“Let’s go,” I said, pointing to the door above.
“Yes,” said Viggo.
“Here.” Landon stripped the black robe off the witch and draped it around my shoulders.
“What about Ewan?” I said.
“I took my clothes off up there,” he said, pointing. “I had just enough time to get undressed before you made me shift.”
Desta looked down at the witch. She was covered in the witch’s blood. “She’s really dead, isn’t she?”
“Got to be,” said Landon. “Nothing lives without its head.”
“But just to be sure,” said Viggo, “I think Camber’s right. Let’s get out of here.”
We sprinted across the room. Landon and Viggo helped us get up, like they had before, and then they came up after us.
The room above was empty. The windows had been busted out. The other prisoners had already escaped, save for Sinead, who was sitting in the middle of the room, hugging her knees to her chest. When she saw Ewan, she stood up, gasping.
Ewan went and picked up his clothes, but didn’t put them on. “Hey, if we’re going out the window, should we shift again?”
“Oh, probably a good idea,” I said, taking off the robe I was wearing. I made Sinead and Ewan shift and I shifted myself.
And then all of us jumped out the window. I was surprised to see, when we got out of there, that it was the house from before, the one up on the tree trunks. I couldn’t figure it. It didn’t match the interior at all. The house must be some kind of illusion. The exterior was different from the interior. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would waste magic doing such a thing, though.
I squinted around at the surrounding woods. Why didn’t this look familiar?
But we didn’t stay to look around. We all ran.
We ran until we had put as much distance between the house as we could. And then we stopped.
I shifted back and had the wolves shift back. We put on clothes, which we’d brought with us from the witch’s house.
Everyone hugged everyone else. I even hugged Viggo.
“Well,” said Landon, “do you remember where we left the car?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “I don’t even know where we are.” Nothing looked familiar at all. “I don’t remember any of this. Do you remember it?”
“It’s the woods,” said Landon, looking up at the trees. “All the tree trunks look the same to me.”
“We can steal a car from Adeline,” said Viggo. “It’s got to be close. And we’ll go back to the werewolf whorehouse now, to sleep.”
“Wait, what?” said Sinead.
“We had to stay there,” I said. “Too many people in the human town recognize Viggo.” I cocked my head to one side. “Of course, now, we don’t even have to stick together, do we?”
“What are you saying?” said Desta.
“I’m saying that Viggo specifically told us that once we were free, he was going to leave you alone. So, no time like the present, Viggo.”
Viggo raised his eyebrows. “You want me to leave?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, actually.”
“Totally,” said Landon.
“Hold on,” said Desta. “He saved us back there.”
“I seem to remember it being a team effort,” I said. “You’re the one who beheaded the witch.”
“We couldn’t have done it without him,” said Desta, looking into Viggo’s eyes. “I don’t think we should just kick him to the curb now.”
“You don’t want me to leave?” said Viggo to Desta, his mouth curving into a smile.
Desta hesitated.
“She does,” I said. “She’s only being nice.”
“We’ve all been cooped up together for a long time,” said Sinead. “We can handle having Viggo around for a little longer, don’t you think? He’s not going to hurt anything.”
“I’m not staying with the prostitutes again,” I said.
“Yeah, let’s just find the car and get back to the pack village,” said Landon. “We’ll figure it all out then.”
I wanted to point out that Viggo was not coming into the pack village, no way, no how. It didn’t matter how much he’d helped us, he was still the enemy. I wasn’t letting him see where I slept. That would be stupid. But I thought that Desta might say that she wasn’t going to the pack village either. After all, this had all happened because she and I had been arguing about the best way to get her back to the city.
I could see my sister saying that she’d travel with Viggo, just to be nice to him, when the asshole didn’t need any favors done for him.
I kept my mouth shut.
We started to walk.
But nothing seemed familiar. The woods here seemed denser than the woods we’d walked through before. The trees were closer together. It was early spring, and it was also cold.
Finally, Landon offered to scale a tree and look around, see if he could get his bearings. At least he should be able to see Adeline and tell us what direction to walk in to get there.
But when Landon climbed down, he had grim news. There were no towns nearby, nothing but trees as far as the eye could see. Wherever we were, it wasn’t anywhere near where we’d gone into the witch’s house.
“I thought something like that might have happened,” said Viggo. “The house—the inside didn’t match the outside. I thought it might mean that wherever it was we were inside was a place outside of regular space and time. So, when we came out, we didn’t come out in the place we went in.”
“What do you mean?” said Sinead. “Like, the house moved?”
“More like the house is in several different places at once,” said Viggo. “Or the entrance is. Which may explain why we haven’t seen any of the other prisoners who escaped. They may have escaped to different places. Perhaps all the windows were different exits.”
“Great,” said Landon. “So, how do we figure out where we are?”
“That I don’t know,” said Viggo.
“See?” said Desta. “Aren’t you glad we didn’t send Viggo away? Without him, we’d have no idea what was going on.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. Was it me, or was Desta a little too grateful to Viggo? I knew that Viggo was a very powerful vampire. He could compel other vampires. Had he compelled my sister to fall for him?
I honestly wouldn’t put it past him, even with his whole little act about how he’d let Desta go and that he only wanted her to be happy. That was probably all part of his evil plan. He’d make us think he was a great guy and think that Desta had gone with him willingly and then he’d turn her into his plaything, and we’d never see her again.
Since we were all tired, we decided to rest. Vampires would be happier traveling at night, anyway, so we might as well get some sleep.
Once the sun went down, Viggo said he’d try climbing one of the trees and seeing if he could see a town in any direction with his keen vampire sight, but I didn’t expect he’d do much better than Landon. Bloodhounds had all the advantages of both vampires and werewolves, so it wasn’t as though Viggo could really see that much better than Landon.
I was too tired to argue. I volunteered for second watch, because Viggo had volunteered for second watch, and I wanted to talk to that creep. Then I curled up on the ground and fell asleep in seconds flat.
I woke up to Landon shaking me. “Hey, time for your watch shift.”
“Thanks.” I yawned, rubbing my eyes.
“I can take your watch if you need to sleep.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said. I was hungry, and I could use more sleep, but I wanted to talk to Viggo. “You don’t have to take care of me, you know. I can take care of myself. Besides, you need some sleep yourself.”
Landon agreed, and I joined Viggo at the front of the group, while everyone else was behind us, asleep.
It was late afternoon. The sun would be down in a few hours. Before that happened, Viggo and I would wake the next shift for the third watch.
Viggo glanced at m
e. “I suspect you had an ulterior motive in taking the watch with me.”
“Oh?” I said. Was I that transparent?
“You really want me to leave, don’t you?”
I turned to him. “Did you compel my sister?”
“What?” He looked thoroughly confused.
“I know that you can compel other vampires,” I said. “You could have compelled her. So, did you?”
“No. Why would I do such a thing?”
“Because you want her to love you,” I said. “You compelled her to fall for you.”
He raised his eyebrows. “If I was going to resort to that, Camber, I would have done it long ago.”
I furrowed my brow. “Oh,” I said softly. No, he was right. That didn’t make any sense. Viggo’s modus operandi was that people without any autonomy bored him. He had spent all his time trying to woo and win Desta. And now, I wondered if he’d succeeded.
“What would make you think that?” he said.
“I probably just didn’t have enough sleep,” I muttered. “I wasn’t making sense.”
“Mmm,” he said.
We were quiet.
“Listen,” he said, “are you saying that you think Desta is acting favorably toward me?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why would you think I’d compelled her?”
“She’s probably just suffering from Stockholm syndrome or something,” I said.
“That’s when you feel sympathy for your captors.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“I was a fellow prisoner, Camber.”
“I don’t want to talk about Desta,” I said.
“Do we have anything else we could possibly talk about?”
“No,” I said.
More silence.
“Maybe I should leave,” Viggo said.
“Um, you should,” I said.
“Even if Desta wasn’t horrified by me, what kind of life can I give her now? I’m no longer a king. I’m a fugitive. Where would we live? What would we do?”
“Good points,” I said. “And I know for a fact that Desta wants to go back to the city.”
His shoulders slumped. “She does?”
“Definitely,” I said.
“Well, that’s… disappointing,” he said. “I suppose I could try to get the government back from Ondine, but the idea of that truly bores me. I thought your sister would want something else. She never seemed that happy in the city.”
“What do you mean?” I said. “Because she hated it in the wolf village and she definitely wanted to go back. Maybe she didn’t like the city because you were there. Maybe it’s just you she doesn’t like.”
“Maybe,” Viggo conceded. He seemed careworn and tired in a way that I had never seen him before. Part of me wanted to feel sorry for him, but I refused to do so. I had to remember who he was, after all.
More silence.
Viggo spoke up again. “Listen, for whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry about the bloodhound.”
“What?”
“I should have simply healed him. It’s possible to do that with vampire blood if you know what you’re about,” said Viggo. “It was only that I didn’t want Desta to have him back. I was jealous, and it made me petty. Now, I’ve ruined him for you. I’m sorry.”
I parted my lips. What did he want me to say? That all was forgiven? I didn’t know if I’d ever actually heard him apologize for something, so there was that, but still, it didn’t make up for everything he’d put Landon through.
“The first prototype that Aston Waterfield made, it didn’t have a rage mode,” said Viggo. “I made him keep working on the bloods until he made something that could be controlled. I wonder if he couldn’t do something, perhaps make it so that your bloodhound wouldn’t rage out.”
I looked at Viggo sharply. “Well, that would be great, except Aston escaped with the others, and we don’t know where he is.”
“True,” said Viggo. “We’ll probably never see Aston again.” He shrugged.
I rolled my eyes. “You know what? How about we just do this watch without talking?”
“If that’s what you wish.”
“It is.”
* * *
Later, when we all woke up in the dark, Viggo climbed up the tree and said that he could see lights of a town in a southern direction, so we all started walking that way.
We hadn’t gone long before we heard the sounds of howls.
Oh, that was right. It was the full moon. Last night, it had been full, and tonight it was full, and the moon would be full tomorrow night as well. I wondered that I hadn’t felt it, but I was so out of it now and so tired that my body was nearly dead.
Within about ten minutes, Sinead and Ewan started to shift, but I reached out through our bond and stopped their shift. I wished that I could be bonded to the other wolves so that I could stop their shifts as well, but I wasn’t. We moved through the woods together, waiting for werewolves to jump out at us. If they did, we would have to protect the vampires, who could be badly injured from a bite.
We didn’t know if this meant that some of the other prisoners had gotten out in the same place as us, or if it was some other wolf pack in the woods. If it was another pack, we were likely safe.
Behind us, a rustling in the trees. No, a thrashing.
Something was coming.
We all turned, tensing.
But it was Aston Waterfield, running like he was on fire.
When he saw us, he fell to his knees. “Guys! It’s you! Oh, blood and fangs, I have never been so happy to see anyone in my entire life.” He grabbed me around the legs and started kissing my ankles.
I wriggled free. “Stop that!”
“I was running from the wolves,” said Aston. “I went out the window with them, and they let me hang, and I thought it was all good. And then the moon came up in the sky, and they shifted.”
“Are they chasing you?” said Ewan.
“Um, yeah, kind of,” said Aston.
“Let’s go,” said Viggo, and we all started moving more quickly, hurrying through the woods to get away from the wolves.
But we weren’t fast enough.
Three werewolves leaped through the trees, heading straight for us.
Landon snarled, heading them off.
“Landon!” I said. “I’d rather we didn’t kill them.”
“I’ll do my best,” said Landon.
I shifted and I made Sinead and Ewan shift too. We outnumbered them that way.
Landon took on one of the wolves. He pounced on it, holding it down.
I heard a crack. He was breaking its legs.
I jumped on the second wolf, and Sinead and Ewan surrounded the third, growling at it.
I used my teeth break to the legs of the wolf I’d taken on. It yelped under me, and I felt bad, but I couldn’t have it coming after us, either.
Sinead and Ewan dealt similarly with wolf number three.
I knew the wolves would shift back in the morning and heal. For now, they were incapable of coming after us.
We left the wolves whining in pain, and we kept going.
I didn’t like to think about how we had hurt them, and the reassurance that they would heal wasn’t making me feel better for some reason.
So, I tried to think of something else, but all that came to my head was that Aston was back, and Viggo had said to me that Aston could take away Landon’s rage mode.
Was it worth mentioning to Landon, to Aston? Surely, if Aston could have permanently undone Landon’s rage mode, he would have told us, instead of giving Landon that temporary injection.
Maybe it wasn’t worth talking about.
I didn’t want to think about Aston, so instead, I focused on Desta, who seemed to be staring at Viggo a lot. I needed to talk to my sister, to find out what she was thinking. If she had lost it temporarily, it was understandable. The stress of it all could make Viggo seem gallant. He was always saving us, after all.
We t
rudged on through the night, and the moon hung heavy in the sky.
And then, abruptly, there was a howl close by, another werewolf.
Landon and I both froze, trying to see where it was coming from.
It burst out of the undergrowth and leaped onto Desta.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I screamed.
Viggo swore.
We both ran for the werewolf, but Viggo got there first. He tore its head off in a move that was so quick and so vicious that I didn’t have a chance to stop it.
But I couldn’t scold him for killing the werewolf, even though it wasn’t its fault it had attacked. It had gone after Desta. I wanted it dead, too. I knelt down next to my sister and brushed her hair out of her face. I couldn’t look. How bad was it?
Viggo was on the other side of Desta, prying at her arms, which were wrapped around her stomach. “Desta, you have to let us see the wound.”
“It’s fine,” Desta managed. “It’s nothing.”
“Desta, it’s a werewolf bite,” I said. “It’s not nothing.” But I didn’t want to see either. “Is it really not so bad?”
She smiled at me. “It’s nothing. I promise.”
“Let us see,” Viggo demanded. “Don’t make me compel you.”
Desta moved her hands away slowly.
It was bad. It was awful. She was bleeding like crazy, and there were several chunks that had been taken out of her. It looked as though the werewolf had crunched her rib bones, shattering several of them.
“See?” said Desta. “Not so bad.” And then she passed out.
I backed away, feeling lightheaded. That was my sister, and I knew she would heal, because she was a vampire, but I also knew how long it took for vampires to heal werewolf wounds like that. Days. She wasn’t capable of moving, and we were stuck out here in the woods, and we didn’t even know where we were.
Landon was next to me, hand on my shoulder. “Hey. It’s going to be okay.”
I turned on him. “Yeah, easy for you to say. This is probably the best day of your life. You love watching Desta suffer.”
Landon stiffened. “Is that fair? Come on, how many times have I helped you save her? You think it will be any different this time?”
Canticle to the Midnight Moon Page 8