Blood and Wolf

by S. M. Gaither

  Copyright © 2018/2020 by S.M. Gaither

  Cover by Covers by Juan

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Foreword

  Hey reader! Thanks for picking up this book. If you’ve read The Shift Chronicles series, you’ll notice some familiar faces in the pages ahead, along with some new ones that I hope you’ll grow to love!

  If you haven’t read that previous series, that’s okay! This series can be read as a standalone; be aware, however, that chronologically Blood and Wolf takes place several decades after The Shift Chronicles, and naturally it will contain spoilers for that previous series. So if you don’t like being spoiled, I suggest going back and starting by reading The Shift Chronicles quartet (it starts with Descendant).

  Happy reading!

  Blood and Wolf

  The Shift Chronicles World: The Next Generation: Book One

  S.M. Gaither

  Contents

  1. Nightmares and Dust

  2. Visions and Scars

  3. Tests and Control

  4. Fire and Sacrifice

  5. Smoke and Sorrow

  6. Questions and Keys

  7. Deals and Decisions

  8. Walls and Weightiness

  9. Dreams and Demons

  10. Light and Possibility

  11. Trust and Prejudice

  12. Anarchy and Secrets

  13. Spells and Mirrors

  14. Beasts and Brokeness

  15. Shadows and Souls

  16. Reason and Fear

  17. Lies and Leaving

  18. Stars and Apologies

  19. Power and Peace

  20. Darkness and Falling

  Never Miss a New Release!

  One

  Nightmares and Dust

  I smell blood.

  An entire trail of it. Fainter on this side of the creek I’ve just waded across, but still acrid and burning in my nostrils.

  Still obvious.

  I palm the handle of my sword—a seventeenth-century saber, one of my favorites in my impressive collection of weaponry—and I pick up my pace, ignoring the mud splashing on my jeans. It rained harder than I thought it did last night. The ground is basically a messy slip ‘n’ slide waiting to happen, which could be fun, but it isn’t really why I’m here, so…

  Focus, Elle.

  I hold my arms out for balance. Study the path ahead, against which I can see the faintest trace of pawprints. So faint I hardly noticed them, but they’re definitely there.

  Which seems weird.

  Why would he have left prints?

  The mud is soft, but so are a lycan’s footsteps. And combined with the very obvious scent trail he’s left, even the occasional outline of paws makes this…

  This is way too easy.

  It’s almost like he wants me to be able to find him.

  The suspicion that I might be walking into a trap hits me about a second too late, and then—

  “Son of a—”

  (Language!) scolds a cheerful voice in my head, just before a massive ball of muscle and white fur slams into my side and sends me sprawling face-first into the mud.

  I slide several feet in the mess, as predicted.

  But it’s not fun. Definitely not fun. Mud should not go in noses. Or eyes, or ears, or…hell, any other crevices of the human body, really.

  I’m trying to sit up, to sputter and wipe out said mud when I’m hit again. Knocked flat on my back this time, and suddenly Liam is over top of me like a giant, dumb, overexcited dog, with one of his paws lightly balanced on my chest, holding me down.

  “If you drool on me, I swear on The Beatles that I am going to stick this sword right through that big floppy tongue of yours.”

  (Say you surrender, and I won’t,) he replies. The words echoe in my head, sounding less smug than they would have if he was in human form and had spoken out loud; thoughtspeech has a way of diluting emotion.

  “Never.”

  (Have it your way, then.)

  I squeal as that tongue lolls from his mouth and comes dangerously close to my face.

  He knows the sword threat was hollow; I still feel bad about nicking his leg earlier—nicking it hard enough to actually cause it to bleed and leave that trail I followed here. But he’s been one of my best friends for eighteen years now, so he should also know that I’m not in the business of surrendering.

  Not even to saliva.

  I plant a foot on his chest and shove. He’s like twice my size in his lycan form; I’m all of five foot (almost) two inches and scrawny in basically every other sense of the word—but I’m a lot stronger than I look, even if I am indefinitely and necessarily trapped in this human body.

  So I manage to lift him with my leg, to push him hard enough that he lands sideways in the muck. Once he’s on his side he just lays there all defeated like, his long, feathered tail flopping and his legs occasionally kicking, splattering me with more specks of mud.

  “You look like the world’s most content pig.”

  (I’m a lot cuter than a pig,) he insists.

  I lift my sword in front of me, grimacing. I try to wipe it off using the sleeve of my jacket, but that’s basically useless given that my jacket is also covered in about a million pounds of mud. “This is not exactly that most helpful training session we’ve ever had.”

  He responds by using his tail to flick mud my direction, and then he stands and shakes even more of it from his fur, until I’m pretty sure there’s more of it on me than on the ground.

  “Are you serious, Liam?” I hiss, shielding my eyes from the flying flecks.

  (Okay, well the lesson you should have learned today was to never let your guard down. Because that’s how you end up face-first in the mud.) He stops shaking and settls back on his haunches, sneezes a bit more sludge from his nose before adding: (But I feel like you should have already known that.)

  “I do.”

  His head tilts in a concerned way. (You seem off your game today,) he comments after a moment.

  I hug my arms against me, gaze straying to that cut I accidentally landed on his leg. Normally my attacks are much more precise. Controlled. And yeah, it isn’t a huge deal, given a lycan’s healing abilities and the fact that it really isn’t that deep of a wound. It will be a faint scar in no time, and he doesn’t seem to be in any pain from it at the moment.

  But it still irks me.

  Because I can’t afford to lose control.

  Our whole world can’t afford for me to lose control.

  My whole life has been about discipline. From the moment I could talk, I had to learn to hold my tongue. To avoid arguments. From the moment I could walk, I had to learn to watch where I was going. To avoid danger. Then, when danger started to seek me out, because of who I am and who my parents are, I had to learn to fight—but only in a very specific, controlled way.

  I can’t fight back by transforming into a wolf with the rest of my pack.

  I can’t fight back by using the elemental magic that I can occasionally feel humming in my blood.

  Because both of these things might trigger fissures—openings between our world and a dangerous, parallel world that we refer to as Canath, which is the world where a crapload of the nasties from folklores all over the Earth actually originated from.

  In the past, that world has occasionally bled over into ours—which is why the human world is filled with all those myths and folktales to begin with. There are some who even thought that the worlds more or less existed side-by-side at one point, creatures walkin
g freely back and forth between them.

  But that was then.

  Way back then.

  Now, this world I live in is overwhelmingly human, and humans are overwhelmingly weak little things, and so the general consensus is that to allow anything from Canath to cross into the human realm would be a Very Bad Thing.

  Which brings us back to the problem of, well, me.

  Thanks to a run-in my mom had with one of the aforementioned nasties decades ago, she ended up ‘contaminated’ by the essence of this other world. A decade or so later, along came me: an otherwise adorable baby with a terrifying symbol of a four-pointed star burned into the curve of my wrist—the mark of Canath.

  A mark that, for whatever reason, seems to be ‘activated’ whenever I’m in distress or under some sort of pressure. Like the sort of pressure that comes when I’m trying to use magic or, I dunno, transform from a human to a wolf-like beast, for example.

  I am a walking, would-be accident.

  A breathing curse on the Earth, essentially.

  My mom always gets mad when I call myself curse. And maybe she has a point. But then again, I vividly remember what I brought into this world, the first time I accidentally almost transformed into my beastly form.

  As if my bones and organs rearranging myself weren’t enough, I’d also had to witness the way my almost-shift made the ground shake, the air tremble, the sky split and unleash an actual, honest-to-god monster—something a hell of a lot scarier than wolf-Elle.

  I still have nightmares of burning eyes and black teeth, of leathery wings and claws that I can’t run fast enough to escape.

  And the second time I almost transformed…

  We don’t talk about the second time if we can help it.

  Because after the second time, the Council of Supernatural Cooperatives—that is, the highest cooperative, governing authority among the various supernatural communities around the world—very nearly voted for my removal.

  Which is a nice way of saying that some people would prefer it if I were dead.

  So I can’t lose control a third time.

  “I’m just tired,” I tell Liam, because he’s still looking at me with as much concern as his wolfish features can muster. “Didn’t sleep much last night.”

  (Bad dreams?) he asks, even though he’s likely already guessed that this is the culprit.

  Sometimes when those aforementioned nightmares wake me, we climb out the dormer window of his bedroom and up onto the roof of our pack’s mansion-like house, and we just sit. Count the stars. Talk about stupid stuff until I’m too tired to worry about nightmares and I fall asleep, usually while still sitting up; I’m actually really good at falling asleep sitting up, standing up, in the car, at the kitchen table….

  My two greatest talents: sword-fighting and sleeping.

  I’m well-rounded like that.

  “Just the usual things,” I say, starting back toward the creek I crossed earlier. The mud caking me is starting to dry and crack in extremely uncomfortable places. “Harrowing visions of the almost-certain end of the world, and me as the harbinger of doom and what-not.”

  (Heavy stuff.)

  “Mm-hm.”

  It’s a warm day—eighty something, which is just warm, not hot, by North Carolina summer standards—so I prop my weapon against a tree and wade into the water, find the deepest pool I can, and lie back in it. My long dark hair fans out around me, tickling my shoulders. I can feel the caked-on mud turning slimy again before sliding off. Gross.

  Liam bounces and splashes around in the water for a bit, letting the playful side of his wolf brain take over. After a few minutes he switches it off, and he shifts back to his human form in that focused, disciplined way that I try really hard not to be jealous of. His transformation is fluid. Graceful, almost. Nothing like the two awful times I almost did it; no sound of bones cracking, or skin splitting, or painful gasps for breath.

  And no possible breaking of the barrier between worlds, of course.

  His clothes haven’t even ripped in the process of going back to his human self—which, I’ve been told, is impressive for his age. Apparently it takes decades for some shifters to manage the sort of control it takes to transform excess materials along with their skin and bones.

  But here he is, in his well-worn athletic shorts and a faded blue t-shirt, a perfect specimen of a human.

  The handsome bastard doesn’t even look like he ever was a wolf.

  He plops down on the bank of the creek, oblivious to the mud, and gives me a smile that’s almost shy. “What?” he asks.

  I realize I’m staring, and I quickly lower my gaze. “You make it look easy.”

  “It’s not,” he says, bare feet skimming the water. I swear I don’t think the boy ever wears shoes. “So don’t feel bad, Elle. Your situation is different, anyway.”

  “I know.” I return his smile just so he doesn’t feel bad, and also so he stops with that pitying look he’s giving me.

  And then I sense it: a disturbance in the air, followed by dozens of scents that set my nerves on end and send a chill rippling across my skin in spite of the warm water.

  Scents that don’t belong, insist my territorial, wolfish instincts. I give my head a little shake, ignoring those instincts. Because human-me knows who those scents belong to. The earthy, underlying scent of faery-folk; the sour, musty smell that I swear all vampires have; the particular pine and rain scent of the sorcerers from Blackwood…

  “Somehow I’d almost forgotten it was council meeting day,” Liam says. He yawns and stretches, rolls his shoulders—the sort of movements he always makes when he’s anxious but trying to hide it.

  I close my eyes and focus on the gentle current washing over me. “I’d rather drown in this muddy water than see any of their judgmental faces.”

  “Me too. Well, not the you drowning part. The not seeing their faces part.”

  “We could run away.”

  “Your parents would kill you. And then they’d kill me for being your accomplice.”

  “They’d have to find us first,” I say with a grin.

  The water sloshes over me as he wades into it. He grabs my hand and pulls me upright, and my feet sink fast in the creek bed. He’s at least a foot taller than me; I have to tilt my head way back to meet his eyes.

  “A demonstration at every meeting… that was the agreement, wasn’t it?” His voice is a bit timid. It always is when we talk about ‘the agreement’—those terms by which our fellow supernatural allies agreed to let me stay alive, and to live with my pack instead of instead of in some prison somewhere.

  And with my pack is where I want to be, even if my curse means I don’t exactly fit in with them.

  So I nod. “Yeah, I know. I’m not going anywhere.”

  His hand is still in mine, thumb tracing along my palm. He must be able to sense the anxiety thrumming through my veins, because, in an attempt at a light tone, he asks, “Are you ready for whatever crazy test they plan on putting you through this time?”

  I think about lying, but Liam knows me too well to bother with it.

  “Honestly? No. I feel like marching in there and just screaming at all of them to leave me alone.”

  “Well that won’t end well.” He drops my hand and rearranges his footing into a more formidable stance. “Come on, we’ve still got a few minutes—let’s go again. Take out your anxieties on me. No swords this time, though. Deal? That old thing looks like it’s going to break apart if you swing it too hard, anyway.”

  “Actually,” I say in my exaggerated, total-weapon-nerd voice, “this saber is made of crucible steel and forged using—”

  “Elf magic and the fires of Mt. Doom, right?”

  “Yes, that,” I deadpan. “That is exactly what I was going to say.”

  “You’re a dork, Elle.”

  “Shut-up, Liam.”

  We exchange a perfectly childish expression, and then a smile, and then my face turns serious again. We’ve been at this for
hours now. But as much as I’d like to quit, I understand why he’s pushing me; this anxiety inside me has to go somewhere, or chances are it’s going to lead to me losing focus in the middle of the council’s test.

  “No swords, elvish or otherwise,” I agree, cracking my knuckles. “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to go easy on you.”

  “I’d be disappointed if you did.”

  That familiar competitive smirk curves his lips.

  We sidestep our way out of the water and then we both freeze, muscles tensing.

  I twitch my fingers, trying to make him react.

  He doesn’t fall for it.

  Our stillness makes everything around me seem louder—the wind shushing through the trees, the water dripping from my hair.

  His fist swings forward.

  I catch it, push off and dart to the side. Counterattack by sweeping my foot at his ankles.

  He jumps at the last second and I brush only the tips of toes, but it’s enough to throw off his landing. He stumbles; I land a punch in his side. Not as hard as I can, obviously, but hard enough that his retaliation has a little more fire behind it, and suddenly he’s throwing punches so fast that I can’t focus on anything except blocking them.

  Left block, right block, left, right, left—

  His hand slips past, catches me in the jaw.

  “Oh, you’re going to pay for that.” I’m still smiling, but my eyes narrow. That anxiety is twisting my gut, tightening my fists. All I want to do is swing hard enough to somehow throw it out of my body. To swing, to kick my way free of nerves, of the weight of judgmental stares and the thought that, however many council tests I pass, I’m still never going to be normal or fully accepted by most of my world.