Legendary Shifter

by Barbara J. Hancock

  She’d felt solid and necessary. So real and seductive because he seemed to crave her warmth and solidity.

  And all because a man kissed her. Not a mere fantasy. Ivan Romanov was a legend, but that wasn’t all he was.

  The stories were dust, blown away by muscle and heat and friction and the hungry penetration of his tongue.

  Elena Pavlova belongs to herself.

  His words had been echoing in her head for hours. He was wrong. She had never belonged to herself. The dance had owned her for two decades. She’d loved her grandmother and her mother, but the dance had ruled her world. Every move she made from dawn till dusk had been to serve the dance. All of the masters who had driven her to try to achieve perfection had demanded her obedience and her complete dedication, but it had been the ballet that they’d all served.

  Back in the apartment she’d shared with her grandmother, dozens upon dozens of pointe shoes hung from their ribbons on nails driven deep into the wall. They were dingy pastel satin, stained with years of her blood, sweat and tears. They were also prize trophies that proclaimed her servitude, not her independence.

  What did the servant do when the master freed her from obligation?

  Elena shivered as she continued her self-guided tour of Bronwal.

  Even if Grigori had never seen her and never claimed her as his own, she would be in crisis now that her career was over. She was a prima ballerina, but an injured athlete’s future wasn’t guaranteed with surgery. At best, retirement could be held off as a dancer was forced to accept lesser and lesser roles. Where she went from there was always going to be a question she had to answer.

  Lev and Soren seemed to have infinite patience with her wanderings. Only the occasional sound of their claws on tile interrupted her thoughts. The clicks were discordant against the ticking clock of her heart.

  She’d wanted to dance and the dance had consumed her. Now she longed for a chance at something more.

  Elena Pavlova belongs to herself.

  There was a possibility that Ivan Romanov, the last Romanov, had voiced her true desire. If she survived Grigori, she would be free for the first time. It would be up to her what she decided to become with her freedom.

  The castle seemed to be utterly empty except for her lone human form followed by two giant wolves. Only distant sounds indicated that her solitude was a lie.

  As Elena searched for the alpha wolf, she thought about Romanov’s lips. She’d kissed him even though she shouldn’t, but it felt like the first real choice she’d ever made. She’d been driven to dance by a natural affinity, but the dance had subsumed all of her passion years before it ruined her knee. It had stopped being a choice and become an obsessive obligation. She danced because she had to. To provide for her grandmother. To honor her dead mother’s memory.

  Seeking the alpha wolf was also something she had to do. It wasn’t a choice. It was survival.

  But kissing Ivan Romanov had been her decision. He had given her ample opportunity to run away. She had to take responsibility for the consequences. The weakness in her knees. The warmth in her belly. The heat of shame when she acknowledged she would make the same choice if she could go back and relive that moment again, even though the kiss had been a mistake.

  She hadn’t gone back to the tower room to flee Romanov. She’d fled from her desire until she could be certain that she would come out only to seek the alpha wolf and not her host.

  The castle was as poorly lit as it had been before. She walked by the sparse light of flickering torches and a small flashlight she’d packed in her bag. On the walls she caught occasional glimpses of the wolves in the form of hulking black shadows. She’d grown up with tales of these wolves. Their shadows were very like the paper cutouts that leaped from some of the pages of her grandmother’s book. Ferocious yet lovely. Mysterious yet beloved and familiar.

  “My, what very big teeth my childhood stories have,” Elena said. Her voice echoed down the empty corridor. It also trembled. Because no matter how nostalgic she was for her grandmother and the old tales she knew, the wolves that trailed after her were deadly and real. They didn’t walk by her side as friends. They followed suspiciously and cautiously as she searched their home for the alpha.

  And their master ignored her desperate efforts.

  She was glad he was nowhere to be seen.

  Once again she roamed from room to room. She didn’t expect to suddenly turn a corner and run into the alpha wolf, but she did hope for a clue to his whereabouts. The Dark Volkhvy and his talk of Grigori had only increased her sense of urgency. Before the witchblood prince found her, she had to have a champion to face him down. If Romanov wouldn’t help her, she had to help herself.

  Her chest grew tighter and tighter with every room she searched. Every breath seemed to require more and more effort to take.

  It wasn’t only time constraints and her failure to find the black wolf that caused emotions to knot around her heart and crowd out her lungs. It was the fate of the people who had once called Bronwal home. She’d yet to encounter a single soul wandering in the halls. She heard them far off—laughing, crying, calling out the name of a loved one again and again with no reply. She braced for a possible encounter around every corner, behind every door.

  But she found only dust and desertion.

  She was a living trespasser rifling through the belongings of the lost. She tried not to disturb personal effects. She limited her search to books and papers. Some bit of knowledge about the alpha that might add to what little she’d learned from her own book of Slavic legends.

  There was nothing. The people of Bronwal had lived with legends. Their personal tales had been told over tables and cook fires. On dance floors and battlefields. The books they’d kept on shelves had nothing to do with the Volkhvy or the legendary wolves. The dusty papers were love letters or ledgers. Diaries about mundane daily events. Not tomes devoted to the alpha wolf’s summoning.

  Lev and Soren paced restlessly when she paused in a room and then they followed her on to the next. They didn’t make a sound until she stumbled upon a large chamber that had obviously been a family suite.

  Elena pushed the heavy door open wide and walked into the room. One of the windowpanes had cracked. Snow had disturbed the sanctum created by abandoned neglect. It swirled icily when she opened the door. Her breath fogged from her parted lips in the unheated air. The bed was a curtained masterpiece of carved mahogany. But it wasn’t the snow or the bed that caught her attention.

  There was a small cradle beside the bed. The winter breeze from the broken window caused it to sway with the tiniest of creaks, a sad and empty sound far from what must have been ages ago when a mother rocked a sleeping infant in his or her comfy bed.

  Elena’s eyes burned. She walked toward the cradle even though the tightness in her chest had spread all the way up to her throat. She grasped the flushed skin of her neck with a trembling hand when she was close enough to see the crumpled blankets and an abandoned toy on the floor.

  She knew what it was before she bent to pick it up. It was grayish in the dim light of her flashlight, but she recognized its shape. It was Lev. Or a hand-sewn likeness of the great white wolf made from a fluffy white cloth that had grown dingy with neglect and age.

  It was the first evidence she’d found of the wolves beyond the sculptures in the portrait gallery.

  She turned the toy wolf around and gasped when she saw the finely rendered face. Blue embroidery thread had been carefully employed to represent the wolf’s eyes. This had been the baby’s toy and it had been left behind when the baby—disappeared into the Ether for the last time?

  A tapestry hung behind the cradle, softening the cold stone wall with muted colors. She raised her flashlight to illuminate the intricately wrought piece of art. Then she gasped. How had someone created so much life and movement with a needle and thread? The compulsion that had
brought her to Bronwal suddenly became a thrill of recognition. Thousands upon thousands of tiny stitches glimmered beneath her flashlight’s beam. They composed a portrait of a woman dressed in medieval style, but she wasn’t some simple maiden. Over her long dress, bronze thread had been used to depict a breastplate, and she wore a matching bronze helmet. From beneath it, a riot of red hair swept out from her face and shoulders in a wild halo created by an unseen breeze. The expression on her face was both ferocious and serene. Purpose was evident in every line of her body and in the sword she lifted into a sewn sky filled with embroidered clouds.

  She didn’t recognize the woman, but she recognized something in her—an emotion she felt within her own breast.

  At first, Elena mistook her sword for the sapphire blade, but once she pulled her eyes from the fascination caused by the woman’s seeming serenity in spite of whatever unseen danger she faced, she realized her mistake. The stone in the hilt of the sword wasn’t a sapphire. It was a blood-red ruby. The massive tapestry seemed an odd choice to hang over a baby’s bed, yet Elena could almost imagine the woman in the portrait watching over the tiny baby as he or she slept. With that thought, it suddenly didn’t seem out of place at all.

  She held the toy wolf in one hand and the flashlight in the other, but she reached with the hand that held the flashlight to gently touch the gem on the sword with one extended finger.

  A low growl suddenly interrupted her fascination with the tapestry.

  Elena whirled toward the hall, wildly painting the walls with an unsteady beam of light. Once her eyes could focus, she saw the wolf toy’s living likeness blocking the door.

  One of her wolf shadows was no longer content to follow in her wake. He’d come forward. And he didn’t seem happy at all. He was much more ferocious than the toy in her hand. As her flashlight steadied and her beam illuminated the doorway, Lev’s legs were braced and his hackles were bristled along his giant back. Worst of all, his teeth were bared in a snarl. The trembling in Elena’s hand returned and transferred itself to her entire body in an instant. If the wolves had been suspicious of her before, that suspicion had transformed into outright aggression.

  Lev paced one stiff-legged stride toward her and then another.

  “I mean no harm. I didn’t mean to...disturb the baby’s room,” Elena said. And it was true. She wished she’d walked by this door. It was too horrible. Her understanding of the torment that must have plagued these people was complete. Here had been a tiny baby only beginning his or her life, but now gone. This was worse than death. A baby ceasing to be. Had the mother gone first or had she followed later? And what of the father? Had he mourned, had he grieved? The Volkhvy divided themselves by Dark and Light, but this curse had been the work of the Light Volkhvy queen. Which meant there was really no distinction between Dark and Light at all.

  Elena turned slowly and carefully to place the wolf toy in the cradle. Lev growled louder, but she withdrew her hand to show what she had done. She raised her empty palm toward the wolf that had allowed her to pet him before. He didn’t seem soothed. In fact, he took another step toward her while Soren stood tense at the door.

  “I’m sorry, Lev,” Elena said. She meant for everything. Not only that she’d disturbed the chamber, but for all the loss and the pain. She was sorry that her presence disturbed the entire castle. Bronwal was a tomb. Every footfall in the dusty passages was a desecration. And yet it was a desecration she must commit to survive.

  Soren had disappeared. But the distant castle and the room suddenly hazed as her perceptions narrowed down to her and the lone wolf that remained. She was alone with the white wolf and he seemed seconds away from tearing her throat out. Elena edged back inch by inch until the cradle was between her vulnerable jugular vein and Lev.

  “I need the alpha wolf’s help. I can’t stop looking. I won’t. But this room is obviously off-limits. I understand. Let me leave and I won’t disturb the baby again,” Elena said. Even as she said it, she was glad she’d seen the tapestry. There was something important about the warrior woman. Her senses tingled with potential revelations that seemed just out of reach. Something about the tapestry captured her. She’d been searching Bronwal to unlock the secrets of summoning the alpha wolf. The tapestry seemed to hint there was more to the legend than she’d been told.

  With a start she noticed that Lev’s giant paws were already in the snow that had come in the cracked window. His breath came in white clouds between his bared teeth. She wouldn’t be able to fight him off with nothing but a flashlight. She was trapped as she was trapped every night in swan form in her nightmares. Her only consolation was that Grigori wasn’t here to see her die. He would get no more pleasure from her pain. The trembling in her body transferred to the light in her hands. The beam wavered on the floor. She faced her death. She wasn’t sorry she’d tried. She didn’t regret listening to the call that had brought her here. If anything, the discovery of the tapestry made her fiercely glad. She didn’t cower. She braced her legs and waited for the white wolf to pounce.

  “Lev,” Romanov said from the doorway.

  Elena’s attention flew from the shivering light to the man who had suddenly appeared from the shadows.

  He didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. His firm tone rent the silent, chilly air as commanding as it needed to be without him raising his voice. Romanov was part of the mystery. He, too, caused a thrill in her like the tapestry on the wall. Even in danger, she recognized the pieces coming together—Romanov, the missing alpha, the warrior woman, the swords.

  The white wolf froze. His breathing was labored as if he expended great effort to halt his attack midspring. Sure enough, his haunches were compressed as if his master had interrupted seconds before he left the ground.

  “I didn’t mean to upset him...” Elena began.

  “You can’t possibly understand what you’ve done,” Romanov said. “Lev. Leave. I’ll take her away. She won’t bring you here again. She didn’t know.”

  “You weren’t always his master,” Elena guessed. “This was his family.”

  “He isn’t a dog. Or a pet. He has no master, Elena. He’s never had a master. But, yes, this was his family,” Romanov said. His tones were raw and subdued as if his chest was as tight as hers.

  “I’m sorry,” Elena said.

  The white wolf blinked as if he’d been woken from a berserker trance. He backed away from her until he bumped into Romanov’s legs. Then he yelped as if he was startled. Romanov reached and placed his hand on the side of the great wolf’s face. But Lev jerked away and ran into the corridor. Elena watched as the wolf disappeared. Soren, who must have gone to fetch Romanov, stood in the hallway. He blinked at her several times, slowly. Then he ran after his companion.

  Elena’s face was wet. She stumbled away from the empty cradle toward the door.

  “You wander a cemetery looking for salvation. Yet nothing exists here beyond invisible bones,” Romanov said. He stopped her at the door with two large hands on her upper arms. He held her at arm’s length and looked down into her eyes.

  “Is the alpha wolf gone? Is that what you’re not telling me?” Elena asked. She searched his gaze, but her flashlight was pointed at the hallway and they were left in cold shadows.

  “You’ll never find him,” Romanov replied. “He isn’t gone, but he’s buried. That’s all you need to know.”

  He was wrong. She needed to know much more. She needed to understand. She’d been compelled to come here, but she was confused by all she’d found. Elena pulled away from her reluctant host. Romanov was a mystery, but she understood one thing: Grigori was coming. He was ten times as dangerous as Lev.

  “Then I’m cursed, as well,” she said. “Lost like all the people of Bronwal. Without the alpha wolf, I’ll die.”

  * * *

  He didn’t go in search of his brother. Lev would have run far from the castle to try to escape th
e grief he wasn’t able to leave behind as easily as he’d left his human form. His memories might be muddled. So hazy that he’d followed Elena as Ivan had ordered without knowing he would step into a room that would penetrate the senses of the beast he’d allowed himself to become.

  It must have been like losing Madeline and Trevor all over again.

  He hadn’t thought that far ahead when he’d ordered the wolves to trail after the woman he had to avoid himself. There were portions of Bronwal he refused to visit even though he didn’t allow himself the luxury of retreating into wolf form. Near immortality was a heavy weight to bear. He couldn’t blame Lev for running away. Not now. And not when he’d given up his human form for good.

  Elena didn’t understand the forces she tampered with or the simmering pain she threatened to unleash. He clenched his fists against hundreds of years of love and loss. He stiffened his spine against the weight of it. Lev would recover. The farther he ran, focusing on the churning of his powerful legs in the snow, the better he would be able to fully become the white wolf again. He would forget. Ivan didn’t have that luxury. He could only endure.

  Perhaps Lev’s pain would at least serve a purpose.

  Elena had been terrified. It had been a fresh hell to see her in danger and frightened. When Soren had come to his rooms to find him, he’d understood his brother’s unspoken urgency. But he hadn’t expected to find Elena in such dire circumstances after the red wolf had led him to her. Lev might have killed her without completely understanding what he’d done. Ivan had interrupted just in time.

  He’d warned her that the castle wasn’t a safe place. Now she’d seen for herself. He should be glad.

  Instead, it was torment to recall the fear in her eyes.