by Skye Malone
Soundlessly, he turned and headed past the evergreen trees. Her stomach tumbling, she followed.
Time crept by, though God knew the world around her didn’t show it. The overcast gray light continued unabated, casting scarcely a shadow while she and Wes trekked onward through endless snow, and slowly, a new fear spread through her. How did she know they were heading the right way? There were barely any landmarks. No signs. Just distant houses and lonely trees like stalwart blots of color amid the endless white, along with the occasional top of a bush nearly buried in the snow. Had she seen any of them before? She couldn’t tell. What if they came across their own footprints? Or, worse yet, the truck?
Her stomach churned worse. Maybe she’d seen that bush already. Or those trees. That house might be familiar. There wasn’t a damn other thing around them to let her know for sure, besides empty fields of white and two black dots on the horizon that maybe were birds.
Those wouldn’t help.
Her heart began pounding harder, her insides twisting into knots. All these hours couldn’t be for nothing. They had to be going the right way, but she couldn’t even ask Wes. And how would he know any better than she could? To be so close and yet lost was almost more than she could bear, but there wasn’t…
Wasn’t…
Nausea rushed up her throat, and she turned, stumbling behind a bush just in time. Everything she’d eaten came back up, her insides heaving as if to flee her body too. On her hands and knees, she huddled next to the bush, her gloved palms sinking into the snow.
She couldn’t even feel the cold.
Trembling shook her as she swiped her mouth with the back of her wrist. She could still move. She wasn’t numb.
But she felt nothing of the chilled surface beneath her.
A rustling sound came from the bush at her side, and instantly her hand snapped out. In her grip, a half-starved rabbit squealed when she yanked it from beneath the branches. The creature squirmed and thrashed, its little heart racing beneath her thumb and its sides heaving with fear.
Everything in her wanted to take a bite.
A whisper came on the snow. Her head snapped up, her teeth baring in a snarl.
Wes was staring at her.
Lindy blinked, reality returning. What the hell was she…
Oh, sweet God.
She dropped the rabbit like it was on fire, and frantically, the creature bolted away. Shoving to her feet, Lindy took off too, striding across the snow as quickly as her legs could carry her.
She didn’t stop walking when the light began to fade from the sky. Or when the horizon started to vanish in the encroaching night. Or when one of her walking sticks snapped.
But then Wes tried to block her path.
Slamming to a stop, she stared at him. “Go.” Her voice shook. “Get away from me.”
He didn’t move.
“Dammit, go!” She flung the remaining stick, the branch flopping far short of hitting him.
Never taking his gray eyes from her, he took a step forward. She flinched back.
A huff left him. Her lips pressed together, though even now her eyes were totally dry.
But maybe she was just trying not to scream.
A shudder racked her body. Closing her eyes, she sank down into a crouch, her arms wrapping around her head as if to block out the whole damn world. Her entire body was trembling, whether from exhaustion or hunger or God knew what else, she didn’t know. But with everything in her, she wanted to teleport straight to her father and brother, grab them, and race to Mariposa.
Except it may already be too late.
Soft sounds came on the snow. Gently, Wes nudged her hand with his snout.
She recoiled. “No, please. I don’t—”
He gave a quiet whine, and it hurt to hear. Squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, she shoved to her feet to start out across the snow.
He blocked her path again.
Quivering, she stared at him. His head twitched to the side, and she glanced over to see a small house sitting atop a snowy rise.
A breath pressed from her chest. She didn’t want to stop for the night. She wanted to run like hell.
Wes made a gruff sound, harsh and insistent, and jerked his head again.
He’d just keep this up until she agreed.
“Goddammit.” She started toward the house.
Scaling the slope up to the house was like climbing a hill of ice. At the top, the little brown house appeared lifeless with snow piled high in front of the door.
The open door.
Beside her, Wes slowed, his head moving like he was carefully sniffing the wintry air. Trepidation quivered through her, and hesitantly, she felt for the shadows along the edges of her mind.
Nothing. No draugar. No Order. Not a hint of the white-noise rush she’d picked up from that elf.
That left a lot of categories that could kill them, the foremost of which was human.
Wes paced closer, and with a flicker of apprehension, Lindy followed. The entrance was almost entirely swallowed by a snowdrift, as if the door had been closed at some point but then finally given way. Several windows were likewise semi-covered, but she could see through one near the entryway.
The house seemed utterly still.
“Hello?” she called through the open doorway.
The wind twisted around her, carrying no hint of sound.
Glancing around, Wes seemed to debate for a moment before pacing over and attempting to scale the snowdrift, finally succeeding in a cascade of powdery white and chunks of ice. Using the doorframe for balance, Lindy climbed after him. The snow blocked most of the remaining weak sunlight, and keeping an eye on the dark space around her, she retrieved a flashlight from her bag.
The beam shone blue-white on a living room with overstuffed furniture and family pictures on the walls. The air was cold on her skin while she walked farther inside, but no sound besides her own breathing reached her ears. To the right of the living room, she could see a dining area that opened into the kitchen, both of which seemed empty, while straight ahead lay a hallway with what looked like bedroom doors along the sides.
If there were going to be any monsters or dead bodies in the house…
She took a sharp breath and headed for the hall. The bathroom was empty, as was the child’s room to her right. Lions on wallpaper patterned with tall grass smiled back at her in cartoonish glee, while big block letters of wood spelled out JEFFREY on the wall. The room next to it was an office, empty, cold, with an open filing cabinet and a cleared desk, while at the end of the corridor, the master bedroom was a staunch mixture of gray and navy, with throw pillows patterned in silver on the bed.
If not for the front door standing open and the bitter cold in the air, it’d seem just like any other house waiting for its people to return after their workday.
Feeling more like an intruder by the moment, Lindy turned to find Wes watching her from the doorway, almost as if he’d been keeping an eye on her. She shivered. She hadn’t even heard him standing there.
Without a sound, the wolf turned and walked back down the hall.
Shifting her shoulders with discomfort, she glanced at the bed again. It’d be so nice to sleep in a bed, but somehow here it felt… wrong. Like stepping on someone’s grave, except of course, maybe no one was dead.
But out by the fireplace would be warmer anyway.
She crossed the room to the closet, hoping maybe extra blankets would be in there, only to hesitate. If someone had tried to hide… if they’d frozen or turned into a draug and she hadn’t picked up on them…
Seidr rose in her, lapping black shadows at the edge of her mind like dark water in which she’d drown.
Swiftly, she yanked open the closet.
Clothes on hangers swung gently in the sudden disturbance of the air.
A breath left her. She tugged them aside for good measure, checking behind the clothes, and then yanked down the blankets stacked on the shelf above. Bundling them in her a
rms, she retreated to the living room.
In the kitchen, Wes made a small yipping noise.
Alarm shot through her. She dropped the blankets and ran, rounding the corner to find him standing in the kitchen, his eyes on the refrigerator.
Her heart pounding, she looked around. “What is it?”
He jerked his head toward the refrigerator door. Cautiously, she walked closer, gripping her flashlight like a weapon.
A piece of paper was pinned to the fridge by a magnet shaped like an ear of corn.
Uncle Bill,
If you find this, Alan and I took Jeffrey and we’re heading south. The power’s gone and the radio is too. We haven’t been able to reach anyone for days. Don’t worry about us. We’ve got what food we had left, and the Suburban should be able to handle the snow. We’re heading for Granddad’s place outside Des Moines. I hope we’ll find you there.
Love, Marjorie.
Lindy looked down at Wes. Something sad in his eyes, he turned away with a sigh.
Nodding to herself as much as anything, she headed back for the living room. Maybe the family made it. Maybe their granddad missed what happened in Des Moines too.
Retrieving the blankets from the floor, she set them on a chair and went to gather couch cushions while Wes disappeared into the bathroom, emerging a minute later in human form with his winter gear in place again. She gave him a small nod, avoiding his eyes with sudden discomfort. Him as a wolf was one thing, scary all on its own. But now that he was back looking like a human, that was a whole other issue. She’d watched him get undressed when he shifted, and though of course she knew from the other night that he was sexy as almighty hell…
She hadn’t seen him fully naked in daylight before.
The man was nothing but muscle, sinewed and chiseled like some kind of tattooed biker god. His naked body took away every question she’d had over how far those tattoos went, because the answer?
Damn near everywhere, and God help her for how her hands had twitched with the urge to trace them across his flesh, exploring every inch of his amazing body.
Her insides heated at the memory, and she ducked her face away, bashing the arousal down hard. With a tight smile, she hurried back to the bedrooms, ostensibly for more blankets because of course that was practical. Craving this man?
That was just idiocy.
She snagged a stack of quilts from the back of the closet, listening hard in case he followed her again. Watching him shift had been… amazing, in a way. Logically, she’d known what was happening, but her eyes hadn’t seemed able to track the change, like what she saw simply couldn’t be processed by the human mind. Seidr had crackled out through the air, tingling over her skin, and somehow, the man became the wolf right in front of her, but without the stretching and bending of some Hollywood portrayal.
He was human, and then, he was a wolf, as if both had existed in the same space, blurring one into the other until the latter took precedence.
The Order described the process as revolting.
The Order didn’t understand what beauty was.
Working quickly, she piled the blankets on the makeshift beds, not looking toward him while he managed to get the front door closed and then went to search for firewood. When he returned and set to making a fire, she headed to the kitchen, checking for any remaining food—for him more than her—but there was nothing except an empty box of crackers and a half-empty container of salt.
And that brought an end to all her ways of avoiding him.
She returned to the simple bed of cushions, looking anywhere but at him when he sank down across from her. His attention was like a magnet determined to draw her gaze no matter how she fought it, and from the corner of her eye, she could see him watching her, never looking away.
Because, of course, he was going to have questions too—and not about anything she’d seen when he shifted.
Discomfort seeped into the space between them like water soaking everything with its icy-cold touch.
“Are you hungry?” Wes said softly, breaking the quiet.
A shudder ran through her. She was starving, but not for anything that made sense. The moment she started paying attention to it, her body began clamoring for horrible things. Blood. Raw meat. She shook her head as flashes of the rabbit in her grasp played behind her eyes, making her stomach growl. “No.”
He was silent.
She cleared her throat, straightening the blankets. “I can keep watch if you want to, um…”
“What was that with the rabbit today, Lindy?”
Her hands stilled. He knew the answer; she’d told him. She was a monster. He really wanted her to repeat that?
She moved to get up. “I’m going to just—”
He caught her wrist and she stopped.
“I promise,” he said softly. “Whatever it is, I’m here. I’m not going to run. Just talk to me.”
Her eyes slid up, finding his in the firelight, and indecision tore at her. She wanted to retreat. Wanted to draw him closer. Fear gripped her for him, for herself, for the whole damn world and yet this…
This was contact and warmth when everything inside her felt so unbelievably cold. Despite all the reasons she should be retreating, she found herself sinking back onto the cushions across from him, making no move to push his hand away.
His brow rose again in silent repetition of his question.
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
He sighed. Taking off his gloves, he reached up, cupping his hand against her cheek. A shuddering breath left her, and she leaned into him in spite of herself. He felt real. Solid when all of her life had become unstable, and his gentle touch made her stomach get butterflies, however tiny and lost in the dark they were.
“I’m scared, Wes,” she whispered.
He rose a bit, shifting around and coming to sit down next to her. His hands moved carefully, pulling away her gloves while she tensed, afraid of what he’d see.
But he only wrapped his fingers around hers. “You’re still you.”
She couldn’t take her eyes from his tattooed hands in the firelight. “I’m not sure. I… I feel this inside of myself, and I don’t want to hurt you, but I—” Her eyes prickled, hot tears slipping down her cheeks.
And her breath caught. Trembling, her hand rose, her fingertips touching the moisture on her skin. A tiny gasp left her, and she looked back to him, eyes wide.
Curiosity passed across his face at whatever expression she wore, but she couldn’t explain. Somehow, some magical how, pain and joy were rising up inside her, more vibrant and real than they’d felt all day. The numbness in her flesh seemed to fade, the heat of the fire beside her taking precedence, and a veil felt as if it was slipping from everything, like the color was gradually returning to the world.
Barely breathing for fear the sudden wash of emotions would vanish, she reached up gingerly, taking his cheek. His skin was warm to the touch, and the scruff of his growing beard prickled at her fingertips. “How are you doing this?” she whispered.
His brow flickered down in confusion. “Doing what?”
“Making me feel alive.”
A breath left him, a smile crossing his face like her words stole all of his. He leaned in closer, and she met him, closing her eyes as he kissed her.
Tension eased from her even as desire began a drumbeat of need through her body. Her lips parted, and he took the invitation immediately, deepening the kiss. Gripping him tightly, she moved to lie back on the makeshift bed, and her leg wrapped his when he joined her, holding him closer as she grinded herself against him.
Breathless, he pulled back. “Are you sure?”
She lifted herself up on one elbow to reach him, kissing him again briefly. “Yeah.”
The corner of his lips rose. Swiftly, he unzipped his coat, tossing it aside, only to hesitate for a moment before stripping off his sweater and shirt too.
Her eyes roamed over him. The firelight played across his skin, the glow touching
on intricate artistry of interwoven tattoos over powerful muscle. The skin beneath the marks wasn’t entirely smooth, however. Now that she was closer to him than when he’d undressed in the back of the truck, she could see a knotted and gnarled tangle-work of scarring crisscrossing his chest and midsection like an interwoven map all its own.
Surprise flickered through her. She’d felt roughened skin beneath her fingertips in the darkness days before. But she’d never imagined…
He didn’t move to come closer, and something inside her ached. Was he worried about this?
She sat up, kissing him before swiftly shedding her own coat. Later, she’d ask him. Later, if he wanted to talk about it at all. But now, she only wanted this.
Something in his eyes made her think maybe he did too.
Heat from the fire warmed the air around her as she lifted her sweater and shirt. Snow barricaded the windows and door alike, nearly covering them, and in her mind, she couldn’t feel a trace of the Order or the draugar anywhere. They were safe as they could be, here alone together, and swiftly, she tugged her sweater and shirt off, tossing them aside.
And then she froze.
The tattoo wasn’t just on her wrist anymore.
A breathless sound of panic escaped her, horror shattering her anticipation. Jet black vines tangled up her right arm and across half her chest, each one carving a jagged path along her flesh and ending in a narrow point as if it were a claw tearing into her body. As her chest rose and fell in short gasps, the firelight glinted from the markings, throwing back shimmers of metallic green.
“Hey.”
Her eyes flew up to Wes for a heartbeat and then returned to the tattoos. How was this possible? How could they just grow like—
“Hey, Lindy, look at me.”
She dragged her gaze up to his with effort, and he caught her chin when she started to look down again.
“You’re still you. These don’t change that.”
She clamped her lips shut, a sob rising in her throat.
Compassion filled his eyes. Never looking away from her, he reached out carefully toward one of the jagged vines.
