Wolf Witch (Victoria Brigham Book 1)

by D. N. Hoxa

  “What’s wrong?” Red said, but I sat on the couch, hugged my knees to my chest and squeezed my eyes shut.

  Go away, go away, go away, I begged in my head, but the squeezing around my heart only grew stronger. My wolf howled again, demanding my body.

  “Victoria, are you okay?”

  Red sat next to me on the bed and grabbed my arm, but I didn’t dare open my eyes.

  “It’s her. She wants to come out,” I said through gritted teeth, and I tried to hold my breath as much as I could, hoping that that was going to distract the wolf.

  “So stop her,” Red said, almost making me laugh.

  “I can’t!” I shouted. My head threatened to explode, the pain rising to brand new levels. “Stop it!” I shouted at the wolf, but she didn’t care. She was going to take my body, and there was nothing I could do to stop her. “Stop, stop, stop!”

  She didn’t. I felt my bones cracking, just like they always did when the shifting began. I screamed in frustration, so focused on my wolf, I hardly felt the pain radiating from my core. I gritted my teeth and tried to calm her down, and when that didn’t work, I tried to force her into submission. I’d done it many times before, ever since I was a kid. It only rarely—very rarely—worked.

  But then, something cold touched both my cheeks. I though, maybe it’s a spell. But Red was a vampire. He couldn’t do spells.

  He could just twist my head to the side real fast, and the pain, the screams, and the howls all disappeared.

  9

  “You broke my neck!”

  The throbbing pain had taken over the back of my head and went down all the way to my shoulder blades. It was fading, but Red didn’t need to know that.

  “Yep. Sorry ‘bout that.”

  “Sorry?!” He had to be kidding, but just in case he wasn’t, I climbed in between the two front seats of his car and sat in the passenger seat to get a better look at him. He kept his eyes on the road, though. “You’re sorry?”

  “It was either that or having to deal with your wolf.” His eyes moved from the rearview mirror and back to the windshield fast but never to me.

  “Oh, so you’re so scared of my wolf, you just decided to take me out instead? The easier prey.” I rubbed the back of my neck furiously. He’d had no right to do that to me.

  “I’m not scared of anything, Victoria, least of all your wolf,” Red said with a fake laugh that hurt my ears.

  My wolf raised her head lazily. I grinned. “She begs to differ.”

  Now he decided to look at me, his green eyes wide as he searched my face. “We had no time, remember? They were coming for us, and I needed to get us out of there asap,” he said, a little angry now.

  “I take it you did?” A look out the windows said that we were on a highway somewhere, and Red was driving over seventy miles per hour.

  “Only barely. I think I smelled them just before we got to my car,” he said, and I could tell by his voice that that had bothered him.

  “So you carried me,” I guessed. How else was he going to get me out of that basement and the forest?

  “I carried this, too,” he said reluctantly, and reached for the glove compartment. In there was the yoyo he’d been so freaked out about.

  I reached out my hand to grab it, but my wolf growled in my head. She was awake now, standing on all fours, watching my every movement like a hawk. I put my hand back on my lap, and she immediately loosened up.

  So I reached for it again.

  There was no doubt left in my mind. My wolf did not want me to grab the yoyo—or whatever the hell that thing was. I closed the glove compartment and leaned back in the seat with a sigh. Things just kept getting stranger and stranger.

  “What’s wrong?” said Red, as confused as I was.

  “I…don’t know. My wolf doesn’t want that thing in my hands.” Which was a first. She never interfered with things like this in the past. Not ever.

  “That makes two of us.” He sounded a bit relieved.

  “What do you think it does?” I wondered out loud. Now that both Red and my wolf were so relieved to have it out of their sight, I wanted to analyze it again, so badly.

  “I don’t know, but it’s heavily loaded with magic.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  “No idea. That’s the thing. It’s all very…blurry. Like everything’s just thrown together into one big mess.” Shaking his head, Red grabbed the steering wheel tighter. “It doesn’t matter, anyway. We’ll keep it out of Haworth’s hands, but right now, we have more important things to do.”

  The mentioning of Haworth’s name made the hairs on my back of my neck stand to attention, which in turn reminded me that the pain from when Red had broken my neck was all but gone. That still didn’t mean that it was okay he did it, but I was glad. Right now, my top priority was my sister, and I would not be helping her if I got caught again.

  “Tell me about him. You said you knew who he was.” I asked reluctantly, but if I wanted to think up a decent plan, I was going to have to gather as much information as I could about Haworth and his gang.

  “His name is Hector Haworth. I’ve yet to find out where he’s from, but he’s a witch. A very powerful Blood witch.”

  “Blood witch. Makes sense.” One of the pack wolves that was killed had had all his blood drained off. The picture Finn had sent me was still clear as day in front of my eyes.

  “He deals in dark magic, but it doesn’t affect him the same as it does other witches,” Red continued.

  “Really? Why?” Dark magic was powerful, much more so than light. But it demanded a much higher price. It took from you, mentally and physically. It either killed you, or drove you insane first, then killed you. Which was fortunate, because if everybody walked around doing dark magic all the time, the world would have been destroyed long ago.

  “I don’t know that, either,” Red said. He wasn’t happy about it.

  “Okay, what else?”

  “I know he’s got a gang of about a hundred people, and nobody knew anything about him before the Four Battles. He came to the surface right after,” he said.

  “That’s strange.” If he was as powerful as Red and Izzy said he was, why wouldn’t he have done something before Erick Adams?

  “It gets stranger,” Red said with a bitter laugh. “I haven’t confirmed this yet, but he was seen with demons as well.”

  My heart fell all the way to my heels. “Demons?”

  Shit. That was not good. Demons were very bad news.

  They, too, had come out only recently. Or that’s what we thought, at first. Turns out, a hundred years ago, during the Great War between the paranormals of earth and the fairies, the ECU of that time had made the demons—super soldiers with more speed, strength and endurance than any other paranormal because how else were we ever going to defeat the fairies? As long as they were connected to their realm, the fairies were stronger than every other paranormal, but the demons did exactly what they were made to do. They killed most, and then the ECU found a way to shut down the thirteen portals between earth and the fairy realm, which rendered the remaining fairies almost completely powerless. Those who fought died, and those who didn’t were allowed to continue life on earth as the lowest level of beings. They were despised and mistreated for a century before the fairy Galladar—the same fairy who took Finn’s leg—reopened the portals.

  After Galladar was defeated, the ECU and the kings of the fairy realm signed a peace treaty. We were sort of living in harmony now, but it was far from over.

  The demons couldn’t be killed. No matter how badly you hurt them, they came back in record time. And when the ECU from a hundred years ago figured that out, they banished the demons to another realm. Well, somebody opened the portal to that realm as well. Not only that, Erick Adams, one of the ECU leaders of our time, found out how to make even more demons. He made a freaking army of them. Good thing for the Storm witches because, as it turned out, only they and their magic could effectively kill a demon fo
r good. They feed on Storm magic, but that same magic kills them, too. Go figure.

  Anyway, if it wasn’t for the dragon girl with the dragon from the fairy realm, Erick Adams would have been king of the world by now, that greedy bastard. But once he was defeated, we all thought the demon problem would go away now that the Storms had made it their lives’ mission to hunt down and kill all of them.

  Apparently, it wasn’t as over as we thought it was.

  “Like I said, I haven’t confirmed this, but if it’s true and he’s working with demons…” Red’s voice trailed off. I was afraid to ask, but I already knew the answer to the question in my mind: no, he couldn’t kill demons, either, no matter his mad fighting skills.

  “So he can do dark magic, works with demons, and he is able to control animals. Just peachy,” I mumbled. “Anything else?”

  “I know he never comes out in public. Wherever he’s hiding, he’s extremely well protected. I’ve been looking for him for four months and never even got close.”

  “What about his people? If you just followed them, they’d lead you to him, wouldn’t they?”

  “Except they didn’t. He’s a smart man. Only a handful of people ever meet him, and those people are as good at disappearing as he is,” he said.

  “But we need to find him, Red. Really soon, too,” I said. Izzy’s face was all over my mind. The fear in her eyes…maybe she knew all of this about Haworth, too.

  “And we will. I think we will now.” He turned to look at me for a second with half a smile on his face. “With that nose of yours, there’s no way his people can disappear on us.”

  “They will if there’s a spell involved,” I said reluctantly.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  I narrowed my brows. “What do you mean? Do I have to be sure? That’s what spells are designed for.” They had scent covering ones and even body odor covering ones.

  “How much of your powers have you tested, Victoria? And please, be honest with me,” he said after a pause.

  I turned to the window on my side with no idea why I was ashamed all of a sudden. I’d never wanted this life. I killed three people before I turned eighteen, and I ran away from all of that because I didn’t want any more blood on my hands. There was never any reason for me to test myself, and frankly, even if it had ever occurred to me, I’d have never done it. I was too afraid and I already knew enough: my wolf controlled me. She was unstoppable. I had to do whatever I could to keep her disinterested. It’s why I’d chosen to work with animals, and I was damn good at it, too.

  “So you haven’t tested anything?” Red said when I refused to answer for a whole minute.

  “Look, I get that that makes me naive or stupid or whatever, but I’m not interested in this lifestyle. I don’t want to test because I don’t want to know, and I’m fine that way. I just need to get my sister out of there, and then I’ll be going back to my old life.” On a different continent, far, far away from here.

  “It doesn’t make you naive or stupid. It makes you untried, and that’s fine. But if you think getting your sister and my item from Haworth’s hands is going to be easy, you’re both and more,” Red said.

  “I’ve got my nose, don’t I?” It’s why he’d brought me along for the ride in the first place.

  “And once your nose gets us there, what do you think is going to happen?”

  I shrugged. “We’re going to hide, get our things, and leave.” Just like I’d done at that apartment complex. Granted, I’d barely escaped with my life, but that’s what my wolf was for, right?

  “You’re wrong. Chances are, we’ll both die at Haworth’s hands, if we even make it to him. To avoid dying, we’re going to have to fight.”

  “So we’ll fight.”

  Silence for a second.

  “Hit me.”

  I turned to him so fast, I almost broke my neck again. “Excuse me?”

  “Come on, hit me. With your fist on my face, real fast and as hard as you can,” Red said.

  “Are you…are you joking?”

  “You know you want to.” He grinned. “Come on, just hit me.”

  He was right, I did want to. And if he was going to just let me hit him…I raised my right arm, tightened my fist and aimed for his jaw with all my strength.

  In less than a second, my arm was twisted all around the back of the seat, and Red had an iron grip on my wrist.

  “Hey, let go!” I shouted, my shoulder screaming in pain. I thought he was going to break my bone in a thousand pieces, but he let go of me immediately. “What the hell was that for?”

  “To show you that you don’t know the first thing about fighting,” Red said, perfectly pleased with himself. I so wanted to punch him again, but I wasn’t sure my shoulder could handle another one of those twists without breaking, so I bit my tongue and held myself back.

  “My wolf can fight, okay? She can kill very easily.”

  Surprised, Red raised her brows. “I thought you said you couldn’t control her. How are you going to get yourself to shift before they kill you?” My mouth opened, but no words came out. “And what if she wants you to shift at a very terrible moment? Can you stop her? Because I don’t think you can, not from what I saw earlier in the forest.”

  Shit. He was right. Taking in a deep breath, I tried to calm my nerves.

  “So what do you propose?” Even before I asked him, I knew I wasn’t going to like his answer.

  “I’m going to teach you how to fight, and I’m going to teach you how to control your animal.” I was right.

  “Oh, okay. No, and…no.”

  “Why the hell not?” He sounded surprised.

  “Because I can’t even shoot a gun. To train me to fight would take time, and my sister doesn’t have time. And second, I was taught by werewolves how to control my wolf and never did manage. I don’t think you’d know where to even start because you don’t have an animal living inside you.”

  “Oh, but I do,” Red said without missing a beat. “A far more dangerous animal than a wolf.”

  Goose bumps rose on my forearms. “It doesn’t matter. My priority is my sister. I’m going to search the entire country if I have to, until I find her.”

  “You’re making a mistake,” Red said.

  “I’m not.” I was pretty confident in my decision. Izzy had no time to wait for me to train, and I’d already lost five years with her out of sheer stupidity.

  “At least think about it,” he said with a tired sigh. “I can’t make you learn something, but keep in mind that we will not make it out alive if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  His words fell on my shoulders, weighing me down. What if he was right?

  I mean, I knew he was right, but what if my wolf didn’t come to my aid when I most needed her? I realized I was doing all of this completely dependent on her, and that didn’t sit well with me. But what other choice did I have?

  “Where are we going?” I asked when I saw the many lights ahead. I needed a distraction, and I needed to know where we were going to be.

  “To the Bronx,” said Red.

  “What’s in the Bronx? Another safe house?”

  Red flinched. “More or less.”

  “We can’t get caught, Red. Not for any reason,” I reminded him.

  He nodded. “I know.”

  “If they catch me, my sister is doomed for good.”

  “I know, Victoria. Nobody’s going to catch us,” he said, his voice heavy. I hoped to God he meant it.

  “For what it’s worth, thanks for not letting me shift back there,” I made myself say. If he hadn’t, who knew where my wolf would have ended up? Because no matter what he thought, he wouldn’t have been able to subdue her.

  Surprised, Red turned to look at me. I couldn’t bring myself to meet his eyes.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, and for once in his life, he didn’t try to rub it in my face.

  I knew where we were going, but if Red thought I was going inside that plac
e, he was a mentally ill vampire.

  “It’s safe!” he said as he came after me, but I didn’t want to hear it. I’d left his car a couple minutes ago and was walking down the street to…wherever. I didn’t know the Bronx that well, but I could find my way back to Manhattan in no time.

  “Victoria, stop it. There’s no need to be afraid. It’s perfectly—” Red continued, but I didn’t intend to let him finish.

  I stopped walking and turned to him furiously. “You brought me to the Lair! The freaking Lair! What the hell is the matter with you?”

  The next second, he came right in front of my face and grabbed my arms but not tightly. I could barely feel his skin on mine.

  “I know how it sounds, trust me. But nothing and nobody is going to hurt you while you’re with me, do you understand? I swear it, Victoria. You’re safe with me. I won’t let anybody near you.”

  “I-I-I…” Shit. The look in his eyes was so genuine. Are you really going to buy this, Victoria? I asked myself.

  Yes. I definitely was, apparently.

  “Right now, there is no safer place for us. Even if they did guess we were here, they’d never dare come anywhere near the Lair.”

  I sighed. “Okay.” It wasn’t like I had a plan to keep myself from getting caught. I didn’t even have enough money in my bank account to buy a decent spell stone—or weapons. And to be honest, I really, really, didn’t want to be left alone right now.

  “Okay?” Red was surprised. Very surprised.

  “Yes, sure. But if any of those suckers even looks at me funny, I’m leaving.”

  He grinned brightly, making something stir in my stomach. Very uncomfortable. “Deal.”

  The Lair was a large apartment complex in the Bronx, where vampires gathered during the night to party or do whatever it is that vampires do. They’d basically claimed the complex as theirs a long time ago, and now, rumor had it that not even the ECU dared to go in there without a very good reason. People kept away from the Lair. Smart people kept away from vampires in general.

  What does that say about me?

  Whatever. I was still following Red across the street as he rushed us toward the entrance of a building. A very dark entrance, too. As if he knew just how scared I was, he reached his hand back and grabbed mine, squeezing my fingers to reassure me that everything was going to be fine.