She doesn’t stop until we’re at the wooden bridge.
Jules falters, stumbles to her knees, and I slump into the grass, tortuously close to the cool water of the stream. All I want is to put my tongue in that water, lap up the clean, cool feeling into my mouth, into my throat, soothing the swollen, blistered skin, and washing away the pain.
Jules lies beside me, heaving heavy breaths, before she rolls over and vomits into the grass.
After a few seconds, she rolls to her stomach and pushes herself up. Regarding me with concern.
“Change back, stupid.”
I can’t. I want to tell her. I can’t.
“Finn. You have to change to heal.”
I watch as she twists and spins in ribbons of smoke. Not smoke. Smoke destroys. She becomes air, and moonlight.
She nudges me with her snout.
Change.
As if it’s that simple.
Change.
Why doesn’t she understand? I’m broken. Killed. Waiting to die.
Change.
She morphs and whirls back into form, long and pale and smooth. The blisters and mottled, ruined skin are healed. Even the scars on her face are thinner, less pronounced. She’ll never grow back the eye though.
The things inside of me twitch, knives sinking deeper into places they were never meant to be. A trembling whine escapes my throat. I taste blood.
“You were right, Finn. I like being a hero a whole hell of a lot more than being the bad guy.”
She runs a hand through my fur. Scratching behind my ears.
“This is going to hurt,” she says, rolling me onto my back and straddling me.
She closes her one green eye and begins to recite strange words, her head bowed in concentration, long blonde hair hanging in waves, tickling at my lips.
I feel heat from between her legs on my belly. I feel her muscles tighten as the incantation becomes louder, faster, more intense. Her heat begins to spread, swarming out from my belly, a thousand ants running under my skin, crawling into every deep part of me, tingling and itching. I yelp and twist beneath her, desperate to scratch them out. I scream inside my head, and it comes from my throat as another whine, begging to be free.
Jules is screaming now, head raised to the heavens, calling out to the moon in some strange, ancient language.
The broken things inside me are melting. The knives are yanked free. I feel like a boiling pot of soup inside, roiling and bubbling. The heat and the itch are inseparable, insufferable. They’re going to drive me mad. I squirm beneath her again, but she holds me down, as my insides collapse and liquefy and are reborn and my body screams out in excruciating agony.
The chanting stops. Jules falls away from me, exhausted. I curl up into a ball of bone and blood and fur, wishing she’d just left me to die, pinned under that smouldering beam.
My muscles finally give in to their destruction, and I lose control of what’s left of my body. Shaking, twitching. Convulsions take hold and shake me so hard that I bite through my tongue, a fresh spout of hot blood filling my mouth as fireworks explode behind my eyes and fade to black.
Then I hear his voice. Simon Magus. Far off, diffused. The third eye—the dream eye—opens, and I see him, climbing in front of me, scrabbling through the rocks, cursing under his breath. He’s shrouded in fog, the corners of the dream filled with dismal grey.
“Damn this infernal place!” He looks back toward me, yanks at something between us—a long metal chain—pulling at my neck. No, not my neck. Emma’s neck.
“Move, you stupid bitch!”
I feel the pull of the chain, and softly, ever so softly, I hear her calling me from inside herself.
Finn. Run, Finn.
My chest aches. Her chest. She feels empty, hopeless, yet soaked through with sorrow.
“Stop your whining. They’re already dead,” Magus says as they reach the plateau. He grabs my face—her face—roughly, and turns it to look down on the fire, raging in the valley.
“Do you see? All dead.” He releases his grip and stomps away. I will her gaze to find two little specks next to the blue line of the stream, just beside the wooden bridge.
The line at her throat tugs again. Her eyes turn to show me Magus moving toward the ruins of Raigan’s cottage.
“We wait out the night here, away from the flames. Tomorrow we leave this miserable place.”
Panic. Desperation. I feel Emma inside, thinking about the edge of that cliff, the long drop into the trees.
I SNAP AWAKE in my own body, cold and thin and hairless, but alive. Jules sits beside me, staring at the flames that have swept from the big house to the shed, and are now licking across the treetops, seeking out the rest of the buildings. She’s watching her home burn.
“Thank you,” I manage to croak through a dry throat full of ashes. I turn on sore muscles and stick my face into the ice of the stream, letting it send a jolt through my body, before I swallow a stomachful and retreat, shaking the wet from my hair.
Even from across the field, the heat is intense, and the flames are bright as day, flickering against her face and dancing across her features, everywhere but the recess of her ruined eye.
“Guess it doesn’t matter much,” she says quietly. “Maybe this place needed to burn. This fucked up place.”
“It’s still your home,” I say, getting to my feet. “Your brothers’ home. Our family’s home.”
I hold a hand out to her. “Do you want to let him take that from you too?”
“It’s already gone, Finn. Look at it. This whole mountain is going to burn.”
“And he needs to burn with it.”
Jules looks at my hand.
“We can’t really be heroes unless we stop the bad guy, right?”
Lame, but it works.
WE HAVE TO take the long way around the woods. The flames are already creeping high in the trees surrounding the valley. Our legs carry us fast and sure through the brush, despite the smoke and the heat. I remember stepping out, into the early morning, when the smoke came down over the city. Not even a week ago. I was crazy then. Crazy, drunk, and out-of-control. Running from everything. Hiding from myself. Believing a lie.
The campfire smell pushes us on, past the fire line and up to the trail on the cliff face. The birds that were so absent when the big house took ablaze, swarm in circles overhead as we make the climb, picking our way carefully over the stones. The moon rises beside us, blood orange and huge in the haze. We crest the top of the cliff, and I sniff at the air, high enough to be out of the smoke, but not so far as to have the smell of it out of my nose.
The birds stream above us—ravens, crows, starlings—blackbirds evermore. Magus must hear them. He knows what it means. The candlelight flickering from inside Raigan’s cabin suddenly swallowed in shadow.
We edge closer to the cottage, stepping slowly, quietly through the stream, stalking our prey.
Jules moves away from me, further upstream, stealthy and slow, circling into the thick brush and through the woods, flanking the little hut as I walk straight to the front door.
My ankles are still wet when Magus appears, alone. For once he’s not dressed in black. It’s as if he’s naked from the waist down, but the skin is loose and folding with seams along the outside of the legs. Empty pouches, like outward pockets, hang from the crotch, and the ankle cuffs are ragged and tapered.
“Well, well, well,” Magus crows, standing in a graveyard of scorched trees and broken totems in front of Raigan’s home. “How you have continued to surprise me, James.”
He wags a finger at me, holding his strange pants up with one side of a pair of clipped on suspenders.
“I thought you’d be so easy to handle. You were such a disappointing waste. Drunk, slovenly, devoid of hope. Full of misery and resentment. I was sure I’d be able to bring you here, get what I needed, and then send you straight on to hell with the rest of your filthy pack of dogs.”
He’s walking small circles in the s
ame small area, afraid to face me in the open. Monologuing again. So clever, and so vain.
“Yet, you just keep coming back. You’ve escaped every trap, every underling, every gambit I’ve laid in front of you.” He pauses. “Maybe I should offer you a position? One seems to have opened up with the untimely death of Mister McQueen.”
He laughs, and I inch closer, pulling back black lips to show him my teeth, the teeth I’m going to bury in his chest.
“I suppose I’ve soured that relationship though. Especially seeing what I’ve done to poor old Arthur.”
The mention of the name stops me in my tracks. He sees the pause, turns his head in mock pity.
“Do you like them?” he asks, hitching the suspenders over his shoulders and adjusting his strange pants. I’m close enough to see what the deflated pouches used to be, and to smell the flayed flesh. “Not as tailored as I usually like. Nor the right colour scheme, but Arthur didn’t need them anymore.”
A grey and yellow flash behind Magus gives me my cue. I inch forward again, low to the ground, growling with as much anger and ferocity as I can manage.
“They’re called Nábrók trousers,” he says, circling away to meet me in the open grass beside the stream. “There’s more than one way to skin a wolf, James. Just like there’s more than one way to become a wolf.”
Magus mutters something and raises his hands as if he’s lifting something to the heavens. The sky crackles and jumps with blue light. I set back on my hind legs, hunching my shoulders, ready to fight. Every hair on my body seems to stand on edge as Simon Magus is swallowed up in the same blue flame I’ve seen flicker to life in the palms of his hands. Sickly grey mist swirls up from the ground, swallowing him whole.
What emerges from the cloud in front of me is not-quite wolf, and not-quite man—a hideous amalgam of creatures, huge and muscular, with long heavy claws, and a terrible wide mouth, gaping from an unhinging jaw, double rows of razor teeth gleaming white inside of it. His eyes are red fire, a nightmare glowing in the night.
The beast roars, throwing its arms back, its wide chest straining with muscle. The sound rattles the trees around us, the birds screaming up into the sky and swirling like a black hole above.
It stomps toward me on cloven demon feet, the ground shaking with each step. That same stench of death and sulfur cutting the air between us. The air sings as its claws slice toward me, and I duck right, then dodge left. I slide under its reach and lunge, sinking my teeth deep into the meat of its leg. A hot, black fluid fills my mouth. It tastes of rot and foul water. I release my grip, shaking the taste from my jaws, and bound forward again, as the thing rears and smashes a fist into the earth, nearly catching my hind leg.
The monster lurches at me, both arms slicing forward, hoping to catch me in a vice grip. I run under its legs, turn and leap, aiming for the back of its neck. One arm swivels with an unnatural pop and crack and catches me by the throat, all four of my legs dangling, useless, in the open air.
The thing turns, gripping my hind legs with its free hand, pulling me close to feel the hellfire of its breath. It hisses into my face, and my body recoils, pulling tenderly at my outstretched limbs, joints twisted at wrong angles. The pressure builds as it tightens its grip, meaning to tear me in half. I feel my spine stretching, ready to pop. The joints of my legs already cracking under the strain. Searing pain fills my legs, my back.
The creature bellows, and I hit the ground, free and still in one piece.
Two wolves—one yellow and grey with one emerald eye; one with olive green eyes and a lustrous black coat—have it by the legs. They tear and pull at its calves, but no meat is coming loose. It cries out, then swings its heavy arms skyward and down in long arcs, swatting them away like errant insects. Jules tumbles into the trees, and Emma splashes into the stream. I leap straight up in the bastard’s face, claws out, swiping a black trail across its eyes, a wet cascade of black sewage following me to the ground.
It rises, seemingly larger and stronger with every pain we cause it. The jagged grooves I’ve carved across its face festering and melting with grey tendrils of smoke and reforming into smooth, unbroken skin.
It roars again, fierce and triumphant, and charges toward me as I shuffle backwards into the treeline.
I duck into the brambles, scoot myself under some thorns, and leap over the roots of an old pine tree that comes crashing down beside me as the beast stomps through the trees as if they were mere cardboard.
I draw it back out into the clearing, Jules and Emma beside me, backing across the stream as it approaches, red eyes glowing from the dark of the forest. There is a rustle behind us. The patter of feet. The two small wolves line up beside us. The straggling remnants of the Strong Wolves standing together at last.
We spread out, Kevin and Jamie moving far outside, circling around beside it, I stay directly in front of the monster, Emma and Jules in between. It turns its skull on a thick neck, measuring each of us, trying to gauge the bigger threat. It comes for me, straight across the stream, but distracted as the other four dive toward its legs. I take the opening and launch myself at its throat, just as it rears up, Kev and Jamie clamping down on its legs, Emma and Jules on its haunches. I catch the throat full and deep, pulling against my cousins in a terrific tug-of-war, until something comes loose, and the creature crumples underneath us. I release my grip, sour filth filling my mouth, and look to my family. Emma has a strip of cloth in her teeth, one of the suspender straps, pulled free. Jules pulls and twists at one of the pouches at its crotch, tears one away with a terrible ripping sound and spits a ragged hunk of skin.
The great beast sputters in blue flame, dissolves in grey smoke, and all that’s left is an old man. Magus lies in front of us, frail and white, crawling across the stream.
He struggles to his feet, backing away from us, toward the edge of the cliff. Thick plumes of smoke trail up behind him across the moon.
The Strong Wolves of Binn Connall creep closer around me, the whole family surrounding Magus and pushing him closer to the edge of the precipice, our shoulders hunched, teeth bared, ready to end this, end him.
Magus sneers and rolls his hands together. A trick I’ve seen before. The small sphere of blue lightning rolling over his fingers and across his palms, getting bigger and brighter, more intense. My eyes are drawn to it, the hypnotic sway of it swirling in and out of his hands as he backs away. His hands come together again, the blue flame caught inside, then he draws them out, fingers wide, pulling the flame with them, larger and larger. He’s farther and farther away. The birds are screaming overhead. Screaming and swirling. The birds, calling out to each other, to us, waiting for their turn at the table. The ball of flame, so beautiful and full.
Magus throws his arms forward, the blue flame rushing toward us and exploding in a flash, lighting up the night with the sudden blast of a dozen suns.
As the hawk takes wing at the edge of the cliff, I leap. I hear Jules behind me, muttering those ancient words.
My jaws close around him, not the bird, but the man. Old and foul and filled with death and rot and sulfur.
My teeth sink deep, bones cracking, flesh surrendering. His blood fills my mouth, and we fall, the heat and the flames rising up to meet us. It ends, just like it began, athwart the gloom.
38
I DREAM OF smoke.
Smoke and blood. Nothing else in this place but the feeling of the earth moving beneath me, the earth spinning, wild and out-of-control, and her green eyes. Dark, olive green eyes, as deep as the sea.
The world is spinning away from me. Above me.
Four wolves standing on the edge of the world
Sisters fair
Running.
Athwart the gloom
Smoke. And blood. Dressed of fur.
A monster made of death.
Tearing, ripping, screaming. Fierce of tooth.
Blue fire, exploding. Fireworks in the night. Black birds spinning endless circles.
The world t
urns backwards, white becomes black becomes red.
So much blood. An ocean of blood. Rising and crashing. Pink foam cresting dark waves.
Inching ever closer with the tide.
Hands reaching out.
Plucking me from the abyss.
Carrying me through smoke and heat.
And always my mother’s voice calling from a place without time.
Not my mother.
Olive green eyes, as dark and deep as the sea. That voice, dark and velvet.
Sweet vanilla and rich chocolate.
The Maiden of the Moon.
“Finn.”
THERE IS A hand in my hand. Delicate fingers, intertwined with mine, an infinite knot.
“Emma?”
She nudges closer and puts her other arm around me, moaning softly in her sleep.
I feel her heat against me, the hard little lump swelling from her belly pushed against the small of my back.
I carefully lift her arm and separate our fingers, slide out of the bed, wince as my bare feet hit the cold hardwood floor.
The house is quiet, and dark. I look out into the yard, three feet high with new snow, the rusted clothesline glossy with ice.
I creep softly into the hallway, gently pushing the door open, Kevin and Jamie on opposite sides of the room, heavy blankets tucked up tight beneath their sleeping faces, Kev’s lip shadowed with the darkening peach fuzz of impending puberty.
The fire is crackling in the front room. I find her sitting cross-legged in my father’s chair, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, feet poking out to each corner. One hand dangling at her side, a thin trail of smoke rising between her fingers.
“Can’t sleep?” I ask her, picking up the mug beside her chair. I can smell the coffee, and the weed, from across the room, but I’m trying to make a point. “You can’t stay awake forever, Jules.”
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