Under the threat of a lashing from Bart’s dominance, he followed them back into the woods. The beta took them to a far secluded spot in the forest, a place none of them had been before. The underbrush was so thick. One could hardly walk through it without thrusting aside the dense branches and brambles that guarded this secret place.
“The key to changing at will isn’t to completely force it. You must summon the wolf forward, bringing it into the open. You must coax it from within yourself. That’s the only way you can change at will. It is by your will that you change, not the wolf’s.”
Fermin pointed back to where they came. “So, why take us from the meadow? Why here?”
Bart opened his arms as if to display the obvious reason before their eyes. “Can’t you feel a deeper connection with it when you’re surrounded by the forest instead of in the open field?”
Darren couldn’t. The forest, the meadow, or the chateau made no difference. He kept his wolf at a distance, always out of arm’s reach. The wolf seemed to prefer it that way too. They were aware of one another, but not interacting except the last two times he changed.
“That’s it?” Edmund questioned. “Just ask it to come out? Why not teach this to everyone?”
Bart dropped his hands and Darren moved a little further into the shadows to lean against a nearby oak, still within sight of his beta but separated from the others.
“Because you actually want to change. Many of the others still fear their wolf and can’t bring themselves to turn. The wolf will only come when it doesn’t smell your fear. So few are ready for the change, but you are.”
Fermin already had his eyes closed, putting into practice what Bart had just told him. Darren folded his arms over his chest, his face telling a different story than what he truly felt. He didn’t want to be there when they changed, but what else could he do? He knew he wasn’t ready for what they wanted, yet Bart wouldn’t allow him to leave.
For nearly half an hour, both Edmund and Fermin tried to change on their own. That time was punctuated by several moments of meditation, ending in an exasperated sigh from either boy when they simply couldn’t bring their wolf forward. Bart told them to have patience and try a little harder.
Surprisingly, he did not pressure Darren to join them. He remained a bored spectator, watching and waiting with a kind of worried expectancy. After a while, his senses wandered, scoping out the forest around him. Nocturnal critters scurried through the treetops as bugs sang their nightly lullaby to the moon above. Everything was calm, pristine, and the four loups-garous were part of nature as it was a part of them all the time.
Yet, there was something amiss. A subtle, but nagging scent that didn’t seem to mesh with the rest of the forest. Darren took one last look at Bart and the rest before slipping away to follow it. It was foolish, perhaps even dangerous to do so. Darren couldn’t just stand there against the tree trunk for the rest of the night while the boys continually failed in their mission to become one with their wolf outside of their cycle.
He came to a certain clearing, one he hadn’t been to before. There were no markings on the trees to tell him where he was in relation to the chateau training grounds. He could still hear the soft voices of his packmates not too far away.
Darren stood on the edge of the clearing and sniffed for the source of the foreign scent. It was metallic, he knew that much. It was something that didn’t belong amongst the wild earth and the living things of the forest. Metal was manmade, like guns and arrowheads and armor. Loups-garous had no use for armor or blacksmithing of any kind.
Yet, even in the moonlight, he couldn’t see any glint of the metal he smelled. Perhaps he was mistaken and it was beyond the clearing?
He took a few steps into the open before he realized his mistake. So swift that he didn’t have time to jump out of the way, a net enclosed around him and a thousand sharp edges cut into the skin of his arms and legs. The metal he smelled burned his flesh when it poked through the fabric of his shirt.
Searing pain like the embers of a popping fire nearly covered his body. Whatever this strange metal was, it was woven into the netting. Darren pulled and tugged at the ropes to snap them, but found himself recoiling and writhing to escape the poison metal.
He shouted for help and it seemed to take an eternity for Bart to find him. In reality, it might have been seconds. The pain blinded him to the passage of time. Darren continued to struggle and fight against his bonds. He could feel the metal lacerate his skin with every motion. The cuts healed slowly, only to be sliced open once more as he thrashed about.
“Darren, stop moving,” Bart ordered. “This is silver. I know it hurts, but you need to stop moving.”
“Silver!” Fermin exclaimed from the safe edge of the clearing where the vicious metal couldn’t hurt him. “That must be a hunter’s net!”
“All of you, calm down!” Bart’s dominance flooded through to each of them and Darren slowed in his struggle, though it wasn’t because of his beta’s orders. The pain was almost too intense for him to bear any longer.
Blood soaked into his ripped pants and tunic, dripping to the ground. Bart couldn’t reach where the edge of the net closed around Darren and suspended him off the ground. So, he began to take his summoned claws and cut around the silver pieces to make a hole for Darren to fall through.
Bart stopped cold and his nostrils flared. Darren smelled it too. A stranger, a human. He was clearly not loup-garou because he didn’t bring with him the tingling sensation that followed every loup-garou. He smelled of foreign, stringent things and more metal.
The stranger must have appeared on the other side of the clearing, because Fermin and Edmund took off running to the north, disappearing from view. Bart roared and charged at the intruder that Darren couldn’t see coming up behind him. He heard the twang of arrows loosed from a bow and the dull thud as the arrow tips imbedded in flesh.
Bart growled and roared, both in pain and rage, but Darren’s consciousness began to slip from him. The fiery, intense pain of the silver against his skin became too much, he couldn’t escape it. He was aware of a sudden silence in the clearing and then the euphoric sensation of falling as darkness enveloped him.
Chapter 9
When Darren’s senses returned to him, he became keenly aware that he was no longer in the forest. The smells of metal, stagnant water, stone, and poison blasted him, instilling a terror that he couldn’t shake. His eyes, burning and sore as they were, finally opened to search in the dim light.
He was trapped in a cage, its shiny metal bars like the ensnaring fangs of a beast. The padlock appeared to be clamped tight around the swinging end of the door. Beyond the bars, he could see further into the room though there was no light to aid him. A long table sat a few yards away. Its surface speckled and stained by old blood that gave its finish a darker shade than what it might have been when it was first made.
Strange tools of all kinds, with blunt and sharp edges, were littered across the tabletop. More contraptions, all bizarre and menacing in their construction, lined the damp stone walls of what he assumed to be a cellar. There were no windows and only one door that remained closed on the opposite side of the room.
Water dripped from the ceiling to create tiny puddles of standing water across the floor. The rafters and wooden planks that made up the roof of his prison were old and rotted out in many places, the boards cracked through. Darren wondered if the earth above would cave in at any moment.
When he turned to look beside him, he was shocked to see another person in the darkness. Not just a person, but a woman. No, a girl, he realized as his eyes further adjusted. She perhaps looked a year or so older than him, if at all. Clad in a long, dingy gray dress whose hem was stained by the dirt and muck from her own private cage. She paid no mind to him.
Her eyes, as pale and gray as her dress, were fixed on the door, as if she were intently waiting for it to open. Long blond hair trailed down her back and over her shoulders, the only radiant thing i
n the entire cellar.
Darren couldn’t help but noticed she was attractive, in a sophisticated and elegant sort of way.
As his strength returned, he pushed himself to sit up, but she still did not turn to him. He inspected his body, expecting to see the many scars created by the silver that had nearly torn him to shreds before he passed out. His skin was clean and spotless, without a single blemish. His sleeping clothes, however, were still torn and wrinkled. Noelle would not be pleased with him after she took one look at the blood-spotted garments.
That was, if he could even get back to Noelle and the chateau. Fear, more stifling than he had ever experienced, took claim over his heart and mind.
“What is this place?” he asked the mysterious woman, crawling closer to wrap his hands around the bars.
“You don’t want to – “
It was too late. The metal coating on the bars burned Darren’s palms and he shrank away to allow them to heal. He hissed at the stinging pain and watched as his seared flesh began to stitch itself back together again.
How did she know the bars would hurt him?
“Who are you?” he asked, still puzzled why she would not look at him. He became furious when she didn’t answer his question.
He repeated it, a little louder this time.
The girl rolled her pretty eyes and finally acknowledged him. The very breath froze in his lungs. When he saw Evangeline for the first time at the chateau, he had thought she was beautiful. Seeing this stranger, he knew that he had been wrong. This fair-skinned lady in the cage beside his might as well have been the definition of true beauty. A goddess incarnate.
“My name is Jane. Jane Gennari… And you’re in hell.”
Darren looked around, hating to tear his gaze away from her. By her accent, he could immediately tell she was Italian. “This isn’t hell. Where am I?”
He knew exactly what hell was. Hell was the black, empty void of his memory that passed when he had no control over his body or senses. Hell was succumbing to agonizing pain without source or reason, that threatened to tear him apart. Hell was being thrown into this new life, watching the old one burn to ashes, and somehow survive. Hell was breathing when all he wanted to do was stop.
“It’s close enough.” Her eyes grazed over him, thick lashes batting with each blink as she assessed the man with whom she was trapped. “You haven’t been a luppo mannero for long, have you?”
One of the boys at the chateau was Italian and sometimes used the term interchangeably with loup-garou. Darren’s gaze turned hard. She might have been in her own cage, but who was to say that she wasn’t in league with the man who brought him here? The one who set the net that was purposefully made to contain a loup-garou. It might have been unthinkable to believe that such a wondrous beauty might have been so evil, but Darren was leaving nothing to chance.
“I beg your pardon?”
Then, she grinned and Darren couldn’t decide which stole his heart first; her smile or the way her eyes seemed to hold their own kind of luster. “It’s all right,” she said. “Perhaps you’re more accustomed to the term ‘werewolves’?” Jane must have seen the way his shoulders went rigid at its utterance. “Yes, you haven’t been turned for long at all. Poor thing.”
A low, threatening growl rumbled in his throat. He hated that term. Hated the very way it sounded, with that pitiful tone like he was some creature for which to feel sorry. He heard it whispered when he passed villagers in the streets, back when he was an infirm child. Not anymore.
“Oh,” she crooned playfully. “You’re a proud werewolf too.”
“I am not proud,” he challenged. “I’m just not poor and I’m not helpless.”
“Except that you are in a cage of which you can’t get out. You appear pretty helpless to me.”
Darren’s nostrils flared. “You’re in the same predicament. You’re just as helpless as I am.”
She held up a pale, slender finger. “That is where you’re wrong. I have a plan. You do not.”
“So, you know where we are?” Darren took another look around, closely inspecting the walls as if there could be some detail that would help formulate the perfect plan.
“Yes,” she said. “We are beneath the house of a madman.”
He waited for her to explain herself or to elaborate on her wonderful, fool-proof plan. She did neither. If it weren’t for the constant dripping of the water and the whistling of the wind somewhere above them, the silence would have rung shrill in his ears.
That was when he realized something was not right. He didn’t hear her heartbeat. Even in the soft silence of the dormitory, he heard the heartbeats of those around him, as well as his own. Here, he only heard one. His own.
He looked to Jane and narrowed his eyes, listening hard for any sign that she was actually there. Surely, he hadn’t gone insane so much as to imagine someone to be there when there was no one. He didn’t hear a heartbeat. Not one. Not even a single breath was expelled from her delicate nostrils.
“Touch me,” he ordered.
Jane looked to him as if he had just asked for an obscene favor. “I beg your pardon?” she shrieked.
“Not that way,” he growled and offered out his hand as close to the bars as he could without touching them. “Touch my hand. I want to make sure you’re real.”
She simmered down and shrugged before slipping her hand and arm through the two sets of bars to touch the tips of his fingers. Her skin was cold, but she was certainly real.
“Why can’t I hear your heart?” he asked, their fingers still barely touching one another in such a way that knotted his stomach and made his wolf shiver. He had never been so close to a woman so exquisite.
Jane blinked and seemed stunned for just a moment before withdrawing her hand from his and pulling her knees to her chest. “You don’t know?” When Darren didn’t so much as flinch, she said, “I’m… I’m a vampire.”
Darren took a second look at her, considering her features. She was pale, but she hardly appeared to be the succubus of the dark, cautionary tales. Then again, neither was the loup-garou. It was completely possible that vampires were not the beasts they were rumored to be.
“Vampire… So, you’re the undead?”
Her slim shoulder shrugged again, such a human and lively quality for a lifeless body to display. “That’s not quite the right term, but it’ll do. I drink blood, too. Just in case you were wondering.”
If he had met her months ago, Darren wouldn’t have believed her. Even if she could prove it, he wouldn’t have reacted with such calm. He simply nodded in understanding. “So, a vampire and werewolf find themselves in the custody of a madman… Why?”
It was clear that Jane couldn’t fathom how he could be so composed either. Yet, now that the elephants in the room had been addressed, they could set to the more pressing business of escape.
“The man, Richard, he has something of mine. I ran away from my father in Italy to get it back. From what I understand, he’s been feeding off the blood of vampires for over a century. It doesn’t turn him into a vampire, but it does give him immortal life.” She scooted closer to the bars. “From what I’ve heard in rumors, he takes something from each vampire he kills. I allowed myself to be caught so I can take back what he stole from my mother.”
Darren’s heart sank into his stomach. With each word, she poured out the passion and determination that led her miles from her home, just for a family heirloom. Her bravery in the face of danger and death was remarkable. This might have been the very place her mother was killed – if he was assuming correctly – and yet she came here willingly to take back something she believed rightfully belonged to her.
Once the amazement of her resolve passed, Darren was able to put the conversation in reverse. “Wait,” he said. “This man drinks blood, but is not a vampire?”
Jane rolled her eyes once more. “It’s much more complicated than that, but that is the result. It gives the drinker nearly immortal life, but it also rot
s the brain, which is why he’s gone insane. To become a vampire, he must be on the point of death and then drink human blood. Vampire blood is not the same, just as werewolf blood is not the same. Why you’re here, I don’t know.”
Darren passed a hand over his eyes, as if it would erase this terrible nightmare. When he looked around again, he was still in the cellar. He would have cursed the spark of life in his chest if a lady weren’t present. Vampire or not, Darren had been taught better than to speak foul language in front of a woman.
“How far away is this place from Albi?” Darren asked, as if Jane would even know.
“I don’t know, but his home is about two days’ walk from the Italian border.”
Darren hung his head in his hands. That was so far from Albi, practically on the other side of France. Surely his pack would be looking for him. What became of Bart, or Fermin and Edmund? They weren’t in the cellar, but that didn’t mean they were alive either.
If he remembered correctly, Bart had been shot multiple times with arrows that may or may not have been made with silver tips. The beta could very well be dead. What if the pack couldn’t find him? What if Jane’s plan to escape didn’t work? What if this madman killed him or tried to use him just like he had used vampires?
Every inch of body quivered as his muscles bunched and tensed beneath his skin. His wolf, as calm as it was from Jane’s presence, writhed and bucked against the confines of his prison. Darren couldn’t take it anymore and grabbed for the bars one more time.
Jane screamed for him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He had to get out, he had to escape and breathe fresh air. Darren roared against the pain as he stretched and bent the bars. Quickly, his nerves and muscles in his hands lost strength and his body rebelled against his own will. He let go, letting the bloody and charred skin fall from his palms.
Darren crouched and rammed his shoulder into the opening he had created, but it wasn’t enough for his bulky frame to squeeze through. If he was the small, weak, frail boy he had once been, he could have slipped through easily. Now, he could barely wiggle the bulk of his arm through the close-set bars.
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