Ice Wolves (Elementals, Book 1)

by Amie Kaufman

  He pulled her farther down the laneway and behind a stable before her voice grew too loud, and she shook him off her arm, pacing the three steps she could manage in the confined space, then spinning on her heel to stalk back again. “I’m a Vallenite, same as them,” she fumed. “I should be protected. The last thing I want is anything to do with scorch dragons, I know what they are. I’m not wicked! Just because it turns out I can fly doesn’t mean I—”

  She broke off, her face even darker red than before—and as her eyes went wide, Anders realized she was too red. This wasn’t a natural color, this was a rich crimson snaking across her skin. Suddenly there was a glimmer of bronze to her complexion.

  Heat was rolling off her, hitting him in a wave, scrambling his thoughts and sending a bolt of panic through him. “Rayna, no!” He threw himself forward, grabbing the front of her dress, as if he could somehow prevent the transformation by sheer willpower alone.

  “I’m trying!” she rasped, squeezing her eyes tight shut in concentration.

  “Breathe,” he instructed her, keeping her close, forcing himself to resist the urge to push her away, the urge to run, find a bank of snow, throw himself into it to cool down. “The wolves told me you change when you have strong feelings, try and think of something else! Just listen to my voice. You can do it, Rayna.”

  She reached out to grab at his shoulders, anchoring herself. “Help me,” she shouted, head thrown back, hands squeezing painfully.

  “Stay calm, focus!”

  And then suddenly she let him go, staggering a step back, the unnatural redness fading from her skin, the terrifying heat fading away, and she was simply Rayna once more. Her chest was heaving as if she’d just run a race, and his heart was thumping like it wanted to shove its way right out through his ribs.

  There was a clatter from the laneway, and a young man burst into view, hefting a broom in both hands. “Get away from her!” he shouted, aiming it at Anders, who ducked.

  “What are you doing?” Rayna screeched, jumping between them.

  “I heard you!” the young man told her, still holding the broom at the ready. “You shouted for help.”

  “No I didn’t,” Rayna protested immediately, and slowly, puzzled, he lowered the broom. “Must have been coming from some other direction,” she insisted, reaching for Anders’s hand. “We don’t need any help. We were just leaving.”

  They left him standing bewildered behind them as Rayna towed Anders straight past him and out into the bustling street once more, disappearing into the crowd as fast as she could. He kept hold of Rayna’s hand as they made their way down the street. With eyes on every corner, and another transformation just a moment’s bad temper away, it felt as if the walls of the city were closing in on them. He felt scared for her—protective of her—in a way he never had before.

  He found his gaze lingering on the wolves. Most of them were in human form, and they held themselves the way the girl Lisabet had. As if they knew they were being watched, and they were allowing it. As if they knew things nobody else did. Anders couldn’t help wondering what that kind of certainty would feel like. That kind of knowledge and power.

  They were walking down a broad street a few minutes later when two little boys ran past them, one wearing a red blanket as a cape. The other caught up with him, wrapping his arm around him and tackling him to the ground, where they both landed with a thud at Anders’s and Rayna’s feet. For a moment they might have been Anders and Rayna years before, a tangle of playful brown limbs, and then one of them spoke.

  “Hold still!” he roared. “I’m going to kill you with my ice spear, dragon!”

  One of them was playing Rayna—the blanket wasn’t a cape, it was a dragon’s wings—and the other was playing a Wolf Guard.

  Rayna stared down at them. “Is everyone . . .” Her voice broke, then began to rise. “Does everyone in the whole city think someone should kill me?”

  Anders knew what was coming before it happened. “No!” he said urgently, reaching for her. “No, listen to me!”

  But this time there was no stopping her. Faster than he could track she grew into a blaze of red, wings unfurling as she towered over him. She took up most of the street, which was one of the widest in Holbard. Tipping her head back, she roared, and the ground trembled beneath his feet. When she thrashed her tail, a shop front flew to pieces like a house of cards.

  Anders staggered back as four—no, six wolves came running down the street, teeth bared in snarls. They made a semicircle around Rayna as she spread her wings again, bellowing a protest.

  Everyone else in the street was turning to run now, pushing past Anders like a rushing tide of water that wanted to sweep him away from his sister.

  The first of the wolves struck the ground with its front paws, just by where Rayna’s blue dress lay in ruins, and two ice spears flew from the stone to hit Rayna where her wing joined her body, drawing a screech of pain and protest from her.

  The next wolf struck, and she ducked her head just in time to stop it piercing her eye.

  Panicked, Anders could feel his own change coming for him, the sights and scents of the world becoming sharper and brighter as his head cleared and his body readied itself to transform, the colors fading to the duller wash he’d seen last time. He tried to stay calm, tried to push it away and stay human, but pain roared through his hurt ribs and down his arms and legs as his bones reshaped themselves, and he once again ripped free of his clothes.

  As he bounded forward—though he had no idea what he was going to do—the largest of the wolves howled, and Anders found he understood the sound. It was an alert, a warning, and like the rest of the pack he tipped his head back to scan the sky.

  A second dragon was soaring in over the roofs of Holbard, at least twice the size of Rayna, crimson, gold, and bronze just as she was, gleaming in the late afternoon sun. It roared, and in response Rayna sprang skyward, the hot downdraft from her wings knocking Anders and the other wolves off their feet.

  The waves of heat coming off her, the dazzling mosaic of scents clouding his nostrils—the musty smell of the horses, the damp of the cobblestones, the sweet hint of someone baking nearby—all of it combined to send Anders’s head spinning.

  As he scrambled upright, there was nothing he could do except watch her wing her way up, edging his way back under the eaves of the buildings so the other wolves wouldn’t see him. How could she do this? How could she fly straight toward the enemy?

  Rayna pumped her wings, climbing steadily, then snapped them open to soar away—and he realized she wasn’t flying to the other dragon, she was running from it.

  As the wolves loped together along the street, staying as close to Rayna as they could manage, a man barged past Anders. Everyone else was taking shelter inside homes and shops, but this man ran out to stand in the middle of the street, looking up as the larger dragon pursued Rayna. He was dressed in a plain blue coat and wore a flat cap that hid most of his face, and but for the fact that he was running out into the middle of the street while everyone else ran away, Anders never would have noticed him.

  A woman ran out to join him, dressed as he was in a plain coat and trousers, sturdy boots showing beneath them. They both looked utterly ordinary, though their behavior was anything but.

  They exchanged a couple of words, and then she ran on past him, until she was a good fifty feet away. As one they dropped to a three-point crouch, one hand resting on the ground, and the crowd around Anders started to scream anew as the pair began their transformation.

  Their skin turned to red, clothes melting into invisibility, and his eyes couldn’t follow the way they began to swell and grow, impossibly large in seconds, copper and bronze and gold streaking through crimson so the sunlight glinted off their scales.

  If Rayna was fifteen feet long, they were at least thirty each, taking up the whole street. They were impossibly, terrifyingly big, heat radiating from them like they might set the street alight any second. With a rush of wind they
launched themselves, circling up with quick, efficient strokes to join the pursuit.

  Rayna didn’t stand a chance. Where their wing strokes were quick and economical, hers were disorganized and unpracticed—she practically clawed her way through the air, rather than flew through it.

  She banked to the right, wings pumping furiously as she tried to put distance between her and her pursuers. But they were all so much bigger than she was, and they soared, closing the gap in seconds.

  She roared her defiance, and she kept whipping her head around toward them—was she trying to breathe fire? If she was, nothing was happening. His heart in his throat, Anders ran along the street after the wolves who were tracking the dragons from the ground.

  The dragons surrounded her, then peeled away toward the mountains, herding her with them like a helpless sheep between three sheepdogs. She tried to barge her way past one of them and it pushed her back into place, breathing a gout of flame horrifyingly close to her head.

  Anders ignored the pain in his ribs—apparently that damage transformed with him—dragging down great breaths as he hurtled along the streets toward the edge of the city.

  He reached the city gates in time to see the other wolves, dozens of them now, pouring out through them and onto the plains beyond. He stopped himself before he ran out onto the plains as well, sinking down on his haunches and biting back a howl of despair.

  Rayna and the other three dragons were already a vanishing dot on the horizon.

  She was gone, and no matter how fast he ran, he wouldn’t catch her.

  In a moment, the wolves would be returning to the city to report, and if he was standing here in the gateway, they’d find him. He had to run.

  He had to find a place to hide, to survive, to live another day and try and make a plan, though he couldn’t begin to imagine what that plan would be. This time, Rayna wasn’t on her own—she was a prisoner. This time, Rayna wouldn’t be waiting tomorrow with hot soup to tell him about her adventures.

  Two questions beat like drums in his mind, over and over again, their urgency making it hard to think straight.

  How could he find the dragons’ stronghold?

  Even if he did, how could he get Rayna back?

  He would need to learn more about the dragons—about where they hid, about their weaknesses, about how to track his sister down and find a way to bring her home.

  He’d spent most of his life scared of one thing or another, letting Rayna make their decisions. But perhaps that just meant he was good at doing things while he was scared—and he could do this too.

  There were rumors about dragons on every corner in Holbard, but there was only one place they studied dragons, one place they learned how to defeat them, one place that could teach him what he needed to know.

  All day he had been watching the wolves, seeing how sure of themselves they were. He needed that kind of power, and knowledge, and there was only one place he could find it.

  He had to enlist at Ulfar Academy.

  He would learn how to control his transformation, learn what they knew about dragons, and find his chance to escape and go after Rayna. He couldn’t wait for her to come back. He had to find a way to help her himself. It was his only hope of seeing her again.

  The huge pack of wolves that had chased the dragons out across the plains was trotting back toward the city wall in formation, coming into view.

  So instead of slinking between the buildings to hide once more, Anders gave himself a shake, and feeling the grass beneath his paws, he walked slowly out through the city gate to meet them.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  DOZENS OF WOLVES WERE TROTTING TOWARD him, and he found in his new form he could read and understand them as naturally as if they’d spoken. Their ears pricked up as they spotted him, and when a big wolf made his way to the front of the pack, Anders found he knew it was Hayn, the wolf he’d met in the alleyway, by his silver-gray coat and the black marks around his eyes where his glasses would be if he were a human.

  With a soft growl Hayn reassured the others, and Anders the wolf could tell by the way he carried his tail high, waving confidently back and forth, that he was more senior than Anders had realized the day before.

  Hayn came to a halt in front of Anders, lowering the front half of his body in almost a bow, stretching his forelegs out in front of him. For a moment Anders was confused, and then Hayn’s legs thickened as his torso lengthened, and he rose to become the broad-shouldered man Anders had met from behind his stack of crates.

  “Good to see you again, young man,” he said gravely, pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose. “Can you transform so we can talk? New wolves often find it easier to use speech at first.”

  Except Anders couldn’t change, especially in front of dozens upon dozens of wolves. Because he still didn’t have an amulet, and the ruins of his clothes were somewhere back inside the city. Again. He whined, unsure how to convey that information, then realized that the wolves around him all understood from the tilt of his head and the soft sound exactly what he meant. Even Hayn seemed to follow, and with a nod, he transformed down into a wolf once more, taking his place at the head of the pack.

  When he lifted his head and rumbled softly, deep in his chest, Anders realized he didn’t just understand Hayn’s gestures, but he could make out their precise meaning: Of course, I should have thought of that. Let’s head back to the Academy.

  It wasn’t that he heard the words, exactly. It was just that in the same way all his senses were reporting new information every second, he found every tiny sound or movement from the other wolves had meaning. It was utterly strange in some ways, but in others, clearer than speaking. He could already see it would be harder to lie.

  A chill raced down his spine as a new thought struck him—was he unwittingly sharing his own thoughts and fears with every movement?

  As Hayn moved past him, Anders turned to fall into step, loping toward the city gates in the midst of the pack of wolves. Somehow, unimaginably, he was one of them. He was fighting the urge to peel away from the pack and run for his life, stretching out his legs and finding out how fast this new body could go, but he forced himself to stay in line.

  The citizens of Holbard parted for them as they made their way through the city—probably they’d never seen so many wolves in one place before, or not since the last great battle. Anders certainly never had.

  They made their way up Ulfarstrat, the cobbled road that led to the Academy itself, which wasn’t far from the city gates. In just a few minutes the huge iron gates of the Academy and barracks loomed before them. They were open just now, and the pack made its way through into a large stone courtyard surrounded by high stone walls.

  Where the shops and homes of Holbard were colorful greens, yellows, and blues, the inside of Ulfar’s courtyard was a grim blue-gray stone. It looked like even weeds wouldn’t dare grow up from between the cracks. The courtyard was hundreds of feet across, and every part of it was in perfect order.

  Most of the wolves turned for the Ulfar barracks, where the adult Wolf Guard trained and lived. Hayn led Anders into the Academy and along stone hallways with thick wooden rafters, well lit with oil lamps every few feet.

  It felt more like a fortress than a school, and Anders felt himself slinking lower with every step, his belly closer to the ground, tail tucked close to his body, less and less certain of his impulsive decision to risk coming here.

  Hayn paused at an open doorway, and as Anders halted beside him, he saw it was a storeroom and laundry. Inside, the shelves reached all the way up to the ceiling, piled high with folded gray clothes. There was a woman busy using a large, metal machine, covered all over in runes. It was an artifact, Anders realized. But even with the magical device, it still looked like hard work—the woman’s fair skin was ruddy from the effort.

  As he and Hayn made their way inside she fed a shirt into the machine. It clanked softly, a series of metal arms whirring into quick movement. A couple of seconds late
r, it extended two of those arms to set a neatly folded shirt on the shelf above her.

  She turned away from the folding machine for the next shirt, and saw the two of them, breaking into a smile. “Hayn,” she said, evidently recognizing his wolf form. “And I see you have a young friend.”

  Hayn stretched, transformed, and offered her a courteous nod. “I have a new student, Dama Lindahl,” he said. “He will need some clothes before I take him to the Fyrstulf.”

  “Of course,” she said, not even twitching a smile, for which Anders was grateful. “Just step behind that screen there, my dear, and we’ll get you outfitted as soon as you’re two-legged again.”

  Anders’s claws clicked on the stone floor as he walked around behind the screen, trying to calm himself enough to transform. His sense of danger was screaming at him to run for it, and in his mind’s eye, all he could see was Rayna, herded helplessly off toward the horizon. His heart kicked up another notch every time he imagined it.

  Then he heard Hayn’s quiet voice on the other side of the screen. “Breathe in deeply,” he said gently. “Hold it for a beat, then out again. Close your eyes. If you let your mind settle, you’ll find the kernel of the human inside you. When I learned, I used to think of it like taking a pair of socks that are in a ball, then unfolding them, turning them right way out. Take your human self and unfold it so it’s on the outside.”

  Anders tried to obey, and for a moment it felt hopeless—but even imagining something as mundane as a pair of socks helped calm him, and a few seconds later, with a bolt of pain up and down his arms and legs as they reshaped, he was human once more. And perhaps it had hurt a little less than the time before.

  Dama Lindahl made him reach his hand around the screen at head height to show her how tall he was, and a moment later she passed him a bundle of clothes. He heard her talking quietly to Hayn as he dressed, her voice less jovial now. “I heard there were four.”