by Haley Weir
Holly felt that using the word “carnage” was a bit overly dramatic, but she knew the point that her father was trying to make. After they had talked some more, Theo and Rubius went out, and Cassandra had a more intimate talk with her daughter alone.
“I know that there is a wild ambition within you,” Cassandra said. “And I am very familiar with that feeling myself. I know what it is like not to want to conform to the meaningless royal duties that have been in place so long that no one even questions their worth anymore—and they should. You heard what we all said to you about this idea, and I stick by what was said. It is too dangerous and too risky for everyone involved—our family, the shifters, and even the humans.”
Holly again felt discouraged.
“But,” her mother continued, “I will always tell you to follow your heart. Your heart will always lead you right, and you must listen to it. So take the guidance that has been given by everyone and think through it within your own mind. You will come to the right decision, and when you do, your family will support you.”
Holly didn’t know what she wanted to do. What had at first seemed like such a good idea now seemed to be too reckless, even for her. She was supposed to be a temperate ruler and wise queen, even at a young age. That was what made great rulers, not the willingness to risk your people and yourself. She needed to clear her head. And the only way that she really knew how to do that was to take a run through the woods in shifted form. It was daytime, and she would stick to the areas of the forest where the packs were so that she would be safe. Holly took the hidden tunnels out of the castle this time to avoid any questions.
When she reached the line of trees, Holly shifted and disappeared into the woods. She ran until she could feel the tingling sinew in her muscles and the fiery air burning in her lungs. She ran until it felt as though her fur was rippling like ocean waves in the breeze. And she thought about nothing other than the run. This was exactly what she needed. Holly stayed to the pack territories and avoided straying too far from where she knew someone could hear her if she called. But then, while she was running, Holly saw the black wolf.
Dex. How did he know that I was here?
He ran alongside her and turned his head until their muzzles were nearly touching, and she looked into his reflective eyes. When he ran outside of the pack territories, she followed. She was with him, and so Holly was not fearful of the hunters or anything else. She had listened to what her father had said, but Holly believed Dex did care about her. And like her mother had said to her—she would follow her heart.
They ran together for as long as she wanted to run, and then when her pace started to slow, they ran back toward his den. They hadn’t spoken a single word in their wolf forms, but intuitively, she followed him. When they reached his den, Dex shifted, and Holly stayed as a wolf for a stalled moment as she looked up at him. He was beautiful, dark, handsome, and bulging in every way. Holly hesitated to shift back to her human form. She hesitated to stand there nakedly with him out of fear of what she would be tempted to do. Dex turned and went into his den, and when he emerged a moment later, he not only had pants on, but a shirt that he put on the ground for her to wear. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to not be naked.
When Holly shifted back to human form, she reached for the shirt and slid it over her head. She could feel his eyes trailing over her body as she did. Dex handed her water, and then a blanket, as the two of them went to sit down by the fire that he started to light. They still hadn’t spoken a single word since their run, but it was almost as if they didn’t need to. There was unspoken trust, a comfortableness that had suddenly emerged between them almost instantly, which was inexplicable and amazing. Once the fire was lit, Dex sat down beside her.
“I have heard things in the city,” he said as he watched the fire grow. “Because I am there frequently, and because I am at the tavern where people tend to talk as if their mouths are faucets turned on after a few mugs of ale, I hear much talking between the humans.”
“What is it that you have heard?” Holly asked.
“Things that concern me over your safety and well-being.”
Holly scoffed. It seemed that her safety was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and she was tired of being afraid. She wanted simply to run and drink ale and not worry about humans that she could snap the necks of with her jaw if only she could be in her shifted form whenever she pleased.
“There are people in the city that are plotting to remove you from the throne,” he said with a serious tone.
“That is nothing new,” she replied. “There have been people trying to remove me from the throne since I was crowned queen, and probably those that thought about it before that.”
“That is true,” Dex said solemnly. “But I’m afraid that their ambition is growing.”
She could see the shadows of concern on his face, and she felt that she could trust him with her idea as well. She thought that maybe he would understand and offer a fresh perspective outside that of her family. But she should have known, being that he was already a loner himself, that he wouldn’t.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“I agree with your family,” Dex said once Holly had finished telling him about her idea to reveal the existence of shifters to the humans in Grenvich. “I think that it’s a very bad and dangerous idea.”
Holly rolled her eyes at him.
“I don’t understand why trying to have everyone live in peace together is an idea that is met with such resistance,” she said in exasperation.
“It’s not the concept that is bad,” he said. “It’s the actuality of it. Your family is right to tell you that it would end in carnage—it would, for both humans and shifters alike. If you truly want to have peace, then everyone should just keep to themselves.”
“Spoken like a true loner,” Holly said sarcastically.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But it is an honest answer. You can’t force species to coexist when they are inherently opposed to it. No more than you can force me to join a pack or become a king.”
Holly chuckled for a minute about the thought of Dex playing at being a king.
“But what if they’re not inherently opposed to it,” she said. “What if they just think that they are, and that if they could only see that there was a better way, they might embrace it?”
“That is an awful lot to risk on a ‘might,’” Dex said. ” Look, I admire your ambition and your good heart, but I fear that exposing the shifters to humans will end up getting you killed, and quite possibly getting us all killed.”
They sat together for a while longer, and then Dex escorted Holly back to the tree line of the forest where she went back through the secret corridors and into the castle. She decided to table her thoughts on the matter for now and listen to the advice that she’d been given by everyone, at least until she felt more clear about what she wanted to do.
***
As the winter snow began to fall in thick and blanketed sheets, the decorations throughout the city were hung and the festive preparations were still underway. While Holly was at the tavern, enjoying an ale while waiting on the tavern keeper to package up a fresh harvesting of figs for the celebration, some of the townsfolk were eyeing the queen’s presence at the tavern. Some couldn’t keep their mouths closed about it.
“You know,” one of the men across the tavern said, in a voice loud enough for the new queen to hear him. “Some kingdoms might look down upon a queen who is seen at the tavern drinking so much.”
Holly’s patience had already been waning since the last incident, and her short-tempered and strong-willed nature was getting more difficult for her to control. She tried to use witty quips to keep her temper at bay whilst still getting the point across. Most of the time, though, the humans that started trouble were the unintelligent ones, so the quips were frequently lost on their inability to even understand that they had been insulted and mocked at their own expense.
“Some ki
ngdoms might think it strange to have a queen who has more balls than the men in its city,” she shot back.
This particular man may have been rather daft and stupid, but he understood enough to recognize the insult in the queen’s comment. The tavern keeper laughed at her cleverness, which proceeded to make the man even more angry and embarrassed. Holly smirked while she finished her ale, pleased with the clever comment she had thought up on the spot. But when she felt someone’s breath against her neck, she turned to find the man standing close behind her with mace in his hand.
Holly did nothing more than roll her eyes at him.
“I really wouldn’t,” she said.
“Oh?” he sneered at her. “And why is that? Are you afraid that the queen with the big balls is going to cry?”
Holly laughed, and the man didn’t quite know how to take it.
“No,” she said, still laughing. “I’m afraid that I will end up beating your ass so hard that you will end up with your own balls in your mouth.”
The man lost his temper immediately and swung the mace at Holly’s head. But she was a much more skilled fighter than anyone there, and she quickly disarmed and knocked the man down onto the floor.
“Like I said,” she reiterated. “I really wouldn’t.”
The man writhed in pain on the floor of the tavern until his friends came and helped him back up on his feet again. There were several glares that were shot at Holly, but she couldn’t have cared less. She made her point in the presence of these idiots—both verbally and physically. And she hoped that this time, the message would stick.
“The problem with this situation to begin with,” the tavern keeper said to her in a hushed voice, “is that the townspeople feel comfortable threatening a member of the royal family at all, especially one that is their new leader.”
He was right. And Dex had been right about it too. These human hunters in the city were too bold for their own good. They had no qualms about attacking the queen out in public, and that made them dangerous, even if they were ignorant fools.
“Agreed,” Holly said as she stood up and placed some gold coins down on the top of the bar. She took the satchel of figs that the tavern keeper handed her and prepared to head back to the castle with them.
But as Holly was getting ready to leave, one of the men caught her off guard, and as she walked toward the door, he jabbed a small blade into her side. The pain shot into her, cutting deeply through the muscle and shaving off bone. Holly shrieked in surprise, and everyone in the tavern stopped to stare at her. It was a moment of beautiful horror, as if an entire crowd of people was watching a magical unicorn be slaughtered. Some were seething with satisfaction about the destruction of something different from them, and others were staring there in a frozen horror as they watched something beautiful be destroyed. The wound wouldn’t be fatal, and the scenario was not quite so dramatic and dire, but the message was the same. There were many people who would stand by and watch harm be done in complacency. They may not inflict harm themselves, but they were quick to watch it happen without acting.
At the very moment that the man pulled his blade back out from Holly’s side, the tavern door opened and Dex walked in for a replenishment of ale. When he saw what had happened, he grabbed Holly just before she was ready to double over herself in pain. Dex was furious and wanted to tear the throats out of every man in the place without hesitation. But his first priority was Holly, so he forfeited enacting a bloody revenge on the humans involved to get Holly back to the castle and her family. When he got to the castle, Cassandra and Theo both came running to see what had happened.
Theo was outraged, and since he knew that Holly was in good hands here and would recover fine; he went to the woods to get Rubius so that the two of them could head back to the tavern and immediately arrest all of the men involved. If one or two of them “accidentally” died on the way to the dungeons, then even better.
Dex got ready to leave after having successfully delivered Holly to her mother’s care at the castle. But Cassandra saw that Dex had affection for her daughter, and so she asked him to stay. He sat in a chair beside Holly’s bed while Cassandra tended to the wound in her side. She first gave Holly a tincture to drink that knocked her out cold so that she wouldn’t feel the pain of the stitches that Cassandra would sew into her side to close the wound.
“Thank you for rescuing my daughter yet again,” Cassandra said as she smiled and worked to stitch up the side of Holly’s torso. “I understand that this is not the first time you’ve come to her aid, and for that, I owe you a debt of gratitude.”
“No, you owe me nothing,” Dex said politely.
“We shall see,” Cassandra said ambiguously. “But for now, you have my deepest thanks.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Holly woke up from the tincture, she heard voices outside of her room. Theo and Rubius were talking to Dex about what had happened in the Tavern. They had been furious about the brawl and about what the man had done to Holly. Theo already had trouble controlling his impulses, and Rubius was every bit as angry and agreed that something had to be done in order to stop this sort of action against the new queen completely. It was a treasonous act to try to harm a member of the royal family.
Holly wondered what they had done to the man that had stabbed her. From the way that they were talking, she got the feeling that they had taken him out to the woods and let the wolves at him. The thing that she found most intriguing, though, was the way that Dex was engaging in the conversation with them. She was surprised to hear him talking with her brother and father at all. Holly didn’t remember anything that had happened after her mother’s tincture had taken effect, but she figured that Dex would have left as soon as he had safely delivered her back to her family. She was surprised that he had stayed and even more surprised that he was still there and talking to her family as if he was willing to help them. It all seemed contradictory to what both he and Rubius had told her about being a lone shifter. It sounded as if he had a change of heart.
She listened silently as she lay in her bed and heard them talking about how they would issue Holly a guard that would accompany her anywhere that she might go in the city. When she was in the forest, Dex said that he would keep watch over her. As much as she appreciated their concern and efforts, Holly didn’t want a constant guard. In fact, she hated the idea of never having a moment of privacy unless she was in her own quarters. She reached down to touch her hand to the wound at her side. It wasn’t that bad. She refused to live in fear of the Neanderthals that had attacked her, and she would refuse the guard when they proposed the idea to her.
They also talked about something else. The men’s voices became a bit more hushed and they spoke of things that sounded an awful lot like recruiting some of the shifters to slip quietly into the kingdom at night and kill off the remaining hunters and any of the men whose loyalties to the crown seemed questionable. Holly didn’t like the sound of that either. It didn’t sound like the way a just kingdom should be run, or the way the pack laws worked either. It sounded like a desperate attempt to maintain control and power over the humans. There has to be a better way than this, Holly thought to herself.
When it sounded as if the conversation was ending, and the footsteps of a couple of the men were walking away from the outside of the door, the bedroom opened, and Dex stepped back inside.
“You’re awake,” he smiled when he saw Holly’s open eyes staring back at him.
“Yes,” she answered, meeting his smile with one of her own. “You stayed.”
He nodded and came to sit down on the bed beside her.
“Why did you stay?” she asked as she looked up at him.
His close proximity to her on the bed made her dizzy. She could feel his body heat emanating from him, and she wanted to reach up and run her fingers through his wildly hanging strands of dark hair.
“Your mother asked me to,” he said.
Holly felt underwhelme
d by that answer.
“But I wouldn’t have left anyway,” he added.
She couldn’t help but let a grin usurp her face at that answer, which quickly made them both uncomfortable. She wanted to ask him why again, but Dex changed the subject before she could.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her.
“Sore, but fine,” Holly answered. She got up to get changed into a new dress that wasn’t torn open and bloodstained. There was a small wince as she twisted her torso to move.
“You’re supposed to be taking it easy,” Dex said while he watched Holly get out of bed and look around her closet for something to put on.
“I don’t want to take it easy,” she argued. “I am more angry and frustrated than I am sore or scared. I need to put an end to all of this feuding in the kingdom. This sort of thing wouldn’t be happening if Aeron was still alive. He’d find a way to put an end to it immediately.”
“I was just talking with Rubius and your brother about that,” he said. “We have a few ideas.”
“Yes, I heard,” Holly said as she yanked a dress out and started to pull her old one off.
She didn’t even seem to care that Dex was sitting right there in view of her naked body. He’d already seen her nude once in the forest, so it didn’t matter anymore. She did, however, glance at him as she was disrobing and noticed him shift anxiously in his chair.
“I don’t agree with the things the three of you were talking about,” she said as she tried to step into the new dress and pull it up. “I don’t want an escort everywhere that I go, and I don’t want the three of you to start killing humans off.”
Dex tried to stay focused, even though it was exceedingly difficult not to get distracted by her changing.
“The men that we were discussing aren’t worth keeping alive. They will only seed problems both in the kingdom and in the forest,” he said.
