvers.
Sibyl shuddered, instinctively shrinking back against the stone wall as she repacked her satchel. Glancing at the table, she suddenly had a horrible thought. What if she was the one on the menu? These half-men, half-wolves certainly had to eat, didn’t they? Why wouldn’t they eat her? The one called Raife had brought her here, but it was clear his brother, Darrow, didn’t think that had been such a good idea, if the sound of them yelling and throwing things at each other was any indication.
She knew they were somewhere deep underground. Maybe inside a cave. Somewhere hidden in the mountains she had seen from her window perch at Alistair’s castle, the mountains that lay beyond the forest where they’d been hunting. They wouldn’t want anyone to know where they were hiding, would they? No, of course not. They certainly couldn’t let Sybil go, after she’d been in their den. Could they?
Her blood turned to ice water in her veins as she glanced from the set table to the doorway. There was a door, thick and heavy, but sound drifted in. The sound of the two brothers, arguing over her fate. She was sure of it. Not only had she heard the one called Raife say her name—the other one kept saying the word “shasennach.” She’d picked that up quickly, because many of Alistair’s men called her that. It mean Englishwoman, although
the way the Scots said it, she might as well have heard them calling her “pig.”
Darrow said the word with the same scorn she’d heard from many of Alistair’s men.
She had been a stranger in a strange land at the MacFalon castle, but now she was in a whole other world. These creatures might look like men, but they were not. Whatever witchcraft or devilry they possessed to make them look human, they were still animals, and animals, even tame ones, could be dangerous when provoked. Even her father’s hounds would bite you if you disturbed them during a feeding. And she’d heard the animal trainer, the one who had come through with his “tame” bear, had later been mauled and killed by that same animal after he’d spent years with it.
Was Raife fighting in her favor, she wondered hopefully, ears tuned, listening for him to say her name again. She had freed the white she-wolf, after all. Maybe that would work in her favor? Or maybe… Sibyl looked again at the set table, shivering in spite of the warmth of the room.
Maybe she was going to be their dinner.
She dug into her satchel, finding the kitchen knife she had stolen wrapped in a cloth napkin. She unwrapped it and looked around for a place to hide it. Surely these creatures, even if they were something wicked and unnatural, could be killed? She would have to be ready, in any case. She stowed the satchel under the bed and had just climbed back onto the bed, looking for a place to hide the knife, when Raife opened the door and stalked into the room.
She sat and blinked at him, not saying a word, as he looked at her with her skirts hiked up past her knees, something that once would have made her blush with modesty, but the past day’s events had changed her. The only flush that crept into her cheeks came because she realized she’d been caught with the knife she’d been planning to hide sitting right next to her on the bed.