Blood and Wolf

by S. M. Gaither

  I try to look as confident as I sound as I grab my sword and secure it in the sheathe at my hip. I’ll just have to risk exposing it to this gross water, I guess.

  I still have the dagger Soren loaned me, too, secured in a separate sheath around my ankle. I tried to give it back, but he told me I’d probably need it again. And I’m not one to turn down a free weapon.

  So at least I’m reasonably well-armed as I step back into the water.

  “Are you sure about this?” Soren asks.

  I’d steeled myself, and was prepared to walk toward that demon guardian without stopping or looking back, but the strange tone of his voice manages to make me hesitate.

  It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him sound even a little bit afraid, I think.

  And that fear causes a weird stirring in the pit of my stomach.

  Is it fear for me, or simply fear that I won’t be able to accomplish these tasks we set out to do? Either way, I don’t really know what to do with it, so I just keep walking.

  “Never been more sure of anything in my life,” I say, waving a dismissive hand without looking back.

  “Elle…” Carys begins in a slightly pleading voice.

  But I don’t hear the rest of her plea, because at that moment the demon horse stops its circling and squares its body up with my approaching one.

  It lets out another snort. Lifts one of its front legs. As it stomps it back into the water, that water darkens and churns and folds away from it. Wave after wave folds away until the creature is standing in mud instead of water. And then that muddy island extends, reaching toward me, the water rolling apart until there is a very clear, very obvious path inviting me toward the demon.

  I step from the water and onto that muddy path.

  One step after the other. With every one, the parted water collapses behind me, splashing cool drops against the backs of my legs and closing off any chance at a quick escape.

  The mark on my wrist tingles a warning.

  Every wolfish instinct I have, however buried it might be, is telling me to turn around.

  The glow the lake is throwing off is so bright that it’s near blinding me.

  The creature in front of me is unnaturally still.

  It doesn’t move as I reach it; it barely even breathes as I stretch a hand forward. My fingers brush skin that feels rubbery, and then they cautiously curl around a mane that feels like its made of seaweed. Or like maybe it’s made of snakes, judging by the way it seems to move and, I swear, to tighten around my wrist and try to squeeze the life out of my veins. I hear shouting from the shoreline; it sounds like Liam, but I don’t turn around to check, because I don’t need his concern distracting me right now.

  Water drips down my arm, so dirty and thick with mud that it looks more like blood in the moonlight.

  The demon’s nostrils flare.

  Its eyes burn a bolder shade of white.

  I picture that last beast I fought—the one I let in, the one that left my mom bloody and beaten and my pack facing the threat of war from the entire supernatural community.

  And then I think of my sword and dagger.

  I brace a hand against the demon’s neck, and I hoist myself onto its back.

  Ten

  Light and Possibility

  For the record, I don’t suggest hopping onto the backs of demons.

  This was a terribly reckless, dangerous idea, and the creature wastes no time in showing me why: after a vicious shake that flings mud and what looks like gallons of water in every direction, it lunges forward into a deeper part of the lake.

  I barely have a chance to take a breath before it dives.

  That snaky seaweed mane tangles around both my wrists and fastens me to its body, so that I have no choice but to press flat against its back and bury my face in its neck, trying to protect my eyes from the dirt and wood and other debris littering the water.

  We dive deeper and deeper.

  Just as I start to panic at the thought that this lake might actually be bottomless, we slam against that bottom. A cloud of leafy mud erupts around us. I’m flung against the ground hard enough to jar my shoulder despite the water slowing my fall.

  The demon is looming over me a moment later, its hooves pressing against my chest, body buoyant in the water but still heavy enough to push me down into a watery grave.

  Mud collapses in around me, filling that grave in.

  I feel fear like a physical presence. Like chains draped over me, weighing me further down, down, down into that grave—

  My lungs burn, growing desperate for oxygen.

  I have maybe forty seconds before I need to kick back toward the surface.

  Maybe less, if the dive we took was as long as it felt—but I’m trying to be optimistic.

  To my right, a definite glow is still there. My eyes are only partially open, blinking rapidly to try and keep out the dirt and junk floating around me, so I can’t tell exactly where or what that glow coming from. But even when I completely close my eyes, I can see the light.

  It’s brighter than ever.

  And the possibility and potential of the keys seems greater than ever before.

  I manage to draw my leg up high enough to get a grip on the knife at my ankle. I draw it and slash it toward me in the same motion, slicing my way through the demon’s flank. It takes all of my inhuman strength to manage to carve into that weird rubbery skin.

  The creature lets out a terrible, wailing, one-hundred percent demon and zero-percent horse kind of sound.

  The water clouds with dark blood.

  It draws away from me, and in that split second I bend my legs, find my footing and shove, rocketing free of my almost-grave and swimming as fast as I can toward where I think the key’s glow is coming from.

  I’m lucky enough that I guess right, too, because after only a few feet I see it clearly: two corners of what looks like a small shrine carved out of shiny stone. It’s tilted on its back and partially buried in the mud, but that glow I’m chasing is clearly radiating from its center, just below the top layer of that mud.

  I swim toward it with wide strokes and frantic kicks.

  The demon follows.

  I don’t see it—because I’ll be damned if I’m looking back at this point—but I feel the water swirl, the waves churning around it and pulling away the same as they did when it stood on the surface. This last part actually helps me, because the shifting water causes a brief sort of magic bubble around us both, and I manage to catch a few quick breaths while I’m inside it.

  And then that churning water begins to pull away the mud that my target is buried under, too.

  Soon I can see it clearly: a shrine with a hollow center that’s holding not a literal key, but a small, crescent-shaped black stone.

  It’s not what I expected it to look like, but I can only assume it’s the right thing—and I am not resurfacing without it.

  I push through the burning in my chest and my lungs that’s starting to make me dizzy, and I give a few more powerful, desperate strokes. The key is a finger’s length away, the glow so bright I’m almost blind, the tingling in my mark so intense that my whole arm feels numb.

  I blindly grope around the shrine for a moment before I finally manage to wrap my hand around the freezing cold stone.

  Teeth sink into my leg.

  Not horse teeth, but sharp, predator-like teeth that feel as if they take half my leg with them when they yank away.

  The amount of blood spilling into the water is staggering.

  I feel my consciousness slipping. I put all of my focus into not losing my grip on the crescent-shaped key. I feel it pulsing beneath my palm. Soon it falls into the same rhythm as the now-pulsing mark on my wrist, and the two of them surging together sends a strange, determined rush of power to my head.

  Using only one leg, I push off the bottom of the lake as hard as I can.

  I’m not strong enough to fight off that demon. Pain is blazing through my leg, my shoulder, an
d those few breaths I managed to take haven’t lasted long. So I can think only of scrambling toward the surface.

  I make it ten feet.

  Fifteen feet.

  I see moonlight shimmering down, almost reaching me.

  Then the demon horse swells into the space just above, blocking that light out.

  I reflexively throw my hand up, and the stone key collides with the jaw that’s opening and snapping those rows of terribly sharp teeth at me. The key shimmers as it brushes over the demon’s skin. The lake above it begins to swirl in a way that reminds me of water draining in a bathtub, and the guardian of this key is pulled into that swirl and then down toward the stone-like object itself, and then I swear it’s actually pulled into that stone.

  Either that, or it just dissolved into the water.

  But either way, it’s gone.

  And there is now a mark on the key’s surface—the same dark, four-pointed star that graces my wrist.

  I’m so shocked for a moment that I can’t do anything except float there with a dumb look on my face.

  My lungs burn. I can’t feel my leg. My vision spins, and everything gets a little blurrier, and I wonder if I’ve already lost my mind from lack of oxygen and just imagined that whole horse-disappearing-into-water trick.

  Then I’m moving.

  Instincts kicking in, pushing me upward along a path that’s not particularly straight or efficient, thanks to the use of only one leg. And clear thoughts are all but gone by the time I actually reach the surface, but I’m still aware enough to realize when I’ve broken out of the water and into the cold night air. Aware enough to know that my lungs are still working and I can still breathe.

  And I can still feel the weight of the knife in one hand, and the first key of Canath in the other.

  I clench my fingers around them both.

  I end up on the shore, somehow, resting in a bed of mud and reeds.

  I see blurry figures leaning over me. I hear voices whispering, and I try to mumble something in response. I don’t start to feel afraid until I realize that I can’t actually make words. I can hear someone crying above me, and I can only assume that it’s because of me and the fact that no sound is coming out of me at all, and because of the way I can hardly seem to move, either.

  I have a terrible flashback to someone else crying because of me.

  My mom.

  I was six years old. I’d gotten into a fight with one of my cousins over I don’t even remember what now, but I remember losing my temper, and I remember the way the world had shaken and the sky had changed because of it. And then later that day I was told that I had to stay in my room, because there were important visitors coming to our house and I couldn’t be in their way.

  I realized eventually that those visitors were council members. That they’d felt the disturbance I’d caused, and that they had come to give my parents a warning. To tell them that it better not happen again—and to remind them of what a risk they had taken by keeping me.

  I’d snuck out later that night, planning to go to my parent’s room and apologize. But then I’d heard her crying from the hall outside. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed my mom crying about anything, and I hadn’t known what to do, so I’d just snuck back to my own room and started crying myself.

  And lying in the mud right now, I might not be able to speak out loud, but the voice in my head is relentless—just like it was that night, while I tried to sleep and to not think about the way it all hurt.

  Stop being so weak, Elle.

  Control yourself.

  Focus, before you destroy your parents and everything else.

  The problem with finding focus, though, is that it brings the pain in my leg sharply into focus as well. So the first sound that I manage to make is basically a scream, and it does nothing to calm the crying going on around me—crying that’s coming from Carys, I realize after a few seconds.

  “Calm down,” I mumble, “I’m fine.”

  “Elle, your leg.”

  “Is it like…completely gone?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I’ll survive,” I groan, placing my hands over my face to try and hide my grimace from her.

  “It needs medical attention—”

  “She does have better healing abilities than the average human,” Liam says. His voice isn’t quite the squeaking, near-panicked tone of Carys’s, but there’s a definite edge of concern in it. I try to pretend I didn’t hear it, because it doesn’t help.

  Calm. Focus. Control.

  “See?” I cough. “I’m not one-hundred percent human, so it’s all good.”

  “Nothing about this is good!” Carys says.

  “She just needs to relax,” Liam insists. “That will help her natural healing abilities more than anything. And it will help her stay… you know.”

  “In control,” I finish for him. “So I don’t break the world.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “I…okay.” I hear Carys take several deep, determined breaths. “Fine. Relax. I can do that. We can do that.”

  “Start reciting facts about the flora and fauna of Ireland again,” I suggest. “That was putting me to sleep earlier.”

  “Oh, ha-ha, very funny—excuse me for trying to educate you, cretin.”

  “On second thought, I don’t want any more education about this place, honestly. I just want to leave before any more demons show up.”

  She grumbles a bit more about my lack of appreciation for her fact-sharing, and then she asks: “Which, by the way, what exactly happened with you and that thing?”

  It takes me a few attempts to find both the energy and the words to somehow recount the past few minutes of horror. And then that horror is renewed all over again when I realize: my hands are empty.

  The key is gone.

  Eleven

  Trust and Prejudice

  “The key,” I gasp. “Where did it go?” I try to sit up, am promptly slammed by a wave of dizziness, and I fall back to the mud.

  Liam manages to get a hand underneath my head just before it hits the ground. He slides his other hand against my back, and with his help I manage to fight my way into a sitting position, only feeling slightly like I might vomit in the process.

  “Didn’t you hear Soren earlier?” Liam says. “He took it. He wanted to try and neutralize its energy and make sure that guardian was really sealed in it like you said, or something like that.”

  “And you just let him take it?”

  “You said you trusted him, right? Also, in our defense, we were distracted by the fact that you looked like you were dead.”

  “I trust him, I just…I don’t trust him as much as I trust myself.” I close my eyes, breathe in and out several times until I feel like I have a shot at keeping my balance. Then I rise slowly to my feet.

  My wounded leg immediately tries to buckle underneath me. It doesn’t seem to still be bleeding, though. And the pain isn’t enough to make my vision blurry this time.

  So my empty hand is much more concerning to me at the moment.

  “I need it back. Right now.” There’s a desperation in my voice that’s unexpected and a little frightening, even to me. “I can’t…I don’t think I’m going to be able to heal until I get it back.”

  “He said you might say something like that.” I can tell Liam is frowning just by the tone of his voice. “That its otherworldly energy might be a dangerous draw for you, that it might make it hard for you to control yourself and—”

  “That sounds kind of like an excuse someone would give so they could take the key from me,” I mutter, starting to limp toward a nearby cluster of trees.

  I can smell the trail Soren left up to those trees.

  Even over the mud and blood and gross lake water staining my skin and clothes, his scent is surprisingly easy to pick out; his smell reminds me of early mornings, clean and new and wet with dew, and there’s a hint of something like cinnamon underneath the dewiness. His appearance has cha
nged, in subtle ways, several times since we met, but his scent has stayed the same.

  I follow that scent, while behind me, the lake is still swirling with a strange energy. There’s still a faint glow over the place where the shrine I robbed is resting. It’s noticeable enough that it might attract and endanger some stupidly curious humans—and the same humans Carys warned us about earlier are still hanging around; I can smell them, too.

  I don’t have any particularly strong love for humankind. Maybe because I’m bitter about the fact that I’m stuck being so much more human than the rest of my pack, even though there’s no way I’d actually fit in with other real humans.

  But keeping those real humans safe is one of those things that the council—and my mom—have repeatedly insisted is part of our obligation as the stronger, supernatural beings of the world.

  Liam and Carys take this obligation a little more seriously than me, so they’re distracted enough by this mission that I somehow manage to pull out ahead of them, and when I find Soren sitting among an outcropping of rocks, he’s alone and so am I.

  I’m aware of this—and painfully aware of how badly my leg hurts after walking so far and so fast—but I don’t think about looking back or waiting for Liam and Carys to catch up. I don’t even think about calling out to them in thoughtspeech.

  All I’m really able to focus on is how strangely still Soren is, and how intently he’s studying the object in his hands. Of how he’s looking at it like he expected it to give him answers but it…didn’t.

  And then how his scent is the same, yet actually a bit different now that I’m closer. Marred by something I haven’t encountered from him yet: something quiet and sad.

  Sadness is one of those emotions that, like fear, sort of reeks with obvious scent markers that are hard to describe. If you’ve ever wondered if your dog can tell when you’re sad, the answer is yes—and so can I. It’s a neat party trick, but also one of the reasons that I’d never fit in with real humans, like I said before.

  It’s also the reason I walk even faster to his side, in spite of the growing pain shooting up my leg, and in spite of the fact that it feels a bit like it did that night outside my mom’s room— like I’m eavesdropping on some private grief.