Blood and Wolf

by Eva Truesdale

  “You say that like collecting them will be easy,” Soren says drily.

  “I didn’t say everything would be right,” I say through clenched teeth. “But it would be nice if I could just do something right. You know, for once in my life.”

  Soren averts his eyes, and Carys and Liam are both speechless for a moment until Carys finally says, “You do plenty right. And I don’t think you’re crazy.”

  Liam gives her an exasperated look.

  “What?” Carys shoots back. “I don’t. Because I’ve heard of these curatorian keys before. I don’t know much about them, I’ll admit. And yes, everyone just assumes they’re legends, but most people don’t have the connection that Elle has to Canath—to that otherworld. So if what Soren said about that connection being able to awaken these artifacts is true, then maybe she could find them even though nobody else has ever come close to doing so.”

  I feel warmth spreading all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, radiating out from a pool of it deep in my belly.

  She said almost exactly what I was hoping she would.

  I’m going to miss her. Terribly.

  And Liam too, even though he’s still giving me that disappointed look.

  “Miss us?” Liam says, and I realize too late that I wasn’t guarding my thoughts the way I should have been. “Don’t be stupid. You aren’t going to miss us.”

  “I—”

  “Because if you’re going to insist on doing something so crazy, we’re obviously coming with you.”

  Carys nods quickly, though her eyes look slightly terrified. “We already talked about it on the way here. Whatever you needed, we would do. Wherever you planned to go…we’re going too.”

  I start to argue, but Soren shushes me before I can get a word out. He points to the woods, and signals for us to listen.

  We do.

  I immediately hear the sound of a wolf barreling through the forest toward us.

  “Okay, so maybe we should explain now,” Liam says sheepishly.

  I spin frantically toward him. “Explain what?”

  “Well, we smelled a sorcerer, and we thought you might be in trouble but unable to tell us, and with all the chaos and mess going on back at the pack house we thought there was no way we couldn’t tell them that you—”

  “Oh, you didn’t.”

  But they did, apparently.

  Because a moment later a sleek, reddish-brown wolf leaps from the woods. She lands a few feet away, kneads her claws into the stone and gives herself a shake to throw off the leaves and twigs clinging to her.

  And then my mom turns her one good eye directly toward me.

  The woods seem very quiet—like I could pick out each individual drop of water falling into the pool behind me. I feel that weightiness that I’m used to with Mom growing, crushing even worse than usual. Then she finally loosens her stance a bit, throws a glance and a sniff over her shoulder, and shifts back to her human form. Her movements are a bit stiffer than usual, maybe. But otherwise she doesn’t seem to be experiencing any lingering pain thanks to the catastrophe a few days ago, which allows me to exhale at least some of the breath I’m holding.

  Her gaze darts directly to Soren.

  “Sorcerer,” she says—more to herself than anyone, though there’s a hint of disbelief and exasperation in her voice that I’m pretty sure are meant for me.

  “Guilty as charged,” Soren says.

  Mom frowns at his casual tone, then fixes a stern look on me. “Explain.”

  I have Liam and Carys to help me ramble through my plans this time, which makes it a little easier to get through it all, at least. And Mom is surprisingly quiet throughout our rambling. Piecing a lecture together in her mind, I assume.

  But once I’ve finished, she surprises me, because all she says is: “This is not how I wanted your life to go.”

  I start to answer her several times before I finally find the right words. “I know. But it’s not finished. I can do this. I can fix everything that went wrong because of me.”

  “Not because of you,” she says sharply. “Don’t you dare ever think that you somehow deserved this, okay? You can’t help the circumstances of your own birth. You can only control where you go from here.” She glances around at the four of us and is thoughtful for a minute, as if trying to convince herself that this ragtag group of us stands any chance of actually stabilizing the entire supernatural world. Then she sighs in a defeated sort of way and says, “Your father will not be happy with me if I let you go.”

  “I know.”

  “Even though he and I had our share of world-saving adventures in the past, you know. And he’ll come around eventually, I’m sure. He always does.”

  I can’t help a small smile, even if the situation’s grim. It’s a nostalgic smile, really, from thinking about all of the stories they’ve told me over the years. Although they always censored the ugliest parts, I know. I try not to think of those ugly parts now. Or about what I might really be getting myself into.

  “And I wish I could, but I can’t go with you,” my mom adds. “Everything is a mess. Maric is threatening war, and our own kind are almost as bad. Dozens of them at our door every day, wanting to ‘help’ me make plans or wanting to know why I haven’t annihilated every sorcerer on the planet yet—as though I could. I barely managed to sneak away with all the people at my throat and I just—” She cuts herself off abruptly and takes a deep breath. It’s not like her to talk about what we refer to as work-stuff with me. “Anyway, my point is that I agree with you: I don’t think you’re any safer at our home than you would be leaving. So.” She wraps me in a tight hug. Takes several deep breaths that I’m pretty sure are attempts to fight tears, and then finally she pulls back and says, “I can’t go with you, but I’ll bring you your sword.”

  “The French saber?”

  “I assumed,” she says with an arch of her brow that clearly says I’m your mother. Obviously I know what your favorite sword is; I know everything about you.

  “She’ll be safe with us,” Carys pipes up, and my mom gives her a warm—if dubious—smile.

  Liam says nothing. His eyes are on Soren. He looks as though he wants my mother to say something harsher, to maybe condemn the sorcerer, and to try to talk me out of doing this while she’s at it.

  But I know Mom won’t. Because despite her personal feelings toward the ones like Soren, Mom has always taught me not to assume things about people just because of the sort of blood they happen to have.

  The vast majority of my kind would freak out at the thought of me partnering up with him, yeah. But most of them also freaked when my mom and dad got together, because my dad is different than mom; he’s a werewolf. Not a natural-born lycan shifter like my mom, but an ‘unnatural’ mutation of his originally human existence. It’s kind of a long story. But the bottom line is, there were people who didn’t like it, my mom didn’t care, they fell in love and saved the world together anyway, and now here we are decades later.

  So yeah, she isn’t really flinching at the sight of the sorcerer standing to my left.

  And thank the gods for that, because I really don’t have the time or energy to convince anyone else of any other part of these plans of mine.

  “I need to report back for more damage control,” she says. Our gazes lock for a second, neither of us really sure what else to say; we aren’t really the mushy goodbye speech type. So I just wrap her up in another quick hug.

  “Tell Dad…Tell him I’m sorry about all this.”

  She squeezes me one last time. “I’ll tell him you love him,” she says, and then she looks back over her shoulder toward our house, sighs, and shifts back into her wolf form once more.

  “We’ll go back too, and get more supplies,” Carys suggests, “and meet you somewhere in a few hours, okay?”

  “Let’s just meet outside the airport.” I turn to Soren, who is stepping from rock to rock, his gaze sweeping the woods around us and starting to look impatient. “W
ill we be able to pull some sort of illusion trick on any weapons we bring?” I ask. “Somehow I feel like that will be easier than dealing with airport security.”

  He shrugs. “I can come up with something, I’m sure.”

  “Easy enough then.” I sound a lot more confident than I feel. “Don’t forget the passports,” I remind my friends in that same fake-confident voice as I give them a quick hug.

  On the way here, and with further input from Carys, we think we’ve narrowed down the location of where we think the first key is hiding. And it isn’t going to be a short trek. It’s going to require a trip across the ocean, actually.

  But hey, at least we all love traveling.

  Chapter Nine

  Four Days Later

  “Really don’t get how you can sleep so soundly out here,” Carys says through chattering teeth.

  I sit the rest of the way up, yawning and stretching after what was apparently a very long nap—it was the middle of the afternoon when I fell asleep. Now it’s pitch black. And I mean pitch black; not much light pollution here on the west coast of Ireland, and the moon is three-quarters full, but it’s buried behind thick rain clouds. More rain clouds. Always with the rain clouds in this place.

  And it’s eerie.

  It’s made more eerie by the knowledge of what happened here twenty-something years ago.

  See, I’ve been here before. My parents and a handful of the rest of our pack come here every year, and sometimes I come with them; this is the spot of the last great battle they all fought together. The spot where my mom was exposed to the evil of that other world in the form of a portal, which is what ultimately led to me being born with this mark on my wrist.

  That portal my mom confronted is obviously closed, now. She sent the monsters that came out of it back through to the other side, and it’s been sealed ever since. But there are still reports of weird weather patterns here, and of a strange red mist that sometimes falls over the sea at sunset.

  I’ve seen that mist myself—just a glimpse of it, back when I was eleven.

  It was the last time a lot of our pack came to this place. Including Liam—although I think his reason for not wanting to be here ever again has less to do with the creepy mist and more to do with the fact that his father was killed here during that aforementioned battle.

  I don’t think he’s ever liked coming here, for obvious reasons. If he didn’t seem so convinced that Soren planned to murder me in a gruesome manner, I seriously doubt he’d be here now. I haven’t questioned him about it, though. Because I know he’d rather just not talk about it. It’s hard to just forget about it, though, because every time Carys glances at him, she looks like she wants to cry on his behalf.

  At least she’s focused on me at the moment, though—practically glaring at me thanks to my enhanced sleeping abilities.

  “It’s because she can sleep through anything,” Liam says.

  “It’s one of my special talents, if you’ll remember.”

  Liam grins, and it sends a flood of warmth through me; I’ve been missing that grin. It’s been so rare in the days leading up to our arrival here. And his current smile might mostly be because he’s trying to pretend he isn’t thinking about his dad, but I’ll take it, anyways.

  “Your talents should also include being able to sense the keys and other things that have crossed over from Canath, if you’ll remember,” Soren says as he tromps his way up the slick, grassy hillside the leads to our chosen campsite. “So, are you even trying to see if you can feel anything weird?”

  “Like what, precisely?”

  “I don’t know. Just a feeling in your gut, perhaps?”

  “Maybe. I’m pretty sure it’s just indigestion, though, from that questionable stew we ate back in that village…”

  Carys stifles a giggle. Soren sighs and looks considerably less amused.

  “What about you?” Liam asks, the smile gone from his face as he glances sideways at Soren. I can tell he’s trying to keep the suspicion from his voice. Making an effort to try and get along with the sorcerer, at least, presumably because I’ve asked him to about eighty times now. “You said you were heading out to search for clues, right? And you’ve been gone for like two hours. So what did you find?”

  “Nothing definite.” He rummages through one of our backpacks while he talks, eventually helping himself to an apple out of mine, and taking several bites of it before he continues: “But there are some local legends about different beast sightings that make me wonder if they might be connected to the key that we believe is in this region. And there’s a lake nearby that’s rumored to have a mysterious glow to it on some nights.”

  “Seems like the sort of thing we should check out,” I say, grabbing my sword and getting to my feet.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Soren says.

  I feel incredibly anxious, suddenly; a pulling in my gut that I don’t know if I can attribute to indigestion. “How far is it?”

  “Less than three miles from here.”

  “I’ll stay and guard the camp,” Carys suggests with a yawn.

  “Are you going to be able to stay awake?”

  “Again: Like I could really sleep in these conditions,” she says, pulling off her glasses and wiping them on the inside of her jacket with a sigh. Then she taps a finger to her head and adds, “I’ll keep in touch through thoughtspeech, no worries.”

  I nod, and the rest of us set off into the night.

  The ground gets more treacherous with every step we put between us and camp. It’s all soggy, downright flooded in some places, and my feet keep getting stuck in the mud. The thick haze of fog that’s rolled in isn’t helping anything, either; I keep having flashbacks to the time we visited a museum in Dublin when I was younger, where I saw these creepy bodies that had been essentially mummified after sinking to their deaths in peat bogs.

  It doesn’t seem like a particularly pleasant way to die, if there is such a thing.

  “Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I ask, stopping short of a particularly questionable patch of ground.

  “Not really, no,” Soren answers. “It wasn’t quite this foggy when I came out here earlier. But I think the lake should be right on the other side of this ridge…”

  “You’re walking awful confidentially for someone who doesn’t know where he’s going.”

  “And that,” Soren says, tilting his head back toward us, “is essentially the story of my life.”

  (I can’t believe we’re trusting this guy,) Liam thinks to me, and I can practically hear the eyeroll in his voice.

  (Trust is a strong word. It’s more like we’re…united against a common problem.)

  (I hope you’re right.)

  (I usually am.)

  He gives me a playful nudge. I resist the urge to shove him back, only because the ground to his right looks awfully muddy, and I’d rather him not end up a mummy.

  We silently pick our way forward for another few minutes, and when we finally reach the top of the ridge, I can see a smidge of glassy lake surface beneath its blanket of fog. I’d swear it has a light glow to it, too—though that might just be because I’m still thinking of that legend Soren mentioned. I fix my eyes on it. Pause, just for a moment, to see if I really could feel something in my gut that might make me confident that we’re in the right place.

  I don’t feel anything.

  But I hear something.

  I reach for Liam’s arm, pulling him to a stop. “Do you guys hear that?” I ask, twisting around and half expecting to see that someone else has somehow managed to creep right up behind us. “Like somebody whispering right in my ear, I swear…”

  “You’re hearing voices in your head?” Soren asks.

  “It wasn’t in my head,” I whisper—but my insistence doesn’t have the bite I meant it to have. Because I can’t help but wonder if he’s right.

  “I didn’t hear anything either,” Liam says without taking his eyes off the lake. “What did they say?” />
  “I…I don’t know. It was in a weird language.”

  “Maybe it was a bog mummy?” he suggests, glancing back with a wry smile.

  “And maybe you should stop listening in on my thoughts without permission.”

  “Sorry. But you smelled like fear. I was curious what you were thinking about.”

  “Of course I smell like fear, dummy. Have you been paying any attention to our surroundings? Any at all?”

  “Not really; I’ve really just been enjoying the stroll. Not getting caught up in the details, you know.”

  “It’s good that you’ve enjoyed it while you could,” Soren interrupts, “because there’s a small detail ahead that I don’t think we’re going to be able to ignore.” He points a finger, and my gaze follows it to the lake. That small patch of visible surface is spreading, the fog clearing in a way that looks like steam rolling off a pot of boiling water.

  “That’s…weird,” Liam says. A moment later it gets weirder, because that light glow emanating from beneath the lake’s surface begins to glow more brightly.

  The mark on my wrist begins to burn.

  I slap a hand over it with enough intensity that it manages to draw both Soren and Liam’s attention away from the lake and onto me. They exchange a look that makes me feel a bit like I’m the drunk friend at a party and they’re trying to figure out how best to deal with me.

  “I’m perfectly in control here,” I say drily. “It’s just…burning. Pinching. It feels weird.”

  Soren looks back to the lake for a minute, and then to me he says, “Try walking closer to it.”

  I take a few timid steps forward. The lake glows brighter. I step backward, and the light dims. I do this several times, and every time, the result is the same.

  “You’re like those fancy dimmer switches Eli has in his library back home,” Liam remarks with a humorless chuckle.

  I stare at the glow, a heaviness settling over me as I realize what this means. “So,” I say, slowly looking back to Soren, “at least part of what you said about me seems to be true, I guess. If that really is one of the keys, it seems like it’s reacting to my presence.”