Lucas kept the fire going and dried their clothes before returning them to his cache. Though he’d spent last night curled up outside the tent as the wolf, tonight they were remote enough that he didn’t need to keep watch and near enough to the snowline that they could use each other’s body heat.
He climbed into the tent and found Bri in a restless sleep, curled on her side with the fur-lined hood of her sleeping bag cinched tight around her face. He sidled into his own bag, shifted their pillows closer together and laid down on his side, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her snug against the front of his body.
She hummed and burrowed closer.
There is this.
He shouldn’t doubt their connection. It was undeniable. A deeper magical bond than he had ever felt with Vivianne. But despite relishing Bri’s body fitting perfectly against his and having stayed awake the last two nights, sleep was slow to come.
His thoughts kept churning over one other possibility he hadn’t yet entertained. What if they succeeded? What if Ryder’s cunning kept proving out? What if they obtained the book and it contained the right spell? What if she was able to free her lover from his curse?
Lucas would not leave Briana’s side. Could not. Ever.
He remembered the challenge in the Ward witch’s eyes, the stubbornness of his jaw, his complete lack of fear. He’d already died for Bri once. Kean would not give her up either. It would come to challenge, and Lucas knew what he would be forced to do. But he also knew she would never forgive him.
She must choose you, or you will lose her anyway.
Chapter Thirteen
The sun cut like a golden blade through the clouds as they reached the jagged lip of the summit. They looked down upon the basin resting at the center of a ring of peaks, several higher and steeper than the one they’d just climbed. The surrounding mountaintops were white with snow, and the wind that blew across Bri’s cheeks was dry and bitter.
She propped her pack against a boulder and climbed atop to gain a better view of the tree-carpeted valley. The forest they’d climbed through was sparse in comparison. The crescent of mountain peaks curved around to the north and east—they were near the southernmost tip.
Somewhere in that valley, in the thickest part of the forest, was the infamous White Wood. Hedvika’s stronghold.
And who knows what lies between us and her.
Bri sharpened her gaze and studied the terrain down the side of the mountain toward the edge of the woods, trying to pick out a path. The steepest part looked easy. Where the climb up had been switchbacks and large, jagged rocks to scale, the back side was smooth and full of gravel. As the ground leveled out, it looked like the earth was dotted with hundreds of tiny puddles.
She turned to find Lucas shading his eyes, gazing in the same direction. “What does that look like to you?”
He wrinkled his nose, and the edges of his mouth curled down. “Unless my nose is mistaken, I believe it’s a bog.”
“Lovely,” Bri said, hopping down. “I don’t suppose you packed appropriate bog attire?”
“I don’t think there is such a thing.”
Lucas made a table and chairs appear in a flat alcove of rock and set to work heating up their lunch on a camp stove he propped on a small ledge. The chair looked awfully inviting, but having Lucas wait on her—especially after the things Ryder had implied about the relationship between a witch and Familiar—was making things awkward.
Bri hovered at his shoulder. “Can I help with something?”
“Just your company,” he said in an easy, unhurried tone.
She hesitated, caught between flattered and embarrassed, but finally cleared her throat and pulled her game face on. “No, really, I want to help. You don’t have to wait on me.”
“I know I do not have to, but it gives me pleasure to see to your needs.”
Her cheeks burned and she sat in the chair with a huff. “You’re doing it for selfish reasons, then?”
Even in profile, she caught the playful curl at the side of his mouth, but his tone was matter-of-fact. “Very.”
“And clearly you still take pleasure in teasing me.”
“Still?”
She leaned her head back in the chair and closed her eyes. Why had she said that? But she knew he was a wolf with a bone, now, and would not let her be until he rooted out the mystery. She sighed. “I remember that, from before.”
His tone was half-curious, half-cautious as he asked, “And what else do you remember? About me? Or us?”
She met his stare and shrugged. She remembered a lot, but she often didn’t realize she remembered it until there was no other explanation for how she knew him so well. Everything about him felt so… familiar. “Little things. I remember your expressions. Your mannerisms. I’m amazed they haven’t changed. You smell the same. Your laugh is the same. Sometimes I know how you will react to something before I say it.”
And she remembered the place on his neck to nibble that would drive him into a frenzy.
Lucas had stopped stirring the pot and was leaning back against a hip-high ledge of rock, ankles crossed and his hands in his pockets. “Then you have me at a distinct disadvantage. You are quite different from before.”
“I think with you, I’ll exploit any advantage I can get.”
The caution slid away from him like the shadow of a cloud passing overhead. A ring of fire flared in his eyes. “Will you now?”
Bri swallowed hard at the carnal memories evoked by those glowing rings. The few heartbeats it took her to process the actual words and not just the husky tone of his voice crackled with electric heat. “I expect you would do the same to get…whatever it is you want from me.”
“I think I’ve been clear about what I want from you, Briana.”
She sighed and stared out at the forest. He’d been clear about what he’d be willing to do for it too. She squinted at him. “But you haven’t actually tried to seduce me yet, have you?”
He laughed. “Do you want me to?”
She gave him an arch look. What a non-answer. But she knew. She remembered his charm, and he’d kept it dampened so far. A small mercy. One that wouldn’t be bestowed indefinitely. She had not doubt he was very, very difficult to resist. Not just that body, those lips, those eyes… but eons of experience.
“How many have there been, I wonder?” she mused, changing the subject. Lucas stiffened, and Bri’s muscles quivered with excitement. She loved when she could twist a conversation off his carefully guarded path. “A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? More than one at a time? Do you like the chase, or prefer them to come to you?”
A faint blush crept up his neck.
Bri giggled, delighted at his discomfort for once. “I’m only teasing. You don’t have to tell. Wow! I had no idea it was that bad.”
He turned a contemplative look on her and stalked to the edge of the table.
She had to lean back in her chair to maintain eye contact.
“No, you asked. I will answer honestly. I do not know the number. Somewhere nearing a hundred, if I’m generous. Sometimes. And I prefer they come to me.”
Bri blinked rapidly and shrugged. “Okay.”
“But I think the number you’re looking for is how many since I lost Vivianne? Eleven. And how many since I met you? None. And there will never be another.”
She shivered at the finality of his tone and stood to put some space between them. “Do whatever you want—I have no claim on you.”
Lucas closed in on her, trapping her between his body and the wall of jagged rock.
“Don’t say that.” His breath was hot against her ear. “You do have a claim on me. I want your claim. I yearn for your claim. I know you don’t love me, Briana, but please do not pretend there is nothing between us. Do not dishonor the sacrifices we have both made to get here.”
Bri nodded, barely controlling the tremor inside. The ache to feel her magic brush against his. Alarm bells were whirring in her head.
Lucas inhaled and exhaled slowly, not moving, as if he hadn’t decided what he would do next. A wave of cold air hit her like bucket of icy water, and she blinked to find him back at the stove.
As Bri had suspected, descending the backside of the mountain took only a couple of hours. The bog was a different story. Ice bog would have been a more apt description. Pools had formed between the clumps of pale tundra and copses of burnt trees, but all of it had frosted over. Not even the sharp wind that swept down from the mountain peaks rustled the frozen blades of grass.
The small ponds didn’t look any different than the icy ground until you stepped in them, as Lucas had discovered the hard way. Twice. Now he went a few feet ahead of her, staying on the slick fallen logs and raised paths of packed dirt and boulders whenever possible, prodding at each new piece of terrain with his sword as they picked their way through.
Late afternoon sunlight gilded the brown grasses and silty grey dirt into gold and silver, dusted with diamond frost. Bare black branches twisted into the cloudy sky. Despite their closeness to the forest, the landscape was eerily quiet.
Bri had taken his suggestion to use the lifelessness of their surroundings to practice her Second Sight. Using Second Sight was like pulling a veil over her normal vision. Regular light was dimmed, but contrast was sharper. Even as the sun began to set, she could see better than with her eyes. Anything that was not purely matter—anything that possessed a life signature—glowed faintly. Anything that possessed a magic signature glowed much brighter, in a rainbow of iridescence. The tundra was bare enough that she wasn’t overwhelmed by the sight.
Lucas made an intriguing study subject. In her Second Sight, he was a luminous figure of smoke and stars, and his irises the glowing amber of the harvest moon. Sometimes, at certain angles, the smoke even seemed to shift into a more wolf-like figure.
A snout, some ears.
Suddenly, her nose was bumping into a hard chest, and she shook her head, blinking back to her normal vision. She glanced up to find Lucas’s grey, human eyes laughing at her.
“I can feel you staring at my ass.”
She snorted. “I thought I saw a tail.”
“It’s alright.” He stepped back and smirked at her over his shoulder as he turned around. “I don’t blame you.”
She didn’t dignify that with a response. “What do I look like in your Second Sight?” When he didn’t answer for several paces, she said, “Are you composing a sonnet?”
His bark of laughter echoed across the valley. “It’s difficult to explain. My Second Sight is different than yours. It’s tied into the wolf, who also sees scents.”
“Oh.” Bri flushed at the thought that maybe she smelled… bad. Maybe he didn’t want to tell her.
Wouldn’t it be a good thing to have some built-in Lucas repellant?
And yet her stomach flipped uncomfortably.
Instead of continuing on, Lucas turned to face her and stepped closer.
Bri froze, her heart lodged in her throat.
“I’ve read tales of men so enraptured by a woman she seemed to glow, to move in slow motion, but what I experience when I am near you is much more than that. You are all my favorite colors and scents and flavors rolled into one. Your heartbeat is the pounding of my feet on the forest floor. Your scent is a sun-drenched meadow. Your magic a cool breeze on a starlit night.”
“Okay, I get it.” She shoved at his chest to make him stop. Her cheeks were burning, and she regretted asking.
A sun-drenched meadow?
He didn’t budge an inch but trapped her hand beneath his and pressed her palm over his heart. “And when we touch, it’s like—”
“Like someone turned on the light,” Bri whispered.
His eyes darkened and locked on her lips.
A tidal wave of heat seemed to follow behind his gaze, sweeping down the front of her body and settling between her hips. She pulled away from him. “I was there too, remember? When the magic first arced between us.”
That’s all it was. Is.
“Right.” He gave her a half smile that seemed either pitying or a little hurt. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
“Sometimes I see the silhouette of the wolf in your magic. I was just wondering if my inner mermaid was revealed in mine. Sparkly green tail to match my sparkling green eyes and ruby red smoke-hair?” She blinked at him coquettishly, as if this whole conversation was a joke.
His smile softened into a real one. With hooded eyes, he lifted the braid from her shoulder and rubbed it between his fingers. “Promise me when this is all through we’ll go to a costume ball so that I can see you in your mermaid form.”
She laughed and her body gave an awkward, jerky shake as she yanked her hair from his grasp. “You know I can’t make that promise. If we live through this, Kean will be back.”
Lucas began his steady plod across the grass islands again. “Even if we do get the book, we don’t know if the right spell is inside it. Even if it is, it could take months, even years, to master the magic of performing it.”
She scowled at his back. “I bet you’re counting on that.”
His silence was answer enough.
She wanted to be angry, but in a way, she appreciated that he didn’t lie. There was no hidden agenda where Lucas was concerned—it was right out in the open. The fact that every pronoun out of his mouth had become “we” hadn’t escaped her notice, either. Though she was doing her best to ignore it for now.
One problem at a time. Get the book. Save Kean. Then deal with the wolf.
If they lived through this. And that was a big if.
With a sigh, she blinked back into her Second Sight and stalked behind Lucas’s shimmering form.
…a cool breeze on a starlit night…
Most of the bog was barren, a murky grey in her vision. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of a glowing fairy mound near the trees in the distance or sparkles that looked like a snail-trail of glitter where something magical had brushed by.
Bri decided maybe unicorns. Why not? Big, wintery Clydesdale unicorns with shaggy icicle manes. They lived in the clouds but came down to frolic in the valley during blizzards.
She caught up to Lucas at the top of a small berm. He had stopped to survey the best path forward. Ten feet below them was the largest pond yet. This one wasn’t frozen over, but the nearly black water was smooth as a pane of glass.
“We’ll cut around over there, it looks more solid.” Lucas turned, not waiting to see if she followed.
Bri gasped as their reflection in the pool below shimmered, and the white bear stood where Lucas had been, staring at her with his sad, black eyes.
“What is it?” Lucas asked from her elbow.
She squinted as the image went wavy, but instead of their reflections, all she saw was a faint bluish glow spiraling through the black depths.
“Bri?”
A hand gripped her shoulder, but she couldn’t look away from the mesmerizing light as it swirled closer and closer. She leaned forward with her weight on her toes, drawn to meet it. A band of solid muscle crossed her chest as Lucas spun her away from the edge.
“What the hell are you thinking?” He shook her.
Bri blinked out of her Second Sight and focused on his shocked face. “I thought I saw–”
A sharp, keening screech tore through the frozen air.
Lucas whirled and put his back to her. He held his sword in front of him in both hands, summoned out of thin air.
SCREEEEEEEEEEEEECH.
The cry echoed from all around them, but nothing in the empty landscape moved. Bri’s heart thundered with an instinctual response to that call, hardwired somewhere in the back of her brain from the times when humans were just nimble naked animals, vulnerable to predators. Bri searched the sky as Lucas crowded her back down the berm.
“What is it?” she squeezed out, trying to see around him.
There was nothing.
“Use your Second Sight!” He glanced over his shou
lder, cursed, and swept her into his arms as he spun and lunged. He swung at the air with his blade, seeming to hit nothing, and cursed again, his hold tightening around her.
Bri looked through her Second Sight, feeling dizzy as Lucas—only sparkling smoke in her vision—dodged and whirled with her in tow. Then she saw that they were surrounded by faintly glowing phantoms.
The ghostly figures were not in the shape of people, exactly. They moved by forming and reforming like clouds of blue-green mist, but with unmistakable hands and clawed fingers. More of the vaporous beings were slowly oozing out of the surrounding ponds as the screeching continued.
The phantoms dissipated on contact with Lucas’s sword, but he could only maintain a perimeter the length of his reach. They were being swarmed.
Panic lit like a fuse, slowly sizzling up Bri’s spine on a countdown until her brain would overload and her ability to reason would shut down.
Calm and collected, Lucas backed them up the berm, towards the large pool. Bri looked over her shoulder to gauge how close they were to the edge and shrieked in utter horror.
Lucas barely paused in his slashing to glance back. He returned his focus to the melee with his jaw clenched.
Out of the black pool grew writhing blue worm of phantom smoke. It was dotted with hundreds of gaping mouths, all screaming in unison. It rose out of the water nearly twenty feet, already towering above them. But as terrifying as the mouths covering the worm’s twisted trunk were, all they could do was screech. Bri saw the calculation Lucas had made in that split second. The real threat remained the army of blue phantoms backing them towards the edge of the berm.
To all those mouths.
Bri stepped out of the circle of his arms and gripped his hand instead, so he had more freedom to move. “Do you have another one of those swords?”
He let go of her long enough to thrust the wavy blade he’d threatened Ryder with into her hand. She backed up against him, slashing it through the air. The phantoms slid away but had already almost closed a circle around them.
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