Wolf Interval (Senyaza Series Book 3)

by Chrysoula Tzavelas

  “AT?” Yejun asked urgently.

  “Yes. Yes, I can.” I ran a hand through my hair, then held it out and looked at how my fuzzy shadow sharpened, grew claws. A red mist danced in front of my vision, but I tried to hold on. The longer I held on, the more focused I’d be later when I was cut free from identity.

  Then I edged forward, using my shadow to catch at the one slipping towards us. It reared up, the elongated silhouette of a person, and started howling at me in an eerie voice that was barely human. There were words embedded in the noise, but not in any language I understood.

  One of the creature’s arms pulled away from the wall and tried to sweep me inside, but I dodged easily. The walls shivered around us as the silhouette’s hand crashed overhead. The shadow held a bucket in one hand. Water sloshed out of it, an endless stream, and Yejun cursed in Korean. Something laughed, a deep, rumbling laugh that I didn’t like at all.

  It was so crowded. There wasn’t enough space. The walls were closing in and the building hated us for invading it. Red-black fluid dripped from the grates overhead.

  I looked up. And then the red mist took over, and all I had was scattered dreams of violence.

  *

  “Wake up,” somebody said.

  I didn’t want to wake up. Last time I’d lost myself fighting, it had been my father who had woken me. I was afraid of what I’d see if I woke up this time. Maybe, I half-thought in that pre-awake way, that was all a dream. Maybe I can stay asleep. Maybe it was a really bad nightmare.

  But that sent me digging through dream-memories, trying to figure out just how far back the nightmare went.

  “Don’t cry,” said somebody, alarmed. “Hell. Come on, wake up. We can’t stay here.”

  And somebody picked me up. That was familiar, too, but this person smelled different. Scary, but not like somebody who would hurt me.

  There was another difference, too. He was using magic to help pick me up. I could feel it, feel the rush of air under me and sense the movement of the lines. But my stomach didn’t turn like it did when this somebody had used magic before.

  This was the first thing that wasn’t familiar or scary, and it was odd enough that I had to start waking up properly to think about it. There was something strange about how somebody’s magic felt.

  My dogs were gone. Still gone. There were no nightmares, just memories and waking up.

  Yejun was carrying me, my head nestled against his shoulder. He felt me shift and said, “Good timing. I was just about to put you in a fireman carry.”

  “No!” I wriggled and pushed away. He let me. I regained my feet and stepped quickly backward. “I can walk. What happened?”

  “You fought the building,” he said dryly. “Eventually it pulled back to lick its wounds.”

  I looked around. We weren’t in the same place we had been, but we were still inside a building that hated us and wanted to crowd us out of existence. It was huge and empty, with an open floorplan that went up several floors. Black catwalks, twisted and broken, criss-crossed overhead and a waterfall of red sparks cascaded down the far wall. Darkness pressed against the windows, with unidentifiable things moving in it.

  “You were pretty cut up yourself,” he added, overly casual. “But just like you said, you heal pretty quickly.”

  “Scrapes and stuff are okay. They don’t hurt more when they heal fast,” I said absently, staring hard at the darkened windows.

  He was quiet a little too long, and then he said, “When you looked like you weren’t going to bleed to death, I thought we should keep moving. This place is still pretty horrible.”

  “Yeah, let’s find a door.” I remembered what had pulled me out of my sleep. “Hey, did you use your magic to lift me?”

  “A little bit,” he said. “Not going to apologize if it helped wake you up because even a ninety-pound girl gets heavy after a while.”

  “I’m not that small,” I grumbled, annoyed. “And it didn’t make me sick. Are you doing something different?”

  He gave me a thoughtful look. “No. I haven’t changed a thing.” Looking away, he said, “Hey, look. A door. Maybe you convinced the building that getting rid of us is better than eating us.”

  He pointed at a large double door some distance down the nearest wall.

  Hopefully, I picked up my pace. Then a smoky cloud billowed in front of the exit. It was ashen at the edges and charcoal at its heart, and the charcoal writhed into a shape I recognized. But it was just a cloud, just my imagination. I couldn’t admit anything else.

  Making friends? my father whispered. Is he a nice boy? Will you play with him? You know what I want.

  I stopped dead. “We can’t go that way.”

  Yejun’s voice was strained. “That’s the way we have to go. Is that who I think it is?”

  I bit my lip hard. “What are you talking about?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t, not now. The shadow is talking to you.”

  I could make out details in the charcoal, as if it was just barely veiling his figure. His eyes, his shoulders. He was real enough that I wanted to go limp and wait for it to be over. My father wouldn’t just taunt me. No, after everything I’d done in the last day, eventually he’d get down to business. I tried to drag Yejun sideways and pleaded, “Let’s just find another way out.”

  Can’t you do anything right? Do I have to teach you another lesson? Give me your hand.

  I clenched my fist, pulling away from Yejun when he resisted my tugging. He looked between the shadow blocking the door and me. Then he shook his head. “That’s the door we have to use. Let’s just run through the shadow. A little freakshow and we’ll be out.”

  Remembered pain stabbed through my fingers. “I can’t,” I told him. The red sparks far above us began to move down the wall. I could smell scorched metal and burning hair and dirty machine oil.

  Yejun dragged his hand through his hair, his eyebrows drawn low. Then he walked around behind me and pressed up against my back. “Sorry for crowding you,” he said, not sounding sorry at all. He was taller than me, of course, and his lean torso was warm against me.

  Confusion momentarily surpassed my paralyzing dread and I twisted to look back at him. “What are you doing?”

  Without expression, he looked down at me, then started to move forward, pushing me ahead of him with his hands still at his sides. It was odd, and more than a little like when a dog leaned against the back of my legs. I sighed and braced myself just like I did with the dogs, and for a long moment we just leaned on each other.

  Then, softly, Yejun said, “Your friends are just beyond that door. Just beyond that shadow. You want to get to them before the Wild Hunt does.”

  “I can’t protect you from him,” I whispered. “I don’t—” I paused. I didn’t want him to get hurt? I didn’t want anybody to get hurt, not if I could stop it, but this was Yejun. He was creepy, too.

  I brought up the Sight that I’d kept down since I first met him. The complex strands of the larger room were beyond me, but the dozens, hundreds of pulsing nodes that made up Yejun’s Geometry presence were inescapable. It was like a tree growing from his spine, broad and old and ever-moving in a cosmic wind.

  Yejun was creepy and he could clearly take care of himself.

  I looked away, pulled away from him, and walked forward. I felt cold, almost frozen as I approached the shadow. My emotions had retreated to the place they went when I’d had to hide my dogs deep within my own shadow. When I was alone, and facing the endless shadow of my father.

  I’d have to do that again soon, without even the hidden presence of my dogs.

  I wanted to run away, but Yejun was behind me. I stepped into the darkness.

  You came back, he crooned. I let you go and you came back. That means you’re mine forever.

  I froze, cringed. And then the strangest thing happened. My own memories of my father went up against the building’s simulation.

  Curling up like a weakling again? Even your mother was
better than this.

  One memory summoned another. Baby, run!

  The child inside took over. I covered my ears and ran into the darkness, screaming for the light.

  -twenty-

  The darkness roared, became wet and clinging, like it was swallowing me. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t go back.

  Then, all at once, I emerged into a storm-lit afternoon, on a plaza, in an empty city.

  I blinked at the relative brightness and a door clanged behind me. I looked just enough to see that it was Yejun’s node tree, then tucked the Sight away again.

  He cracked open the door in the building behind us. Because that’s what you do when you emerge from a building that tried to eat your soul. You open the door and look back inside again. At least, that’s what you do if you’re Yejun.

  “It’s a mall now,” he reported, his voice very subdued. “Looks normal.”

  “Don’t go back inside!” I scanned the plaza. A familiar fountain, but there was no fiddle music, no astonishingly tall Chinese man. Dizziness swept over me. Were we actually outside, or was this another vision? It looked just like the plaza I’d run away from, but that was awfully convenient and our companions were nowhere to be seen.

  Before I could invent any really horrible theories, Brynn called, “AT! Yejun, you found her!” She and Amber appeared around the fountain.

  “Where’s the Fiddler?” asked Yejun, his fingers brushing my arm as he moved past me.

  “He left,” said Brynn, annoyed. “He said that we needed more time for the tuning and he’d have to make that happen. I told him you don’t tune people but does he listen? You know, I thought I liked weird, but I’m really starting to hate this place.”

  Brynn wasn’t quite as she’d been when I left her. The dark marks on her hands had sharpened. They no longer looked like bruises, but smudges of dirt. I stared hard at them, trying to figure out what they actually were. She noticed, and put them behind her back self-consciously.

  “Where’s Nod? And the others?” Amber asked quietly.

  I took a deep breath. “Gone.”

  Brynn’s self-consciousness flashed to alarm and her hands came out from behind her back again. “Gone? What do you mean, gone?”

  How could I explain it? How could I explain it so we didn’t have to talk about it? I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to remember. But I’d never forget, even if I didn’t ever talk about it again. And they’d known them. In the short time we’d spent together, my companions and my dogs had developed their own relationships.

  This was like the shadow in front of the door, I realized. The only way out was through.

  “The Hunt found me,” I said quickly. “They wanted hounds. They ripped the dogs away from me, bound them to the Horn. And they changed. Ion, the first Huntsman, he controls them now. They’re what he wants them to be.”

  Brynn shook her head as if a fly had landed on her nose and stared at me, her eyes widening. But Amber wasn’t looking at me at all. She stared off into the distance, the whites of her eyes showing. Slowly she put her hands to her pale hair, her fingers digging into her scalp.

  “Oh god,” she said.

  “There’s more,” I rushed on, before my voice could break. “I’m so very sorry. I wish—the Hunt went after Tia with the pack. They found her. They caught her.” My voice failed.

  Brynn gnawed on her finger. “So we have to rescue them all, don’t we? That’s what you’re saying?”

  That question was so sweet and so hopeful. I couldn’t cope. I walked away, over to the fountain, then climbed the rim and splashed down into the cold water. It soaked my feet and crept up my pants and I rested my head against the stone block and let the waterfall course down over my head and back. It was gaspingly, painfully cold and I knew if I stood there long enough, I’d eventually go numb.

  “What’s your problem now, Amber?” Yejun sounded irritated rather than curious.

  Then Amber splashed into the pool beside me.

  “Your dogs were like me, right?” The intensity of her voice cut through the cold like a red-hot wire. She sounded eager.

  I pulled away from the waterfall and shook my dripping hair from my face. “No.” But I remembered what Cat had said and I didn’t have the conviction I had before.

  “They are,” she whispered. Her eyes were dilated and hungry. “Tia was right. I could be free of him. Really free.”

  I stared at her, incredulous. I’d told her what happened to my dogs, to me, and how they’d changed. And all she could think of was how much she wanted it to happen to her?

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” I pushed her hard enough to send her sprawling into the water.

  She blinked up at me, then bounced to her feet. “Me? At least I want to be free. If my maker wakes up and realizes what I’m doing, I’ll just vanish.”

  That hurt a lot. I turned away, muttering, “You’ll be a monster no matter what.”

  She grabbed me, spun me around to face her. “Yeah, well, you’re not. But look at you, you’re going back when this is over. So don’t you dare judge me for wanting freedom.”

  “How can you know anything about me?” I demanded. “You’re just this spawn I met yesterday.” Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Brynn looking down at her feet.

  Amber sneered at me. “What’s to know? You’re a hot mess at the slightest provocation, you cringe and snap like a whipped dog, and you’re going back.”

  “You don’t get it, though,” I told her miserably. “You never actually escape.”

  “Sure you do,” said Yejun, unexpectedly. “You just walk away from them. What goes with you is you. You just have to own it.”

  Darkness flickered across my vision for just a second and I stared at him, wishing desperately he hadn’t said that.

  Amber climbed out of the fountain. “Maybe that’s true for you three, but not for me. I can’t just walk away. I belong to him. If he dies, I die too.”

  “You chose that. You’re exactly what you wanted to be and I don’t understand why you’re so miserable about it now.” I raised my voice, but only because she was walking away. Honest.

  You came back to me, and now you’re mine forever, my father had whispered to me as he tended to my injuries.

  She looked back at me and laughed bitterly. “It sounds so romantic, doesn’t it?” Her voice became mocking. “Being with me forever would cost your soul, Amber. I love you, how could I do that to you?” She shook her head. “I thought he was so beautiful. So lonely. Misunderstood. And it was good at first, as long as I didn’t make him angry. Until he started making me bring back others. Even then I tried to think of it as a game. Until it wasn’t.” She tugged on her hair as her eyes got that faraway look again. “I have to get out of here. You three stick together, okay? Enjoy having the ability to change your mind and change your choices, even if—” her eyes focused on me briefly, “—you don’t always use it.”

  I shouted, “Go then! Nobody ever wanted you here anyhow.”

  Amber gave me a look full of pain and I knew that somehow I’d hurt her the same way she’d hurt me. But she only tossed her hair away from her face and ran out of the plaza.

  I sat on the edge of the fountain and covered my face. Then I pulled my hands away and stood up. “We should get moving. We have to find the damn Horn before the Hunt finds us.” I realized Brynn was standing very still, her arms wrapped tight around herself as she stared at the ground. “Are you hurt, Brynn?”

  Slowly, Brynn shook her head. “I’m fine.” She hesitated. “I’ve always been fine. My family’s always taken care of me. They’re nice. And I have a good school, too. Nobody’s ever said anything awful to me there even though I like girls instead of boys. I worried sometimes about that but I never even thought—my family is really great!” Incongruously, her eyes were shimmering with tears. “All three of you have had such horrible things happen to you. It’s not fair. You don’t deserve it.” She scrubbed at her face. “And I’m being s
o stupid. I have been this whole time. Can you believe I thought I could save you?”

  “Wait, what?” Bewildered by her tears, I latched onto the most incomprehensible bit. “Save me?”

  She shook her head. “My life has been so easy. I don’t know how I thought I could save anybody.”

  “You’ve got those marks,” Yejun pointed out cheerfully. “Whatever Tia did to you is still there. Maybe it’s something really nasty.”

  “No, back up,” I demanded. “What were you hoping to save me from?”

  Brynn gave me a sad look but said nothing.

  My life is fine, I started to say, then realized that was the selfish answer that pushed her away without convincing her to stay away.

  “Look,” I said, my heart thudding against my ribcage. “I had a friend in junior high. She was my best friend. We hung out together a lot. Her family was awesome. Then one day she vanished. There was an Amber Alert and everything. She was never found. But I knew what happened. My father mocked me when I was upset. He didn’t want me having friends. I called the cops and told them where he’d gotten rid of her. They found some fragments, that’s it. My father was angry at me. Later, I met this woman. She wanted to help me out. He shattered her arm just for talking to me. He would have done worse if somebody else hadn’t saved her first.” I never once looked away from Brynn’s eyes. To my surprise, she never tried to look away from mine, though hers overflowed with tears.

  “That’s horrible. That’s really horrible.” She swallowed, then went on, her voice unsteady. “But you got out in between those horrible things. You got away. Tia helped you. I want to help you, too.”

  “There’s no point. I came back,” I said flatly.

  Yejun, glancing between us, put in, “Why?”

  “Because.” I tore my gaze away from Brynn and glared at Yejun. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Yo, my parents think I’m a witch.” He crossed his arms. “They’re hardcore religious, too. They tried hard to get the evil out, until the wizards turned up and told them I wasn’t evil, just deformed. Then they fed me and gave me hand-me-downs and stuff, their own house charity, but they couldn’t wait until I died. And every wizard who came by assured them I would. Any day. Not sure they’re ever going to forgive me for not dying.” A wry smile curved his mouth, drew down his eyes. “For my eighteenth birthday, I got Sen on my doorstep, offering to take me away from it all.”