He doesn’t look at me. He’s digging underneath the corner of the bed.
Between the mattress and box spring.
“Can you trust Sienna?” I continue talking. “She met with Alastor. Then she just shows up with information and is willing to help you? To train with you? To lead you to whatever you’re looking for?” I intuit.
He grabs my right wrist without looking in my eyes, and clamps a soft cuff on it.
“Hey!” Holy shit. He has straps to tie someone to his bed! I clench against the arousal growing within me. I stand, not sure what I’m attempting to do exactly. Run away?
He grabs my other wrist and another thick cuff is under his palm. He quickly, dexterously cinches the bindings. In seconds, I’m tethered to his bed. I’m speechless. Stunned with sexual curiosity.
“Listen closely, Glory.” He taps my nose. I look up from my manacled wrists. His blue eyes are swirling with anger and if I’m not mistaken, lust.
“We are going to recover a very valuable weapon. You will not be coming with us, as you declined to access and train your greatest strength. You are a liability.”
I lift my hands to slap him across the face, but they are snapped short by the restraints.
He smiles wickedly. “You’re not top alpha anymore, Glory. I am.”
I catch sight of his canines just before he turns towards the door.
“Don’t trust her!” I yell to his back. It seems obvious to me, but what do I know?
When his foot disappears off the top step, the marble slides back into place.
I’d expect a grating rumble or a space age whoosh, but it’s near silent.
I drop my butt to the edge of the bed.
I can’t hear anything through the marble. Nick’s bedroom is soundproof.
Time passes. First five minutes. Then twenty.
I settle myself more comfortably on the bed.
Can I trust my mind to mark the passage of time? It could be an hour. Two.
Fourteen months in a silo felt like a week. Maybe this hour is mere minutes?
Suddenly, I’m lit up within. All my synapses firing from inside my chest, lightning bolts to my limbs. It’s a call. A call of magic whispering through my limbs.
Every muscle, ever ligament, poised with expected excitement. I pull against the nylon rope, knowing with happy elation I can break this. Easily.
In my most berserk form.
I take a deep breathe. Another. Another. Another. Meditating on pulling air into and out of my lungs. My human, unchanged lungs.
I don’t want to change, but I know if I so decided, it’d happen within a blink. There’s power and magic coursing through me. I want to box it up, tuck it away. But. It’s too abundant. I can let it run it’s course. Flow through me. Over me. But I won’t let it sweep my self away.
Why now? Why tonight?
Is it because of the jealousy I felt? The lust? What? Why is my monster ready to come out and play?
I focus deeply on remaining human.
I hear footsteps on the stairs. Light. Small. A growl erupts in my chest, and I squash it down.
She crosses quickly to me. Kneels down to untie my hands.
I can smell the fear and nervousness coming off her.
“I know you don’t trust me. But for what it’s worth, I haven’t been spying on Nick. Or the others. I truly wanted to help.” Sienna’s words spill out of her mouth. In hurried nervousness. I want to trust this is her truth. She’s worried. Something’s not right. She works at my wrists, unlatching the right successfully.
“Just tell me quickly.” I shake her off the left and undo the loop myself.
“We opened a portal tonight. Nick and the others went through it, but something went wrong.”
Finished with the cuff on my left, I lift my head. The magic is still coursing through my body, tingling.
Sienna’s own is bowed in front of me. I breathe deeper. Pulling in the scents of brimstone, ozone, earth, gunpowder. Fear.
“What went wrong?” I pull Sienna up with me, start towing her to the stairs. She sets her feet, and I turn back to her.
She shakes her head back and forth, looks up and the tears glisten in her eyes.
“We used your mom’s journal, she had detailed notes on how to do it.”
“WHAT? Are you kidding me?” I shake Sienna a little to get her to look at me.
My mother’s journals. I had them safe and sound in a box under my bed. Had them since Nick had returned them two months ago. But he and the council obviously had them the entire time I was in the silo. It’s very possible they transcribed them. Gave them to the witches to find out if the craft written inside was true. I breath around the darkness.
“Please tell me you weren’t so foolish as to do anything she had written.”
I hadn’t looked past the first journal. The one where she summoned a demon to impregnate her, and she successfully carried the baby to term. Me.
“The incantation checked out!” Sienna whispers with stubborn, stupid conviction.
I throw my hands up in the air. “Who the fuck cares?! Isn’t the number one rule you never, ever do someone else’s spell?”
God, the terminology sounds so pedantic to me.
“What did you do? What happened?”
Her eyes lift from the floor to my face. The truth I see it in her eyes. God. It’s terrible.
“What is it? What was the spell?” I whisper.
“The hunt. The Wild Hunt.”
Chapter 29
The Wild Hunt. All the energy in my limbs spools into a hard knot of fear and dread in my stomach.
“Where? Where did you do the spell?” I shout at Sienna.
“In Big Sky. At the compound.”
I grab her hand and pull her up the stairs. She’s in full out hysterics, and I have the urge to just dump her. Her fear and regret is clogging my own thoughts, making it hard to focus.
“Your coming with me. On the way, you tell me everything you know about the wild hunt.”
She’s not resisting me, and I don’t stop till I’m behind the wheel of my SUV.
Worry for Nick is pushing me. What if I’m not fast enough? What if he’s already hurt. Or worse.
And my sister! Justice is there in Big Sky.
Sienna gives a moan of terror when the dash lights up. My eyes land on what she’s looking at. The clock reads 3:33. A shiver rolls from the top of my shoulders to the base of my spine.
I feel thick hairy fur sprout along my spine underneath my shirt. Oddly pleasant. Like a sneeze. A release of pent up energy.
Shit. Not now. I grip the steering wheel, breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth. Sienna is sobbing quietly in the passenger seat. I can smell the salt of her tears and sweat. Her fear. I salivate. She is easy prey.
My left hand spasms. Fur erupts along the top of it. Claws grow out of my fingernails. Hard.
I reach for the door handle. Have to use my right, when my left is a bumbling useless, ugly claw.
I step from the car. The door closes behind me, muffling Sienna’s distress.
Satisfaction in her weakness. I can taste it on the tip of my tongue, just as good as her meat would be. My lips stretch into a smile. And my teeth ache with anticipation. The dull click of the door lock quietly breaks into the quiet night. I laugh under my breath. As if locks will keep me out.
The wind hits my face, it’s cooling caress bringing intoxication. It’s coming.
There’s a vibration in my soul. A calling.
I drop to my knees. When I rise, I am.
The great beast of power.
Indestructible.
Through my paws, I feel the earth rumble. Feel the deep bass of anticipation. My ears prick to the east. Unearthly noise.
The hunt is here. And I am joining it.
Chapter 30
Over forests, fields, and ditches,
Clustering pallid flare on flare,
Wolves with hundred feet, and witches
The hunters' shouts, the thunders' crash,
Roared high in the lust of slaughter,
Through horses' whinnies, the snap of the lash,
Above the livid water.
Just before them, roe and hart
Flew as if on hidden pinions
From the ghost-king and his minions,
Cleaving the slow mists apart.
Then the black snake coursed the meadow,
The red dragon rose unwombed,
While the storm wailed like a shadow
To eternal anguish doomed.
The full moon, like a bleeding troll,
Unheeding the earth's ire,
Cruelly charmed each tortured soul
From out the Abyss's fire.
They thought that his doom was sealed for aye,
By no prayers to be diminished:
To hunt until the last Judgment Day,
Till World and Time were finished.
-Excerpts from Johannes Carsten Hauch, The Wild Hunt
I lift my nose into the air. Scenting. Happy with what I can smell, knowing in my bones what’s coming, I return the call. My single howl is returned back to me from the approaching darkness. It’s a roiling, boiling, seething mass. Moving fast, it blots out the night sky in seconds. Darker than night. I know what that means now.
I run to it. Hurl myself into the air, and am caught.
Rightness swells within my breast. I run.
I run on black clouds. I am the blackness. One with the hunt.
Run, run, run.
Behind me the clamor of hooves, wings, wind, thunder. And wolves. Baying, yipping, barking, growling. Communicating. My family is here.
A blast of horn. The noise is at my shoulder. I turn.
He is Death. Dark cloak, skeletal head. A scythe held aloft. And he rides. A Frankenstein horse, melded together so that it’s eight legs paw and pound the ground in seamless movement.
Flanking Death, are two wolves, almost as tall as the horses themselves.
Even in my great form, I am just half as tall. Their appearance doesn’t scare me.
No. It calls to me. These wolves are my pack.
Behind them, more huntsman, horsed. A mix of creatures they are. Gruesome zombies, ghosts in spectral forms of near-translucence, demons, vampires, and some creatures so beautiful, they seem unreal, complete with wings. Faeries? Valkyries? Angels?
We are over the mountain, the valley, and over the next mountain with swiftness.
What do we seek? Souls.
My berserk brain processes time differently. Processes everything differently. The pulse of the hunt is a fever in me.
I catch his scent. The one who came to me, captured me, and threw me in a hole.
He is mine. And he is here. I break from the mass.
My brethren follow. Tonight there are vampires at his side. Three. One woman wearing full on shiny battle armor, and two near-identical men in leather jerkins. They draw swords upon our arrival.
Surround. Isolate. My brothers know the hunt. Know our moves without need for communication. We are one. We are pack.
Alastor’s horse rears up, hooves to the sky.
I take my chance, feet launching me from mythical clouds to take him down. My jaw snaps around his neck. Meets in the middle.
His head, our bodies fall through the clouds. I hit pine branches heavily. They snap beneath me like bones breaking.
Hard landing. In snow.
My muzzle is bathed in blood. I relish it. I breathe deeply of the victory.
I stand, my battered body aching. My paws are like snow shoes, distributing my weight so I don’t sink. I take the steps to his body slowly. Sniff. Alastor is dead. Too quick. I would have liked to made him suffer.
In a deep, dark hole.
For a long, long time.
To the sky I lift my head. Give my victory howl.
The black clouds of the hunt are already disappearing on the horizon. To the east, the sky is lighting up with the hint of the dawn.
I sit on my hunches, and lick my chops. Guard my kill and wait to greet the day.
Chapter 31
Falling asleep as a furred creature, and waking with the tang of blood on a human face is disgusting. What’s worse is that I’m naked, somewhere in the mountains.
I stand on wobbly legs, a creature reborn in human form. Alastor’s headless body with spine and ligaments and visceral gore spilling from its neck is a gross reminder of my monster form.
Gray vision and spinning nausea swirl through me. I stumble away from it.
Into the bushes where dry heaves rack my aching body.
Flashes from the night before. Death. His zombie and ghost hunting party.
I drop to my knees, using the cold snow against my face. It melts against the warmth of skin, cleansing me of the blood and sickness. But not the memories.
Later. Later I can process. For now, I have to get out of...wherever I am.
I swivel my head around. Attempt to get my bearings.
At the edge of a tree line, on the side of a mountain. Above me a sloped hill. Below me, deep woods.
At least the sun is shining, and there is cover in the woods.
I start walking. Carving my own trail by weaving through forest and around rocks. The snow is not deep here. It’s mostly caught by the tree canopy. Every now and melting mounds of it plop down heavily onto the earth breaking the silence of the morning.
My feet are turning a particular shade of blue. Skin is so...vulnerable. How did cavemen do it?
Of course, I have another form more adapted to running through the wild.
When was the last time I accessed her?
Once in the past six months. When I couldn’t take the itchiness in my skin.
Could I do it now? When I had just spent the night before in my third form.
No. Don’t think on that now.
Focus on getting off this mountain. Getting warm. Getting home.
I’d survived freezing cold temperatures before. Without the wolf. I survived as a human.
My inner eyes reflects those memories.
Stomping over ice-cold snow and pin-pricking pine needles. He is what I see. His body beneath me, blue in frozen stillness. I had brought him back from the brink.
Where are you, Nick?
I’d know quicker if I just embraced that part of me that’s adapted to this.
Shivering, I stop. I rub my arms up and down attempting to warm up.
The cold is painful. Focusing enough to do it when I am tense, shivering and achy will be near impossible. I force myself to do a few squats to warm up, loosen up. I shake out my muscles and pull oxygen into my lungs with big breaths.
Soon, my hands turn to paws. My ears slide up, become furred and pointed. My vision shifts in focus. My scent keener.
I catch the scent of deer. Maybe just a few hours old. I pad to the area it is coming from. Sniff. The deer have beat a highway into the ground here. Probably leads to a water source.
Things are simple in animal form. Instinct takes over and I follow that cervid scent.
The deer highway crosses a dirt road. A plowed dirt road. Descending.
Nose to ground, I smell exhaust. This road was plowed not too long ago.
I keep parallel to it, still within the woods a good twenty yards. The last thing I need now is to be spotted. There’s no telling where I am, but people that live in rural Montana are known for carrying.
Grizzlies may hibernate in the winter, but any man or woman spending time in the great outdoors knows they are not the only threat in the wild.
After a mile or so, the dirt road meets blacktop. There probably was a house somewhere back up the dirt road. But, now I have the choice to go right or left?
I lift my head. The scent of exhaust comes from the right. I stick as best as I can in the cut-over woods, but the undergrowth is thick.
I decide to walk on the blacktop and dive into t
he woods if I hear a car coming.
Thankfully, no cars can be heard. My breath puffs out in the cold air. A break in the tree line ahead. A small house sits in a patch of cleared woods.
I hide myself not too far from it, hunkering down behind a felled tree.
I watch for an hour or so. No movement in or around it. With the driveway cleared and it’s newer appearance, there’s no way it could be abandoned. Could be whoever lives here is out.
I decide after another thirty minutes to take my chances.
I trot to it cautiously, cataloging scents. From the garage, the scent of gasoline and exhaust. The door is closed so I circle around to the back side of the house. There is a closed in sunroom, no curtains. The windows afford me a view of inside. Comfortable furnishings.
No noise from within. Everything is quiet. Over my shoulder, a winter cardinal lands at a feeder in the backyard.
I release. Back to my normal self, I quickly reach for the door knob.
I’m surprised when the door clicks open without resistance.
I push it more open with the flat of my hand.
I know this house is empty. I can feel it. There is no emptiness like the emptiness of a house. No silence like the silence of being alone.
I step through the door, shut it behind me. Make haste through the kitchen down the small hallway. The first bedroom is a small office, the second a child’s room.
In the master I find what I need. Clothes.
A man’s flannel shirt. A pair of basketball shorts. Thick socks.
Back out to the kitchen, I find the second thing I need. A phone. Old school, handheld. Landline.
There’s one more piece I need.
I look about the kitchen. Everything is tidy. Clean.
I find what I’m looking for by the front door. A ceramic dish holding the mail.
I dial the only number I have committed to memory. My ex-husband, Grayson.
Chapter 32
Marc answers.
He is audibly stressed. “Where are you?”
“Somewhere in Montana. Please, Marc. Do you have Justice’s number? I don’t have a lot of time.”
“You know what went down last night?”
Do I know what went down? Alastor’s head. Down. Down. Down. The vision of it as it fell from the black clouds replays on my eyelids.
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