Blood and Wolf

by Eva Truesdale

  But he just laughs.

  “I’m looking particularly good tonight, aren’t I?”

  It almost sounds like something the real Liam would say, and it’s so convincing sounding in his stolen voice that it makes me furious. I draw the mirror back, ready to slam it directly into this demon thief’s face.

  “You break that mirror, and I’ll take you next,” the demon says in a smooth voice. “I’m always happy to grow my collection.” At the word collection, he pats a thick leather bag hanging from a belt I didn’t notice before now. It jangles with the unmistakable sound of glass scraping glass, and it’s obvious, suddenly, where the mirror that Liam broke is. Where the pieces of his broken soul are.

  But I think there’s more than that.

  Because I swear there’s a faint glow coming from that bag, and the harder I concentrate on it, the brighter it gets. And suddenly I feel the same tingling sensation over my mark that I did back at that lake in Ireland.

  So this asshole demon is a guardian, apparently.

  I set the mirror carefully down, draw my sword, and circle back to the demon. I move so that he’s between me and that mirror that I definitely don’t need to break. His eyes follow me.

  “You have two things that belong to me,” I say evenly, “And I intend to take both of them.”

  He smirks. “By doing what? Killing me? While I’m using your friend’s body?”

  “He would rather die than live with you, I’m sure,” I reply.

  The demon’s eyes continue to size me up; they fall on my mark, and suddenly, briefly, he looks as confused as he did earlier, when he told me I shouldn’t have this mark. But before he can start rambling nonsense like that to throw me off-guard, I strike.

  The thought of actually hitting Liam brings me physical pain, but I have to immobilize him so I can steal that bag of glass, somehow.

  I rush forward and swing low at his ankles. He jumps at the last possible second, and brings his fist down onto my shoulder and shoves me aside. I stumble forward but keep my balance, and I spin around just in time to lift my sword to meet his second driving fist. Blood sprays my face as the blade scrapes across his knuckles. He howls in pain. My stomach twists.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry—” I mumble. Even as I’m apologizing, I’m already darting around behind him so I can slam the hilt of my sword into the back of his head. But my footing’s off, and so the pointed blow isn’t as hard as I meant it to be. He twists around, still conscious enough to retaliate. I land a violent kick in his side. And then a punch, and then I hear what I’m pretty sure is at least a couple of ribs cracking.

  He staggers.

  I decide it’s now or never, and I quickly sheath my sword and grab my dagger instead. I dive for the bag. My hand wraps around it and we fall together, tangled and fighting our way over the dirt and rocks and what feels like a few chips of glass thrown into the mix just for fun.

  His head slams into a particularly sharp rock. It dazes him for a split second—enough to give me a chance to tighten my grip on the bag. I pull that bag until the belt it’s attached to is taut and I can slip my knife beneath it, and then I cut through with a quick jerk of my wrist.

  I try to escape with my spoils, already searching for a rock I can use to crush the shards holding the real Liam. But as I’m crawling away, the demon latches onto my ankles and yanks me back. I twist awkwardly and try to swipe at him with my knife, but I catch mostly air. His claws come out. They dig deep into my calves—deep enough to give him an excellent hold on me so that he can easily lift and fling me into the nearest tree. I don’t think about bracing myself for impact. I’m only thinking about not losing the bag in my hand.

  So the impact is not pretty.

  I slam into the tree headfirst. My vision goes black. Sounds and smells go with it, and my entire existence is down to my hand, my grip on the thick leather, the only thing I can think about…

  I’m not sure how long this mostly-unconscious moment lasts, but when my eyes flutter open, I find Liam’s staring back at me. And his hand is around my throat, squeezing.

  “Give. It. Back,” he growls.

  I didn’t even realize I still had it—the glass bag—before now. But now its position is obvious: Secure in my closed fist, crushed between my back and the tree. My other fist is empty, my knife resting several feet away.

  His fingers tighten their grip until I’m choking, weakly coughing and trying to swallow even the tiniest bit of air. I try to shove him off, but he’s a lot bigger and stronger than I am—even more so than usual, it seems, with the demon’s added presence. I only manage to pull away from the tree by a few inches. Just enough to get a less awkward grip on the bag. And since it looks like that’s all I’m going to get, I make the quick, painful choice to start crushing the bag and its contents in my own fist.

  I squeeze hard enough that some of the glass edges shove through even the thick leather, cutting ribbons of blood across my palm. But I can feel my inhuman strength surging, powerful enough that the bag of glass is quickly turning to a bag of dust.

  I squeeze harder.

  So does the hand around my neck.

  But the demon seems to have realized what I’m doing, because he’s trying even more desperately to reach that bag, trying to choke me and pull me out of his way at the same time.

  I drop the bag.

  On purpose, because it makes him lunge recklessly for it. His hold on me relaxes, and I slam my knee forward into his chest, knocking him off balance. As he struggles to regain it, I throw the rest of my weight into him. We roll to the ground together, scuffling for several feet before I manage to break away. Using a fallen log as a springboard, I bounce back to the base of the tree, and I stomp as hard as I can on the bag. Over and over, even as I hear Liam scrambling to his feet and sprinting toward me.

  One large shard refuses to be crushed—the key, I’m guessing. Its glow is getting brighter and brighter.

  My mark is pulsing like mad.

  Everything seems to be moving in slow motion—I can’t seem to crush the shards fast enough, however hard I stomp. I bend and frantically snatch the bag, intending to race away to a safer place for stomping.

  I’m too slow.

  Liam dives, claws outstretched.

  The only reason he doesn’t hit me is because Soren hits him first. I see a flash of steel in Soren’s hand—my fallen knife, recovered—and I’m paralyzed for a second at the thought of them carving each other to pieces with claws and blades.

  Soren draws him farther and farther away from me, slashing at his arms and legs with expert, annoying strokes. Not cutting deeply—just enough to aggravate him and make Liam’s wolf side want to fight back. Every time the demon tries to turn Liam’s head back toward me, it’s met with a swipe of the dagger instead, until with an irritable roar, Liam fully abandons me for the moment and dives for Soren instead.

  I have a painfully clear view of the claws that Liam rips across Soren’s chest. The way the blood flowers across Soren’s shirt. The way his body buckles—

  My mark throbs again, reminding me of what I still have to do.

  I turn away before Soren hits the ground. I drop to my knees and pound the largest stone I can find over the bag several more times before I see wisps of white trying to slip up through the drawstring top. I undo that drawstring, and I dump the contents of the bag out: sparkles of ground up mirror, and one large, intact shard that glows so insanely bright that I instantly have to recover it with the bag just so I don’t go blind. I don’t know what this bag is made of, but it seems to have some sort of magic, neutralizing abilities.

  Once my eyes readjust following the near-blinding, I can see those strands of white growing bolder and brighter as they twist their way toward Liam, who is down on one knee and holding his side. There’s blood puddled next to him on one side. On the other side, Soren is lying crumpled up and still.

  The rain has started to fall harder, almost a solid sheet of it that makes my body feel even
more exhausted and heavy and off-balance. I stagger to my feet anyway. Liam’s head jerks to me. The look on his face is pure, enraged demon. I draw back just as the white wisps surge forward and gather together before plunging like a javelin into his chest. He convulses, and his skin changes from its usual tan to a sick, milky shade of grey. He grabs desperately for his head, fingers digging in like he’s trying to rip the demon from himself with his bare hands, trying to make room for that white soul-stuff that the smashed shards have released.

  I wipe the rain and sweat from my brow and I run forward, left hand clenching the wrapped second key. My other hand is ready to draw my sword against whatever Liam might pull out.

  I’m less than five feet away when the demon emerges.

  I pull sharply to a stop as shadows spring toward me. I pocket the key and grip my sword with both hands. As those shadows reach me, they fall into a shape that resembles a tall, thin man with glowing red eyes, his hand drawn back and ready to strike.

  I strike first.

  I heave my sword up into the creature’s center, cleaving into a body that gives more than a human’s would, maybe, but that is still very much solid. My arms shake and my knees threaten to give out underneath me as I push my blade deeper and deeper. The creature lets out a blood-curdling screech. So loud and piercing that I have to fight the automatic instinct I have to drop my weapon and cover my ears instead. No way is this sound good for my sensitive hearing.

  The creature envelops me as it screams, curling its lithe figure directly over me and scraping tendrils of shadowy claw-like appendages across my back. Wherever it touches me, my clothing melts. My skin burns and stings as it pulls away, like the feeling of hot wax being ripped from that skin.

  But I’m not the only thing being ripped apart, at least.

  Because along a line where my sword has cut through, the demon is beginning to unravel. Literally. Pieces of its body are peeling away, curls of shadows spilling like guts to the forest floor. Those shadowy guts squirm around my ankles, weirdly alive looking and still solid and threatening my balance. I kick them away, but they instantly spring back—not to me, but to their host body, which they attach themselves to and then begin to meld with, putting it back together so that it looks even larger and more terrifying than before.

  The air is chokingly thick with the scent of blood—a heady mixture of Liam’s and Soren’s and mine, along with the pungent, burnt smell of my own skin. Liam is lying on the ground, but still alive; I hear him groaning softly, and my chest unclenches a bit.

  But it tightens and takes my breath all over again as my gaze flickers to Soren.

  He still hasn’t moved.

  The demon finishes reconstructing itself. It swats its shadowy claws at me, jerking my attention back to it. I lurch sideways and just out of reach. I stumble a bit as I try to put even more space between us. My knee slams into a rock. I swallow a hiss of pain, brace myself, and turn back to fight.

  It towers over me.

  Then I suddenly remember the water demon in Ireland, the way it loomed above me, too—until it disappeared.

  Cursing myself for not thinking of it first, I retrieve the glowing key. Squinting in its light, I thrust it forward just as that creature tries to envelop me again. My fist, and the key in it, collides with its chest and slowly sinks in. It feels like it’s burning and peeling away the skin of my hand as it does. Tears sting my eyes, but I blink them away and fight to keep the key held steady.

  There’s no screeching from the demon this time; it’s more like a deep, mournful bellowing as its body begins to disintegrate the way it did before. Only this time, when the pieces of it peel back toward the host body, they don’t rejoin with that body—they dive instead through the spaces of my clenched fist and into the key within it. After several seconds of this flurrying dance of shadows, there’s no body left. It’s just me and the second key of Canath trembling with power in my outstretched hand.

  The glass shard is dark and seems to swirl with the absorbed shadows, and as I watch, that familiar mark of the otherworld begins to etch itself across the key’s surface. And as the last of its curves appears, I feel that uneasy stirring in my stomach—the same strange pull that the first key caused when not under the neutralizing spell.

  I think of the lockbox that the other key is contained in, buried in one of our backpacks—bags which are where, now?

  Bag.

  There was that leather bag that the demon had this in. It’s all my mind can think about, suddenly.

  I have to contain this key, I have to find that bag, to find something, something…

  My head is pounding. The ground feels like it’s shifting as I crawl over it, lifting me and tossing me this way and that, turning me around so that I always end up back where I started. And that key continues to pulse. My heart pulses with it, faster and faster, so hard that it feels like it might pulse its way right out of my chest. The beast inside me surges and claws for my attention. I try to push it down. It’s no good; I can feel my bones start to twist and my mouth itching, fangs sprouting.

  No, no, no—

  I sense movement to my left, but I’m too far gone to do anything about it.

  Chapter Sixteen

  My awareness returns in one swift, painful swoop. All at once I’m incredibly conscious of the pain in my back, in my arm, along all of the places that I’ve been ripped and torn apart. The overwhelming scent of blood is back in my nostrils.

  But there’s also a familiar voice back in my head.

  “Does that help?” Liam asks, and I sit partially up to see him yanking the drawstring of that leather bag, closing up the key. I can still feel its energy pulsing, trying to pull me toward it. But something about that container makes it bearable at least; I remember the shrine that the first key was in. And now I wonder if it was as much to protect the guardian from the key’s energy as it was to protect the key from outside forces.

  I’m speechless for a moment, thinking over these things and staring at Liam—studying his face for any lingering traces of darkness.

  “It’s me,” he says softly. “Only me.”

  I sit the rest of the way up, wincing as my melted clothing peels away from the burnt skin of my back. The pain makes my stomach heave, but somehow I keep myself from vomiting as I crawl my way across grass that’s blackened and dead—from that demon’s touch, I’m guessing—and I throw my arms around Liam.

  “So maybe in the future you should be a little more superstitious,” I mutter into his chest. He squeezes me tighter, and it hurts like hell against my bleeding and burnt and broken body, but I wouldn’t have even thought about letting go if I didn’t have to.

  But I have to, even though I’m afraid of what I’m going to see when I race to Soren’s side.

  I race to it anyway, despite my exhausted body’s protests. I drop to my knees beside him, into a puddle of wet earth and blood. His body flinches slightly at my nearness. It’s the only indication he gives that he’s aware of me at all. He’s breathing, at least, and somewhat evenly at that. But there’s too much blood. It’s hard to tell exactly how much, since the rain is still falling in sheets and dampening his shirt and making all the blood—old and new—appear fresh. But either way, it’s too much. And his face is far too pale.

  “Elle,” Liam begins, “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Go find Carys,” I say quietly. “Go make sure she’s still okay. I’m going to stay with him.”

  He hesitates, looking broken and horrified over the damage he technically caused. And I know that awful feeling of causing unintentional destruction far too well to be able to tell him don’t worry about it. I know better. Really, you can’t not worry about it, unless there’s something wrong with you.

  So instead, I give him the most sympathetic look I can muster through my tiredness, and I just say, “Hurry, please.”

  He drops the bagged key at my side, takes to his wolf form, and races off into the night.

  I look back to the s
tomach-turning sight beside me. All of Soren’s illusion magic has faded, and so it’s his actual, true form that I run my hands across, inspecting the bruises and claw marks and trying to figure out where he’s losing the most blood from. His shirt is already partially shredded, so I tear it the rest of the way open. I use the rain-dampened strips of it to clean the deepest wounds, which are the claw marks across his chest. The gashes are not as deep as I expected—but then, I was expecting the absolute worst, so that isn’t saying much. I continue to clean them as best I can, and then I take my own jacket off and use it to apply pressure, trying to stop the bleeding that’s still happening.

  I wish he would open his eyes.

  I wish I could let him borrow my supernatural healing abilities, somehow.

  His body isn’t like a normal human’s, at least. No creature that has magical ability—whether it’s shape-shifting, or blood magic, or both, or anything else— has all the limitations of a human body. Stronger lungs, extra hearts, cells that repair themselves at insanely fast rates; us ‘human-like’ supernaturals all have our slight modifications of those human bodies. And I don’t know the exact anatomy of his particular sorcerer lineage, but I do know, now, that he’s a true Blackwood.

  So he’s too powerful to die like this.

  Right?

  “You can’t die on me,” I say quietly, just in case he’s thinking about trying it.

  I think I see his eyelids flutter, as if he’s hearing me and trying to respond. But I can’t bring myself to keep talking. Each word I try to force out seems incomplete and inadequate, not matching the gravity of the situation, and each of those words brings a threat of choking and tears with it, too. So I keep my mouth shut. I focus on action instead of words. I slip the bag containing the key into my pocket, and then I pull Soren into my arms and stand up slowly, carefully.