Lord of the Wolfyn and Twin Targets

by Andersen, Jessica

  The Dead Forest was the only thing keeping him alive at this point, slowing the dragon and forcing it to stay in snake form because there was no room for it to spread its limbs and bring its wickedly barbed tail into the attack. But that boon was also a hindrance, as the branches fouled his aim. And there was no way he could fight the creature up close. With a boar pike and a beast-chaser, he might have had a chance. With a short sword and no armor, he would be dead before he got in his first puny blow. His wolfyn form would be no improvement; he might be able to outrun the creature on the ground, but it could fly and the witch had linked it to his life essence.

  There was no hope of escape. One of them had to die.

  If he could just…there! Up ahead there was a large tree with low, sturdy branches, and what looked like a clearing beyond.

  Putting on a burst of speed that sucked all but the last dregs of his energy, even with his secondary canines extended and his healing powers maxed, he raced for the tree, leaped and grabbed the low branch and clambered up. From there, he could fire down on the dragon with no interference, maybe even a better angle.

  But when he turned back, the beast was gone.

  “Abyss.” That wasn’t good.

  He was already turning toward the clearing when he heard the thousand-arrow whistle of the Feiynd plummeting from flight. The creature landed in the open meadow just short of the tree in full dragon form, with wings and limbs extended.

  Screeching, it reared up on its hindquarters to tower over Dayn’s position, taller even than the trees. He couldn’t see its eyes, couldn’t get a bead on the flexible armpit zone that was often a weakness of armored creatures. All he could see was its scaled underbelly and wide, sweeping wings as it stayed upright for nearly a full second, screaming.

  Then, suddenly, it crashed down to all fours atop the tree, tearing through the branches and sending the trunk skewing wildly for a second before it fell, uprooted by the creature’s great force.

  Dayn tried to fling himself free, but landed just ahead of the outer branches, which came down atop him, pinning him. He ripped free, scrambled to his feet and—

  A huge black mass blurred from the side as the Feiynd struck, clamping its jaws on his upper arm and partway across his chest. Its curving, barbed teeth dug in, sending white-hot pain lashing through him.

  “No!” His perceptions wrenched and a terrible sense of wrongness washed over him, warning that he was badly hurt. He could smell his own blood over the creature’s brimstone breath, could taste it in his mouth and feel it coming from his nose. But at the same time his focus narrowed to two crucial points: he still had his crossbow, and those tiny red eyes were suddenly very close.

  He twisted his body and felt more pain, more wrongness, but that didn’t stop him from bringing the crossbow up.

  Without warning, he was heaved up into the air, still clamped in the dragon’s powerful jaws as the beast whipped its neck. Then it let go.

  Dayn’s inertia tore him from the barbed teeth and he went flying. For a second he was weightless, in a state of almost-pleasure as the old pain of being chomped disappeared and the new pain of being torn up and spit out hadn’t yet hit. Then he crashed into the dusty meadow and skidded several feet on the hard ground with the boom of impact ringing in his ears.

  He tried to get up, but couldn’t. Tried to raise the crossbow he still held clutched in one hand, his fingers cramped around the stock, but he couldn’t do that, either. All he could do was lie there as the Feiynd reared back on its haunches again, spread its wings and roared its triumph. Then it thudded back to the ground and came toward him, swaggering in dragon form. Its piggish red eyes locked on him and its mouth split wide to show those awful barbed teeth, now stained with his blood.

  It took its time, but there was no question what would come next. The stories all said the same thing, after all: the Feiynd never left its target alive.

  As it closed to within a dozen of its huge paces, Dayn sought his healing magic, but it was spent. His wolfyn magic, too. He was too far gone, too depleted. His mind raced, but his thoughts were scattered and dull, his plans nonexistent. I’m sorry, Father. He had failed, after all. He had come so close, yet was still falling short. And in the end, he was more the man than the prince, anyway, because his last thought as the Feiynd closed to striking range wasn’t of his family or Elden, but of his lover. Goodbye, sweet Reda, he thought, glad to know that she, at least, was safe.

  But as the beast reared up over him, its eyes glittering, mouth gaping wide, he heard the thunder of hoofbeats and her voice screaming, “No!”

  An arrow sang, burying itself in the Feiynd’s armpit.

  The dragon screeched and scissored sideways, which sent it crashing aside, away from Dayn. He simultaneously cursed Reda and blessed her, wanted to—

  The Feiynd’s tail lashed out, whistled through the air and came down hard on Dayn’s battered body.

  Darkness.

  “NO!” REDA STOOD in the stirrups and sent another arrow flying at the dragon as it regained its feet. “Get away from him, you bastard!” Beneath her, MacEvoy stayed steady and galloped his heart out, even though his ears were flat to his skull and his body shook with fear.

  The arrow bounced, but got the dragon’s attention. The thing’s head whipped around and it hissed when it locked on her. It was too close to Dayn; there was no way she could get to him with the monster practically standing over his body. Worse, as they closed on the fight, she saw to her horror that Dayn was still and limp, his clothing blood-soaked, his wounds horrific. Far worse than what Kenar had done.

  “No,” she whispered.

  In the moment between one gallop stride and the next, she flashed hard on the sight of Benz behind the counter, the gunman spinning to level his weapon at her and the plan she never executed. Divert and then attack.

  A diversion!

  Reda didn’t stop to think or plan, there was no time, no point. She just kicked free of her stirrups, leaned close to MacEvoy’s neck and said, “When I bail, get your ass out of here.”

  She didn’t know if the bay got the message or not, but as they blew past Dayn’s body and the huge, glistening black dragon oriented hungrily on what it probably considered horsemeat-on-the-hoof, she screamed, “Go!” And then she flung herself out of the saddle.

  The ground was hard, the impact crushing. She tucked and rolled, but by the time she came to a stop, her head was ringing and her right wrist hurt from being jammed, or worse.

  She didn’t have time to worry about that, though. As she lunged to her feet, she saw that MacEvoy had done his job—intentionally or not—drawing the dragon away. But the monstrous creature only followed the horse for a few strides before it stopped, turned back and reoriented.

  Reda fell to her knees beside Dayn, horrified by the ragged, gaping wounds she could see through his torn shirt and the blood that trickled from his mouth. He was breathing shallowly, his eyes rolled back in his head. Sobs backed up in her chest, but she didn’t have time for them now. She shook him slightly, hoping for a groan, but got nothing. “Dayn, wake up. We need to go!”

  She couldn’t carry him and MacEvoy was long gone. Worse, the ground rolled beneath her as the big black dragon headed back toward them, its beady red eyes burning with hunger and hatred.

  Moving behind Dayn, she tried to lever him up, but he was deadweight. Worse, she was hurting him, probably doing more damage to his injuries, but what other choice did she have? “Dayn, please, wake up!”

  All rationality in the world said for her to leave him and run, that the creature wanted him, not her. But logic didn’t stand a chance against her feelings for him, so she stayed put, trying desperately to rouse him. His head lolled and his mouth opened slightly, revealing his fully extended secondary canines.

  The sight stirred a one-two punch of heat and understanding. She didn’t let herself think about it, didn’t let herself hesitate. She opened his mouth, set her wrist against those two scalpel-sharp points and
pushed.

  She cried out at the pain, but then sucked in a breath at the wash of heat that followed, flowing through her body as he moved slightly against her, rousing. Backing her wrist off his fangs, she turned her arm so the bloody spots hit his tongue, which moved, fitfully at first and then with purpose, lapping two strong strokes and then a third.

  Doing her best to ignore for now the pleasure-pain of his feeding, she leaned in and said, “Wake up. I need you.”

  Her heart hammered and despair threatened as the dragon reached them and reared up, shrieking and beating at the air with its wings. Then it slammed back down and snaked its vicious triangle of a head toward them, moving in for the kill, gaping its jaws wide and—

  Dayn moved convulsively, jerking upright, yanking the crossbow into position and putting his bolt straight into one fiery red eye.

  The dragon bellowed and yanked back, wings flailing so hard that it lifted off the ground and hung for a moment, suspended as it writhed and keened, contorting into impossible-seeming shapes in the sky. Seconds later, it went limp and plummeted to the ground.

  It vanished when it hit, sent back to whatever magic had summoned it.

  Suddenly, the meadow was entirely silent.

  Reda stared at the place where it had been, and blew out a long breath. “Okay. We made it. That was…okay.” She wasn’t okay, though, because she was far too aware of the deep ache in her wrist and the echo of mingled pleasure-pain within her.

  Dayn, too, was far from okay. He groaned as he tried to sit up away from her, then fell back weakly. A muscle pulsed at the corner of his jaw. “We need to get out of here. Moragh will know we killed her creature. She’ll send men to find us, or come herself, and I’m in no shape to fight.”

  That was an understatement. It took all her effort to get him on his feet and keep him there, and he leaned heavily against her. More, as they left the meadow and headed back into the forest, he slid into and out of lucidity, his mumbled thoughts fragmented. “Don’t know who I am, he says? I’ll show… Wish I could’ve gone with you, my sweet Reda, wish you hadn’t come back… Don’t know where they are…”

  The “wish you hadn’t come back” was a theme. And where before she had told herself he had sent her away to keep her safe, now she wondered whether she was kidding herself. But for a change, instead of immediately assuming the worst, she decided she would wait and see. First and foremost, she needed to get him back on his feet. And although she thought she knew how to do it, the prospect wasn’t appealing.

  Or rather, it was appealing. And that was what worried her.

  A short distance into the forest, she found a spot where a big tree had long ago fallen against three big boulders. Time and weather had hollowed out the giant trunk, creating a small sheltered area that would have to do, because Dayn was breathing hard and struggling to keep himself upright.

  She eased him into the hiding spot and then walked a quick circuit, but didn’t find any sign of the witch, at least nothing that she could detect with her all-too-human senses. Rejoining him, she ducked down and crawled in beside him.

  The hollow was dry enough and offered good concealment, but she sorely missed the supplies that had galloped away with MacEvoy, because Dayn didn’t look good at all. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow and pain cut deep grooves beside his mouth.

  The thing was, though, he didn’t need anything from the saddlebags. He needed blood.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  STEELING HERSELF, Reda looked down at her wrist. The slices were neat marks, already sealed up through some sort of vampire magic. But what made her the most queasy was the reddish circle painted on her forearm, showing where his mouth had been.

  When it had actually been happening, it hadn’t really bothered her. Now, though, her stomach roiled, though she couldn’t have said why. It hadn’t really hurt all that much, and the pleasure had far outweighed the sting. More, she didn’t feel any different than she did before, and it had saved them, damn it. How was that wrong?

  It wasn’t until she didn’t get an answer that she realized she was waiting for one. She wanted reason and logic to weigh in, wanted to hear from practicality, because they were the ones who could explain why her baseline human self said it was wrong for one person to drink blood from another, yet under the circumstances she couldn’t think of a good reason why.

  Maybe that was her answer, and the reason why the other parts of her were staying silent—because in the end this wasn’t the human realm, wasn’t even the wolfyn realm. They were in the kingdoms where magic—and emotion—trumped.

  She had heard it all before: love is messy, it hurts, it’s not logical, it defies prediction. But now she got why those were clichés, got why some people nodded knowingly over them while others looked blank.

  Her parents hadn’t made any sense together. On the surface, a fey dreamer, possibly even a realm traveler, shouldn’t have had anything in common with the stalwart, conservative, linear-thinking major. Yet they had chosen each other, had made four children together. More, when she died, a piece of him had died with her—the piece that had known how to laugh, how to live, how to remember without letting the past take over the present.

  Reda had long known that she was a product of her mother’s death and the way her father changed. What she hadn’t really grasped, though, was that she had also come from a love that had been so strong that it had drawn her parents together despite their differences, and whose absence had made her father a different, lesser man.

  Which brought to mind another of those sayings: throw your heart over first and the rest will follow. He had done that and gotten burned. Had she on some level realized it and held herself at a distance rather than leading with her heart, not wanting the pain he’d lived through, not wanting to cause the pain he had experienced because of it?

  When had she ever thrown herself into a relationship? More, when had she put her heart into it first? Maybe she had started to in the wolfyn realm, only to have Dayn’s secrets rear up between them. But even there she hadn’t given herself fully.

  His test might have been proving that he could think of others before himself, but maybe hers had been to do the opposite and learn how to please herself and stop worrying about what other people—including the ones she channeled in her head—thought about her decisions.

  “Got it figured out yet?”

  Starting, she looked over and found Dayn watching her through heavy-lidded eyes. A flush touched her cheeks, warmed her skin and made her suddenly conscious of her own pulse. “Have I got what figured out? The way onto the island?”

  “Whatever was making you look so fierce just now, like you were ready to take on the whole world by yourself. The thought of which, by the way, terrifies me.”

  Hearing him sounding more like himself, she took a closer look. “You’re healed!”

  He nodded, shifting and testing a muscle here, a move there. “I can’t explain it, but that little bit of your blood helped far more than I would have expected it to. Maybe it’s got something to do with whoever your ancestors were, or maybe it’s connected to the part of the spell that ties my life force to the island. Who knows? But believe it or not, I’m good to go.” He parted his ragged shirt to reveal his chest and flat stomach, made whole once more, save for reddish marks stamping the places where he had been torn to the bone an hour earlier.

  If they had been in the outlaws’ cave, separated by fences and space, it might not have happened. But she was sitting so near him in the small hollow that it was too easy to stretch her hand across and press her palm to his chest to soak up the feel of the warm, yielding muscle the steady lub-dub of his heartbeat.

  “I thought you were going to die.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, hadn’t meant for her eyes to well up.

  He covered her hand with his own, holding her against his heart. “You’ve seen for yourself that I’m not easy to kill.”

  “But you could have died back there. You still might.”


  Reaching up with an arm that had been broken an hour before, he touched the single tear that had broken free, then cupped her cheek in his palm. “Ah, Reda. My sweet, sweet Reda. I wish I could freeze time right now. No more looking back or moving forward, just the two of us together.”

  She closed her eyes and felt another tear track down her cheek as he leaned in and touched his lips to hers. And although nothing was different between them, there was something new inside her as she opened her mouth beneath his.

  He made a low, urgent noise in the back of his throat, almost a whimper yet so much more masculine than that, as if he, too, so badly needed this yet had been afraid that it wouldn’t happen ever again. But it would happen, it was happening, and she poured herself into the moment, determined to take what she needed and give everything in return. There was no more second-guessing, no more inner debate; her mind was still and wholly in the moment when she wrapped her arms around his neck and he rose above her, easing her down to the dry, yielding moss. There were no more reservations, no skittering fears of too-sharp teeth or compulsions, because this thing happening between them went both ways.

  She felt his wolfyn’s enthrallment in the gentle rasp of his weapon-callused hands over her skin as they loosened enough clothing to find each other, and in the shudder of his breath when she softly kissed his cheek, his forehead, the touch saying, I’m here, with you, and right now nothing else matters. She felt him control his other, vampire self in the way he coiled tight with pleasure and need when she grazed her teeth along the veins at the side of his neck, nipping lightly over the fading love bites.

  And it was because of that enthrallment, because of that control, and because of the time-faded, grief-faded memory of her father twirling her mother across the back lawn and the two of them racing down the wooded path to the forest, looking back over their shoulders like naughty kids—or mismatched lovers who had somehow matched perfectly—that there was no fear as she shifted beneath him and guided his mouth to the side of her neck.