Ice Wolves (Elementals, Book 1)

by Amie Kaufman

  His mind was spinning, grasping at new facts and then tossing them at him, as if they were supposed to somehow help everything make sense.

  I transformed into an ice wolf.

  Rayna transformed into a scorch dragon.

  But we’re twins, so that’s impossible.

  Whether it was some trick of the dragons’ or some kind of mistake, he didn’t know, and he didn’t know how to start figuring it out.

  He pushed to his feet, picking his way across the grass, keeping away from the edge of the roof to be sure nobody would see him.

  He had to find his sister. That was all that mattered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE NEXT MORNING, ANDERS WAS still searching. He’d stolen a pair of boots from the mud rack in the courtyard of a house the night before, and pulled his spare trousers, even more threadbare than the ones he’d lost, from where he kept them stashed in a butcher’s roof. As it had grown darker he’d missed the coat he’d left behind at the docks, and the loot in the pockets that would have bought him supper. He’d felt bad about stealing the boots, since the home clearly wasn’t a rich one, but there wasn’t much choice.

  He and Rayna had a dozen prearranged places to meet if things went bad, or to leave each other messages and instructions. It was their way of finding each other when they had to run for it and couldn’t stay together. Slowly, hoping against hope that Rayna had somehow managed to turn human again and made her way back into the city, Anders had worked his way through most of them the night before.

  He’d climbed over the rooftop meadows and dodged patrolling members of the Wolf Guard in the streets, and his heart sank a little further every time a meeting place turned up nothing. He’d waited for somebody who had recognized her at the docks to start a rumor that the dragon had been Rayna, but so far in that, at least, they’d been lucky. Eventually he’d curled up in the long grass in the lee of a chimneystack for warmth, and tried to snatch what sleep he could as he waited for dawn.

  This morning, he’d woken up to find Kess staring at him from a safe distance. The black cat was seated by a patch of bright yellow-and-white flameflowers, named for the colors of a dragon’s flame, their buds still closed in the early morning light. Somewhere nearby herbs must be growing, because Anders could smell the sharp tang of chella and penries.

  It felt like a little weight off his chest, seeing a familiar face, even if it was just a cat’s. He reached out one stiff arm to click his fingers and call her. “Hey, Kessie girl. Come over here. We can keep each other warm a little longer, while we make a plan.”

  It felt like having an ally, just for a moment. Like he wasn’t Anders, who had transformed into a wolf, been chased through the city, and lost his sister. Like he was just himself. He’d cuddle with Kess while he figured out what to do next.

  But Kess just stared at him with huge, yellow eyes, the tip of her tail slowly twitching, not moving an inch closer.

  “Come on,” he whispered, clicking his fingers again. But she wasn’t moving, so he forced himself up onto his hands and knees, crawling a little nearer to her.

  Her little pink nose twitched as he came closer, nostrils flaring as she took in his scent. And then she came alive, arching her back, tail lashing as she bared her incisors and fluffed up her fur to make herself bigger. One paw lifted, claws extended, to take a swipe at him, and he threw himself back into place once more, his back slamming hard into the chimney.

  “Kess, what the . . . ?”

  But the cat was gone, whipping around and running for it in a quick black streak of movement. Like she’d caught wind of his scent, and it wasn’t that of a boy, but a wolf.

  It was like she didn’t know him at all.

  When he looked down to the street below, the city was transformed as surely as he had been himself the day before. The guards they’d encountered the last couple of days had been nothing compared to this. Members of the Wolf Guard patrolled in groups of four, eyes sharp, looking up as well as searching the faces of the crowd. Everyone was watching the sky, and everyone was on alert.

  Anders was jumpy as well, and he kept catching himself looking up, but he didn’t know what he was hoping to see. If a dragon appeared, would it be Rayna, or would it be here to attack?

  Anders made his way stiffly down from the roof, jumping onto a wagon full of hay and surprising the sleepy pony hitched to it. He scrambled free, picking hay from his clothes and hair, and strolled off before its owner could return.

  If Rayna was still a dragon, no doubt she’d be hiding somewhere safe, far from the city. But he’d figured out how to change back from a wolf, and he had to hope she’d figured out how to get back to human form as well.

  If so, she’d have come from the farmland to the west, which meant he might still find her on the other side of town. With so many wolves on patrol, it made sense that she wouldn’t risk making her way across the city to him.

  They’d stopped spending any time on the west side of the city more than a year ago—the homes there were too rich, and that meant the shabby twins were too easy to spot for what they were—but there were still hidey-holes she might use.

  An hour’s walk later, he finally found her signal.

  It was just a collection of lines drawn in chalk, high up on the wall next to a bakery. It had to be from her, though—no one else could have climbed up on top of the barrels set against the wall and fished around under the eaves until they found the bit of chalk hidden there, then drawn a picture in the exact spot they’d chosen.

  But what was it? It was a half circle, flat along the top, like a bowl. There were wavy lines rising from it, but what did that mean? He tried to press his tired brain to work.

  Eventually, he remembered. Last year he’d been down with a fever, sweating hot and cold, shaking so hard it had scared both of them. With the snow coming down relentlessly outside, Rayna had tucked him away inside a stable and made the trek across the city.

  She’d climbed over roofs and pushed through snowbanks for hours, and come back blue, but carrying a stoppered thermos of the best soup in the city, wrapped in layer upon layer of cloth and paper to keep it warm. Everybody said Dama Sancheo’s shop was the best of the best, and when Anders was sick, Rayna was convinced that the best of the best was what would bring him back.

  And she’d been right—she’d helped him drink it, shaking with cold herself, teeth chattering, and then she’d tucked him up in the hay once more. And in the morning, the fever had broken.

  He couldn’t imagine how anyone was going to fix this problem—him a wolf, her a dragon, all of Holbard hunting for her—but he knew that somehow she would. If he could just find her, she’d find a way, as she always did.

  So now he knew where Rayna must be, and soon he was standing outside Dama Sancheo’s shop. He could see the Dama and her staff inside, working over steaming vats of soup, and the customers were queuing out the door and down the street.

  He was just considering whether Rayna might be hiding in the laneway down the side of the building when he thought to look up. And there by the gable window on the roof was his sister, clad in a blue dress and watching him with her trademark grin.

  Something in his chest released, and he almost let his knees give out so he could sink down to the street in sheer relief. But Rayna pointed toward the lane, then disappeared out of sight. He made his way around the corner, and it was quick work to climb the stone-and-wood frame of the house, until her hands were reaching down to help him scramble onto the roof, and they could collapse together onto the grass and wrap their arms around each other.

  She’d already pilfered some soup, of course, or pilfered the money to buy it, and produced the thermoses from where she’d concealed them by the gable window. The early spring flowers bobbed in the gentle breeze around them, the rooftop meadow stretching for the length of the whole block. The pair of them sat with their backs to the window, out of the wind, and let the soup warm them up as they spoke.

  “I couldn’t b
elieve it, I ripped my way right out of my clothes,” she was saying. “By the time I figured out how to change back, I was naked in the middle of nowhere. Naked, Anders!” She laughed, shaking her head. “I didn’t have a thing left, except my hairpins! How do you suppose the wolves keep that from happening?”

  “They—”

  But he couldn’t get a word out about the amulets before she was speaking again. “Do you like my new dress?” She held up a handful of the blue fabric for him to admire, her words tumbling out. “It’s better than my old one, I think. So really, I came out ahead! I stole it from a clothesline. I found a farm quite quickly.”

  “I hope it wasn’t someone’s best,” he said, touching the fine fabric. He’d felt bad enough about the boots, but this dress was beautiful.

  Rayna shrugged. “We’ll take care of us, and let them take care of them. I couldn’t get boots there, but I got them a little closer to town.”

  She tugged out her copper pins, wisps of curls escaping her braid and blooming around her face, and dropped a pin into his hand. “We always said they must have a little bit of essence in them,” she said as he turned it over in his fingers. It was finely crafted, beautifully forged, the beaten copper always shiny. Along one side were a series of tiny, intricate designs that they had always thought might be runes.

  Anders knew that the runes were what channeled the essence—the power that came from nature, from the earth itself—into artifacts.

  But if the pins were artifacts, they’d never shown the slightest hint of essence, except for having survived Rayna’s transformation to a dragon. She’d had them as long as they could remember, maybe forever, and no matter how hungry the twins had been, they’d never traded them. They both felt instinctively that they were too valuable—they were the only thing they had that might have come from their past.

  Anders handed back the pin, but as Rayna kept on at full speed, he couldn’t help feeling the words were almost too gleeful, too cheery—this wasn’t Rayna’s usual confidence. Despite her cocky smile, Rayna had hugged him just as tight as he hugged her. Anders wondered if for once she’d been afraid too.

  Somewhere behind that confidence, she was rattled. But Rayna didn’t know any way forward except full speed ahead.

  “Flying was incredible,” she said. “Incredible! Every muscle in my back is aching today, but oh, I can’t describe it. Soaring, once you get the hang of it . . . I have to find a way to do it again.”

  Anders had been so caught up in his hunt for her—in his exhaustion, in reeling at his own transformation, in his cold, stiff tiredness and his worry—that he hadn’t had time to stop and think about anything but finding her since his mad flight from the dockside square. But now, as Rayna spoke, Anders did think.

  “Did you see them all running away from me?” she asked. “They were panicking, it was almost funny. I saw one man run straight into a building. Little wolves and people scattering all over the place.”

  Anders sipped his soup, not sure how to reply to that. Rayna had always been sharper around the edges than he was, but she’d never been hard-hearted. Now, though, she seemed to think that transforming into a dragon had been some sort of game. Was it bravado, or was she really more excited about flying, about her new dress, than what this could mean?

  “I thought for a moment the guards were going to really hurt me,” she was saying when he started listening again. “The ice spears the wolves throw, did you see them? I’ve got bruises all up and down my leg from where they hit me, and there’s a horrible cut on my side. Still,” she continued with a laugh, “I don’t think much of their aim.”

  “They’re still hunting you,” he said, so quietly she almost missed it.

  “They’re what?”

  “I was looking for you all over the city, I heard the rumors everywhere. The wolves are hunting you. There are patrols on every street,” he said. “Everyone’s eyes are on the sky. They’re saying you’re a scorch dragon spy, that next time, they’ll be ready.”

  “But I haven’t done anything wrong!” she protested, indignant. “I might have transformed, but I’m not like—I’m not like dragons are. I don’t want to hurt anybody! I didn’t even mean to transform!”

  “So what if it happens by accident again?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “What’s really been worrying me is whether you’re going to turn into a dragon too, because I—”

  “Rayna,” he tried, but she kept speaking.

  “I thought about it and—”

  “Rayna,” he repeated, louder this time, and she stopped in surprise.

  “I didn’t become a scorch dragon,” he said quietly, forcing himself to meet her eyes. For once she didn’t interrupt, seeming to sense he had more to say. And he made himself say it. “I became an ice wolf.”

  Rayna stared at him, speechless—though not for long. “A wolf?” Her voice was a squeak. “You can’t, a family can only be one—dragon or wolf!”

  “I know that,” he replied quietly, staring down at his soup, feeling as if somehow he was to blame for this impossible problem. Like since she’d transformed first, he should have matched her. Like suddenly their connection was damaged because he hadn’t.

  “But we’re twins,” she insisted, dumping her own thermos to one side and leaning sideways to catch his eye. “Don’t look at me like that, you know we are. It’s right there in our faces.”

  And it was . . . but it wasn’t. They really didn’t look that similar, but if you knew where to look, there were small things. They both had exactly the same dimple in their right cheek, the same strong brows, the same long eyelashes. They both folded their arms across their chests when they were uncomfortable, and they both tilted their heads exactly the same way when they were thinking.

  But how many other people in Vallen have dimples? asked a tiny voice in the back of his mind. Did you learn to fold your arms that way from watching her?

  Rayna was in every memory Anders had, from sharing a crib together at the orphanage to the time they ran away when they were six, because the woman in charge wanted to separate them, to . . . today. Anders grabbed hold of that tiny, nasty voice with both hands and shoved it in a mental box, nailing the lid down tight.

  Rayna was his sister. She always had been. And she always would be.

  CHAPTER SIX

  RAYNA WAS STARING AT HIM, AND ANDERS made himself reply. “Of course we are. We’re twins.” And then, hating the words even as he said them: “Rayna, do you think we should leave Holbard? They’re looking for you here. And maybe for me too. Wolves are supposed to go to the Academy, and join the guard.”

  “Leave?” She looked sick at the thought. Holbard was Vallen’s capital city, and really, its only large city. Anywhere else they’d be fending for themselves in a town, or worse, a village. Somewhere people would learn to recognize them quickly enough, and learn to watch out for their sticky fingers. “Let’s do some reconnaissance first. Let’s see how bad it is.”

  They both knew that Rayna should hide while Anders went out to gather up rumors and bring them back to her. Though perhaps she really was as shaken as he was, deep down—neither of them wanted to be apart, and so when Rayna suggested she trail him up on the rooftops where nobody would see her, he didn’t argue.

  But when he climbed down from the roof, the news was all bad.

  There were rumors on every street, and members of the Wolf Guard on every corner. If Anders thought there had been extra patrols before, it was nothing compared to the waves of gray-clad uniforms everywhere he turned.

  He checked in with the shopkeepers who sometimes slipped them scraps, other children who ran on the streets, with all the usual gossip sources, and the same words were everywhere. The whispers and worries of the day before had unfurled into fully grown facts, passed around undisputed.

  They were simply lucky nobody who knew them had been at the docks—or, at least, nobody who knew them had been inclined to speak to the authorities, and thus draw attenti
on to themselves. As the city’s fear grew, though, so too did the risk that if they had been recognized, somebody might break their silence.

  “There are dragon spies all over the city,” said Dama Sturra, a baker who was usually good for a bite to eat if they were desperate. Her worried face was daubed with a fine layer of flour as she mixed a new batch of dough. “A whole network of them, I’m hearing. Ready to rise up and start a new war for control of Holbard.”

  “Another battle like the last,” said one of her customers, smoothing down her fine blue dress, as if wishing she could smooth out the city’s problems just as easily. “I’ll never forget it. I was down by the docks when the battle came there. We jumped into the harbor in our coats and boots, we were in that much of a hurry. There were dragons diving down to burn us alive, and only the wolves and their ice to stand between us and being turned into charcoal.”

  “The ice wolves saved us,” agreed the baker’s husband, Herro Mensen, handing Anders a small cinnamon roll with a kind wink. “And don’t you worry, they’ll save us again.”

  “I heard the dragon at the dockside square was a spy,” a second customer said, busy packing her purchases in her basket.

  “Makes sense,” Dama Sturra agreed, nodding thoughtfully. “Did she get what she came for, that’s the question.”

  “And shame on them for using children,” Herro Mensen added, frowning.

  “She didn’t,” the customer replied with relish. “She was sent to destroy the Staff of Hadda, as I heard it. To make sure no more wolves could make their transformation, to weaken the Wolf Guard. But they have it safe, I heard it from a guard himself.”

  “Dragons only ever want one thing, and that’s to hurt the innocent, kill if they can,” said the first customer. “And yesterday’s was no different.”

  And on it went, everywhere he tried.

  When he met Rayna in a laneway and relayed the conversations to her, her lips thinned as she pressed them together. “Hurt the innocent,” she whispered, cheeks darkening with anger. “Kill if they can. I’m the innocent, Anders! I’m the one who got turned into—”