“Forget that. You’re dealing with me now,” Kael said. “And we both know this girl’s no good to you dead.”
“That’s true. And I’d be worried if I thought you actually had the nerve to pull the trigger.”
Kael’s grip on my arms suddenly tightened. “Well then I guess it’s a good thing you know absolutely nothing about me,” he said.
A wall of sweat had formed on my forehead. The droplets trickled down and stung my eyes. I heard the click of the gun’s safety being released.
And for the first time, Valkos looked uncomfortable.
He took another step forward, his eyes narrowing.
“Impertinent child… I’ve let you live this long as a favor to your mother, the gods rest her soul. But you’ve defied me one too many times. If you value your pathetic excuse for a life, you’ll get away from her. Now.”
“If you kill me, I’m taking her with me.”
“Pull the trigger then.”
I shut my eyes tightly, partly because they were burning from the sweat, but mostly because I was beginning to think Kael might actually shoot me. I kept seeing Markus. Kept hearing that gunshot and seeing his lifeless body slumping to the floor. The more times the scene played itself over in my head, the more vivid it got, so I was glad when a familiar voice suddenly distracted me.
“He was willing to kill her before, and my guess is that he’s willing to kill her now.”
I opened my eyes.
Sera stood in the doorway, holding something in her hand; I couldn’t tell what it was from this angle. She crossed the yard to Valkos’s side and bowed her head respectfully. She kept her back to me, so that even when she offered Valkos whatever it was in her hand, I still couldn’t see it.
“Sir, I think you should see this,” she said. “I don’t know that you needed more evidence of it, but your son is every bit the traitor you thought him to be.”
“Son…?” I repeated in a whisper.
“Not my choice,” Kael said softly.
“His intention has always been to kill the descendant and solidify the pact,” Sera continued, glancing back over her shoulder. Her eyes met mine, and a triumphant smile crossed her face before she turned back to Valkos. “Sir, he meant to stop you, by whatever means necessary. He still means to.”
I felt lightheaded. What had Sera shown him? No…it didn’t matter. Because it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. If Kael really wanted to kill me, he would’ve done it a long time ago, right?
Right.
Except Kael didn’t bother to call Sera out on her lie.
And the look on Valkos’s face told me he didn’t think Sera was lying at all.
“Let her sister go,” Valkos commanded.
I breathed for the first time in almost a minute. At least Lora was going to get away, at least she—
“Alex!” The sound of footsteps came from my left.
I cast my gaze sideways as best I could without turning my head. Lora was half-running, half-tripping her way towards me.
What was wrong with these people?
Why couldn’t they just freaking run away when they were told to?
“Lora!” I snapped in the most commanding, big-sisterly voice I could manage at the moment. “Get away from me! Go home!”
“Alex, I—”
“I’m serious! Go!”
She stumbled to a stop a few feet away, tears glistening in her big brown eyes.
“Lora,” I said. “You have to go. Please.”
She didn’t budge.
“Vanessa’s waiting for her,” Kael interjected quietly. He turned, pulling me with him, so that we could see the white wolf now perched on top of the hill. The sight of Vanessa was almost calming, and I tried to force a reassuring smile as I turned back to Lora.
“That’s my friend Vanessa,” I said. “And I really, really need you to go with her.” I swallowed, trying to combat the dryness in my throat. “We’ll catch up with you guys soon.”
Lora wasn’t stupid.
She had to have known that last part was a lie.
For a minute she just stood, shaking her head in silence. Then she stepped forward, closing the distance between us, and she leaned in and pressed her forehead against mine. She was wearing my silver necklace again, the one with the tear-drop shaped diamond. The faint humming it was giving off didn’t really bother me right then. The scent of honeysuckles clung to her, and I couldn’t help but smile. She might’ve spent the last few days a hostage, but she still smelled nice, and every hair was still in place.
Still my Lora.
And if my mom—no, her mom—lost her, she would never recover.
“Promise I’ll see you again?” she whispered.
“I’d pinky-promise and everything, but my hands are a little tied up at the moment,” I said.
She pulled away and I gave her a meek smile, which she didn’t return. For a minute, I still didn’t think she was going to leave my side. It made me angry, but I tried to hold it in.
I couldn’t yell at her anymore.
So I was enormously relieved when a look of understanding finally crossed her face, and she nodded and started to back slowly away from Kael and me. Her eyes still didn’t leave me as she walked, and it took every bit of strength I had to keep that smile on my face, to keep the tears from filling my eyes, to keep nodding her forward, away from all this.
Away from me.
Maybe for the last time.
19
persistence
As I watched Vanessa disappear with my little sister, I couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed.
Not just by Kael, but by all of them.
I couldn’t help but think: had this been their plan all along? It made sense, now that I thought about it. When I’d suggested severing the pact, hadn’t they all gotten upset? Worried? Maybe they’d seen me as the threat that needed eliminating? And maybe, this whole time, they’d been planning to sacrifice me right in front of Valkos’ face, in some crazy anti-war demonstration.
And now that my sister was out of the way, Kael could pull the trigger.
He could kill me, and that pact they were all so concerned with could never be severed.
It was a perfect, obvious plan.
“What are you going to do now, boy?” Valkos asked.
I tried to look up, tried to look into Kael’s eyes, hoping they would give me some sort of clue as to what the hell was going through his head right now.
But his face was turned away from me, away from everybody. I twisted my own head as far as I could, trying to see what he was looking at.
Vanessa was gone.
But out of the corner of my eye, I could see another lycan standing on the hill. He stood completely still, but after a second he lifted his head and gave a single, low howl.
“It’s about damn time,” Kael said under his breath.
“Who is that?” I asked.
“It’s Shane.” Kael’s grip on my arms started to relax a little.
“Sera.” Valkos’s sudden, stern voice made me jump. I turned back and saw Sera hurry to his side again. “Take care of him,” Valkos told her.
Sera nodded and lifted a hand. At least a dozen of the lycans standing behind Valkos rushed to her side, and after Sera’s own quick, effortless transformation, the group of them bounded off toward the hill.
There was no hesitation in their charge.
Valkos’s voice had been confident.
The lycans closest to Kael and me gave a few anxious whines, but other than that, Shane’s appearance really didn’t make me feel that much better about the situation I was facing.
Sera and her group had gotten about twenty feet from Shane when for some reason they started to slow down.
They were almost completely stopped when the first lycan came barreling over the hill top— followed by five more in the span of about two seconds.
And then five more.
And more.
They just kept coming.
“He j
ust had to make a dramatic entrance, didn’t he?” Kael muttered.
But Shane could be as dramatic as he wanted to, for all I cared— I was just glad he was here.
It was starting to look like we might walk away from this after all.
“It’s not over yet,” Kael said, effectively bursting the hopeful bubble inflating in my chest. He let go of my arms and shoved the gun into my hand. I saw a flash of metal as he pulled what must’ve been another gun from somewhere, just as Valkos’s voice rang out over the snarls and yelps of the commencing battle.
“I want the girl alive,” he said. “But be sure you kill him.”
Kael spun around and pressed his back against mine. A second later two shots rang out, followed by two high-pitched whines and the thud of bodies dropping to the ground.
I tried to lift and aim my own gun, but my hands were trembling too badly.
“Alex! Either start shooting or give me that gun!”
I was about to yell back at him, to tell him to stop being so damn pushy, but at that moment the lycan closest to me crouched and sprang. Another shot rang out, and if the gun hadn’t kicked back so hard I probably wouldn’t have realized it was me doing the firing.
My hurt wrist throbbed from the pain of being jerked back.
I tried to ignore it, just like I tried to ignore the still body of the lycan whose life I’d just ended.
I lifted the gun and fired again.
Another body fell. Another shot. Another body. I didn’t know this person pulling the trigger. But I wanted her to stop.
Four bullets later, she did.
I had to stop—I was out of bullets. I threw the gun aside. Even if I had more bullets, I don’t think I would’ve reloaded it.
Because of Kael and me, there were seven bodies. Some of them were completely still, some of them still twitched a little as they took their last, desperate gasps of air.
They would die as savage, brainwashed animals.
I wondered what they had looked like as humans.
More were closing in on us, but they were met by others who must’ve been members of Shane’s pack; I couldn’t tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys anymore. I don’t know how they could tell each other apart, either. But they all seemed to know their target somehow, and they didn’t hesitate to attack each other.
“Come on,” Kael said, grabbing my arm and dragging me away from the chaos. I followed, my body feeling a little number with every step.
We were almost to the base of the hill when I saw him: a white beast of a lycan.
He didn’t move with the same grace that Vanessa and the others did; his footsteps were heavy and his shoulders squared with every step. At first, his head stayed low to the ground as he walked, but then he lifted his nose to the air and opened his mouth a little. Tasting the scents on the air, maybe.
Looking for something.
After a few seconds, he dropped his head and turned his eye—his one good eye— on us. It was startlingly blue in the sunlight, while the milky white one faded into the background of his fur. His lips pulled back, but not as if in a snarl.
It was more like a smile.
He turned and bolted off into the woods.
“Where is he going?” I was already sprinting up the hill, the numbness in my legs suddenly disappearing.
Valkos had taken the exact same path into the woods that Vanessa and Lora had.
“I don’t know,” Kael said as he ran up beside me. “But what do you think you’re going to do about it?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his hand reach for me, but I managed to dodge it. I sped up enough so that I was just out of his reach.
“This is crazy, Alex,” he called angrily. “You can’t fight him like this. And besides, Lora has Vanessa, and Will— plenty of protection. She doesn’t need you to die for her!”
“Valkos can’t kill me!” I yelled back. “He needs me.”
Kael dove. He caught me around the waist, and his momentum sent us both stumbling
“Get off of me!” I struggled, but his grip on my arms was relentless.
“Even if he can’t kill you,” he said. “There are worse things than death, trust me. And he knows all about them.” He finally relaxed his grip, and I jerked my arms away.
I glared at him for a minute. Then I nodded slowly. “Yeah.”
“Good. I’m glad you—”
“Yeah, you’re right: I can’t fight him like this.”
“Alex? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Kael might’ve been right beside me, but his voice was little more than background noise.
And the same was suddenly true for everything surrounding me. The sounds of the forest, the battle in the distance—soon all those noises became nothing but static.
Then, finally, there was complete, eerie silence.
Individual sounds came back to me first—my breathing, the barks and yelps in the distance, Kael’s cursing at me—with a degree of clarity unlike anything I’d ever heard.
My balance suddenly seemed off. Worried I might fall, I started to kneel forward, and to my surprise I found that I didn’t have to go far before my hands hit the ground. A second later, the familiar tingling erupted over my entire body. I didn’t open my eyes, because I was afraid that actually watching what was happening might make it harder to remain calm.
I could still feel it though.
And it felt weird.
I remained crouched on hands and knees. My arms lengthened first, and I felt myself grow taller, as though the ground below me had suddenly decided to heave violently upward. My back legs formed more quickly, bending and lifting me off my knees, onto my feet and into a four-legged position that felt surprisingly natural.
In fact, it all seemed natural now.
Why couldn’t I do this sooner?
Suddenly everything made sense again. The world around me started to slow, even as my mind raced with euphoric energy. My fear was gone. Sights, sounds, colors—everything seemed so different, so strange and exciting. And enticing. Part of me would’ve given anything to have had the chance to just walk around and take in this new world.
But my human mind was still with me, and a quiet voice surfaced in my head, reminding me that I had things to take care of.
And then I was running.
As a human, I thought I’d been fast. But compared to now? It was like I’d been standing still my whole life. I ran, and I didn’t even have to think about where I was going. Somehow I just knew. Somehow I knew where not to step, somehow I knew every path through the trees.
And somehow I knew where Valkos had gone.
He turned around just in time to see me launch myself at him—but not in time to dodge.
I managed to sink my teeth into the ruff of fur surrounding his neck. My grip wasn’t strong enough, though, and with a toss of his head he sent me flying into a nearby tree.
I stumbled to my feet, disoriented, and looked up to see him stepping toward me.
(You are persistent—I will grant you that. It’s a bit annoying.)
I only snarled in response, and suddenly cold laughter filled my head.
(I am glad to see you’ve abandoned your human form, though. At least you’ll be able to put up a little bit of a fight now. Should make things more interesting.)
I was amazed at how quickly, how gracefully, I was able to move my new body—and of how easily I’d adjusted to the fact that it was mine. If I’d had time to think about it, I guess it would’ve seemed really bizarre.
Luckily though, I didn’t have time.
So I didn’t think about how strange it was to have four legs instead of two. I just appreciated how fast they could throw me at Valkos.
It was almost scary how pleasing it was to sink my teeth into him. Not that it lasted long. The second after my fangs broke his skin, he shook me loose and countered with an attack of his own, raking his claws across my side and turning streaks of my fur a darker shade
of red. An intense, burning pain followed, and a particularly sharp pang of it caused me to stumble just as I lunged toward him again.
He dodged, and I landed clumsily.
My balance abandoned me completely for a moment, and Valkos wasted no time in taking advantage of that.
He sprang.
Even if I had been on steady legs, he was still faster than me—it didn’t take me long to realize that.
I managed to roll out of the way, but my escape was so close that I’m pretty sure Valkos pulled away with a clump of my fur between his teeth.
The longer we fought, the more I began to think that first attack I’d managed to land had just been a stroke of beginner’s luck. Now I had to concentrate all of my energy on just avoiding him, and it wasn’t long before that grew frustrating.
But there wasn’t much I could do about it, so I kept dodging, waiting for a chance to attack.
It didn’t take long before I started to get tired, and the close-calls grew closer and more frequent. My exhaustion must’ve been more obvious than I would’ve liked to admit, too, because after a few minutes I heard Valkos’ amused voice in my head.
(I wonder how much longer you’ll be able to keep this up? You know, you’re only postponing the inevitable.)
(I could keep this up all day,) I snapped back, hoping my voice didn’t reflect how tired I actually felt.
His hollow laughter filled my head again. (Well I’m getting kind of bored myself. How about we go ahead and end this?)
I didn’t have time to reply one way or the other before he slammed into my side and sent me skidding wildly across the forest floor. Before I’d even slid to a complete stop he was already looming over me, his jaws opened wide.
His fangs came down on my neck.
The pain was unbearable—like a hundred bee stings for each of the teeth that sank into my flesh. I tried to jerk away, but that only made the pain worse. I lay still after that, and I was silent save for the occasional involuntary whimper.
Death would be okay now, I vaguely thought.
Anything to make the pain stop.
Maybe death was the best thing now, anyway. I’d done all I could. At least I’d slowed him down—hopefully long enough to be sure that Lora got to safety. What was left to do? It was over.
Descendant Page 26
