by Sierra Dean
My own wolf, I’d been told, was salt-and-pepper gray. I’d never seen myself in that form, but La Sorcière had described it to me once. Like winter coming in the dead of night, snow blotting out the stars.
It sounded better when she said it. Tu est comme l’hiver venant du plus profond de la nuit, la neige voilant les étoiles.
The French sure did have a way with words. Everything La Sorcière had said, when she deigned to speak at all, was like liquid poetry rolling off her tongue. The simplest words were magic.
I was so lost in thought I walked directly into Wilder when he came to a sudden halt. I raised my hands up, bracing them against his lower back, and was shocked by how soft the cotton of his shirt was. Before common sense could stop me, I trailed my hands down slowly, enjoying the feel of the material and his warm skin, until I realized what I was doing and stepped away.
He smelled like cheap hotel soap and fresh sweat. The lingering fragrance of motor oil was barely there today.
Wilder glanced back at me, his gaze darting down to my hands, though they weren’t on him anymore. He smirked and gestured to something on the ground ahead, leaving me no opportunity to dwell on the incident. I skirted around him for a better look.
Was that…?
Ahead of us, growing in a wide circle too evenly spaced to be natural, was more magnolia. The white blooms were almost blinding against the otherwise dark green backdrop of the tree leaves. The life of the flowers was already dwindling. The shell-like waxy white petals cupped yellow pollen, the tender edges of each flower starting to brown.
The smell in the air was overpowering. Lemons and honey, reminding me of Lina’s perfume, but turned up to eleven. Even with Wilder right beside me, the soapy scent I’d gotten off him moments earlier was lost to the sugary-sweet fragrance from the blossoms.
I wrinkled my nose, my eyes watering from the wall of perfumed air we’d walked into. The odor was thick, bordering on toxic. This was exactly why werewolves didn’t spritz on CK One on their way out the door every morning. Scent was much more intense to us than it was to humans, and it was the sort of thing we couldn’t turn off. We might be able to ignore our inner wolves, but some of the features weren’t optional.
Once I got over the impact of the magnolia tree border, I realized that’s precisely what it was. A strategically planted hedge. And since we were in the middle of the woods, I didn’t think someone had placed it here for its aesthetic value.
Crouching down, I brushed fallen leaves back off the ground. Purple flowers winked up at me.
“Look at you,” Wilder declared, lowering himself to my level. “Little bit of Nancy Drew in you after all.”
“Does that make you Bess or George?” I rubbed the petals of the wolfsbane and raised my fingers to my mouth, tasting them. I knew what it was, but it felt like a small act of defiance to prove to myself I couldn’t be defeated by their flora.
“Why do I have to be one of the girls?” he asked, sounding fake hurt.
“Because her boyfriend was useless.”
He smirked and helped me to my feet. “Better a useful woman than a useless man, I say. Which one was the flirt?”
“Bess, I think.”
“Then call me Bess.”
His hand paused around my wrist, and I fought to swallow. When I finally got the lump in my throat down, my stomach gurgled. How the hell had I ever managed to date, let alone keep a boyfriend, when I was apparently only capable of acting like an idiot around men?
You’re not an idiot around Cash.
No, and I wasn’t in a position right now to think about why. I slipped my hands out of Wilder’s and was about to speak when something behind him caught my eye. At first, seeing only a flash of movement, I was terrified it might be the spectral woman haunting me. I wondered if I’d be able to ignore her so Wilder wouldn’t think I was batshit crazy.
I wondered if he might be able to see her too.
Then the figure moved, and I let out a small gasp of surprise.
A little girl, her hair strawberry blonde and tangled, stood about ten feet away, clutching a battered teddy bear. She couldn’t have been more than five years old. She was sucking her thumb, but when she noticed me staring, she stopped and pulled her thumb from between her lips with a small, guilty smile.
“Hello.” I waved, hoping not to frighten her.
She looked as though she might put her thumb back in her mouth but thought better of it. Instead she glanced over her shoulder, beyond the magnolia to something I couldn’t see. She seemed to be considering making a run for it.
“Do you live near here?” Wilder stared at me when she didn’t answer, shrugging but clearly at a loss for how to deal with this tiny interloper.
“You can’t be here. You gotta go before they see you,” the girl announced. Her voice was raspy, more like a 1940s lounge singer than a child.
“What?” I took a step back. She’d erased any protective impulses I had towards her with one sentence.
This time when she spoke, her voice was singsong. “No one is supposed to see us, Daddy said. He said if anyone sees us, God will be mad, and he’ll make us move again. Please don’t—”
“Genie,” Wilder’s voice rang out, cutting the girl’s warning short, but I didn’t even get a chance to look at him. He pushed me, and it was probably the only thing that kept the blow from cracking my skull open.
I crumpled to the ground, covering my head in case a second wave of assault came. The last thing I saw was the little girl’s dead-eyed stared as I was dragged away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
My arms screamed in pain.
I blinked away tears and tried to adjust my position to relieve whatever was causing all my discomfort. My first thought was that Cash had rolled over on my arm while we slept and now the weight of his body had cut off my circulation. It had happened before. We didn’t often sleep in perfect harmony. Usually one or the other of us was making things uncomfortable.
As the room came into focus, so did the memory of how I had gotten there.
I was hanging from the rafters of an old wooden hunting cabin, trussed up like a pig for the slaughter. My hands were tied behind my back, and my legs and shoulders were tethered to the contraption holding me off the floor. The rigging would have put a BDSM rope-play fan to shame.
I didn’t think there was anything sexual about this. They knew precisely what they were doing. When I moved my legs or shoulders, they pulled on each other, rather than the ceiling ropes. I couldn’t separate my hands enough to relieve the rough pressure of my bonds, let alone grab anything. If I moved my head at all, a rope around my neck would tighten enough to remind me it was there.
This wasn’t amateur hour.
“Wilder?” My voice was barely a whisper. I was worried anything else might make the apparatus strangle me.
Micro adjustments were uncomfortable, and rather than relieving any of my pain it just moved the pain to new locations in my body.
Tears sprang up in my eyes, and I tried to blink them away, but they fell, dropping to the dusty floor where a pool of blood had already started to turn brown. My head throbbed from where I’d been hit, but I seemed to have healed. Beneath it was a huge black stain, haphazardly cleaned.
The brown blood was mine, I could smell it.
The black stain beneath it? I didn’t want to think about what had happened to the last person they’d strung up. I just took small relief in knowing it was too old to be Wilder’s.
“Wilder?”
Nothing.
What if he’d been taken somewhere else? It didn’t matter that the blood here wasn’t his. He could still be dead someplace else.
“Wilder.” My voice rose, and just as I’d thought, the rope tightened, rough twine digging into the exposed flesh of my throat. I gurgled and stopped yelling. More tears spilled. I wanted to keep shouting for him until he answered, but logic told me yelling myself to death was a stupi
d way to go.
For once I listened to reason.
Then I got mad at myself for crying and blinked until the tears stopped. I concentrated on the part of me being gnawed at by worry and forced my rage into it. Whoever had hung me here knew what Wilder and I were. If I’d been hung from my arms like every hack kidnapping movie, I’d have been able to rip the hook right out of the ceiling without much traction.
If I tried that in my current situation, I would only succeed in dislocating something on my body or strangling myself.
A door creaked behind me, and I took a deep breath, hoping the smells carried in on the breeze might tell me something. I got a whiff of something human and then sneezed because the magnolia blooms were still too strong in the air.
We hadn’t gone far.
Keeping my body still, I tracked a pair of feet as they moved around me. Dusty brown men’s work boots with scuffed toes. Whoever this was wore paint-stained jeans and smelled male.
I wanted to remember his scent so I’d be able to hunt him down later, but once the aroma of magnolias was gone, it was replaced with the pungent reek of men’s body spray. So much of it, I couldn’t make out his natural body odor.
These guys were smart.
They smelled like sexual predators looking for easy prey on Bourbon Street, but they planned ahead. After he showered I wouldn’t be able to find his real smell again.
The man crouched in front of me, his face hidden behind a black ski mask. Brown eyes that might have been warm in other circumstances met my angry glare without blinking.
He wouldn’t have been cocky if I wasn’t tied up.
“You’re awake. Good. It took a lot of effort to bring you down. I was worried they might have really hurt you.” He brushed my bangs away from my face. I flinched but couldn’t recoil. “You don’t look like much, but you’re a scrapper.”
“You don’t look like much either.” I growled after saying it, in spite of the way my throat protested.
The area around his eyes bunched, and I realized he was smiling.
The urge to smash him in the face was so intense my body vibrated from trying to hold still.
“Still got some fight in you. Isn’t that sweet?”
Condescending prick was going to find out exactly how much fight I had in me as soon as I was free. I’d like to see if he was smiling after I turned his large intestines into an infinity scarf.
“If you let me go, nothing will happen to you,” I lied. “I just want to go back to my people.”
“You don’t have people.” His tone was suddenly cold and scary, and I didn’t like the way he said people, like he was mocking me. At first I was terrified he was suggesting Wilder was gone or something had happened to Cash. Then his meaning sank in, and it was much more obvious.
I didn’t have people because I wasn’t human.
Lowering my eyes to the floor beneath me, I focused on the black bloodstain. How many other non-humans had hung here before me? How many lives had these people decided weren’t important because we were different? I thought I might cry again, but this time the tingling had moved from behind my eyes and into my hands.
Not the tingling of feeling returning to my extremities, either.
If this guy didn’t want to deal with me as a werewolf, fine. But I had other ways to make him suffer.
“You’re going to want to let me go,” I said quietly. “And my friend too.”
“Oh? And why would I do something like that when I went to all the trouble of tying you up so nicely?” He ran his finger over the rope at my throat. Our eyes locked, and he seemed to be challenging me to stop him because he knew I couldn’t.
Takes a really tough man to challenge a lady when she resembles a Thanksgiving turkey.
“If you let me go, I won’t hurt you. I won’t make you suffer. I’ll walk away with my people, and I will pretend this town never existed. That you never existed.” I almost believed it myself. It might work. If I was released, I could leave. Take Cash and the Shaws and go.
Somehow, given my current circumstances, I didn’t think walk away was in the cards.
His loss.
The tingling in my fingers got worse. If not for the other sensations in my arms and legs, it might have even hurt. Instead it just woke me up, made me feel alive. It gave me something to focus on other than what he’d done to me.
“You’re not going to let me go, are you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not a chance in hell.”
I smiled at him, and he must not have expected it because the uneasiness in his eyes was obvious. “Good. I might have felt bad otherwise.”
He stood up, moving out of my sight, and when he came back, he was holding a huge hunting knife. My limbs twitched in response, but I couldn’t do anything to get away or move my body out of his range. If he wanted to cut me wide open, there was nothing I could do to stop him.
“Now, I want you to tell me where your friend went. If you do that, I might not have to use this.”
Relief, a feeling almost as euphoric as an orgasm, flushed through my whole body. Wilder. Wilder was safe. He’d gotten away from this somehow, and they didn’t have him hogtied in another room. Just knowing he was okay made me let out a short whoop of pure, unadulterated joy.
If Wilder was free, that meant this might all still end okay.
I wasn’t depending on him to rescue me. His freedom just meant one less person I had to get out of this mess. Now I could focus on saving myself instead of worrying about him.
“Come closer,” I whispered.
“Do I look stupid?” He touched the blade to my cheek, but this time I didn’t wince.
“You’re wearing a ski mask in this weather. Of course you look stupid. It also makes you look like a coward.” The restraints tugged painfully as I spoke, but I couldn’t stop. My voice sounded raspier as I went, but I charged ahead. “You’re covering your face so I won’t know who you are. But what does it matter? If you’re really going to kill me, why do you care? If you believe in the cause you’re fighting for, why hide? The truth it, you’re terrified I’m going to get out of here. And you don’t want me to come find you when this is all said and done.”
He scoffed but lowered the blade. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then you must just be fucking ugly.”
My pinky stretched out, practically disjointing itself, but I was able to curl it around one of the ropes holding me. I hope that one touch was all I would need.
This wouldn’t be easy. I couldn’t shift my focus; I could barely string coherent thoughts together. I’d need to say the words out loud, because casting any spell with just my mind would be out of the question. I would need to be on the top of my game for that, and this hardly qualified as my best form.
“Air, hear me,” I whispered.
“What?”
I ignored him, hoping I’d be able to get through the whole thing before he decided to slit me open. “Earth, hear me.” I stared down at the still-wet spots my tears had left in the dirt and smiled. Never let it be said crying wasn’t good for you. “Water, hear me.”
“What are you saying? Are you praying?”
“No. But you should be.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The last words of the spell spilled out of me in a war cry. “Fire, hear me. Fire, yield to me. Fire, be my breath, be my touch. Fire heed me.”
My skin felt as if it might crack open like an aged blister and peel away at the lightest touch. I was coming apart, being ignited from the inside out. In the midst of the spell taking hold, I stopped being Eugenia, and I became the magic. I was no longer human, even on a small scale. I was pure; I was liquid energy. There was no body to contain me; I was time and emotion. I was the start and end of the universe. I was the molten core of the earth.
I was this motherfucker’s worst nightmare.
The rope holding me caught fire, burning up and
turning to smoke and ash. I should have fallen. I braced myself to hit the hard wood face first. Instead I floated up, the charred bits of my restraints hovering around me like blackened snow frozen in place, flecks of ember trapped in midair as if they were fireflies. My feet weren’t touching the floor, and I hovered near the rafters, bright red flames encasing my arms up to the elbows, licking outward. The heat was real, I could feel it around me, but I didn’t burn.
I would take time to be scared of myself later.
I would think about the fact I could apparently levitate later too.
First things first, I needed to make sure later was a reality I could count on.
“I gave you a chance,” I snarled. My voice gave me chills. It crackled and popped, words roaring like angry fire into a room. The space around us was filled with my words, as if they were tangible weapons I was spitting at him. “You could have made this easy. You could have walked away.”
“I-I… Wh-wha…” He eyed the door as if it was his last salvation.
The lucid part of my brain tried to imagine myself as he was seeing me. I couldn’t decide if I appeared more like I was demon-possessed, or like Jean Grey from the X-Men when she went all Dark Phoenix.
Either way, I hoped it scared the piss out of him.
He dropped the knife. “I’m sorry,” he sputtered.
You can’t kill him.
That stupid do-gooder voice in my head was back again, reminding me this wasn’t me. This wasn’t who I was.
But God I wished it could be.
I stared down at the floor uncertainly. Since I hadn’t willed myself to float up, I wasn’t sure how to control this new ability of mine. Was it just hovering, or could I actually fly? If it was the latter, that might be the coolest thing to ever happen to me. No one could fly. In spite of rumors to the contrary, vampires couldn’t. They couldn’t turn into bats, either.
