Blood and Wolf

by S. M. Gaither

Such a mistake.

  The way he’s looking at me makes that heat in my cheeks spread over my entire body.

  He leans a little bit closer.

  I’m frozen in place. I have to fight to remember my reasonable side—all my very sane excuses as to why I can’t do this. “I’m just not a fan of that whole star-crossed lovers trope, you know?” I mutter. “My pack would still freak if I brought home a sorcerer, even after we’d saved the world together. And I feel like I’ve freaked them all out enough already.”

  “Who said you had to bring me home?”

  I open my mouth to reply.

  Nothing comes out.

  My breathing is shallow, quick with growing desire that I can’t really deny, however hard I might try. I shuffle a bit, ungraceful and so very aware of his nearness. I expect the movement to cause pain. But the pain in my leg is gone. I can’t help but think of how he’s the reason for that, and about how tenderly he’d touched me, and the warmth and comfort of him and his spell…

  Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve leaned toward him. One of his hands falls back to my leg, fingers resting just as gently as before. The other finds the small of my back in a bolder, more possessive grip that he uses to pull me even closer, eliminating almost all the space between us.

  Our noses bump.

  His warm breath tickles my skin.

  Our lips brush once, twice—

  The sound of footsteps squishing through the mud reaches us. We pull away from each other and turn to see Liam walking toward us.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t realize I was interrupting something.” His voice is flat, even though he attempts to give me his usual carefree smile.

  “You weren’t,” I say, jumping to my feet and putting a little space between Soren and myself. I do my best to crush the rebellious desire still shivering through me. Taking a few more steps away from Soren helps.

  Sort of.

  “Well you weren’t answering me or Carys. So I have to assume you were too…busy.”

  “I didn’t hear you,” I say, frowning.

  Liam gives up on his attempted smile and mirrors my frown instead.

  “The spell’s fault, probably,” Soren says, under his breath and more to me than Liam—though, of course, Liam can still hear it.

  “What spell?” He gives me a dubious look— like he can’t believe I could possibly have been stupid enough to let my guard down and willingly let a sorcerer cast a spell on me. And now that I’m not distracted by pain or the closeness of Soren’s body, my brain insists on reminding me that Liam is right.

  I knew I was being stupid.

  I knew it was a terrible idea.

  But that hadn’t stopped me, and it’s not stopping part of me from wishing we could have had just a few more minutes to finish what we’d started.

  Still, I fumble for an answer, an explanation to make myself look less reckless and dumb and to try and alleviate that exasperated look on my best friend’s face.

  “I was just trying to help her relax,” Soren says, his voice smooth and suggestive in that way that just seems to come naturally from him, but that also does nothing to make Liam look any happier about finding the two of us together.

  “It was a harmless spell,” I insist.

  Liam stares at me for a moment—almost glaring, really, which is a weird look on him—and then through thoughtspeech he says, (There’s no such thing as a harmless spell.)

  (Your prejudice is showing,) I think back. (Just because he’s—)

  “Anyway,” he interrupts out loud, “We got what we came for, right? And the lake seems to be back to normal now. So we were thinking it’s probably time to pack up and get out of this dreary country. Preferably before we attract anymore unwanted attention.”

  I nod, holding back a sigh as I safely pocket the key before moving to his side.

  One down, two to go.

  And that is what I should be focusing on.

  Twelve

  Anarchy and Secrets

  “You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?”

  Liam takes another sip of his water and leans away from the table, rolling the tension from his shoulders as he squints toward a couple walking a dog on the sidewalk across from us. “Mad? No. I was never mad at you to begin with, stupid.”

  “Just disappointed, right?” I say with a half-hearted grin, because we both know that sounds like something his mother—or mine— would say.

  “I’m not your parent.”

  “And yet your gee-I-wish-Eleanor-wouldn’t-do-such-dumb-things look is scarily similar to my dad’s.”

  He cocks an eyebrow, but says nothing to that, just leans further back in his chair and closes his eyes as if he’s really into the Romanian pop music that this café is serenading its customers with.

  “It’s been three days,” I say, “I figured you would have dropped it by now.”

  Three days of traveling from Ireland to this quaint little village in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, and the two of us have hardly spoken. Every attempt at our normal sort of interaction that I’ve made, he’s managed to deflect, usually by dragging Carys into the conversation and finding some way to get her to start talking about the things she’s been researching in our attempt to zero in on our next target.

  It isn’t exactly hard to get her to talk about those things, either. We decided on the general location of the next key, and over the past few days, Carys has essentially downloaded an entire database of Romanian mythology into her brain, hoping to give us an edge on discovering and fighting whatever nasty guardian might be in store for us next.

  And I’m glad for it.

  Because again: it’s what I should be focusing on.

  I shouldn’t be sitting here thinking about how Liam and Soren have kept as much distance as two people traveling together could possibly manage to keep. Or how, every time they have gotten too close to each other, the end result has been clenched fists and threats that Carys and I have just barely managed to deescalate in time.

  “If you’re waiting for me to stop being concerned about you, you’re going to be waiting for a lot longer than three days,” Liam says without opening his eyes.

  “He helped me that night, you know. Like I told you before. Like twelve times before, I think it’s been now?”

  “I don’t like him messing with your mind. Even if he claims it was to heal you. I don’t trust his brand of healing.”

  I sink a little deeper into my chair.

  “I’m accepting the fact that he’s a necessary evil,” he says, eyes blinking open but still avoiding mine. “I’m accepting that he knows more about the keys and how they work than we do, and so we need him to help possibly cure you or whatever—which I want so badly that I’m willing to put up with the little twerp for as long as I have to. But I don’t like the way he looks at you. Because I swear, he constantly looks like he’s plotting something.”

  “Did it ever occur to you that you might feel that way just because you’ve been raised to feel that way? The entire pack has done nothing but fill your head with terrible things about the Blackwood sorcerers, but what if they aren’t all like that? What if we’d all really tried working together a long time ago?”

  “The pack has its reasons for the things they’ve said. And maybe you should have been paying attention to what they had to say—they’re your pack too, you know.”

  “Are they?” The words snap out of my mouth before I can stop them, leaving us both stunned and silent for a minute.

  I should try to take them back, maybe.

  But I can’t seem to get myself to do that.

  He starts to get up.

  “Liam, I didn’t mean that you—”

  “I’ll see you back at the inn,” he says, abruptly dropping his credit card beside my plate, leaving me with nothing for company except the electronic, slightly static beat of foreign pop music.

  I do go back to the rustic little inn we stayed in last night.

 
But not so I can meet up with Liam again.

  Not yet.

  Not feeling like I really belong with most of my own pack…that I was used to, even if he didn’t want to hear me say that. But I’m not sure how to handle feeling like I can’t be comfortable next to my best friend, either.

  I feel weak admitting it, but I desperately need to be somewhere where I feel like I belong. So the first thing I do when I reach the inn is find Carys. Hopefully I’ll have better luck with her than Liam, conversation-wise, since she’s the more level-headed of the two of them. And she’s been in a particularly good mood today, since she actually got to sleep in a real bed last night—after using every argument in her arsenal to convince us to risk staying in an actual inn.

  She’s in a predictable place: the little fireplace room off the lobby, with its squishy armchairs and weathered wooden table that she’s covered in books.

  This is where she camped out most of yesterday evening, too, pouring over those books that the innkeeper lent her, and occasionally dragging that innkeeper into her research as well. I witnessed a few of their conversations— Carys attempting to use the few Romanian phrases she’s managed to learn, and the innkeeper’s daughter trying her best to interpret Cary’s enthusiastically quick questions.

  That innkeeper seems to be steering clear of her study room today.

  I doubt Carys has noticed, though. Hell, she barely notices me until I’m hanging right over her, and even then, she doesn’t look up from her book.

  “Liam came back a half hour ago, and then left again in a hurry,” she says as she flags a page with a bright green post-it note. “I thought you two were having breakfast together?”

  “We walked back separately.”

  “You fought again?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” I flop onto the couch in as dramatic a fashion as I can manage. “Quick: distract me with random facts about Romanian mythological creatures.”

  She looks thoughtful for a moment, sighs, and then dutifully recites: “The furat-diavol are also referred to as changelings or body-snatchers. They’re a legend known mostly just in this village—tiny little devil things with the ability to take the souls of weak-willed, lost people who wander too deep into the forest.”

  “Weak-willed?”

  “Mmhm. So basically, anytime someone around here does something bad—something that weakens their soul or whatever, they’re said to be making themselves furat-bait.”

  “I’ll try to refrain from soul-compromising activities while I’m here, then.”

  “You probably should. But it wouldn’t save you from the balaur— a creature in Romanian mythology that’s similar to a European dragon. It has three heads in most stories, but there are some stories that say it has as many as twelve.”

  “Ooh, that sounds fun,” I deadpan. “I hope we get to fight that.”

  “It could be worse.”

  “Am I imagining this, or do you sound way too enthusiastic about the fact that there are even worse creatures that might be awaiting us?”

  She holds up the page she’s just flagged, tapping an entry headed Giants of Romania with all the excitement of a kid showing off an award she’s just won.

  “Go on,” I say with a bemused smile.

  “Novaci,” she says. “A designation for the giants specific to this region of the Carpathians. They’re known to skin their victims alive and use their bones to build shrines that they horde treasures in.”

  “Well that sounds terrifying.”

  “I know, but shrines. And treasures. Exactly what we’re looking for, right?”

  “Maybe. No mention of any giants by any of the locals we’ve talked to, though. Seems like they would have mentioned something that big when we asked them about local stories and legends.”

  “Maybe they just don’t want to scare away the tourists? Or there could be some sort of magic at work, hiding them from humans.” She shrugs, but goes back to her book, flipping through pages and assumedly searching for a backup answer in case her first guess really is wrong.

  “Skinning their victims alive…geez.”

  “I know,” she says. “Kind of puts the little fight you had into perspective, huh?”

  “I don’t know. I might consider being skinned alive if it means I don’t have to talk to Liam again anytime soon.”

  “Oh, come on. Fights between you two never last long. This time won’t be any different.”

  “Circumstances are a little different.”

  An extra player has entered the game, I think to myself. Or I meant for it to be to myself, anyway. But I’m picturing Soren so strongly in my mind now that I apparently don’t manage to keep this—or the rush of emotions it causes me—from Carys’s attention.

  “Yeah, he’s not a fan of that guy. But…it isn’t just Soren that’s bothering him, you know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Haven’t you noticed? He’s been weird ever since Ireland. We came too close to the place it all happened, I think. And then you practically drowned there too, which didn’t make the visit anymore pleasant, and I think he’s just struggling with all of that.”

  She means the place where our parents fought that otherworldly evil, of course— where my mother was poisoned by the Canath monsters that escaped that portal, and Liam’s father was killed by them.

  And I’d already thought about his aversion to being there, but then I’d gotten distracted by Soren and everything else, and so I’ve yet to find the right moment—or the right courage—to actually bring it up with Liam.

  “I’m kind of a terrible friend,” I say, picking up the stack of post-it notes and absently sticking a trail of them along my arm. They look kind of like feathers. I’m tempted to see if they can help me fly away from all this craziness.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She snatches the post-it notes, muttering something about me being wasteful. “You’re a little distracted by other things, right?” she says. “I don’t think he expects you to have a therapy session with him about any of this. Just give him time. He’ll be back to his usual self after we get a little more distance from that first guardian battle. Focusing on the next battle would probably help.”

  “Aye-aye, captain.” I sigh wistfully. “I’m glad I have you to keep me in line, at least.” My tone is a bit teasing, but I mean what I say. She’s younger than all of us, but she’s still basically the adult chaperone on this crazy field trip.

  “Someone has to,” she says, echoing my sigh.

  “So where to next?”

  She flips through the dog-eared notebook in her lap for a moment, finds a page with a bulleted list, and then presents it to me. “I’ve narrowed down promising locations for us to check out, based on these books and a conversation I had with the innkeeper’s daughter. She mentioned the Cambio Forest—that’s the one at the bottom of list there, the one that I starred. Said hardly anyone goes in there at night, because of weird things like lights and music that apparently come from nowhere. The locals apparently put mirrors around the edges of the forest to confuse evil spirits, to keep them lost in the trees so they can’t reach the villages and people outside. So, you know, that’s creepy.”

  “Sounds like exactly the sort of place we should find some more trouble— slash otherworldly artifacts.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Well, perfect. I say we head there first. Also, you’re a godsend.”

  “I know I am.”

  “I’m going to go start packing up.”

  “I’ll catch up. I need to call home first and let them know we’re all still alive.”

  “And also so you can nerd out with your dad about Romanian giants and dragons?”

  “Obviously.”

  I’ve always thought it was kind of adorable, the way the only person that out-dorks Carys is her own father. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and all that.

  I feel a twang of homesickness myself as I watch her pull out her phone and flip through
her contacts. It’s been two days since I last called home; when I did, I only talked to my dad, and it had been a brief conversation. Mom had been gone, on her way to meet with the alphas of two other local packs. Still doing damage control thanks to all the trouble I’ve caused, I think— though Dad only kept insisting that things were fine.

  He always says that, though.

  Particularly when things are not fine.

  I consider suggesting Carys ask her dad for more details about what’s happening back home—Uncle Eli has always been the type to offer up straight facts without holding back for fear of frightening or upsetting people.

  But in the end, I decide that maybe I don’t want to know all the details this time.

  I can only focus on fighting so many battles at once, you know?

  So instead I just give Carys a weak smile. “Tell him I said hello,” I say, and then I leave her and head for our room.

  Back in the room the four of us shared, I find Soren neatly folding blankets and stacking pillows on the pull-out sofa he slept on last night.

  “You know housekeeping is just going to unfold those so they can wash them, right?”

  He shrugs. “I’m in the habit of keeping things tidy. My dad was essentially a drill sergeant about chores.”

  “Fold on, then.” I move to the corner, where I’ve stacked all my things in a decidedly less neat fashion, including my trusty sword. That sword has lost the illusion Soren casted over it when we arrived. We thought we might raise some eyebrows by carrying weapons and stuff in here. And my weapon doesn’t fit very easily into my suitcase, so for these past twenty-four hours or so, it’s appeared to all the world as a harmless guitar that I could sling onto my back.

  Seeing the blade back to its normal appearance and sharpness settles some of the unease that had started rolling around in my stomach once I started thinking about home. There’s something reassuring about this reminder that I’m out here to fight.

  The first key to Canath is in the small lockbox the inn provided in addition to a floor safe, and the literal key to that lockbox is in the zippered pocket of my jacket. I reach for it now. Aside from my weapons, it should be the first thing I pack and secure. That’s what I decided on the way up here.