Legendary Beast

by Barbara J. Hancock

  Fully rested, she and Lev might have been able to fight off an ordinary pack of wolves. Lev might even have stood a chance against a pack enhanced by the Volkhvy. But only the white wolf and the ruby Romanov warrior could face the threat he described.

  Lev suddenly leaned to scoop her into his arms. He took a moment to brace his legs against the new burden, and then he carried her to the base of a large tree. He settled her into a nook created by the giant oak’s exposed roots and an earthen bank that was collapsing beneath its weight.

  “I won’t hide while you fight,” Madeline protested. Lev silenced her with a hard kiss against her lips. The kiss felt like a goodbye. He was going to try to shift again. She felt the fury of the white wolf in his flexed muscles before her hands fell away.

  “They will regret challenging a Romanov wolf,” Lev said. “And terrorizing his family.”

  She believed him in spite of his extreme fatigue. Because in spite of hers, she was going to rise and fight by his side.

  She struggled to her feet, but there was no thunder from the shift. The earth didn’t quake beneath her as she used the gnarled tree roots to pull herself out of the nook. Lev still wasn’t able to shift. His human form remained. His back was to her. She stood beside the tree and forced her hand up to her shoulder, where the hilt of the ruby sword waited for her grip. Only hers. It had been made for her, after all.

  Lev Romanov was her husband. She was his warrior mate. Even if they couldn’t be together, she would wield the blade against their common foe. For Trevor.

  “You are beaten,” a voice proclaimed on a rise above them, just as the Ether-manipulated wolves poured around the bank to flank them on either side.

  Madeline looked up. On the rise, a marked Volkhvy stood in a long gray coat. The witch was male, with a perfect pale face and cruelly joyous eyes. His sharp cheekbones matched an even sharper smile. His figure looked as though it could have been cut from glass, all gleaming angles in the setting sunlight. And his hands were outstretched toward the wolves. His fingers glowed with a citrine hue, but the yellow was tinged all around the edges with obsidian.

  “If Vasilisa couldn’t beat us, do you honestly think you have a chance?” Lev asked.

  Madeline drew her sword. The rasp sounded as confident as Lev’s growl. But the ruby didn’t respond to her desperate internal call. They were going to die. There was no way they could win. She’d rejected the ruby’s power. Now it rejected her.

  Lev was only a man. She was only a woman. Their bodies had already been pushed to their limits by the long day of grueling travel. The wolves around them had bottomless black pits for eyes. They were filled with Darkness. So filled that it leaked from their eyes like oil to mat their fur and coat their fangs with filth. The witch on the rise suddenly swept his hands together as if he was a conductor commanding a symphony of rabid teeth and fur.

  The wolves erupted. They ran toward Madeline and Lev with a cacophony of unnatural shrieks. They were a terrible horde, more than a pack. The marked Volkhvy had made a horrible desecration of the poor animals.

  Madeline raised the ruby sword, but her hands shook on its hilt. The wolves had been made into hellhounds. They rose from the Ether rather than hell.

  But Lev’s howl suddenly ripped from his body. His back was still to her. He stood between her and the attacking wolves with his arms outstretched and his hands curved into claws. His shirt split at the seams. The muscles of his thighs bulged the leather leggings until she knew they were seconds from splitting, too. His supernatural howl drowned out the pack’s cries.

  Once again, he didn’t shift into the white wolf, but he was more than a man.

  The witch on the rise yelled a warning to his horde of demon wolves. Madeline’s attention flew from the witch to the wolves as they swirled around to close in on Lev’s position. They ignored her. After all, her sword didn’t glow. She was barely able to stand on her feet.

  A hard smile curved Madeline’s lips. A certainty rose in her heart. She’d dreamed about sewing a tapestry that revealed the Call of the sword. She was suddenly certain that the dream had been a memory that had been woken because of her connection with the enchanted ruby when Lev had leaped over the ravine. She remembered Lev on the ramparts of Bronwal. She remembered his wildness, controlled, and his offer to help her run. She remembered the first touch of his big hand, gentle on her face. She couldn’t remember riding on the white wolf’s back, but she was suddenly sure that she had done so. She was stronger and braver than the marked witch knew.

  Like the tainted wolves, the marked witch on the rise was ignoring her, too. His attention was fully on Lev Romanov as the first wolf leaped on Lev’s back to bite and rip the already shredded material of his shirt. Wolf after wolf after wolf followed. Their attack left smears of black Ether taint on Lev’s skin.

  But he met every foe with ferocious energy that had been given to him by the Light Volkhvy queen. His muscles were as hard as steel, and his scars gave testimony to his fierce survival experience. He flung the wolves off him again and again. He fought them with nothing but his fists.

  Ether flowed from the wolves’ eyes and black foam coated their mouths.

  Lev was undaunted. Madeline looked from the wolves to the witch on the rise. The glow from the marked Volkhvy’s hands was now more black than citrine. And his eyes had gone as obsidian as the wolves’. His fingers were stretched in the wolves’ direction. He followed their movements, or their movements followed his. She couldn’t be sure which. But a dawning certainty did claim her as she watched.

  The witch wasn’t only influencing the behavior of the wolves. He was channeling Ether’s energy into the pack.

  Madeline closed her eyes. She envisioned Trevor’s sleeping face. She couldn’t remember his laughter. She couldn’t recall his tears. One day—one day soon—she would see her baby smile.

  She was undaunted, too.

  One foot responded. And then the other. She moved, and no one noticed. The horde of wolves tried to devour a man who was more beast than they were. He beat them back. He would not fall. At least not before she climbed the small rise that seemed like a giant mountain to her exhausted legs. She climbed anyway. One step after another. The marked Volkhvy only had eyes for his horde. Black liquid foamed from his lips now. He screamed at his wolves, every bit as rabid as they seemed.

  She remembered the revelation of the tapestry she’d sewn. Thread by thread, the ruby sword she now held had Called her to Lev Romanov’s side. She couldn’t accept its enchantment now. Lev was far removed from the young, controlled man he’d been. He was haunted and hounded and nearly out of control these days because of all he’d been through during the curse.

  Her steps were punctuated by Lev’s howls. He didn’t have to summon four paws and a horrifying snarl. He was the white wolf. The white wolf was Lev. She finally knew it. There was no separation. Her husband was the Romanov wolf.

  But she was a warrior, enchanted connection or not. She didn’t need the ruby’s glow. She could accept its long-ago judgment that she was worthy of wielding its power without accepting the power itself.

  Madeline plunged her sword into the marked Volkhvy’s chest and out his back. She aimed for his heart and met her mark. Black blood gushed around the blade. But it was the witch’s shock that was her true reward. He hadn’t seen her as a threat. He’d hardly seen her at all. His mistake had enabled her to slowly climb the rise and fell him, even as she faced him.

  The marked witch collapsed to his knees. As he fell, Madeline pulled her blade free from his dying body. His last move was to reach for the gaping wound. His hands no longer glowed.

  “You’re only a woman,” the witch said, coughing. More black blood bubbled up from his lungs to join the foam on his lips. “You can’t...”

  “You obviously have no idea what I can and will do,” Madeline said. She only allowed her sword to fall to her side once the witch’s eyes glazed over in death. She used it as a prop against the ground to keep hers
elf on her feet. And only then did she look down to where Lev stood.

  The whole horde of wolves was strewn around him. They weren’t dead. She saw them breathing, and some of them were already trying to rise. There was steam all around. The black taint of Ether was evaporating from the wolves. Steam rose from Lev’s skin as well. The taint had smeared on him during the attack.

  But there was also blood.

  As hard as Lev seemed, he was still human. Not marble. His scars proved it. More scars would join them now. He had beaten off a savage attack with nothing but his fists.

  Madeline gasped when Lev turned away from the wolves toward where she stood on the rise. The fight wasn’t over yet. Not for him. His eyes blazed and his teeth were bared. He tilted his head toward the rising moon, and the tendons on either side of his neck were taut. His eyes closed and he raised his fists to the sky before a howl erupted from his chest. He expressed his fury with every cell of his human body, and it wasn’t enough. He was denied the shift as she was denied the ruby’s light.

  She felt the echo of Lev’s howl in her own chest.

  He was the wolf as she was the warrior, but she didn’t utter a sound. The dead witch who had collapsed at her feet began to disappear. First his spilled blood evaporated as black steam, and then the cells of his body disintegrated into the air to follow the tainted blood into the Dark nothingness of the Ether that inexorably pulled them to rejoin its constant cold hunger.

  Madeline shivered. Was that what Lev had endured while she was sleeping? In moments, the dead witch and his blood were gone, as if they’d never existed in the first place.

  She looked from the empty spot on the ground to where Lev stood. He’d fallen silent. The wolves all around him were dragging themselves to their feet and creeping away into the forest shadows. Lev followed her attention to the wolves and allowed them to retreat. One turned to look at him briefly before it melted into the trees. He’d described the alpha wolf to Madeline, and she recognized the poor creature now. After a pause, the alpha disappeared in the shadows. Even though Lev’s body was still stiff with fury and tension, he showed the fallen creatures mercy. Their eyes no longer gleamed an oily obsidian. The Ether had begun to evaporate from them as soon as the witch was no longer actively channeling it into their bodies, and now the fog had disappeared, returning to where it came from.

  The wolves were freed, and other than the bruises they’d suffered from Lev’s defense of their attack, they appeared as if they’d survived the marked Volkhvy’s manipulations. Madeline looked down at the sword in her hand. The witch’s blood had also evaporated from her blade. It was clean enough to sheathe now, and she did so slowly with a grimace of pain.

  Suddenly, her body was spent once more. The adrenaline of necessity had flowed away and she was left more exhausted than she’d been before. As the blade slid home with a comforting swoosh, her knees crumpled beneath her. One second she was standing. The next found her on the mossy earth.

  She wished she could draw the moss around her like a soft green blanket. But before she could try, Lev was there. He’d leaped for the rise when she fell. In spite of all he’d been through, he was there to stop her head from hitting the ground. He caught her as her body leaned to the side.

  It was a considerate gesture, even though his chest was probably much harder than the ground.

  “You fought back at least fifty wolves,” Madeline said. She had every intention of pulling away and standing up. In a minute. After the next breath or two. But apparently, every cell in her body needed to rest. She couldn’t make herself rise.

  “You killed the witch,” Lev said. He spoke into her hair, and she could have sworn he nuzzled his cheek into her tangled locks. “The ruby doesn’t shine, but it doesn’t matter. You shine without any need of enchantment.”

  She could barely reconcile the ferocious creature she’d witnessed fighting off the wolf attack with the gentle giant who cradled her now. Lev was every bit as tall and muscular as he’d always been, but he growled soft words of encouragement instead of howling.

  “The marked Volkhvy disappeared. Was that what it was like for you? For Soren and Ivan and all the people of Bronwal?” Madeline asked. If she’d been less fatigued, she would have kept her curiosity to herself. Lev Romanov was damaged beyond repair by the years he’d spent trapped as the white wolf. She’d witnessed firsthand his destruction of the tower room and the way the whole castle avoided him. His pain and anger were evidence of wounds that had penetrated deeper than the ones that had scarred his skin.

  He stiffened against her and his hold tightened. His tension had returned. He drew his face back from her hair as she waited for him to reply. Long, silent seconds passed.

  But he didn’t stand up and walk away. That was a good sign.

  “The curse came down on us like the black fog of Ether-tainted blood from the wolves in the clearing below. We were consumed. Devoured. There was no chance of escape. I searched for you. I called until I had no voice left. Until I had no mouth left to yell. Even in the cold nothingness of the Ether, I think I tried to scream. Once every hundred years, Vasilisa allowed Bronwal and its people to materialize for one month, but we always returned to the Ether again and again,” Lev said.

  “She thought your father had killed her daughter,” Madeline whispered. She couldn’t imagine what it had been like for a father and husband to lose his family. Especially one used to being an unstoppable champion of the Light. She remembered him as he’d leapt the ravine. She remembered him as he’d fought the wolves. Lev didn’t give up. No wonder he had railed against the Darkness for hundreds of years.

  “Anna was caught up in the curse and tortured for centuries—by her own mother,” Lev growled.

  “She and Soren fought the Ether together. He was her constant red-wolf companion. They survived,” Madeline said.

  “Anna is a witch. Just like her mother. Volkhvy can’t be trusted. Light, Dark, marked—they’re all the same,” Lev said.

  “Vasilisa protected me and Trevor as we were sleeping. She kept watch until we recovered,” Madeline said.

  “She’s used your memory loss to tell you a tale that absolves her of guilt. Your ‘illness’ was of her making, Madeline. Queen Vasilisa caused your enchanted sleep. It was part of the curse. She took you from your home and family. She stole everything from Trevor. She stole your past from you,” Lev said. His body shook. He pushed her away as if he didn’t trust himself not to crush her in his fury. She had rested long enough that she was able to keep her balance as he withdrew his support to stand. “She stole you from me. She severed our connection. You and Trevor were imprisoned in crystal, and I was left alone.”

  Madeline closed her eyes and swallowed. Her throat was numb. Behind her eyelids, she saw the shattered glass of the coffin-like bed she’d first woken up in on Vasilisa’s island. The queen had told her that the white wolf had woken her too soon, and that was why she’d lost her memories.

  But the white wolf hadn’t shattered the glass.

  Vasilisa had broken the glass and taken Trevor from her arms. Had the queen done that in response to Madeline beginning to wake up, or had she done it in order to wake her? Judging from Lev’s anger, if the white wolf had finally found the island after centuries of searching, Vasilisa would have needed something to stop him.

  Something. Someone. Her. The ruby warrior who rose to do her queen’s bidding as naturally as her heart beat.

  Had the Light Volkhvy queen put her to sleep and then woken her up too soon, all to punish the white wolf, once her champion, but now her greatest enemy?

  Madeline forced herself to breathe. She gathered her strength and brought her legs up beneath her. She rose because she couldn’t remain on her knees when Lev was trembling with rage nearby. Not because she was afraid. Trevor wasn’t with them. She wasn’t afraid of any threat against herself. Her only fear was not reaching Trevor in time to save him from the marked Volkhvy.

  Her concern for Vasilisa hadn’t compl
etely faded. Lev had been a wild beast for so long. He believed the tale he told. But she wasn’t sure what to believe. Just as it was hard to reconcile beast from man, it was hard to imagine the kind, motherly woman on Krajina as an evil queen.

  The last Madeline had seen of Trevor, he was swaddled in a blanket and cuddled securely in Vasilisa’s arms. She had to believe that Vasilisa would protect her baby until she could get to him, or she’d go insane.

  “You aren’t alone now. Our connection is severed. It has to be. Neither of us has any idea when or if the white wolf will return, or if he’ll be rational or a savage beast when he does,” Madeline said. “But we’re together now, and we’ll beat the marked Volkhvy. We’ll save our son.”

  “With my bare hands if I have to,” Lev vowed. His anger fled before his determination. Or maybe fueled it. His fingers were fisted, but he no longer shook. His tension was a calm one, filled with intent. “There’s something you need to know.”

  Madeline braced herself for more emotional revelations. She was already reeling, unsure of what to believe, but haunted by the story Lev had told her. His tale seemed to continue even after he was finished, as if the lover and father he described were deep within her mind, moving rock after rock of the avalanche that had smothered her memories.

  “The alpha was leading that pack,” Lev said. “I think you freed him from their control, but there are others.” He watched her face. She didn’t falter or fall even though she understood immediately what he meant. “It was only a small portion of the pack I discovered before.”

  “They won’t give up,” Madeline said.

  “The Volkhvy won’t allow them to give up,” Lev said. His hatred of witches was evident in every forceful syllable, with no distinction allowed between Dark and Light.

  “We won’t give up, either,” Madeline replied.