Blood and Wolf

by S. M. Gaither

“The pine trees didn’t seem to impress you enough, so this was plan B.”

  I laugh. “I’m impressed by the trees, I promise.”

  He starts to reply, but I cut him off by abruptly sitting up; I hear voices in the distance, suddenly.

  “Not exactly as private as it seems, apparently,” I say.

  “It’s not?”

  “I hear people. There’s a beach nearby, I think; I smell the concentrated sand and lots of dead crabs in it—that last scent isn’t particularly pleasant, if you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t wondering, but thanks for sharing.”

  “The joys of having a wolf’s nose.”

  “Maybe I can help with that?”

  “Help?”

  He stands and looks up through the dizzying heights of tree trunks again. “I can paint one more picture for you,” he says. “One last, more complete distraction. And then we’ll have to go. But for now…” His voice is soft with thought. Exactly how I imagine a great artist would consult with himself before embarking on an attempt at a masterpiece.

  “Let’s see it then, Van Gogh,” I say, resting back on my palms and watching him work.

  He moves his hands as if he’s holding a brush; swift expert strokes that spill shadows instead of paint into the air. It’s subtle, almost, the way it all melds at first with our surroundings; from a distance I imagine it would look like the clouds causing the moonlight to bend strangely around the existing trees.

  But I’m close enough that I can clearly see those shadows he’s conjured, the way they start to turn more solid and then to take on bark patterns and sprout pine-needles of their own.

  He ‘plants’ at least dozen more trees in this way, raising them up from thin air and encircling them into our own, private grove-among-the-grove. The look incredibly real. They smell incredibly real—so much so that they do almost completely distract me from anything in the distance.

  I feel that familiar sense of awe and attraction to him and his power, tempered by just the slightest bit of trepidation over how easily he makes my mind forget what’s real and what’s not.

  “Now we have a little more privacy, at least,” he says, and when he looks down, his eyes are back to their real, green color. It makes this space seem that much more private and only for us. “I don’t think anyone on the beach could have seen us to begin with, but now they definitely can’t.”

  “You’re terrifyingly good,” I say, marveling at the way the illusion-trees even seem to dance and creak in the breeze the same way as their real counterparts. “I swear I can’t tell the difference between the real and the fake.”

  “I know.” His eyes flash back to blue, and he smiles and offers me his hand.

  I think he’s going to pull me into another kiss that tastes like anarchy and destruction. I want him to do that, as stupid as I know it would be, and he almost does—but then he stops just close enough for our noses to bump, and for me to get lost in the blue of those eyes for a minute.

  He kisses me very softly—safely— on the lips, pulls back, and he says, “And I’m glad. But I’m also sorry about that, Little Wolf.”

  His tone is all wrong.

  I try to laugh it off. “The only thing you have to be sorry for is that stupid nickname.”

  He shakes his head.

  Before I can speak or move or hardly even think, his hand reaches behind his back, under his jacket, and he grabs hold of something and jerks.

  I remember the dagger he’s carrying, and I instinctively slam my knee up toward his groin.

  But he’s anticipating that— he lets me go and jumps back before my strike hits.

  And it isn’t the dagger in his hand.

  It’s the bag of keys.

  I stare in shock as he dumps the two of them onto the ground between us. They’re still neutralized, but the two of them combined and outside of the protective bag is enough to immediately make me want to shut my eyes to try and block out the pain that screams through my head. It’s a pain that I’m almost convinced will go away if I give into that pull I feel building inside of me, yanking my hands toward those keys and begging me to take them.

  Control, I remind myself, same as I’ve been doing for most of my existence.

  I manage to gain enough of that control to fall back against the ground, and to glare up at Soren and fiercely demand, “What are you doing?”

  “There’s a particular energy about this place that makes me think there’s a strong connection to Canath here. So here seems like as good a place as any to use these keys and perform the necessary spell to finish what I set out to do.”

  “You can’t,” I say through clenched teeth. “We need the third! You said it yourself, we can’t do it until we have them all gathered together, or things could backfire, and we—”

  “Oh, Little Wolf,” he mutters, crouching down next to the neutralized keys and letting his hand hover over them. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

  I want to run, but all I can do is stare in horror.

  “It’s you. You’re the last key.”

  Nineteen

  Power and Peace

  I don’t remember falling.

  But somehow I end up on the ground. My senses are dulled, every sight and smell and sound fading away until there’s only the sensation of pain.

  It’s only on my wrist at first. On my mark. It feels like someone is trying to rip the bones from my wrist out, one by one by one—

  Then that same ripping sensation spreads up my arm, to my shoulder, across my chest. Everything inside of me is being torn out. I would swear on it. The pain is so terrible, so excruciating, that all I can think about is death.

  I want to die.

  I don’t.

  The pain disappears abruptly.

  I know I didn’t imagine it, though, because there’s blood all over my shirt, in my lap, on my hands.

  My whole body is shaking.

  But the world seems surprisingly still as I lift my head, and my eyes manage to focus on a bright red object, shaped like a four-pointed star, resting several feet away from me.

  It’s in the same shape as the mark of Canath.

  The mark that has now disappeared from my skin.

  “I should correct my earlier statement,” Soren says, and it sounds as if he’s at the other end of a tunnel, whispering words I can barely hear. I desperately want to hear them. I desperately want to hear some sort of explanation. Something that could undo this ache in my chest and make this blood all over me disappear.

  “You aren’t so much the key as the former carrier of that key,” he continues. “A sort of guardian, like the others we faced—though you’re a slightly special case, obviously. One I almost overlooked.” He kneels down in front of me and retrieves that third key. “For what it’s worth,” he adds, “I’m glad it didn’t kill you, drawing it out like that. I was afraid it might.”

  What I want to ask is how could you? But I refuse to let him know how badly he’s hurt me. So instead I choose to focus on the question that started this entire expedition: “Why was it in me to begin with?”

  He lines the keys up side-by-side, studying them for a moment and muttering things—parts of spells?— under his breath.

  “You at least owe me an explanation.” My voice is surprisingly calm. Everything around me is still surprisingly calm. Despite my pain, despite my anguish, despite my fear—the ground isn’t shaking.

  The sky isn’t splitting.

  The world isn’t ending.

  I lift my hand in front of my face to better study the wrist that once carried my mark. I still can’t believe it’s gone. That I actually feel something like stable, even after everything that’s just happened.

  I should be celebrating.

  But this isn’t at all how I pictured this moment going.

  “Your mother was the original ‘guardian’ of this key,” Soren finally says. “My theory is that she was too powerful to be contained within it, the way the other guardian
s where eventually re-contained within their respective keys; so when it first manifested—after she dealt with that portal to Canath all those years ago—she alone absorbed its power. And then she unknowingly passed that power to you when you were born. But you were just a child, not nearly as strong as her. So the otherworldly essence of this key has essentially been fighting with you, making itself known through that mark on your skin. It was poison in you, making your powers unstable and unusable and skewing their development. And now I’ve done you the favor of drawing the poison out.”

  “Favor?” I snap, jumping to my feet. “If it was such a favor, then why didn’t you just tell me you planned on doing it?”

  “I told you: I thought it might kill you. And honestly I wasn’t sure how I was going to draw it out, or if I’d even be able to, until just recently. Not until I saw the way you reacted to the other keys. Then it became obvious that your power was drawn to theirs, even while they were in their neutralized state.”

  “You could have explained that to me. I should have had a say in this!”

  “Maybe. But I wasn’t sure you would have agreed to help me if you thought there was a chance you’d die in the end.”

  The trees continue to moan and creak around us, nearly drowning out my voice as I quietly say, “I was never afraid of dying. I only wanted to fix this world, whatever it took. And I thought you wanted the same thing.”

  He smiles. It’s small—the subtle reaction he has when he realizes he’s right about something. When one of his illusions has successfully tricked someone.

  It fills me with a pulsing, aching dread.

  “What else have you lied about?” I demand. “Was it all a lie? Everything you told me about yourself? Everything we did when we were alone together?”

  For a fraction of a second his smile is replaced by something uncomfortable, and then his expression turns stony.

  Instead of answering me, he focuses on running his hand across each of the keys, stripping the spells he’s casted over them.

  I can feel their power building. It’s not pulling me, not driving me crazy anymore, but I still feel almost overwhelmed by it.

  They shouldn’t be collected like this. I can’t stop thinking that. It’s too much power in one place.

  And suddenly I realize the only question that I should have been asking—the only one that really matters now: “Did you even want to fix this world at all?”

  Black flames twist around his hands, reminding me entirely too much of the last time I faced his father. Maric Blackwood. The enemy I thought I was fighting. The one I thought I could outrun and outsmart. That I could defeat.

  How can I even think about defeating his son, when just minutes ago I thought I was falling in love with him?

  “There are things that I plan to fix,” Soren says. “But how this particular world holds up…Well, that’s not really my concern, because I don’t plan on staying in it much longer. Though, for your sake, I hope it lasts.”

  I realize what he’s going to do the instant those black flames start to twist away from his hands and encircle the keys instead.

  I don’t think. I just throw myself forward, slamming my shoulder into his chest and knocking him backward. A cheap shot at his existing wounds, maybe, but it scatters his magic and allows me to step protectively between him and the keys.

  “Destroying them isn’t going to close the link to the other world, is it?” I demand. “You said it yourself when we first met: if I had been killed, it might have ripped open a permanent fissure. And that’s exactly what you plan to do, isn’t it? You obnoxious, piece of—”

  “I don’t think it will be permanent.” He climbs back to his feet, wincing and holding his side. “And less like a tear and more like a stable bridge, now that I’ve collected enough power to do it, along with researching the proper spell, but—”

  I punch him. I aim straight for his head this time.

  He manages to twist so that I’m only able to land a glancing blow, but it’s enough to disorient him long enough that it gives me time to grab one of the keys—the one that came out of me—and I shove it into my pocket. As I finish securing it, I see him diving for the others.

  I kick them both as hard as I can in opposite directions.

  He abandons his pursuit of the keys and turns furiously after me instead. “You’re going to force me to deal with you, aren’t you?”

  “You should have seen that coming, asshole. If I didn’t back down to the demons we fought, what made you think I would I would let you get away with this?”

  He narrows his eyes and lifts his hand, bending his fingers as if beckoning magic to them. The air around him shimmers and swelters.

  I lift my hand as well, focusing on my nails, thinking of all the times I’ve almost transformed them to claws in the past. I can’t help the fear that skips through me out of habit, warning me, repeating those three words that have been my existence for so long: Human. Control. Peace.

  But I’m more than human.

  I’m in control, now.

  And the only way I’m going to find peace is by stopping him.

  However I have to do it.

  So as Soren steps toward me, I draw back and prepare to strike, and as I do I feel thick black claws curving out from my fingertips.

  He clenches his fist, and two mirror images of himself materialize in that shimmering air around him. All three versions of him reach for the dagger at his back. I bolt forward before any of them can draw the weapon, and I swing toward the center Soren—the real one that I haven’t taken my eyes off of—and my claws slice easily through his clothing and catch him just above the hip as he tries to spin away. They carve into him as easily as if he’s made of water. The scent of his blood explodes into my nostrils, and the memory of the last time I smelled so much of this blood crashes into my head along with it.

  I’d been so afraid of losing him.

  I’d thought he was actually mine to lose.

  I feel the raw, stabbing pain of his betrayal all over again.

  A hot rush of fury follows it. It makes me blind and stupid for a split second—enough time for him to counterattack by hooking an arm around me and slamming me to the ground.

  I roll over and spring immediately back up, but by this point, the three different versions of him have mixed themselves up. And they’re all bleeding, suddenly. They all have torn clothing, like I attacked all three of them.

  My heart skips several beats faster.

  “Go home, Elle,” says one of the Sorens.

  “No,” I snarl back, wiping away the dirt and pine needles sticking to my arm.

  “You’re cured,” says the Soren to my right. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You’re stable. You can go home and live your life in peace and forget about me.”

  “If you do something stupid with those keys, it’s still my fault! I’m the one who gave them to you. The one who was stupid enough to trust you!” My eyes dart frantically between the three of him, trying to come up with a plan. Trying to see the real him, somehow.

  And then I realize—none of these are real.

  They all still have those deep blue eyes that I know don’t really belong to him.

  I’ve made his illusion slip before. So maybe there was something real between us that night on the Irish hillside, and maybe I can use it to draw him out again.

  It makes me cringe inwardly to do it, but I lower my voice and my claws, and in the most vulnerable tone I can manage, I say, “I thought I was falling in love with you, you know.”

  All three of his bodies draw back half a step. But then they quickly redistribute their weight back to a casual stance, and they all regard me with the same relaxed smile as the center one says, “You should have known better than to fall in love with someone that’s constantly changing. It could only have ended poorly.”

  “I’ve seen the real you. There are things about you that you can’t change. And those things we did—you can’t change those, either.
I know you felt something. Even if almost everything else about you was fake, at least tell me those feelings weren’t. The two of us almost split the sky open that day at the inn. That was real.”

  He’s silent for a moment.

  Hardly even breathing.

  I can hear those voices on the beach again, and the steady ebb and flow of the ocean waves, and the way my heart seems to have paused along with his breathing.

  “Go home,” that center Soren repeats, quieter this time.

  “I want to see the real you first. One more time. Please?” I lock eyes with the one closest to me. Still blue. I’m scared to look away, because I’m afraid I might miss them changing. But then I hear the one to my left move—just the tiniest bit of uncertain shuffling.

  I spin around, and I immediately find his eyes.

  Green.

  My breath catches at the sight. I don’t hesitate long enough to think about all the reasons why.

  I just jump forward, claws outstretched. And this time I make sure they sink more completely in, deeply into his shoulder.

  He tries to grab me and throw me to the ground again.

  I dig in and hold on, dragging him down with me. We roll several feet, kicking and punching and scrambling for position, until he manages to get a hand tangled in my hair. He uses that grip to slam my head into a gnarled, protruding tree root. The jarring pain that shoots through my temple makes my vision dance and my stomach lurch, threatening to throw up all that questionably greasy food I ate earlier.

  I sense him looming over me.

  My inner wolf surges up, and for once, I don’t bother trying to keep it chained.

  I let my instincts take over, let my beastly strength throw him off me. It springs me to my hands and knees in the next instant. I’m still shaped like a human, but my mind is all wolf, sending me scrabbling on all fours until I’m close enough to pounce on his chest and pin his squirming body underneath me.

  I feel sharpness in my mouth. Fangs sprouting, jaw unhinging and shifting and growing powerful enough to crush.

  He throws his hands up and takes my face in a vicious grip. He yanks it closer to his, almost as if for a violent kiss, and he harshly whispers, “I really didn’t want to have to hurt you this way. But you’ve left me no choice.”