Blood and Wolf

by Eva Truesdale

  My lungs burn, growing desperate for oxygen.

  I have maybe forty seconds before I need to kick back toward the surface.

  Maybe less, if the dive we took was as long as it felt—but I’m trying to be optimistic.

  To my right, that glow is still there. My eyes are only partially open, blinking rapidly to try and keep out the dirt and junk floating around me, so I can’t tell exactly where or what that glow coming from. But even when I completely close my eyes, I can see it’s light. It’s brighter than ever.

  And the possibility and potential of the keys seems greater than ever before.

  I manage to draw my leg up high enough to get a grip on the knife at my ankle. I draw it and slash it toward me in the same motion, slicing my way through the demon’s flank. It takes all of my inhuman strength to manage to carve into that weird rubbery skin. As I do, the creature lets out a terrible, wailing, one-hundred percent demon and zero-percent horse kind of sound.

  The water clouds with dark blood.

  It draws away from me, and in that split second I bend my legs, find my footing and shove, rocketing free of my almost-grave and swimming as fast as I can toward where I think the key’s glow is coming from. I’m lucky enough that I guess right, too, because after only a few feet I see it clearly: two corners of what looks like a small shrine carved out of shiny stone. It’s tilted on its back and partially buried in the mud, but that glow I’m chasing is clearly radiating from its center, just below the top layer of that mud.

  I swim toward it with wide strokes and frantic kicks.

  The demon follows.

  I don’t see it—because I’ll be damned if I’m looking back at this point—but I feel the water swirl, the waves churning around it and pulling away the same as they did when it stood on the surface. This last part actually helps me, because the shifting water causes a brief sort of bubble around us both, and I manage to catch a few quick breaths while I’m inside it.

  And then that churning water begins to pull away the mud that my target is buried under, too.

  Soon I can see it clearly: a shrine with a hollow center that’s holding not a literal key, but a small, crescent-shaped black stone.

  It’s not what I expected it to look like, but I can only assume it’s the right thing.

  I push through the burning in my chest and my lungs that’s starting to make me dizzy, and I give a few more powerful, desperate strokes. The key is a finger’s length away, the glow so bright I’m almost blind, the tingling in my mark so intense that my whole arm feels numb.

  I blindly grope around the shrine for a moment before I finally manage to wrap my hand around the freezing cold stone.

  Teeth sink into my leg.

  Not horse teeth, but sharp, predator-like teeth that feel as if they take half my leg with them when they yank away. The amount of blood in the water is staggering. I feel my consciousness slipping. I put all of my focus into not losing my grip on the crescent-shaped key. I feel it pulsing beneath my palm. Soon it falls into the same rhythm as the now-pulsing mark on my wrist, and the two of them surging together sends a strange, determined rush of power to my head.

  Using only one leg, I push off the bottom of the lake as hard as I can.

  I’m not strong enough to fight off that demon. Pain is blazing through my leg, my shoulder, and those few breaths I managed to take haven’t lasted long. So I can think only of scrambling toward the surface.

  I make it ten feet.

  Fifteen feet.

  I see moonlight shimmering down, almost reaching me.

  Then the demon horse swells into the space just above, blocking that light out.

  I reflexively throw my hand up, and the stone key collides with the jaw that’s opening and snapping those rows of terrible sharp teeth at me. The key shimmers as it brushes over the demon’s skin. The lake above it begins to swirl in a way that reminds me of water draining in a bathtub, and the guardian of this key is pulled into that swirl and then down toward the stone-like object itself, and then I swear it’s actually pulled into that stone.

  Either that, or it just dissolved into the water.

  But either way, it’s gone.

  And there is now a mark on the key’s surface—the same dark, four-pointed star that graces my wrist.

  I’m so shocked for a moment that I can’t do anything except float there with a dumb look on my face. My lungs burn. I can’t feel my leg. My vision spins, and everything gets a little blurrier, and I wonder if I’ve already lost my mind from lack of oxygen and just imagined that whole horse-disappearing-into-water trick.

  I’m moving, though.

  Instincts kicking in, pushing me upward along a path that’s not particularly straight or efficient, thanks to the use of only one leg. And clear thoughts are all but gone by the time I actually reach the surface, but I’m still aware enough to realize when I’ve broken out of the water and into the cold night air. Aware enough to know that my lungs are still working and I can still breathe.

  And I can still feel the weight of the knife in one hand, and the first key of Canath in the other.

  I clench my fingers around them both.

  I end up on the shore, somehow, resting in a bed of mud and reeds.

  I see blurry figures leaning over me. I hear voices whispering, and I try to mumble something in response. I don’t start to feel afraid until I realize that I can’t actually make words. I can hear someone crying above me, and I can only assume that it’s because of me and the fact that no sound is coming out of me at all, and because of the way I can hardly seem to move, either.

  I have a terrible flashback to someone else crying because of me.

  My mom.

  I was six years old. I’d gotten into a fight with one of my cousins over I don’t even remember what now, but I remember losing my temper, and I remember the way the world had shaken and the sky had changed because of it. And then later that day I was told that I had to stay in my room, because there were important visitors coming to our house and I couldn’t be in their way. I realized eventually that those visitors were council members. That they’d felt the disturbance I’d caused, and that they had come to give my parents a warning. To tell them that it better not happen again—and to remind them of what a risk they had taken by keeping me.

  I’d snuck out later that night, planning to go to my parent’s room and apologize. But then I’d heard her crying from the hall outside. It was the first time I’d ever witnessed my mom crying about anything, and I hadn’t known what to do, so I’d just snuck back to my own room.

  And lying in the mud right now, I might not be able to speak out loud, but the voice in my head is relentless—just like it was that night, while I tried to sleep and to not think about the way it all hurt.

  Stop being so weak, Elle.

  Control yourself.

  Focus.

  The problem with finding focus, though, is that it brings the pain in my leg sharply into focus as well. So the first sound that I manage to make is basically a scream, and it does nothing to calm the crying going on around me—crying that’s coming from Carys, I realize after a few seconds.

  “Calm down,” I mumble, “I’m fine.”

  “Elle, your leg.”

  “Is it like…completely gone?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I’ll survive,” I groan, placing my hands over my face to try and hide my grimace from her.

  “It needs medical attention—”

  “She does have better healing abilities than the average human,” Liam says. His voice isn’t quite the squeaking, near-panicked tone of Carys’s, but there’s a definite edge of concern in it. I try to pretend I didn’t hear it, because it doesn’t help.

  Calm. Focus. Control.

  “See?” I cough. “I’m not one-hundred percent human, so it’s all good.”

  “Nothing about this is good!” Carys says.

  “She just needs to relax,” Liam insists. “That will help her natu
ral healing abilities more than anything. And it will help her stay… you know.”

  “In control,” I finish for him. “So I don’t break the world.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “I…okay.” I hear Carys take several deep, determined breaths. “Fine. Relax. I can do that. We can do that.”

  “Start reciting facts about the flora and fauna of Ireland again,” I suggest. “That was putting me to sleep earlier.”

  “Oh, ha-ha, very funny—excuse me for trying to educate you, cretin.”

  “On second thought, I don’t want any more education about this place, honestly. I just want to leave before any more demons show up.”

  She grumbles a bit more about my lack of appreciation for her fact-sharing, and then she asks: “Which, by the way, what exactly happened with you and that thing?”

  It takes me a few attempts to find both the energy and the words to somehow recount the past few minutes of horror. And then that horror is renewed all over again when I realize: my hands are empty.

  The key is gone.

  Chapter Eleven

  “The key,” I gasp. “Where did it go?” I try to sit up, am promptly slammed by a wave of dizziness, and I fall back to the mud. Liam manages to get a hand underneath my head just before it hits the ground. He slides his other hand against my back, and with his help I manage to fight my way into a sitting position, only feeling slightly like I might vomit in the process.

  “Didn’t you hear Soren earlier?” Liam says. “He took it. He wanted to try and neutralize its energy and make sure that guardian was really sealed in it like you said, or something like that.”

  “And you just let him take it?”

  “You said you trusted him, right? Also, in our defense, we were distracted by the fact that you looked like you were dead.”

  “I trust him, I just…I don’t trust him as much as I trust myself.” I close my eyes, breathe in and out several times until I feel like I have a shot at keeping my balance. Then I rise slowly to my feet. My wounded leg immediately tries to buckle underneath me. It doesn’t seem to still be bleeding, though. And the pain isn’t enough to make my vision blurry this time.

  So my empty hand is much more concerning to me at the moment.

  “I need it back. Right now.” There’s a desperation in my voice that’s unexpected and a little frightening, even to me. “I can’t…I don’t think I’m going to be able to heal until I get it back.”

  “He said you might say something like that.” I can tell Liam is frowning just by the tone of his voice. “That its otherworldly energy might be a dangerous draw for you, that it might make it hard for you to control yourself and—”

  “That sounds kind of like an excuse someone would give so they could take the key from me,” I mutter, starting to limp toward a nearby cluster of trees. I can smell the trail Soren left up to it. Even over the mud and blood and gross lake water staining my skin and clothes, his scent is surprisingly easy to pick out; his smell reminds me of early mornings, clean and new and wet with dew, and there’s a hint of something like cinnamon underneath the dewiness. His appearance has changed, in subtle ways, several times since we met, but his scent has stayed the same.

  I follow that scent, while behind me, the lake is still swirling with a strange energy. There’s still a faint glow over the place where the shrine I robbed is resting. It’s noticeable enough that it might attract and endanger some stupidly curious humans—and the same humans Carys warned us about earlier are still hanging around; I can smell them, too.

  I don’t have any particularly strong love for humankind. Maybe because I’m bitter about the fact that I’m stuck being so much more human than the rest of my pack, even though there’s no way I’d actually fit in with other real humans.

  But keeping those real humans safe is one of those things that the council—and my mom—have repeatedly insisted is part of our obligation as the stronger, supernatural beings of the world. And Liam and Carys take this a little more seriously than me, so they’re distracted enough by this mission that I somehow manage to pull out ahead of them, and when I find Soren sitting among an outcropping of rocks, he’s alone and so am I.

  I’m aware of this—and painfully aware of how badly my leg hurts after walking so far and so fast—but I don’t think about looking back or waiting for Liam and Carys to catch up. I don’t even think about calling out to them in thoughtspeech.

  All I’m really able to focus on is how strangely still Soren is, and how intently he’s studying the object in his hands. Of how he’s looking at it like he expected it to give him answers but it…didn’t. And how his scent is the same, yet actually a bit different now that I’m closer. Marred by something I haven’t encountered from him yet: something quiet and sad. Sadness is one of those emotions that, like fear, sort of reeks with obvious scent markers that are hard to describe. If you’ve ever wondered if your dog can tell when you’re sad, the answer is yes—and so can I. It’s a neat party trick, and one of the reasons that I’d never fit in with real humans, like I said before.

  It’s also the reason I walk even faster to his side, in spite of the growing pain shooting up my leg, and in spite of the fact that it feels a bit like it did that night outside my mom’s room— like I’m eavesdropping on some private grief.

  And I can’t say exactly why, but I don’t want to run and hide from it this time.

  “You thought I was stealing this from you, didn’t you?” he says by way of introduction, not looking up from the key in his hand. It’s no longer black but a nearly translucent grey—more like glass than stone, now.

  Neutralizing it, like Liam said?

  Whatever the hell that means?

  All I know is that it makes its newly-acquired mark of Canath stand out even more, and I can’t help the way my hand strays uneasily to that same mark on my wrist.

  “You’re fond of tricks,” I say with a shrug. “A girl has to assume that now you see it, now you don’t could be one of those tricks.”

  He grins, but it doesn’t completely chase away the sadness that I sense clinging to him. “I was casting an old sealing spell I learned when I was younger. Once again, not one of my magical strengths, so I wasn’t sure how it would work out—I thought it would be safer if I put some space between us, just in case something backfired.”

  “Really? That’s all?”

  “Really. That’s all I did. And since then I’ve just been sitting here thinking. I figured you’d catch up.”

  “Thinking about what?” I stumble as I try to climb the rest of the way to his side while practically dragging my aching leg. He offers me a hand. I take it. Mainly because the alternative would probably be an ungraceful tumble back down the rocks. But his sadness somehow seems less suffocating when I’m holding his hand, too, so I hang on to it even after he helps me position myself on a sturdy rock beside him.

  “I was thinking about how that must hurt, first of all,” he says with a nod at my leg.

  “It feels great, actually.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Never better.”

  “And then I was thinking about how quickly you ran straight at that demon once you realized what had to be done.”

  “So you were thinking I’m a reckless idiot,” I say with a quiet laugh.

  “Not exactly.” His voice is oddly soft. He studies the key for a minute more, smudging a speckle of dirt off the mark on it before he continues. “I saw something in your eyes before you ran into the water. Something reckless, yeah. I guess. But I understood it. You’re desperate to change things that you had no control over. To make up for things in your past, somehow.”

  I’m not sure what I was expecting him to be thinking about. But I guess I didn’t really expect him to be thinking about me, so I can’t manage an immediate response.

  “And in a way, I’m doing the same thing,” he says.

  I slowly pull my hand from his. Extend it expectantly toward him, and he hesitates only a moment be
fore he places the key in my palm.

  “You still haven’t told me your full, true reason for doing this, you know.” I trace circles on the object’s smooth surface while I muse. I’m acutely aware of this new gentle, studying way that he’s watching me. I’m not sure how it makes me feel, but I can’t seem to get myself to look up and meet his gaze. “And I’m probably going to keep assuming that you plan to steal things from me until you do,” I add. “You don’t have to tell me your hopes and dreams. But you have to give me something to build on, you know?”

  I feel his gaze shift away from me. I chance a glance out of the corner of my eye, and I see him staring at the sky, lips parted as if he’d started to say something but decided against it. For several minutes he continues to decide against it. Long enough for me to have an entire thoughtspeech conversation with Carys and Liam—about the humans they apparently found and managed to chase away—and then longer still; so long that I almost manage to fall asleep sitting there.

  The only reason I don’t manage that is because the pain in my leg doesn’t seem to be subsiding as much as it should be. It continues to nag, with the occasional sharp twinge. Likely because I’m still not calm, and so I’m still not fully healing. My mind is racing, my inner wolf still growling about how dangerous this all is; it’s not a fan of being this far from the pack, or of fighting demons, or of thinking about the hard road that still stretches ahead of us. I can almost feel it pacing anxiously inside me. It’s probably wondering why in the world I’m sitting so close to one of my kind’s sworn enemies, too—especially since he’s still not talking, not saying anything to grow my confidence or trust in him.

  I think of the medical kit Carys insisted we pack, tucked securely into our things back at the campsite. With a resolved sigh, I give up on getting Soren to divulge things, and I focus on preparing to try and stand instead.