Blood and Wolf

by S. M. Gaither

  “Lucky me.”

  “Right?” he says, either not hearing the sarcasm in my voice or else choosing to ignore it. “What’s really lucky though,” he continues, “is that there’s another option.”

  “Which is…?”

  “The curatorian keys.”

  I hesitate. “Curatorian? Why does it sound like you just made that word up? Wait…Are you making all of this up? Is this a trick?”

  “Trust me, I’m not creative enough to come up with this sort of thing. Because this is complicated stuff—I’ve spent years gathering as much information as I can about it all. But we only have time for the short version at the moment.” He does another sweeping check for listeners, and then continues. “So the short version is that there are three of these ‘keys’, spread across the world. Maybe more. But I’m sure of at least three, all of them created at points where the other world—Canath— bled into ours for a prolonged period of time before being closed up.

  “During the ‘closing up’ part, these objects were created as a sort of side-effect. Basically, the immense energy created by the break in the world had to go somewhere—so it went into those three keys. And the lingering existence of these objects is responsible for the link between Canath and our earth being as strong as it currently is—strong enough that abnormalities like you can trigger things like fissures.”

  “So if the keys were destroyed…”

  “Then bam, the world becomes much, much more stable. Even with you in it.”

  It all sounds too easy. Too good to be true. Too obvious for me to have never heard of it all before. Because I know my parents, my aunts and uncles…they’ve all poured over every book in Uncle Eli’s vast library, trying to come up with some sort of solution to me.

  And for eighteen years, they’ve come up with nothing.

  So I can’t help but ask, “But why couldn’t you just destroy them yourself? Why do you need me?”

  He steps closer.

  I try to back up again, but there’s nowhere to go but into the wall.

  He wavers, hands lifting a bit as if to say he means no harm, and then he reaches for my arm. I tense, but for some reason I don’t try to draw away again. “That mark on your wrist,” he says, his tone quiet and thoughtful in a way that reminds me a bit of Uncle Eli—or his daughter— when he’s about to go off on one of his theoretical rants. “If I’m right, it should help us track down the locations of these keys, and then get them to reveal themselves to us. Along with revealing whatever might be guarding them.”

  “And what is guarding them, exactly?”

  “Long story, those guardians—maybe we save it for later?”

  I start to protest, but in the same instant, a shrill alarm sounds in the hallway, and dread clenches my heart. “What is that?”

  “That would be the security system. Goes off after the door’s been open too long.”

  “Then why in the hell didn’t you close it?”

  “Honestly?”

  I glare at him.

  “Honestly, I forgot. I’m sort of new to breaking people out of prison.”

  I shake my head in disbelief, but he’s not looking at me; he’s leaning out of the cell and coolly darting his gaze back and forth.

  “So you don’t really have a plan for breaking me out? Seriously? None?”

  “Well, I have magic.”

  “And I have basically nothing! I’m trapped in this human form—you get that, right? And I don’t even have any weapons!”

  “I also have this lucky dagger of mine, if that helps.” He retrieves the blade in question from a sheath hidden against his lower back. It has a slight, elegant curve to it and a hilt of beautiful gold that’s embedded with blue jewels.

  I stare at it for at least as long as I got caught up staring at him.

  What can I say? I have an equal appreciation for pretty boys and pretty weapons.

  “And you did say you would rather die as opposed to them keeping you here and using you, right?” he asks.

  “Yes, but so—”

  “So that’s a good thing, because we might actually be about to die.”

  “Wow.”

  He flashes me a smile that makes him look more attractive than anybody has a right to be in a situation like this. “But in the event that we don’t: You’re agreeing to help me, right?

  “This is crazy. You’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, but you’re probably at least a little less likely to die if you stick with me, and I promise I won’t torture you, either. So. Decision time. Chop chop.”

  “Okay, fine, yes! If the alternative is death or torture, then obviously I choose you!”

  “Good.” He reaches into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out a small, strangely-shaped black key, and works it into the magical cuffs binding me. They disintegrate at the key’s turn, falling as ash against my skin.

  I take a moment to rub the soreness from my wrists before snatching for that beautiful dagger. He hands it over after only a second’s hesitation.

  “That was my mom’s. Don’t lose it. And don’t mess it up.”

  “The only thing I plan to mess up is anybody who gets between me and the exit of this place. Now let’s go.”

  He nods, and together we throw open the cell door.

  Seven

  Deals and Decisions

  We make it about a half of a step out of the cell before he grabs my arm.

  “Hold up. I almost forgot something else.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah…do you ever feel like you have a million different windows open in your brain—like on a computer, I mean, and there’s distracting music playing on one, and you know that on another one there’s that Wikipedia article on puffins that you were in the middle of reading, but you can’t for the life of you find it, and it’s basically driving you crazy?”

  I start to answer, but at that moment he takes my face in his hands and, I’ll be honest, my thoughts get a little fuzzy.

  “Well that’s been me for the past week, trying to plan all this,” he mumbles, obviously struggling to concentrate.

  The alarms are still sounding, and he’s still focused on my face. On tracing the curve of my jaw with his fingers. On staring into my eyes so intently, so carefully—like he’s trying to memorize every swirl of color in them.

  It would all seem very romantic if he hadn’t just mentioned that we were probably going to die.

  I try to swat his hand away.

  He pulls back just for a second—just quickly enough to avoid getting smacked—and then his hands are immediately back on my face, taking an even more commanding grip this time. He presses his forehead to mine. Whispers words that I’m too flustered to understand.

  “Are you insane?” I gasp.

  “No, just a bit scattered at the moment.” His mouth is entirely too close to mine as he speaks. I don’t breathe normally again until he finally draws back and asks, “Did you not get my metaphor?”

  “What are you even trying to…” I trail off as I feel a strange tingling spreading over my skin. An odd tugging sensation on the corners of my eyes. And then the weirdest thing: my hair— which up until this point had been wound into a messy bun on top of my head—suddenly drops free and cascades down my shoulders, and all the way down to the middle of my back. It feels at least a foot longer than it should.

  I hold up the dagger and I see something impossible in its gleaming surface: I’ve been…transformed.

  Darker skin; wider eyes that are brown instead of blue and that show no trace of the exhaustion I’m still fighting; hair that’s reddish-brown instead of my usual almost-black.

  He closes the cell door with a quiet click, then leans over my shoulder, surveys my reflection along with me for a second before he nods approvingly. “I’m pretty damn good, aren’t I?”

  I contain an eye roll at his arrogance, still focused on running my fingers through what is not-my-hair. I can’t help but be a little awestruck, because it is good. I
t doesn’t just look different; it feels different, too. A shiver passes over my skin.

  This is incredibly advanced illusionary magic.

  What else does he know how to do?

  “You did this just by touching me?”

  “Physical contact with the object you’re trying to illusion helps,” he says, giving me a little pat on the head for emphasis. “Along with reciting certain words.”

  I hear footsteps in the distance, and my awe turns to alarm. “I don’t…who am I, what am I supposed to do here? I look different, but I’m not a different person, really, so how can I—”

  “Just walk normally. And don’t say anything stupid to anybody.”

  “Says the guy who was stupidly rambling about puffin articles a minute ago.”

  “Or maybe just don’t talk at all,” he says under his breath. Then he starts to walk, discreetly motioning for me to follow.

  And what else am I going to do at this point?

  I take a deep, resolved breath and a second to find my balance in the middle of my tired, dizzying thoughts. Then I tuck the dagger into my sleeve and casually stroll after this strange boy.

  Side by side, we pass several people walking briskly toward the cell I left behind. They’re arguing with each other, or else arguing into phones or handheld radios. None of them seem particularly interested in us. At first I’m grateful for this. I keep my head down and keep walking.

  But after a few minutes, it starts to seem strange.

  So I wait until we reach a clear hallway, and then in a quiet voice I ask, “I’m guessing that whatever you did to me, you’ve also done to yourself? Because none of them seem to recognize you, or notice that you—my supposed guard—have left your position outside my cell.”

  He waits until we reach a door, one that leads to a covered walkway between the grey building we were in and yet another grey building, before he glances over at me and says, “Clever, aren’t you?”

  “Well I’m not stupid,” I say dryly. “I don’t know what you really look like, and I don’t even know your real name. So yeah, consider me skeptical.”

  “My name is Soren Blackwood, if it helps.”

  “That could be an illusion, too—you could be making that up.”

  “Technically all names are made up. All other words, too.”

  “Yes, but what name was made up for you by your parents, smart ass?”

  “I don’t have parents. I was grown in a lab.” He obviously means it as a joke, but there’s a hard edge to the word parents that makes me think it wouldn’t be wise to keep asking about his heritage at the moment.

  So instead, I say, “And I also think it’s weird that you were the only one who was guarding me.”

  “I wasn’t.” He immediately tenses and starts to walk faster, as if he’s trying to escape the fact that he just said that out loud.

  I, on the other hand, slow down and start looking for other possible exits. Ones that don’t involve him.

  “What are you doing?” he asks, just barely tilting his head back enough to see me.

  “What happened to the other guards? What did you do to them so you could get me alone, precisely?”

  His eyes dart around, losing that unnaturally calm and collected demeanor of his for a split second. Then he walks to me, splays his fingers against my back, and steers me back into motion.

  “Hey! Quit pushing me.”

  “Hey, quit making so much noise.”

  As if to prove I was being too loud, a man suddenly opens the door in front of us. His eyes immediately land on the two of us. Soren relaxes his pushing hand, drapes it more casually around my waist instead. I try to give the man by the door what I hope is a casual nod and smile as we stroll by him.

  But his eyes linger too long on us.

  I can feel those eyes burning into my back until we walk into the other building. Once the door is shut, Soren and I both hesitate. I can tell he wants to turn back to make sure we aren’t being followed, but he doesn’t. Neither of us do.

  “Illusion magic doesn’t last forever,” he says after we’ve walked a few more steps and it’s clear that man we passed isn’t coming after us. Not immediately, anyway. “It fades slowly, starting with the things that a person’s sense of smell and hearing can pick up on. Well, those things and the things they could touch—touch is the hardest sense to trick. Sight is the easiest, and outward appearance is the easiest thing to change, and the last thing that changes back. Sight alone is enough to fool the average person, but the ones in here are better at spotting illusions than most, obviously. There are marks that can give these spells away. And if they get suspicious, they’ll….”

  The sound of distant, braying dogs interrupts him, and he sighs.

  “…They’ll get the dogs, or some other similar, equally nasty creature that has better senses than they do.”

  The hair on the nape of my neck stands up. Dizzying pressure dances against the back of my skull and spreads in a shiver down my spine and arms. My wolf side, trying to react. It realizes how tired I am, even as I’m trudging on and refusing to admit that exhaustion. And it wants to be let out. To somehow protect us.

  I reach for my marked wrist and wrap a shaky hand around it. I try to focus on the sharp curve of the dagger I’m holding below that marked wrist, because I find thoughts of it protecting me much more comforting.

  “These particular dogs are a pet project of one of the blood king’s closest advisors,” Soren says of the still-braying creatures. He’s walking faster now. “Dogs mixed with DNA from other creatures, and fortified with some questionable, technically illegal magic. Man-eaters. Bred specifically to enjoy the taste of blood.”

  “Lovely.”

  He looks like he has another smart-ass comment waiting, just for me, but before he can get it out, we hear the sound of a door opening and closing behind us. And then whimpering and the scrambling of clawed feet and barking—all of it definitely in this building.

  “Okay. Forget what I said about acting natural,” Soren whispers.

  We run.

  I’m faster than he is (thanks, werewolf genes), and even with my head spinning from lack of sleep and food I still manage to get way ahead—until I come to a dead end and then I remember that, oh yeah, I have no idea where the hell I’m going.

  I stop, and he catches up, grabs my arm without a word, and jerks me back toward a spiral staircase that leads down into a storage area lit with hazy florescent lights. There’s a wide door on the opposite side of the room. He makes a beeline for it.

  I follow soon after, but stop short as two men appear to Soren’s right, so suddenly that I’m ninety-eight percent sure they just materialized out of thin air. One slams into his side hard enough to send him crashing into a stack of crates. As the crates topple around him, Soren regains his balance just in time to intercept the second guy diving for him. He grabs the guy’s shoulders and throws him to the ground with a surprising amount of force. Then he trips his way through the scattered crates and continues toward the door.

  But there’s magic sparking around the hands of the assailant who’s still standing. Black, nasty looking bolts of it.

  He lifts his hands, taking aim.

  And I’m not convinced Soren doesn’t deserve to get struck by lightning, or that he’s anymore a hero than the ones attacking him.

  But I am convinced he’s my ticket out of this place.

  So I sprint forward, swoop up a crate, and slam the corner of it into the side of Lightning Man’s head. I nearly lose my grip on the dagger in the process; I consider using it to finish the job, but I’d rather avoid killing anyone today if I can help it. So I just readjust my balance and my grip on that weapon.

  As I’m doing that, the man on the ground grabs for my ankles.

  I jump out of his encircling arms, plant one foot on the ground and then kick the other one into his nose. Hard. It’s kind of unsettling how far my foot sinks into his rat-like face. Like, there’s a chance that I might ha
ve just left a permanent indentation in that face.

  I shake off the morbid thought of that and race after Soren, who’s waiting at the door, holding it open for me.

  We burst into the humid, sticky summer night. Behind us, the prison compound towers so high I can’t see the top of it, a black silhouette of sharp angles and a stone face that makes it look like it belongs more in medieval England than in northern Maine. I wonder what sort of tricks they’re pulling to keep something like this hidden from the general public.

  There’s a wide open field in front of us, and far, far in the distance I can hear the sound of cars and other signs of civilization. Civilization that I’m desperate to reach after the horror of that tiny little isolated cell.

  The only problem is that no less than seven people are standing in front of us, blocking my path to it. Two of them hold chains attached to those beasts Soren was talking about. They’re just a tiny bit smaller than a werewolf (like that’s saying much) and their eyes are glowing like red-hot coals. Instead of fur they have scaly skin, and barbed tails—both of which make them look like some sort of weird dragon/dog hybrid.

  And somehow I don’t think I’d be surprised if it started spitting fire, either.

  A women holding one of the thick chains steps forward. She wraps that chain a little tighter around her hand and gives it a sharp, commanding tug, which seems to aggravate the beast further. It snaps at the air. Foamy drool dribbles from the corners of its mouth.

  “The dogs are uneasy,” the woman says. “They seem to think you’re hiding something.” Her eyes narrow directly at me. “Reveal your true selves. Now.”

  Soren takes a step back and reaches for my hand.

  “Do you trust me?” he whispers, his eyes still on the blockade in front of us.

  “What? I’ve known you for all of like five minutes, so I’m going to have to go with ‘no, not freaking really’.”

  “Well too bad. Hold on to me and close your eyes. Tightly.”

  “I’m—”

  “Now!”

  There’s an eye-wateringly bright flash of greyish-white light. Bright enough to cause actual pain, and to make me let out a strangled cry along with what sounds like every person who was facing us.