by Leia Stone
“Just stay on our side of the woods.” Professor Hines tone dropped into ominous levels and I perked up.
“Werewolf City’s border is marked with red stakes every few feet. Do not step over into the Wild Lands.”
Walsh shifted uncomfortably next to me and I frowned. “What is the Wild Lands?” I whispered to him.
“Look…” He ignored my question and I peered up to see the bus drive out from the thick canopy. As the treed road opened up into a green valley, the breath hitched in my throat.
“Holy crap,” I breathed.
Two giant mountains stood next to each other like old friends. Between them was a bright green valley full of lush green growth and mossy sponge covering the ground. The mountain to the right, the slightly bigger one, had a cobalt blue vein of water pouring down its middle. It was like we were at Yellowstone National Park or some other famous place, but instead we were in an unknown portion of Werewolf City, gazing at the most beautiful waterfall I’d ever seen.
Walsh pointed to a small cluster of wood cabins to the right. “I used to come here as a kid. My mom has a cabin over there.” I’d never spoken to him this much, but seeing his home seemed to bring the chattiness out of him.
On the other side of where his mom’s cabin was, there were a line of reddish-orange flags in the dirt, clearly demarcating a property line. I thought about what Professor Woods said about staying on “our side” and frowned.
I wished my parents had told me more about this place. I had little idea who the Paladins were, or any of this stuff.
We parked the bus in a designated spot and disembarked, taking in the picturesque surroundings. The beautiful sound of over thirty students’ shutters opening and shutting in tandem made a grin pull at the edges of my lips. I decided to try something different. Pulling a spare lens out of my bag, I held it up, looking through it about twelve inches away, and then snapped a picture of the lush landscape through the lens, through my camera, catching my fingers holding it in the frame as well.
“That’s going to be a good one,” Professor Woods murmured beside me.
I gave him a wry smile, so grateful for this fieldtrip.
“Let’s start hiking! We aren’t even to the really pretty stuff yet,” Professor Hines said.
I’d worn my white Converse knockoffs, which I had a feeling I was about to trash. Mental note to get hiking boots with Sawyer’s money, because now that I had these cuffs on I felt less bad about spending his cash. If he was going to be a dick and cage me, I was going to retaliate with shopping therapy.
“Oh look!” Jennie pointed to a thick fern bush and I followed her gaze.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust, but when I realized what it was, I gasped a little.
Whoa.
There must be over a hundred orange and black butterflies dripping down the branches like a living sculpture.
I screwed on my macro lens and took an amazing zoomed-in picture of the texture of the wings.
Click, click, click. We all snapped pictures.
“The monarchs. We only get them for a few months and then they’re back on their way to Mexico,” Professor Hines said.
After that, we silently settled into the hike across the valley and over to the base of the waterfall.
“Can I go in the water?” Jennie asked.
I liked Jennie, she was chill, low maintenance, and didn’t make the top twenty with Sawyer, so she wasn’t an asshole to me like the other girls.
“Absolutely,” Professor Woods said.
Chris pulled a camera drone from his backpack and I scowled at him. “Cheater.”
He grinned. “I’m not climbing all the way up there for a good shot.”
“I am!” I announced.
“Me too,” a dude named Samson said, and started to hike in that direction.
“Wonderful! It seems you all have an idea of the shot you want to get. Take your time. We have three hours slotted for the fieldtrip.”
I started to hike up the well-worn path to the right of the waterfall, and Walsh stepped in behind me. “You don’t have to go up with me,” I told him.
He just grumbled under the hood of his jacket, which was now pulled up because the waterfall was spitting mist at us when the wind changed directions.
Okay, I guess my chatty Walsh was gone.
It was a steep hike. Like a freaking stair stepper. My thighs burned when we got halfway, and I stopped with Samson to pull water from my backpack and take a long swig. Walsh didn’t look nearly as out of breath as Samson and I, and I wondered what kind of exercise regimen Sawyer’s guards were on. Because clearly I needed it.
“Fuck this. Good enough,” Samson groaned, and walked over to the edge, starting to snap pictures.
I frowned. “Not going to the top?”
He shook his head. “Too much work for a photo.”
I swallowed my scoff and nodded. Photography was my life. Most of the time it was taking a photo in a moment, but others it was waiting hours for a bird to show up and drink from the bowl of water you set out, or to hike a mountain and get that shot that’s in your head. Photography was freezing your memories so other people could view them forever, and that’s what I was determined to do today.
I took off up the mountain with fierce determination. I wasn’t going to back down because something was hard—what kind of person did that? No one I could ever respect or be with. I glared at Chris’ drone as it flew down from the top, already having taken its amazing photos and now done. An annoyed growl ripped from my throat and I picked up the pace even faster.
“You’re pissed about something,” Walsh commented, barely winded at my side.
I gave him a long side-look. “Yeah, it just seems like everyone in Werewolf City is used to having things handed to them on a silver platter.”
A slow smirk pulled at his lips. “And you’re not?”
“No,” I growled, and pushed harder into the hike. It hit me then, I was so mad. Mad at Werewolf City, mad at Curt Hudson and his stupid bylaws, mad at the system. Why did my mother and father get kicked out? Why did I have to grow up without a pack, in a school of misfits who shit on me every day, when these Wolf City kids were being spoon-fed every drop of luxury. I guess I was glad it happened that way, it made me who I was. I wasn’t the girl who took the easy shot.
Before I realized it, I’d reached the peak of the mountain. It was craggy and pointy, with a path only about twelve inches wide. If you slipped forward, you would fall down the front of the waterfall, and if you slipped backward you would fall down the back of the mountain.
Note to self: Don’t do either.
I peered to my right, down the backside of the mountain, and noticed those little red boundary flags and a blur of motion as something moved in the thick tree line down there.
A Paladin?
My heart hammered in my chest as I stared at the spot, but I didn’t see any more movement and started to think I was making it up. Picking up my camera, I took a picture of the boundary flags, reminding myself to ask Sage more about it. I stepped about five paces along the path until I was directly up to the waterfall, hovering right over it. Part of the mountain was flat, bringing water from a river somewhere, but the part I stood on, that I’d just climbed up, steeply cut off the back like it had been shorn off in an earthquake or something.
Nature was crazy.
Pulling my camera up to my eye, I stepped forward and looked down over the waterfall.
“Be careful,” Walsh warned.
I pulled the camera back and looked at him, twenty feet away back at the path that led down the mountain. “Come here, you gotta see this. It’s amazing.”
He shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t like heights.”
I chuckled. “Okay.”
Looking back down through my lens, I couldn’t help but feel a thrill run through me at the sheer size of the height I was standing at. Water flowed unrestricted down the mountain, slower at fi
rst, until it crashed into a mass of white rapids and turbulence.
I hung my head directly forward and snapped the picture. And that’s when I felt my balance go wonky. The ground was wet, so when I went to take that half a step forward to get the shot, my foot gave way.
Oh hell no.
I felt myself fall forward, toward the waterfall a little, and panicked, throwing my weight backward to counter the move.
Bad idea.
“Demi!” Walsh screamed as I overshot the path and began to fall completely backward. My ass hit the ground hard and then I was sliding. Pain laced up my back as I slid like a kid on a snow day, except without a sled.
Oh fuck, was all I could think as I dropped my camera around my neck and started to grasp at ferns, tree trunks, anything to slow my fall.
That’s when I started to roll. I hit a little rock shelf, went airborne, and when I came down on my left shoulder, something snapped. I wailed in pain and I just started rolling. Like a fucking bowling ball, I tumbled down the mountain, Walsh was screaming my name like a madman and I just kept thinking: How is it not over yet? How am I still falling? My wolf surged to the surface, but the cuffs kept her at bay as I rolled and rolled, until I felt sick and battered and half dead. Pain throbbed and sliced through my entire body as the mountain chewed me up and spit me out.
With a grand finale, my head smacked the side of a rock and everything went blurry.
I cried out as pain laced behind my skull, and I finally stopped rolling, skidding to stop on the ground.
With a shaky hand, I used my right arm to grab the side of my hair, and upon feeling the sticky wetness there, I pulled it back with a whimper.
Walsh’s voice felt far away and warbled. I was confused.
What happened? Where was I? How did I get here?
Fuck, I hit my head.
Oh God, my shoulder.
I focused on Walsh’s voice, something familiar, something that I knew would keep me safe as I lay there and felt sleepiness work its way into my body. A twig snapped, and then a giant of a man, big enough to rival Eugene, stepped over and crouched in front of me. A man about sixty years old stood shirtless with bright blue tribal war paint on his chest and face. A necklace made of tiny, sharpened bones hung around his neck. He bent down and looked at me, frowning.
I was scared of him for a moment. I mean who was this? A Paladin? Had I rolled on to “their” side?
Everything was confusing.
When he crouched down and looked at me, I was taken back with how kind his blue eyes were. Eyes that kind couldn’t hurt me, right?
He reached out a hand to place two fingers at the pulse on my neck and I smelled him.
Wolf.
Dominant.
Magic?
Satisfied with my pulse, he picked up my right, good hand, and inspected the arm cuff, then he leaned down and smelled my wrist, looking back at me wide-eyed, his eyes the color of the waterfall.
“You need to be more careful, pup. I’ve seen the Ithaki drain your kind in less than a minute,” he whispered, looking behind him as if he’d heard something.
Ithaki? Drain my blood? Maybe my head was still concussed, because I was confused about what he was saying. Walsh still sounded so far away, screaming for the guy to leave me alone. I just wanted to sleep. I groaned, my eyelids closing. The man lightly slapped my face, causing my eyelids to flutter open.
“No sleep,” he told me, and looked back up to where Walsh was screaming.
I whimpered as the pain of everything that just happened seeped into my body all at once, and the adrenaline left me. “It hurts.”
He frowned and then nodded. Reaching into a pouch at his waist, he pulled out a small white root. “Chew.” He shoved it in my mouth and I nearly spat it out. It was bitter as all hell, but within a few bites I’d crushed the outside and a sweetness coated my tongue as some of the pain was chased away along with my foggy thoughts.
Oh God. I fell. I fell really bad. The last few minutes were coming back to me now and how badly I’d royally screwed up.
“Get the fuck away from her!” Walsh screamed, closer now.
The man looked over at Walsh sadly and then down at me. “Stupid city wolves. Have you been with them this whole time?” he grumbled, and started to unfold an animal skin from his waist pouch.
Leaning down over me, he lay the animal skin blanket over me, and that’s when I realized I was shivering. He picked up my cuff again and inspected it. “Won’t heal with this on,” he growled, as if he were angry.
What would a random forest caveman wolf have to be angry about on my behalf?
I pointed at him, finally feeling the effects of the pain-relieving root. “Paladin?”
His blue eyes flicked to mine and he nodded, just once, before his head was sliced from his body.
Terror ripped through me as I screamed bloody murder. Crimson blood splattered over me as the man’s head fell to my side and his body tumbled forward.
Walsh was no longer human, because instead of hearing him scream my name, I now just heard the howl of a wolf.
Looking up at the shadow that crossed over my face, I saw a … I don’t know what it was. A pointed-ear fey man that smelled of a wolf? He was dressed in the same crude homemade clothing style as the nice man who’d just tried to help me, but he looked much more sinister. Black hair hung to his waist in a thick braid, and he had small pockmark scars over his greasy face. With one kick, he knocked the head of the Paladin away from me and then leaned down to smell my neck. It was then that I saw a dozen more men behind him, all grinning and holding long, curved and serrated, sickle-type blades.
I screamed again, trying to move, but when I did pain just laced up my body in all directions and I felt dizzy.
Taking a deep inhale of my scent, he grinned. “Little demon, you’re coming with me.”
Then he struck the side of my temple with the blunt end of a sword and I was met with blackness.
When I came to there was a period of confusion. I smelled burning meat, and that bitter yet sweet taste was still in my mouth. Pain wasn’t even a word I could use to describe how I felt. Torture was more apt.
Everything hurt.
My skin, my muscles, my eyeballs, maybe even my eyelashes, I wasn’t sure if there was a part of my body that didn’t hurt.
That’s when everything came back to me in hazy flashes.
I fell.
Bad.
The Paladin man had tried to help me and … I choked on a sob as I remembered his head coming off like that.
Light flickered behind my eyelids and I realized I hadn’t opened them yet. Springing them open, I tuned into the voices in the room.
A man was standing over a woman who sat in the corner of the room. I was in some type of hut with bamboo slat floors and bamboo slat walls, crudely tied together with twine.
“The skin is too damaged from the accident, I will have to sell her in pieces,” the woman was saying as bile crept up my throat.
The man growled. “Then we will heal her first and we can get a better price.”
The woman was silent. “You’re lucky the demon has been bound by the cuffs, or she’d have ripped you limb from limb.”
The man snarled. “Can you heal her or not? I’ll give you ten percent of what she fetches at market.”
The woman sighed. “Fine, but I want twenty percent. Fully healed, her skin alone will fetch enough for both of us to retire on.”
I bit down on my tongue to keep from crying out. Yanking my wrists, a tear slid from my eye as I realized they were bound in front of me.
No. No. No.
“I heard the witches like the bones more than the skin,” the man said.
The woman scoffed. “I’ve been doing this over fifty years. Trust me, a freshly-skinned demon fetches no greater price.”
Freshly. Skinned. Demon.
Demon?
I screamed then. I mean, if I was going to be skinned alive, I might as well fucking put u
p a fight, and if I didn’t scream I was going to lose my mind.
The man crossed the room quickly and held up a steel mallet.
Oh God.
“Wait!” the witch cried from the corner. “Don’t bash her brain in, I need it whole.”
Oh. My. Leaning over, I vomited onto the man’s bare feet.
He sighed, looking over at the woman. “Can I wash this off? Or is vomit worth something too?”
The woman scowled at him, stepping out from the shadows. “Everything on this little demon is worth something. You don’t pluck a hair from her head without my say so.”
He pulled a knife from his belt and nodded. “What should I start with?”
The woman had stepped into the firelight and I could see her more fully now. She was younger than I thought. I mean, she said she’d been doing this for fifty years, but she looked early thirties. Stocky, with thick wavy hair and a harsh face, she wore dirty clothes that looked like they’d been pieced together. Life had not been kind to this woman, I could see that. But on top of that she was … what was she? I inhaled, confused by her pointy fey ears and yet vampire smell.
She looked right down at me, took in my confused appearance and laughed. The sound made my skin crawl. “You trying to figure it out, love?”
I nodded. Anything to keep her talking and not skinning me alive. Where was Walsh? Was he dead? My memories were fuzzy. The nice Paladin man had tried to help me and then they killed him. Walsh would have seen the dozen hunters and surely turned back for help … right? He’d tell Sawyer and Sawyer would come for me … he wouldn’t leave me here.
The woman reached out and grasped me by the hair, pulling me up into a sitting position. I hissed as pain shot up my skull, my wolf coming to the surface; pelts of fur rolled down my arms and I growled.
She grinned. “There you are, little demon.” Then she pointed to herself, and the dude standing next to her. “We are Ith-a-cki.” She spoke slowly like I was stupid. “Part fey, part other magical creature. It’s rare, but sometimes interbreeding with a fey results in pregnancy, and when it does…” She clicked her tongue: “You better flee to the forest, or the fey will kill that baby before it’s born.” She grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “We’re bad luck. Just. Like. You.”
