Blood and Wolf

by S. M. Gaither

  But a minute later, I hear them: paws sprinting lightly through the overgrowth. Relatively silent considering the size of the bodies being supported by those paws.

  They break through the trees and leap onto the rocks across from us a minute later, and that massive size is enough to make Soren draw back just a bit. He quickly recovers and regains his balance, but his eyes still look a little wider than normal as he takes in the sight of my two best friends. They linger the longest on Carys, who I think is the most intimidating of the two, with her jet-black fur and piercing golden eyes.

  It’s kind of…adorable, really—Soren’s previously nonchalant demeanor going poof! and being replaced by the almost kid-like wonder on his face.

  Not adorable, I scold myself. He’s not adorable, he’s a sorcerer, and he’s almost definitely full of dangerous magic and secrets, and we’re only together because we have a mission to focus on.

  But that look on his face isn’t sorcerer-like at all. I’m used to his kind looking at mine with nothing but scornfulness, but the longer he stares, the more his features fall into mere curiosity.

  Maybe he really is different than the rest of them.

  Or maybe this is just another one of his illusions.

  Carys and Liam don’t seem taken in by it, illusion or not. Their hackles are raised, teeth bared. There’s a low whine building in Carys’s throat, and Liam is looking at me in a way that manages to look disappointed. Which doesn’t seem like something wolves should be capable of, but there it is.

  (I thought I smelled a sorcerer,) he thinks toward me. (And I still smell you, underneath that ridiculous exterior he’s conjured up for you.)

  (I think you look good as a blonde,) Carys offers, her body language still betraying her nervousness, even though her voice is light.

  “Okay: I can explain all of this,” I say.

  Soren nods, taking a step toward me as if to present a bit more solidarity. His movement makes Carys give an uneasy bark and then bound to my side. I quickly take her giant head in my hands and lean against it, both to try and contain and calm her.

  “He was my guard,” I say quickly. “But he helped me escape.”

  (Why?) Liam demands.

  “I’ll get to that. Just keep calm and listen, please?”

  And they do. For the most part, anyway. After a little coaxing, they both shift back to their human forms as I speed through the explanation I’ve been rehearsing for the past two days that it took us to get this point—from the revelation about Maric Blackwood’s true goals, to Soren’s plans to counter them, to my escape, and finally to my decision to come here first.

  Once I’ve finished spilling all the details I can think of, I hold my breath and wait for someone—anyone—else to say something.

  “I wish you would just come home,” Carys says quietly.

  Not what I wanted to hear, but not unexpected, either. We’re pack animals, after all. Or they are, at least. I’m feeling less and less like I belong to that pack by the minute, but I still understand why they want the comfort of that group. And I get why they don’t feel nearly as composed as I do about teaming up with—of all things—a sorcerer.

  But that doesn’t change my mind about any of this.

  “I can’t,” I say. “Trust me: I’ve thought this through. I can’t go back home and put the pack in danger again. I just wanted to come here tonight so you could both see me and know that I was safe. But this is it for me and this territory. I have a new plan, and I’m a little unsure and fuzzy about the details, but it definitely doesn’t involve staying home or anywhere near it.”

  “I don’t know if hunting down these key things counts as a plan,” Liam says. “It sounds more like reckless, wishful thinking. You collect three little objects and suddenly everything is right with the world again? Come on, Elle.”

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

  “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 that I kind of want to knock off his face.

  “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 from the catastrophe of 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 som
ehow 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, one that comes from thinking about all of the stories they’ve told me over the years. Although they always censored the ugliest parts; I’m aware of that.

  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. “Will 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 managed to narrow down the location of where the first key is hiding—we think. 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.

  Nine

  Dreams and Demons

  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.

  Also? It’s eerie as hell.

  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, because I know he’d rather just not talk about it.

  But it’s hard to just forget about it, 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 that 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. Ma
king 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 grumbles, 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.