Copyright © 2018/2020 by S.M.

Gaither
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 Foreword

Hey reader! Thanks for picking up this book. If you’ve read The Shift
Chronicles series, you’ll notice some familiar faces in the pages ahead,
along with some new ones that I hope you’ll grow to love!

If you haven’t read that previous series, that’s okay! This series can be read
as a standalone; be aware, however, that chronologically Blood and Wolf
takes place several decades after The Shift Chronicles, and naturally it will
contain spoilers for that previous series. So if you don’t like being spoiled, I
suggest going back and starting by reading The Shift Chronicles quartet (it
starts with Descendant).

Happy reading!
 BLOOD AND WOLF
The Shift Chronicles World: The Next Generation: Book One

S.M. GAITHER
 Contents

1. Nightmares and Dust

2. Visions and Scars
3. Tests and Control
4. Fire and Sacrifice
5. Smoke and Sorrow
6. Questions and Keys
7. Deals and Decisions
8. Walls and Weightiness
9. Dreams and Demons
10. Light and Possibility
11. Trust and Prejudice
12. Anarchy and Secrets
13. Spells and Mirrors
14. Beasts and Brokeness
15. Shadows and Souls
16. Reason and Fear
17. Lies and Leaving
18. Stars and Apologies
19. Power and Peace
20. Darkness and Falling

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 ONE

Nightmares and Dust

I SMELL BLOOD.
An entire trail of it. Fainter on this side of the creek I’ve just waded
across, but still acrid and burning in my nostrils.
Still obvious.
I palm the handle of my sword—a seventeenth-century saber, one of my
favorites in my impressive collection of weaponry—and I pick up my pace,
ignoring the mud splashing on my jeans. It rained harder than I thought it
did last night. The ground is basically a messy slip ‘n’ slide waiting to
happen, which could be fun, but it isn’t really why I’m here, so…
Focus, Elle.
I hold my arms out for balance. Study the path ahead, against which I
can see the faintest trace of pawprints. So faint I hardly noticed them, but
they’re definitely there.
Which seems weird.
Why would he have left prints?
The mud is soft, but so are a lycan’s footsteps. And combined with the
very obvious scent trail he’s left, even the occasional outline of paws makes
this…
This is way too easy.
It’s almost like he wants me to be able to find him.
The suspicion that I might be walking into a trap hits me about a second
too late, and then—
“Son of a—”
 (Language!) scolds a cheerful voice in my head, just before a massive
ball of muscle and white fur slams into my side and sends me sprawling
face-first into the mud.
I slide several feet in the mess, as predicted.
But it’s not fun. Definitely not fun. Mud should not go in noses. Or
eyes, or ears, or…hell, any other crevices of the human body, really.
I’m trying to sit up, to sputter and wipe out said mud when I’m hit
again. Knocked flat on my back this time, and suddenly Liam is over top of
me like a giant, dumb, overexcited dog, with one of his paws lightly
balanced on my chest, holding me down.
“If you drool on me, I swear on The Beatles that I am going to stick this
sword right through that big floppy tongue of yours.”
(Say you surrender, and I won’t,) he replies. The words echoe in my
head, sounding less smug than they would have if he was in human form
and had spoken out loud; thoughtspeech has a way of diluting emotion.
“Never.”
(Have it your way, then.)
I squeal as that tongue lolls from his mouth and comes dangerously
close to my face.
He knows the sword threat was hollow; I still feel bad about nicking his
leg earlier—nicking it hard enough to actually cause it to bleed and leave
that trail I followed here. But he’s been one of my best friends for eighteen
years now, so he should also know that I’m not in the business of
surrendering.
Not even to saliva.
I plant a foot on his chest and shove. He’s like twice my size in his
lycan form; I’m all of five foot (almost) two inches and scrawny in
basically every other sense of the word—but I’m a lot stronger than I look,
even if I am indefinitely and necessarily trapped in this human body.
So I manage to lift him with my leg, to push him hard enough that he
lands sideways in the muck. Once he’s on his side he just lays there all
defeated like, his long, feathered tail flopping and his legs occasionally
kicking, splattering me with more specks of mud.
“You look like the world’s most content pig.”
(I’m a lot cuter than a pig,) he insists.
I lift my sword in front of me, grimacing. I try to wipe it off using the
sleeve of my jacket, but that’s basically useless given that my jacket is also
covered in about a million pounds of mud. “This is not exactly that most
helpful training session we’ve ever had.”
He responds by using his tail to flick mud my direction, and then he
stands and shakes even more of it from his fur, until I’m pretty sure there’s
more of it on me than on the ground.
“Are you serious, Liam?” I hiss, shielding my eyes from the flying
flecks.
(Okay, well the lesson you should have learned today was to never let
your guard down. Because that’s how you end up face-first in the mud.) He
stops shaking and settls back on his haunches, sneezes a bit more sludge
from his nose before adding: (But I feel like you should have already
known that.)
“I do.”
His head tilts in a concerned way. (You seem off your game today,) he
comments after a moment.
I hug my arms against me, gaze straying to that cut I accidentally landed
on his leg. Normally my attacks are much more precise. Controlled. And
yeah, it isn’t a huge deal, given a lycan’s healing abilities and the fact that it
really isn’t that deep of a wound. It will be a faint scar in no time, and he
doesn’t seem to be in any pain from it at the moment.
But it still irks me.
Because I can’t afford to lose control.
Our whole world can’t afford for me to lose control.
My whole life has been about discipline. From the moment I could talk,
I had to learn to hold my tongue. To avoid arguments. From the moment I
could walk, I had to learn to watch where I was going. To avoid danger.
Then, when danger started to seek me out, because of who I am and who
my parents are, I had to learn to fight—but only in a very specific,
controlled way.
I can’t fight back by transforming into a wolf with the rest of my pack.
I can’t fight back by using the elemental magic that I can occasionally
feel humming in my blood.
Because both of these things might trigger fissures—openings between
our world and a dangerous, parallel world that we refer to as Canath, which
is the world where a crapload of the nasties from folklores all over the Earth
actually originated from.
 In the past, that world has occasionally bled over into ours—which is
why the human world is filled with all those myths and folktales to begin
with. There are some who even thought that the worlds more or less existed
side-by-side at one point, creatures walking freely back and forth between
them.
But that was then.
Way back then.
Now, this world I live in is overwhelmingly human, and humans are
overwhelmingly weak little things, and so the general consensus is that to
allow anything from Canath to cross into the human realm would be a Very
Bad Thing.
Which brings us back to the problem of, well, me.
Thanks to a run-in my mom had with one of the aforementioned nasties
decades ago, she ended up ‘contaminated’ by the essence of this other
world. A decade or so later, along came me: an otherwise adorable baby
with a terrifying symbol of a four-pointed star burned into the curve of my
wrist—the mark of Canath.
A mark that, for whatever reason, seems to be ‘activated’ whenever I’m
in distress or under some sort of pressure. Like the sort of pressure that
comes when I’m trying to use magic or, I dunno, transform from a human to
a wolf-like beast, for example.
I am a walking, would-be accident.
A breathing curse on the Earth, essentially.
My mom always gets mad when I call myself curse. And maybe she has
a point. But then again, I vividly remember what I brought into this world,
the first time I accidentally almost transformed into my beastly form.
As if my bones and organs rearranging myself weren’t enough, I’d also
had to witness the way my almost-shift made the ground shake, the air
tremble, the sky split and unleash an actual, honest-to-god monster—
something a hell of a lot scarier than wolf-Elle.
I still have nightmares of burning eyes and black teeth, of leathery
wings and claws that I can’t run fast enough to escape.
And the second time I almost transformed…
We don’t talk about the second time if we can help it.
Because after the second time, the Council of Supernatural
Cooperatives—that is, the highest cooperative, governing authority among
the various supernatural communities around the world—very nearly voted
for my removal.
Which is a nice way of saying that some people would prefer it if I were
dead.
So I can’t lose control a third time.
“I’m just tired,” I tell Liam, because he’s still looking at me with as
much concern as his wolfish features can muster. “Didn’t sleep much last
night.”
(Bad dreams?) he asks, even though he’s likely already guessed that this
is the culprit.
Sometimes when those aforementioned nightmares wake me, we climb
out the dormer window of his bedroom and up onto the roof of our pack’s
mansion-like house, and we just sit. Count the stars. Talk about stupid stuff
until I’m too tired to worry about nightmares and I fall asleep, usually while
still sitting up; I’m actually really good at falling asleep sitting up, standing
up, in the car, at the kitchen table….
My two greatest talents: sword-fighting and sleeping.
I’m well-rounded like that.
“Just the usual things,” I say, starting back toward the creek I crossed
earlier. The mud caking me is starting to dry and crack in extremely
uncomfortable places. “Harrowing visions of the almost-certain end of the
world, and me as the harbinger of doom and what-not.”
(Heavy stuff.)
“Mm-hm.”
It’s a warm day—eighty something, which is just warm, not hot, by
North Carolina summer standards—so I prop my weapon against a tree and
wade into the water, find the deepest pool I can, and lie back in it. My long
dark hair fans out around me, tickling my shoulders. I can feel the caked-on
mud turning slimy again before sliding off. Gross.
Liam bounces and splashes around in the water for a bit, letting the
playful side of his wolf brain take over. After a few minutes he switches it
off, and he shifts back to his human form in that focused, disciplined way
that I try really hard not to be jealous of. His transformation is fluid.
Graceful, almost. Nothing like the two awful times I almost did it; no sound
of bones cracking, or skin splitting, or painful gasps for breath.
And no possible breaking of the barrier between worlds, of course.
 His clothes haven’t even ripped in the process of going back to his
human self—which, I’ve been told, is impressive for his age. Apparently it
takes decades for some shifters to manage the sort of control it takes to
transform excess materials along with their skin and bones.
But here he is, in his well-worn athletic shorts and a faded blue t-shirt, a
perfect specimen of a human.
The handsome bastard doesn’t even look like he ever was a wolf.
He plops down on the bank of the creek, oblivious to the mud, and gives
me a smile that’s almost shy. “What?” he asks.
I realize I’m staring, and I quickly lower my gaze. “You make it look
easy.”
“It’s not,” he says, bare feet skimming the water. I swear I don’t think
the boy ever wears shoes. “So don’t feel bad, Elle. Your situation is
different, anyway.”
“I know.” I return his smile just so he doesn’t feel bad, and also so he
stops with that pitying look he’s giving me.
And then I sense it: a disturbance in the air, followed by dozens of
scents that set my nerves on end and send a chill rippling across my skin in
spite of the warm water.
Scents that don’t belong, insist my territorial, wolfish instincts. I give
my head a little shake, ignoring those instincts. Because human-me knows
who those scents belong to. The earthy, underlying scent of faery-folk; the
sour, musty smell that I swear all vampires have; the particular pine and
rain scent of the sorcerers from Blackwood…
“Somehow I’d almost forgotten it was council meeting day,” Liam says.
He yawns and stretches, rolls his shoulders—the sort of movements he
always makes when he’s anxious but trying to hide it.
I close my eyes and focus on the gentle current washing over me. “I’d
rather drown in this muddy water than see any of their judgmental faces.”
“Me too. Well, not the you drowning part. The not seeing their faces
part.”
“We could run away.”
“Your parents would kill you. And then they’d kill me for being your
accomplice.”
“They’d have to find us first,” I say with a grin.
The water sloshes over me as he wades into it. He grabs my hand and
pulls me upright, and my feet sink fast in the creek bed. He’s at least a foot
taller than me; I have to tilt my head way back to meet his eyes.
“A demonstration at every meeting… that was the agreement, wasn’t
it?” His voice is a bit timid. It always is when we talk about ‘the
agreement’—those terms by which our fellow supernatural allies agreed to
let me stay alive, and to live with my pack instead of instead of in some
prison somewhere.
And with my pack is where I want to be, even if my curse means I don’t
exactly fit in with them.
So I nod. “Yeah, I know. I’m not going anywhere.”
His hand is still in mine, thumb tracing along my palm. He must be able
to sense the anxiety thrumming through my veins, because, in an attempt at
a light tone, he asks, “Are you ready for whatever crazy test they plan on
putting you through this time?”
I think about lying, but Liam knows me too well to bother with it.
“Honestly? No. I feel like marching in there and just screaming at all of
them to leave me alone.”
“Well that won’t end well.” He drops my hand and rearranges his
footing into a more formidable stance. “Come on, we’ve still got a few
minutes—let’s go again. Take out your anxieties on me. No swords this
time, though. Deal? That old thing looks like it’s going to break apart if you
swing it too hard, anyway.”
“Actually,” I say in my exaggerated, total-weapon-nerd voice, “this
saber is made of crucible steel and forged using—”
“Elf magic and the fires of Mt. Doom, right?”
“Yes, that,” I deadpan. “That is exactly what I was going to say.”
“You’re a dork, Elle.”
“Shut-up, Liam.”
We exchange a perfectly childish expression, and then a smile, and then
my face turns serious again. We’ve been at this for hours now. But as much
as I’d like to quit, I understand why he’s pushing me; this anxiety inside me
has to go somewhere, or chances are it’s going to lead to me losing focus in
the middle of the council’s test.
“No swords, elvish or otherwise,” I agree, cracking my knuckles. “But
that doesn’t mean I’m going to go easy on you.”
“I’d be disappointed if you did.”
That familiar competitive smirk curves his lips.
 We sidestep our way out of the water and then we both freeze, muscles
tensing.
I twitch my fingers, trying to make him react.
He doesn’t fall for it.
Our stillness makes everything around me seem louder—the wind
shushing through the trees, the water dripping from my hair.
His fist swings forward.
I catch it, push off and dart to the side. Counterattack by sweeping my
foot at his ankles.
He jumps at the last second and I brush only the tips of toes, but it’s
enough to throw off his landing. He stumbles; I land a punch in his side.
Not as hard as I can, obviously, but hard enough that his retaliation has a
little more fire behind it, and suddenly he’s throwing punches so fast that I
can’t focus on anything except blocking them.
Left block, right block, left, right, left—
His hand slips past, catches me in the jaw.
“Oh, you’re going to pay for that.” I’m still smiling, but my eyes
narrow. That anxiety is twisting my gut, tightening my fists. All I want to
do is swing hard enough to somehow throw it out of my body. To swing, to
kick my way free of nerves, of the weight of judgmental stares and the
thought that, however many council tests I pass, I’m still never going to be
normal or fully accepted by most of my world.
I slam my fist forward.
Liam parries.
I slam my other fist.
Over and over, faster and faster—it’s turning wolfish, that twisting in
my gut, this sudden need to fight. The beast in me doesn’t even understand
what we’re fighting. It just senses my desperation and knows it wants to
live, to win, and so we are biting, clawing, snarling at everything in our
path.
“Elle, wait a second, calm down—”
I’m panting. Can’t tell if it’s creek water or sweat beading on my skin
anymore. My mind drums with a chaotic beat, but somehow I still notice
tiny things: things like the pressure building around my teeth. The way they
suddenly feel too small for my mouth. The sharpness I feel when my tongue
brushes across them.
 I see a vision of splitting sky, pinkish-red light leaking from it like
blood from a wound.
“Elle, stop.”
I draw back abruptly and drop to my knees. My vision flickers. I see
images of that familiar monster who haunts my nightmares. More bursts of
light. And then something new: a cloaked figure with shining green eyes,
their hand reaching out to me.
Then it’s all black.
Normal. Black. Normal.
Grey dots dancing in front of my eyes, then black again.
I feel hands on my shoulders, gripping tight. I manage a deep, almost
calm breath. I squeeze my eyes shut and say, “I’m fine.”
The hands loosen their grip, slightly. When I open my eyes, Liam’s
crouched in front of me, watching me with a concerned look. There’s no
trace of his playful smirk from before.
“Maybe that was a bad idea,” he says, softly.
“Did I…?”
He keeps his eyes locked on mine, clearly not wanting to answer my
unfinished question. But I can answer it just by glancing up.
A fine, smoke-colored mist is drifting down from the sky.
“Damn it.”
Fissure residue.
I swallow hard. “Did anything…?”
“I don’t think so. It was just a flicker. It didn’t last long enough for
anything to cross over.”
My throat tightens, though I believe he’s right; aside from the smoky
mist, the world looks normal. No gaping holes in it that I can see. And there
are no terrifying creatures in sight, unless you include the two of us—and
I’m far from terrifying at the moment, the way I’m curling around myself
and shaking.
There cannot be a third time.
“What are the chances that nobody felt that?” I ask, breathless and
unable to hold Liam’s gaze.
He’s quiet for what seems like an unnecessarily long and dramatic time,
and then he says: “Zero.”
I wince, about to protest his negativity. But then he nods to his right. I
follow his gaze, and suddenly I understand what he means—because there’s
a silver wolf watching us, perched on the crest of a hill some thirty feet
away.
And even with all the distance between us, I can practically feel the
piercing disappointment in my dad’s eyes.
 TWO

Visions and Scars

“I CAN EXPLAIN.”
My dad cuts me a sideways glance as we walk through the woods, back
toward home. He’s human now. Each of my steps is equal to about half of
one of his. His long legs are one of the few things I didn’t inherit from him
— in just about every other way, he can’t deny me; my hair started off light
and reddish like my mother’s, but it’s changed as I’ve gotten older, so now
my dad and I have the same wavy dark hair. The same fair skin. The same
light blue eyes. Although his skin is a lot more scarred than mine, and his
eyes usually look a lot more tired…
Particularly in moments like this.
“You knew what was coming today, Eleanor,” he says with a sigh. “Our
territory is swarming with creatures able to sense the slightest magical
disturbance—why would you risk such an intense training session, when
you knew the sort of risk it could pose?”
“I thought it would help me focus. And it wasn’t that intense at first, we
were just messing around, we—”
“This is not a game.”
I trudge along in silence for a few minutes. My gaze drifts toward the
trees around us, to occasional flashes of Liam’s white fur breaking up the
greenery.
He shifted back to his wolf form basically immediately after catching
sight of my dad. Gave some excuse about it being past his scheduled time to
sweep part of our pack’s territory in search of possible threats—but I know
better.
Truth is, my dad can be terrifying when he’s angry.
And Liam is a coward, and I’m totally going to call him out on it later.
Assuming I survive until later, which is feeling less likely with every
disappointed glare my father gives me.
“Nothing happened,” I say. “Nothing escaped from anywhere…. I just
saw a few images in my mind, and then I managed to make it all stop. I
didn’t destroy the world, okay? Just a stupid little scare; it’s not like this
hasn’t happened before.”
“What did you see?” His tone is suddenly mundane, almost; the
question is routine, after all. My parents ask about everything I see—
whether in nightmares or those visions I sometimes have during the
fleeting, loss-of-control moments. In addition to her innate elemental magic
—a rarity among shifter kind—my mom also has the gift of Sight, and her
visions have been known to predict the future and stuff. So there’s reason to
believe my ‘hallucinations’ might be worth paying attention to, as well. But
my mom is also an otherwise accomplished magic-user, fully in control of
her power and her beastly wolf side.
Unlike me.
“The same monsters as always,” I say.
Nothing from the future, only from my past mistakes.
My answer sounds as well-rehearsed as his question, but I find myself
slowing to a stop as I say it.
Dad looks back, curious at my sudden hesitation. “Is that all?”
I frown. “Actually…No, I guess it wasn’t. I saw a weird figure in a
cloak, too. Weird green eyes.” He watches me closely for a moment, like
he’s trying to decide if I’m just messing with him—and honestly I’m a bit
skeptical of myself, too.
Because for some reason I’d almost forgotten about that cloaked figure
until now.
Am I making it up?
I give my head a little shake, annoyed that I can’t even seem to control
my own thoughts, on top of everything else.
Yeah, I wouldn’t say I’m feeling super confident about the council’s
upcoming test.
 “Probably nothing to worry about,” Dad finally says, as if he can sense
that uncertainty. Actually, he probably can; fear has very distinct scent
markers that even a werewolf in human form can pick up on. And even if it
didn’t, we’re close enough that he’d probably know, anyway. He circles
back, lightly takes hold of my arm and urges me forward. “Let’s focus on
getting through this meeting and its test, how about?”
I’m quick to agree, because it means we don’t have to talk about my
most recent screw-up anymore.
We cross the rest of the forest in silence, slowing at the edge of our yard
as the comforting scent of food wraps around us. The crisp, bubbly skin of
fried chicken. The buttery scent of fresh bread. Chocolate. There’s
definitely chocolate of some kind involved. I’m really hoping it’s in the
form of a giant cake.
“Your Aunt Vanessa’s doing,” Dad says.
“I figured.” Vanessa is Liam’s mom. She isn’t technically my aunt by
blood, but I’ve grown up referring to her by the familial title, same as I do
most of the elders that live with us. It’s a pack thing.
And Aunt Vanessa insists that everyone, regardless of species, gets
along better if she fattens them up first. And she’s exceptionally good at
fattening people up. Even some of the more…wild ones in our pack—the
ones who have no problem chasing down fresh meat in the forest—rarely
turn down a dish made by her.
My mouth is watering by the time we reach the door, but Dad reminds
me that I’m not exactly presentable at the moment, and he insists I go
change into clothes that don’t smell like the creek and everything that’s ever
died in it.
“Hurry up,” he says. “Your mother is looking for you; I’ll distract her
for as long as I can.”
We share a slight, conspiratorial smile. It’s short lived, though, because
as soon as I duck into the hall that leads to my room, I just about collide
with the very person we were trying to avoid.
“Distract me from what, exactly?” my mother asks.
Damn supernatural hearing.
“And do I smell blood?”
My fingers clench on the hilt of my weapon, which I thought I’d
scrubbed thoroughly enough, but apparently not.
Damn supernatural senses of smell.
 My father catches up and attempts to sway her in our favor by way of a
sheepish smile, but her frown doesn’t budge.
“What were you doing?” she presses. “I sensed fissure movements, and
now I smell blood, and Elle, look at you—you didn’t forget what today was,
did you?”
As she talks, she’s pushing my dirty hair from my face, inspecting for
new cuts and bruises; it’s an anxious habit she’s had for as long as I can
remember, the way she almost always greets me like this. And it makes me
feel like a toddler who she accidently let out of her sight, but I usually just
endure it.
Because I understand why she does it.
Or I try to understand, at least. I try to remember that her own skin is
covered in scars that each carry a painful memory; that she’s blind in her
left eye for reasons she’s never wanted to talk about with me.
There’s a lot my parents don’t talk about with me, really; about wars
and magic that came before I was born. I just know that they’ve faced death
enough to become intimately familiar with it. Enough that they’re
convinced it might show up and snatch me away if they don’t watch me
closely enough.
Mom is worse than Dad.
It’s funny, because Alexandra Aurick-McClelland is unshakable around
other people—like when she’s donning her metaphorical crown as leader of
canine shifting kind, whether at council meetings or otherwise; but
whenever it’s just the three of us like this, it flips some sort of anxiety
switch that can usually only be switched off by Dad.
“She’s fine, Alex,” he says, intercepting her hand as she reaches to pick
a wet leaf from my hair. “And we already talked. Just a minor slip-up while
training.” I’m thankful when he doesn’t elaborate past that. He just holds
her hand and insists I get moving, and there’s no mention of my curse, or of
my visions of weird cloaked figures or anything else.
I escape to my room and place my blade in the smaller of my two
weapon cabinets, making a mental note to finish cleaning it later. My eyes
keep drifting back to those cabinets as I gather my things for a shower.
It started as a hobby, the weapon collecting, and I realize it would
probably strike most people as strange. Maybe a bit creepy—because what
seventeen-year-old girl collects deadly weapons for fun, really?
It’s more than that, though.
 I’ve made it a point to familiarize myself with every single one of those
blades, those bows, those guns, because it helps me feel a little less
powerless in my life full of dangerous and supernatural things. I can’t use
magic, or my beast form.
But at least I can make a weapon out of just about anything else.
I sense more bodies approaching, crossing the yard toward our house. I
don’t have to look out my window to recognize them. And, really, I smell
god-awful, and I should be hurrying up with the shower thing.
Something pulls me toward the window instead.
Something makes me feel like studying all of the pseudo-humans below,
even though I’ve seen them dozens of times: The familiar pale face of
Myran Greenguard, the only member of the Seelie Court who regularly
attends these meetings; the cluster of head witches from the New England
collected territories, who are all decidedly friendlier than Myran, and who
are dressed in their usual flowy white dresses; the members of different
vampire covens who all wear similar cloaks to protect against the light of
the setting sun...and the list goes on.
It’s a very colorful parade of supernatural, freakish things.
Liam once joked that we could sell tickets to humans for this spectacle.
The council would put us to death for it, yeah, but we’d be millionaires for
a while, at least.
I smile at the memory of that conversation, and I start to turn away.
But that’s when I notice it: Someone I don’t recognize, trailing behind
the group of Blackwood sorcerers that’s just emerged from the trees.
He doesn’t look much older than me, and he’s wearing the same
pendant as all those other sorcerers from the Blackwood lineage—the one
with a golden chain and a tiny, clear diamond filled with blood that catches
the setting sun’s light. He walks with an easy, unconcerned stride. Lifts his
head with the same sort of nonchalant effort and glances straight at my
window.
Straight at me.
And his eyes are the same, unmistakable green that I saw in my vision.
 THREE

Tests and Control

“ELLE? ELEANOR? ELLEEEEE?”

“What?”
“Are you even listening to me?”
I blink several times, forcing myself to meet the golden eyes staring at
me through oversized, retro black glasses. “Sorry, Carys,” I say with an
apologetic sigh.
The third part of the trio completed by myself and Liam mirrors my
sigh, twisting her long, black hair around her fingers. The ‘troublemaking
trio’. That’s what her father, Eli, calls us.
We very probably deserve it.
Or at least Liam and I do. Carys is the youngest, but admittedly the
most straight-laced of the three of us. The last time we tried to talk her into
sneaking out in the middle of the night— off to check out a waterfall pool
that isn’t technically located within our pack’s territory— she responded by
lecturing us for thirty minutes about the sort of disease-causing microbes
that can be found in rivers, offering us a book on the subject, and then
rolling over and going back to sleep. We left the book, and caught no
diseases (that I know of). But it hasn’t stopped her from trying to ‘educate’
us on a regular basis. Like right now—she’s got another huge book
unfolded, taking up her entire lap, and its pages are marked with post-it
flags and slips of paper with messy notes scribbled on them.
She’s been trying to help me with last minute preparations for my
council test. And I appreciate it. I really do. I feel bad for letting my
attention drift, but all her notes about the history of the Blackwood
sorcerers, and their common ancestor and his magic, were starting to make
my head spin. They’re the ones responsible for conceiving and conducting
my test this time, which further explains why Mom was so uptight earlier.
My parents’ dislike of the Blackwoods isn’t exactly a secret.
That’s not the only thing that’s making it hard to focus, though.
I tried to find that green-eyed boy again. But there’s been no sign of him
since I left my room, and the few people I asked brushed me off like they
had no idea who I was talking about. Like I might be crazy or something.
“I give up,” Carys declares, snapping the book shut and making me
jump. “You’re not listening, obviously.”
“I’m a lost cause.”
She nods. “Well, I only have two simple pieces of advice for you, then.”
“Which are…?”
“Don’t do anything stupid, and don’t die.”
“In that order of importance?” I mime writing her notes on my hand,
because it makes her laugh even as she’s rolling her eyes at me. “And can
you elaborate on what you mean by stupid, maybe? I think I need a
powerpoint presentation on the subject, if you happen to have one?”
“I would have made one if I’d thought you could have stayed awake
through it,” she says dryly.
“She’ll be fine, Carys,” Liam says. “Stop worrying so much. You’re
making me nervous.” He sinks down on the couch next to me, plate of
chocolate cake in hand. I attempt to swipe a corner of it. He jabs at my hand
and shoos me away with his fork. “Not a chance, Shorty.”
“This could be my last meal,” I insist. “I might be marching to my
doom in a few minutes, and you’re going to deny me cake?”
“Yes, I am. Especially since I know for a fact you already ate a piece.”
“She had two pieces,” Carys corrects.
Typical.
Always insisting on sharing all the facts.
“Also: I wish you would take this more seriously, Elle,” she laments.
I settle back, disgruntled and cakeless. After a moment of enduring
Carys’s frown, I say, “Random question: Does Maric have a son?”
Maric is the leader of the Blackwood sorcerers—their blood king, as
they refer to him. The blood part is because he’s a direct descendant of
Orion Blackwood. Or at least I think that’s what Carys said his ancestor’s
name was… She showed me this crazy family tree thing too, and she
threatened to quiz me on it. So I do know that all of the sorcerers in this
group refer to themselves as part of the Blackwood Clan, but only a few—
like Maric—are actually descendants of that original, most powerful
bloodline.
Which gives us something in common, I guess. Not that I want to have
anything in common with that creep. But I’m also a descendant of an
extremely powerful creature; my great-grandfather was a powerful dude by
the name of Cyrus Aurick, a lycan who single-handedly changed the history
of our kind through decisions that had long-reaching effects on my mother’s
life—and ultimately, on mine. Our magic, our visions, our power…it all
comes from that bloodline.
Not like it really matters since, as I mentioned before—I can’t use any
of that power I inherited without destroying the world.
But I’m digressing. Again. It’s a bad habit.
Carys looks cautiously optimistic that I’m at least focusing on
something other than cake. “He had a daughter, I think. I don’t remember
the details; but I’m pretty sure she died a long time ago.”
Well there goes that theory.
“Why do you ask?”
“I saw this guy earlier…” I hesitate, suppressing a shiver at the thought
of those striking eyes. “I didn’t recognize him, but I could have sworn he
looked exactly like a younger version of Maric. I thought maybe it was
bring-your-kid-to-work day or something. But if he’s dead…”
“You’re seeing ghosts now, too?” Liam teases, shoveling another bite of
cake in his mouth. “Weirdo.”
“No one said you had to be friends with me,” I point out. “Also, I may
be weird, but at least I’m not a slob. Seriously—where did you learn how to
use a fork?”
“I’m self-taught.”
“It shows.”
“Aaand we’ve derailed again,” Carys sighs.
The derailment doesn’t last, because a minute later the double doors to
the sitting room open. All three of us fall silent and solemn as my mom
steps inside.
Gone are her fidgeting hands, her nervous glances; she’s in Empress of
Wolves mode now as she gently smiles at me and beckons me to her side.
 “Good luck,” Carys and Liam say together.
I give them a little salute and hop to my feet, my movements full of a
confidence that melts away as soon as I leave the room. I shut the door
quickly, leaving just me and Mom and a long walk to the courtyard, where
the council’s meeting has been taking place. She doesn’t say anything for
several minutes.
I can feel the strain of our relationship in moments like this; our quiet is
always different than the comfortable silence I share with Dad.
It isn’t bad, but it’s… heavier.
She would never admit it, but sometimes I think she regrets having me.
Or, more like, she feels guilty for having me, because she feels responsible
for giving birth to someone who could, you know, possibly destroy this
world or whatever.
And I never asked her for an apology—don’t need one, thanks—but
sometimes I catch her looking at me as if she wants to say sorry.
"You know the Blackwood clan is fond of illusion magic,” my mom
finally says.
“Yeah. Carys reminded me. I know more about the origin of their magic
than any person could possibly ever need to, thanks to her.”
The corner of her lip quirks, but the almost-smile fades as she grabs my
hand and pulls me to a stop. “So hold on to what you know,” she says, her
gaze locking on mine. “Remember that however they try to test you, it
likely isn’t even real. And even if it is real, you’re strong enough to focus
through it. You’re stronger than all of these people who insist on testing
you. You understand that, right, Eleanor?”
She sounds overly anxious, even by her standards.
I nod, trying to reassure her with a confident smile. But suddenly I’m
like a nervous little kid on her first day of kindergarten, and I can’t help
blurting out: "I had a strange vision earlier.”
“I know you did.”
“You know?”
She lifts an eyebrow, crinkling the white patch that covers her scarred
and blind eye. “Your father knows better than to keep secrets from me after
all these years,” she says.
“So… what do you think?”
She gives my hand a little squeeze and turns once again to face the door
that leads to the backyard. I can hear the voices of the council members on
the other side of it.
Growing restless, it sounds like.
“I think he was right to suggest we focus on getting through this test
first,” Mom says.
I can’t really argue, because suddenly that door is being opened by my
Uncle Eli, and he’s beckoning us outside. My mom is back to empress-
mode. I try to follow suit; my head is high, my steps resolute, my face
impassive.
“They’re ready for her,” Uncle Eli says, pointing toward the spot on the
lawn where most of the council has gathered. The so-called blood king,
Maric, is at the center of this group. When he sees me he holds up a hand,
and all the conversation around him stops.
One-by-one, people turn to look at me.
I’m always greeted with an interesting mix of expressions when I walk
into one of these meetings. Tonight is no different. A few try to offer me
kindness, sympathy; others wear thinly-veiled fear on their faces. And then
there are plenty like Maric, who look confident to the point of smugness—
as if they’ve finally caught a wanted criminal and can’t wait to watch me
fumble and accidentally incriminate my guilty self.
The smugness almost makes sense this time. Because as I come to a
stop in front of him, the first thing Maric says is, “Several of us sensed a bit
of a…disturbance earlier. Further proof that control is becoming more
difficult for you, isn’t it? I believe some of us predicted it would do so, as
you got older.” He glances around and is met by agreeable nods and
murmuring; neither of which he needs, because he already knows he’s right.
I have found my strange blood more difficult to control, ever since all
that hormonal crap that human teenagers get to endure started happening to
me. It happened later than normal, at least—not until I turned sixteen,
because it turns out having a dormant wolf in you really screws with your
biological clock. But yeah, it definitely didn’t make it easier to harness the
dangerous side of me.
As evidenced by that ‘disturbance’ earlier.
Instead of admitting that to this asshole, though, I stare directly into his
cold gaze and say, “A small mistake. I fixed it quickly.”
“Small mistakes can have big consequences. The mistake of letting you
run free for this long, for example, might prove to have disastrous
consequences for us all.”
 There’s some movement at this last statement. Uncomfortable shuffling.
But I swallow down the retort building in my throat. I know my parents
wouldn’t approve of me saying it, no matter how much they dislike Maric
and his kind and all the hateful things they spew.
Pack first, is what they would say. Think of all the lives that would be at
risk if we don’t respect our alliances and at least try to keep the peace.
With that in mind, and with a quick glance at my dad, who tilts his head
toward me in reassurance, I keep my voice even as I say, “I am not a
mistake. And I will prove it again tonight, same as I’ve been doing for over
a decade now.”
Maric gives me a tight-lipped smile as he extends a hand in front of
him, palm flat toward the sky. “No one will be more thrilled than I to see
that proof,” he claims.
Black flames dance up from the spaces between his fingers.
“In accordance with the addendum to this council’s laws, set forth in the
second week following your birth and the emergence of the mark of Canath,
and then further amended following the deadly fissuring incidents you were
found directly responsible for, it is my solemn duty to administer this test,
to determine your willingness to control your power for the sake of yourself
and the safety of our world.”
There’s a weird sensation prickling the back of my neck.
I can sense several people taking a step back.
Focus, Elle.
“Let’s begin.”
The black flames writhe their way around his hand, up his arm, around
his entire body.
They leap toward me.
I know it’s an illusion, but I have to force myself to hold still. The
flames crackle and dance around my body. Grey smoke fills the space
between me and Maric. It builds and builds, growing thicker and thicker.
Then it collapses in an instant, and he’s gone.
No, not gone. Just going, I realize as I’m swatting at the smoke, which
clears in a disturbingly convincing way—as if it had been real all along.
Maric is already twenty feet away. Leaving and motioning for the rest of his
fellow sorcerers to follow him. He looks wild. Furious.
I don’t understand what’s happening.
 But I was so eager to prove him wrong—so ready to kick this stupid
test’s ass—that I can’t stop myself from jogging after him.
“Hey! I’m not finished with you!”
He spins around, so violently quick that I stumble to a stop.
“Oh, but you are finished.” His voice is chillingly calm. “Your entire
pack is finished, because we have decided that we are finished with catering
to their ridiculous insistence that we keep performing these tests, when we
all already know what is going to happen in the end.”
“You don’t know—”
“You are too weak to safely carry that dangerous mark.”
All around us, the air begins to hum with uneasy power. Several of my
pack are in their wolf forms, and the sound of their anxious whining and
low, rumbling growls makes my breath catch.
They’re preparing to fight.
You know, the exact thing I was trying to prevent by showing up and
passing this test.
This is all wrong.
What is going on?
Then it happens in an instant, before I can do anything else to prevent it:
The raven-haired sorceress to Maric’s right lifts her hand, conjures up a ball
of crackling yellow energy, and flings it.
It strikes a grayish-white wolf—Sam Loflin, I think it looks like, though
I’m too terrified to see straight— and sends him flying across the yard,
tumbling through the patch of rose bushes that Carys has been growing as
part of a crossbreeding experiment.
I turn, frantically searching for her, afraid her and Liam will have made
it out here in time to see that. Injured pack member aside, screwing with
one of her experiments is one of the only ways to get Carys to lose her
temper and actually want to fight you.
But she’s nowhere to be seen.
Neither is Liam.
At least they’re safe, I think.
No one else in the yard is.
Because the second Maybe-Sam’s body hits the ground—lifeless and
smelling terribly of singed fur and blood—several wolves lunge for the
sorceress who struck him. She summons another orb of magic. Sweeps it
through those descending wolves and sends two more tumbling. But two
others reach her and lock their fangs and claws into her legs. She staggers,
with them attached, for several feet, and then she falls on her back.
A third wolf is at her throat an instant later.
I turn away, not wanting to see the fountain of blood I’m sure is
bubbling up.
My eyes fall on the woods.
And that’s where the rest of the Blackwood sorcerers come from.
They emerge from the trees in a haze of the same sort of smoke and
black fire that Maric called forth moments ago. I wouldn’t be surprised to
learn that this is their entire clan, because there are too many to even try to
count. Way more than I’ve ever seen, and way more than the agreed upon
number for this council meeting. Such an incredible show of force that it’s
essentially a declaration of war.
They never intended this to be a test.
This was going to be a massacre from the start.
And we aren’t even prepared to fight back, because how many times has
Mom drilled the word peace into our pack’s heads? Peace. These
demonstrations are about keeping the peace.
So half of that pack is not even here, and of the ones that are, most
aren’t even transformed.
All around me there are scrambling, vain attempts to try and find some
sort of order and properly fight back.
Some of the other council members are trying to stop the chaos.
Most are simply picking a side and joining into the quickly-escalating
fray.
I hear a shriek from somewhere to my right, and I immediately
recognize it.
Carys.
She’s pinned against a tree near the edge of the yard, held there by a
brute of a man—vampire, maybe?— with a gun in his hand.
If I had to guess, I’d say there are silver-coated bullets in that gun.
Out of the corner of my eye I see her mom, my Aunt Katie, trying
desperately to get to her. But she’s being violently cut off by a group of
asshole vampires who are taking turns swiping at her with their clawed
hands and kicking her with their heavy boots. I’m not sure anybody else
even noticed Carys; she’s so small and completely eclipsed by her attacker,
and her screech is just one of dozens.
 I have no weapon.
This is probably going to end poorly.
I race toward Carys anyway.
I make it within ten feet of her when a shadow overtakes me. I’m
slammed into and sent sprawling across the ground. My head catches the
edge of a sawed off tree stump on the way down, and it rakes bloody
scratches across my face.
I fight my way to my hands and knees and find Maric Blackwood
himself looming over me.
In his hand are those dancing black flames, and as I watch, they stretch
and sharpen into a sword-like shape. He points it toward me. Swipes it back
and forth a few times, making little sparks of it peel off and sizzle in the air
for a moment before disappearing.
I scramble backward and trip several times trying to get to my feet.
He follows.
“Aren’t you going to fight?” he asks, his lips playing into a cruel smile.
“You know you want to.”
The wolf inside me surges, desperate to answer by clawing his face off.
And why not? What does it matter now?
There’s no peace left to keep.
Carys is no longer screaming.
Is she even alive?
The fear of what might have happened to her takes me in a cruel grip,
squeezing me a little closer to violence. The tips of my fingers tingle and
itch, my claws trying to extend. My whole body shudders, muscles rippling,
building—
“Go on.” Maric’s voice is hardly above a whisper. “It’s okay to give in,
you know. It was only a matter of time before you did. Even your dear
parents knew that, child.”
I shake my head. Take a deep breath, and manage to think three words:
Human. Control. Peace.
The three words of my existence.
Human.
Control.
Peace.
But the wind is picking up anyway. It’s making the scratches on my face
sting. And the lighting around us is changing, bathing everything in the sick
yellow-green hue that comes before a storm.
Or before a fissure.
“No,” I groan, closing my eyes.
I’m in control, I’m in control...
Maric’s voice floats down to me: “You see? Your parents can’t even
stand to look at you now. They knew you would fail. I only wonder why
they’ve allowed you to suffer so long, instead of just putting you out of
your misery before you caused this disaster.”
I open my eyes and glance around.
Disaster is an understatement.
Several fights have stopped, the blood-streaked and torn up combatants
turning my way now that Maric has me cornered, all of them watching to
see what he’ll do. But still others keep fighting. The air is brimming with
smoke and waves of magical energy, and filled with the sounds of painful
cries and moans.
Somehow I find my parents through the haze, standing hand in hand in
front of several members of our pack.
Maric is right: They seem to be purposely trying not to look at me. They
aren’t searching for me. They aren’t worried about me.
And that’s when I know.
“This is not real.”
The flame-sword in Maric’s hand flickers, and the scene around us
begins to do the same.
“You bastard,” I growl. “What kind of sick, twisted illusion—”
That illusion shatters the rest of the way, like a curtain falling away to
reveal the true scene. But parts of it remain the same: the lighting is still
strange. The uneasy energy of magic is still lifting hackles and making all
the different council members shuffle anxiously.
My face is still bleeding.
And my dad is not happy about that last part.
He closes the space between him and Maric with frightening speed.
“The rules of our agreement say that you are not allowed to actually touch
her,” he snarls, taking hold of the sorcerer’s arm and jerking it so hard that
Maric drops what’s left of his magic. The flames hiss and extinguish against
the ground.
“Kael! Stop!” my mom shouts.
 But he isn’t listening—not to her, and not to me either, even when I
insist, over and over again, that I’m okay. I’m not even sure he can hear me
over Maric’s angry shouting, or over the sorcerer king’s violently sparking
magic.
So much anger.
So much chaos escalating now, all because of me.
And it’s all real this time. Not an illusion. I can reach out and grab the
bodies scuffling, fighting and tangling with each other all around me, and I
can feel their weight as I try uselessly to pull them apart.
My muscles begin to twitch again. I drop to my knees and grasp my
head in my hands, bury my face into the cool earth and try to shut out that
primal voice in my head, the one that’s crying that I don’t have to be
useless, that I could fight, I could shift, I could destroy all these cruel
people who insist on testing me, pushing me, fighting me.
I can’t drown out that voice.
I feel my buried magic burning, urged on by my wolf. My palms
suddenly itch. Because lightning is dancing across them. Magic.
I’ve accidentally summoned magic.
Oh no.
A vicious CRACK rings from up above.
I look up—everyone looks up—because shimmering dust is floating
down over us.
It’s drifting out of a wide, grey blur against the otherwise clear sky. At a
glance, it just looks like a strange cloud. And a glance is all the time it lasts
for before it blinks out of sight, but it was long enough for something to
emerge. I saw it. Everyone saw it.
And now everyone is silent.
Still.
The fighting has stopped, because they’re all watching that shimmer of
falling dust as it materializes into a monster.
 FOUR

Fire and Sacrifice

“INSIDE,” my dad says, his calm tone obviously forced as he pulls me up

and gives me a little shove toward the house. “Now, Elle.”
“No! I can help, maybe I can fix this, reverse it somehow if I just—”
“You’ve done enough!” he shouts.
We both stare at each other in shock for a second.
He never shouts.
But he doesn’t apologize. There’s a nasty looking burn on his cheek
from Maric’s magic, and his breathing is hard, uneven. My mom is at his
side a second later, and her eyes dart toward me, more wild and afraid than
I’ve ever seen them.
“Go,” she commands, just as the creature falling from the sky fully
materializes, taking the shadowy shape of something that resembles a
massive bird with blazing red eyes. With every flap of its wings, more of
that shining dust rains down. People scramble to get out of its path, shoving
and screaming as they run.
And I hate this.
That I’ve caused this mess, and I can’t even stay and fight, because I’m
just in the way and liable to make it worse. I hate every step, but I still run
for the house. I pause at the front door just for a moment, just long enough
to glance back and find my parents, to make sure they’re still okay.
I don’t see them.
I’m still searching when I feel a hand on both my arms, dragging me
backwards into the house. I swing blindly, all of my pent up frustration and
irritation at the situation unleashed in the form of a swift punch that lands in
a hard set of abs.
“Um, ow?”
I manage to twist around to see Liam, just as he doubles over with an
arm wrapped around his stomach.
“What the hell was that for?” he demands.
“Because she’s tense, obviously. I told you to warn her first,” Carys
says, rolling her eyes at him as she slams the door shut. Then she tightens
the grip she still has on my arm and starts to drag me deeper into the house.
I sigh with relief to see them both safe. Then I remember my parents,
and I instantly jerk free of Carys’s grasp. “I need to go to my room. I need
to get a weapon.”
“No way,” Liam says, straightening up and jogging after us.
“Your mom has been in our head for the past five minutes, practically
screaming at us in thoughtspeech to take you away and lock you up if
things got bad,” Carys adds, giving me a sympathetic frown.
“And this is bad, if you didn’t notice,” Liam says.
A moment later something slams into the house hard enough to knock a
chandelier from the ceiling, sending it crashing to the floor and into a
million pieces of glass and plaster and dust. We have to jump aside to avoid
the glass shards that skid in every direction. A particularly large shard of
glass slides to a stop at my feet.
I stare at my reflection in it.
At the dried blood across my face.
“Basement bunker, now,” Carys is saying.
But the memory of Maric’s words is louder than her voice.
You caused this disaster.
I sprint towards my room.
“Elle! Stop!”
Thanks to his way longer legs, Liam is faster than I am, and a minute
later he’s jostling his way beside me in the narrow hallway, trying to get a
tight enough hold on my arm to stop me. I keep wriggling out of his grasp.
Stumbling along the runner rugs and bouncing ungracefully from wall to
wall. We fight almost all the way to my room like that before I finally slip
up—I trip over the elegantly carved leg of an accent table and slam into the
wall.
Liam grabs my arms and pins me against that wall.
 I’m too off-balanced to slip away immediately, and he has time to get a
proper grip and to exert his full strength which, as much as I hate to admit
it, is more than mine.
I keep struggling, but he’s pissed at me, his dark eyes are wild with
annoyance, and so it’s useless—he’s not letting go.
“I’m the one who brought that monster into this world,” I say, “so I
should be the one out there fighting it!”
“That thing is going to be drawn to you precisely because you’re the
one who brought it here—you know that. That’s what happened both times
you opened fissures before, right? It’s probably searching for you right now.
So we need to get you underground, somewhere where it can’t find you.”
He’s right, partly; the creatures I’ve released from that other world both
went for me almost immediately. We assumed it was because I’m stained
with the same essence of that world and its monsters, and that apparently
makes those monsters really, really interested in hunting me down before
they do anything else.
But in the absence of me, there’s another person who shares that same
tie to the other world—Mom.
The thought of that beast setting its sights on her makes me want to
throw up.
“Let it be drawn to me!” I try again to struggle free. Useless. Again. “It
just means I’ll have an easier shot to take it down!” I shout.
“No, it means that if you go back outside then you will most likely die.”
“Then let me die! Maybe I want to die.”
An awful gasp answers me: Carys has caught up just in time to overhear
this brash declaration. I wish I could take it back. Because I feel a little
guilty about the distraught look on the sweet, sensitive thing’s face.
But I also feel like those words held a little too much truth for me to
take them back, as messed up as that sounds.
Liam must have been able to hear that truth, too, because his grip
loosens a bit, and he fixes me with an uncharacteristically serious look.
“Don’t say things like that,” he says quietly.
I take a deep breath. I feel tears welling up.
How annoying.
I widen my eyes and give my head a little shake, trying to keep those
tears from falling. My voice is level when I answer him. “I have been
nothing but trouble for this pack since the day I was born.”
 “That isn’t your fault—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Another deep breath.
Keep it together, Elle.
“It doesn’t matter,” I repeat. “It is what it is, right? And it’s only going
to get worse. Things are getting harder for me to control. Maric was right. I
can’t pretend anymore. I can’t hide from this.”
As if the universe needs to remind me of that lack of control, it chooses
that moment to have the beast outside let out a high-pitched, cringe-
inducing shriek. I close my eyes against the thought of what the outside
scene must look like. Has that creature already killed?
Did any humans see it emerge?
How much irreversible damage has been done?
“Let me go,” I say, quieter now as I open my eyes and fix Liam with a
determined look. “At least let me go down fighting, okay?”
His expression softens, just the tiniest bit.
I don’t have to ask him if he understands what’s going through my head.
I already know that he does. And he proves it a second later by reluctantly
letting go of my arms and taking a step back.
“If you die, just know that you’ve killed me too.”
“How grossly romantic,” I say, blushing a bit.
He shakes his head. “No, I meant a literal death—as in your mother and
father will kill me for letting you do this.”
I manage to crack a bit of a grin despite the circumstances. “Then just
for you, I’ll try not to die and stuff.”
“Solid plan.”
“I always have one,” I lie, and then I sidestep around him and wrap a
still-speechless-and-distraught-looking Carys in my arms for a quick hug.
“You two go somewhere safer, please?” I add.
And then I sprint the rest of the way to my room.
I already have a weapon in mind: English longbow. Long-range,
powerful, and one of my personal favorite—and most-practiced-with—
bows. I just practiced with it yesterday in fact, which makes it an even
better choice; because it’s still strung, and the two dozen arrows I have for it
are already neatly loaded into a quiver that’s still resting in the corner next
to my closet. I grab the bow and quiver. Then I slap a bracer onto my arm
and tie it in place—because if you didn’t know, accidentally getting slapped
from the backlash of a string with a hundred-pound draw weight freaking
hurts—and I move on to part two of my plan.
Because I actually do have one of those, this time.
Sort of.
I race to Liam’s room, stumble my way over clothes and dirty dishes
and several other unidentifiable objects—I swear he’s such a slob—and I
throw open the window facing his bed. I climb through it and onto the roof.
People don’t usually think graceful climber when they think about wolf
shifters, but my lycan genes make me agile and fast, and strong enough to
get a good grip on even the narrowest edges as I jump from windowsill, to
shingled incline, to another windowsill, side to side and all the way up until
I’m at the highest point of the roof that I can keep my balance on.
The sky is the color of a half-healed bruise. What little sunlight is left is
strangled and weak. The air is drowning in the scent of blood and other
bodily fluids that are sour and pungent and distinctly not human.
From my vantage point I can see that the groups below—the ones who
didn’t run away—at least seem to have managed to fall into some sort of
order, and they’re fighting back against the bird-monster, whether by
weapons or magic.
None of it seems to be doing much good.
The creature is unbelievably fast, whipping in and out of trees like it’s
made of liquid.
It’s dodging almost everything they throw at it.
Dodging things, and then immediately circling back around and diving
after the pack of wolves that seem to be purposely leading it around the
yard and the woods. My pack. Trying to keep its attention on them so that
the others can attack, it seems like, even if those attacks aren’t actually
landing, nine times out of ten.
The creature keeps following them, because my mom is at the center—
still in her human form— and drawing it toward her, just as I’d expected.
She seems to be moving terribly, unusually slow.
For a moment, panic sinks its claws into me, and I have to fight off the
urge to jump immediately down, to run to my mom’s side and make sure
she’s okay.
But then I see fire. Not black like Maric’s, but orange and brilliant as
the sun—and I know it’s hers.
She’s still fighting.
 There’s no mistaking the weariness in all of them, though, so I don’t
know how much longer they’re going to last. I need to slow that bird down
somehow.
I need to line up a better shot.
I look to the trees, noting the way the wind is blowing their leaves, and
then I move so that wind is blowing my scent towards the creature. I carry
that essence of its world in my very blood, supposedly, so I’m hoping the
dried mess on my scratched face will be enough to catch an extra bit of its
attention.
It doesn’t do the trick.
So I take one of the long arrows out of my quiver, and I add some fresh
blood to the mix by tearing a path up my arm. I bite back a gasp of pain and
keep my eyes straight ahead. I’ll heal faster than an average human, yeah,
but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like hell in the meantime.
“Come on you stupid beast,” I mutter under my breath.
It swoops low, next to several of the New England witches, who attempt
to blast him with some sort of blue-tinted spell. It veers up sharply to avoid
the attack, and when it settles back into hunting mode, the rest of my pack
is already on the other side of the yard, panting and snarling and snapping.
But luck—for lack of a better word— funnels a gust of my scent
straight toward the monstrous bird, and it abruptly halts its pursuit of the
wolves.
It cranes its neck in my direction. Gives several slow, powerful flaps of
its wings to gain altitude. Its eyes are enormous, reflecting the sun at my
back in a way that makes them look like they’re a portal to hell itself.
Hell seems like a good place to start shooting at, I think.
It dives.
“NO!”
The voice screaming down below makes my hands fumble a bit, but I
still manage to notch an arrow and hold it steady.
The scent of my blood seems to be driving the hell-eyed bird as crazy as
I’d hoped it would, because it’s somehow moving even faster than before.
So fast and so reckless that there’s no way it’s going to be able to evade my
shot, if I can aim it just right....
I wait until the last possible second—until it’s close enough that its
massive shadow swallows me up and strains my sight, and I blink and
readjust in the darkness just in time to focus on the left eye.
 I draw and release in one furious, uninterrupted motion.
The arrow slams into my target, and the bird pulls up so quickly it
essentially somersaults, its clawed feet and the tips of its folded wings
grazing the side of the house and busting out several windows in the
process. It cries out in pain and anger. Struggles, but finds its balance and
then gives a vicious toss of its head that sends purplish-red blood streaming
from its eye.
Its other eye squints, fixes on me.
Nock, draw, release.
It’s as easy as breathing with this bow, and I’m strong and I’m fast—but
my aim is a little shaky, and my second arrow doesn’t sink completely into
its other eye; it just grazes the corner of it. Not enough to completely blind
it, in other words.
Just enough to completely piss it off.
It shakes the arrow from its punctured skin and tears after me.
I jump to a lower part of the roof.
It follows. Clearly off-kilter without proper eyesight; it tumbles and
bounces ungracefully around, throwing up a flurry of fiery red feathers in
its wake. It’s still insanely quick.
But then again, so am I.
I scramble to get far enough ahead to find another vantage point that I
can fire from. Not a particularly easy feat with the bow and quiver bouncing
awkwardly around on my shoulders, but I manage; I land somewhat
gracefully on a balcony attached to one of the upper bedrooms, find my
balance, and spin around.
Nock, draw, release.
The arrow hits the right eye dead center. And my follow-up is faster this
time: a second arrow flying, and then a third, one into both of what I
assume are its ears.
“Going to be hard to evade attacks now that your blind and deaf,” I call
to it—but my victory taunt is shortened by the fact that the beast is still
careening straight toward me.
There’s no direction behind its attack anymore, but it’s still attacking.
And it’s still massive and powerful.
Powerful enough that I don’t think this balcony is going to win when
the two collide, so I fling myself over the edge and end up in a dizzying roll
down the side of the house, slipping and scrambling for purchase and
eventually landing on my back on the ground, hard enough that it slams the
air from my lungs.
The creature falls after me.
Following my scent trail, maybe, however much it’s struggling to do so.
I could probably escape pretty easily if I could breathe properly. But I’m
still dazed from the fall, and my leg is twisted at an odd angle, and I can’t
do much other than pull myself to my hands and knees and painfully start to
crawl.
I make it maybe five feet before it’s on top of me.
But there are others converging—others it can’t see or hear or evade,
now— and in a flurry of spells and weapons the supernatural council makes
quick work of finishing the creature off.
It’s death cry rings in my ears for what feels like several minutes. The
scent of feathers scorched by magic is burning in my nostrils and making
my eyes water, so I don’t see the golden-white wolf bounding toward me
until she’s right in front of my face. My Aunt Vanessa. She lets out a low
whine at the sight of me, and her voice is in my head a moment later.
(Your father is furious with you, just so you know.)
“Where is he? Is he okay?”
She hesitates.
(He’s with your mother.)
“Is she okay?”
Instead of answering, she kneels down so I can throw an arm around her
and take a steadying grip on the ruff of fur around her neck. Her continued
silence is worse than anything she could have said. Aunt Vanessa isn’t the
silent type—she’s the bubbly, optimistic type that usually convinces my
parents to let me off easy when I do something stupid.
She gets stiffly to her feet, pulling me with her.
I hobble along with her for support for a few steps. But the pain in my
leg is getting worse, so after a moment I just haul myself the rest of the way
onto her back and press flat between her shoulder blades.
She races across the yard.
She’s still not speaking.
We dart into the woods, and I see my dad first. He’s down on one knee,
a human, surrounded by a circle of wolves who all have their ears pinned
back and their fangs bared, facing anyone trying to approach. They let us
pass, but they keep dozens of others at bay—dozens of different races of
creatures who are all whispering, exchanging glances, peering through trees
and craning their necks.
They’re all trying to get a better look at my mom, who is lying on the
ground in a puddle of blood, not moving.
 FIVE

Smoke and Sorrow

I SLIDE from Vanessa’s back and hit the ground numbly. I meant to hit that
ground running. But I feel like I weigh a million pounds, and my knees
keep trying to give out under my weight.
My dad doesn’t turn to me as I approach.
Still, I know I’ve been noticed, because everyone around him goes quiet
enough for me to hear him quietly ask, “Why are you not hiding, Eleanor?”
I hold my breath, waiting for the rest of the lecture. Kind of hoping for
it, really, because I think it would be less frightening than that still-forced
calmness in his voice.
He doesn’t say anything else.
I don’t have to answer him, thank every deity in existence, because at
that moment my mom finally moves. Finally speaks. Her words are slurred,
incomprehensible against my racing thoughts and my ears that are burning
with embarrassment at the wreck I’ve caused. But the sound of her voice
still makes almost everyone around us breathe a collected sigh of relief.
Someone runs to find my Aunt Katie, who worked as an ER nurse before
Carys was born, and who is usually our calm savior in moments like this.
The air is tense, and the sounds of scuffling and shouting matches can
still be heard in the yard behind us. Mom keeps trying to sit further up, to
arch her neck and get a better look, to talk someone into helping her up so
that she can go address that unrest.
Everyone insists that she be still.
 Dad looks like he’s ready to tie her down just so he doesn’t have to keep
repeating the words Be still before you bleed to death, for god’s sake.
He’s talking to her in that same tone he used with me. Stoic, somehow
— like this is all just a minor inconvenience and everything is going to be
fine, just fine.
But there is an awful lot of blood on Mom’s side.
She soon wins the battle to get to her feet, only because suddenly there’s
no one to stop her; everyone is distracted by the sight of Maric Blackwood
approaching, moving through the trees toward us. He’s flanked on either
side by a half dozen very angry looking sorcerers.
“Eleanor,” my mom says, sharply. She motions for me to get behind her.
It doesn’t seem right, hiding behind someone who can hardly stand for all
the blood she’s lost. But she has that determined set to her jaw and that
clench of her fists that tells me not to argue.
Besides, it feels like I’ve already caused enough trouble for one day.
I slink behind her. Her body flinches at my sudden closeness—
adrenaline driven and automatic at this point, I think. I offer my arm, and
she squeezes it for a moment until she finds balance again.
There are bloody fingerprints on my skin when she pulls away.
Dad positions himself between us and Maric. Several of our pack fold in
beside him, hackles risen and teeth bared. The wolves are large enough to
stare the sorcerers in the eye, but I swear not a single one of those sorcerers
flinches as they approach.
“You cannot honestly think that you can still protect her now.” Maric’s
voice is low and threatening, and maybe a bit deranged, at this point. It
sends growls rippling through the wolves in front of me.
“Get off of our territory,” my dad says, his voice just as low, just as
threatening.
“Your territory is our territory during these council meetings. That was
part of the agreement. So you are not ordering us away from anywhere until
our business here is finished. And it is not finished.”
“There is no council. I am dissolving it as of right now.”
Maric laughs. It’s a cold, empty sort of chuckle. “You don’t get to
change the rules of the game just because you’ve lost. Just because she
failed.”
“She only failed because you didn’t stick to the agreed upon terms.”
 I shuffle uncomfortably, my fingers reaching for the bow still slung over
my shoulder, wrapping tightly around the curved wood.
“She failed because she is too weak to carry that mark!”
Everyone is watching me. No one is defending me—even my parents
seem momentarily lost for words. Not that I want or expect anyone to
defend me now. Not that I could do it myself.
Because what is there to defend?
The woods are spinning around me, and my chest feels like it’s caving
in.
“She is not—” my dad begins.
“What does it matter?” I interrupt. “The point is that I failed. He’s
right.”
Silence.
Then my dad’s voice, faint but determined and in my thoughts: (That’s
enough.)
But it isn’t enough.
Nothing I’ve done is enough—not my trainings, not these tests, not my
eighteen years’ worth of trying to be strong enough to overcome this
sickness I was born with.
And I’m tired of spreading that sickness to the rest of my pack.
I can’t stand the sight of my mom covered in blood, barely able to stand,
unable to lead the way she needs to because of me.
I can’t stomach the thought of how many died here tonight because of
me.
So I step around my mom, and I meet Maric’s appraising gaze.
“Years ago you offered me a choice,” I say, “of continuing these tests, or
of voluntarily committing myself to imprisonment.”
“I said that’s enough,” my dad says, spinning toward me and grabbing
hold of my arm to keep me from walking any closer to our enemy.
“Vanessa, take her—” He tries to pull me toward my aunt.
But with a vicious surge of strength—one that makes my mark itch and
the air seem to shudder—I break free, and I close the space between myself
and the sorcerer king.
“Well I volunteer.” My voice trembles a bit. “Lock me up. I can’t do this
anymore.”
My parents and most of my pack start forward.
 Without taking his eyes off me, Maric lifts a hand and conjures black
flames up from the ground itself, creating a wall that separates our two
groups. The rest of his group follows his example, reinforcing that barrier
until it burns so fiercely that I can just barely make out my dad’s eyes
staring from the other side. They’re wide and furious.
And heartbroken.
I force myself not to look at him anymore.
Not at him, or at my mom as she stumbles to his side.
I look only at Maric.
“So let’s just go, then,” I say quietly.
The sorcerer stares at me.
Then his fingers reach and grip me beneath the chin, lifting my eyes to
his as if he’s searching them for evidence of trickery. Which he apparently
doesn’t see, because his mouth soon curves into a victorious smirk.
The fire is not entirely an illusion this time—or else it’s such an
advanced illusion that it’s tricking other senses besides sight; a second later
I smell the awful scent of burnt fur and flesh, and I hear yelps of pain as
members of my pack try to fight their way through to me.
More pain because of me.
“Attempt one more intrusion like that,” Maric says with a cursory
glance toward that forcefield of flame, “and I will kill her right now.” His
hand slides into a light grip around my throat, emphasizing his point.
“Which is unnecessary. Because so long as she comes quietly, I don’t see
why we can’t take her alive. The prison that lies on our land is more than
equipped to contain even the most dangerous sort of magic, after all.”
It was built, centuries ago, during a civil war fought between the various
sorcerer lineages who had taken up residence in the northernmost region of
what would eventually become the state of Maine. Built to hold prisoners of
war, to withstand the magic of unimaginably powerful sorcerers.
So I have zero chance of escaping it, in other words.
Between that, and the rumors of the torture chambers that lie in the
deepest levels of that place, I should be terrified just thinking about it. But
instead, I’m picturing the person who told me all those facts about the
Blackwood Prison Complex—it was Carys, of course—and all I can think
about is that she’ll be much safer with me gone.
They all will.
 Our pack can just exist now, separate from the politics and problems
that come from these council meetings and the forced interaction with other
supernatural creatures.
Maric’s fingers trace the hollow of my throat. I fight the urge to kick
him as he lowers his voice and adds: “I’m glad you finally came to your
senses, even if the rest of your kind hasn’t managed to.”
The rest of my kind are getting more frantic. But the flames are
climbing higher, and though I can hear their distress—can smell it, even—I
at least don’t have to see it thanks to that barrier.
I should have been focusing on creating a barrier in my mind.
Because my mom’s voice is painfully clear, and I think it’s the only
thing that could come close to undoing my resolve at this point.
(Please don’t do this, Elle. Please.)
I grab my wrist, and I dig my fingers into it hard enough to draw blood.
(I’m sorry,) I think back. (I’m so, so sorry.)
There’s a grand flourish of smoke and flame, a strange stabbing
sensation against the side of my head, and I feel my consciousness slipping
as I’m dragged away.
 SIX

Questions and Keys

I WAKE up with my hands bound behind my back.

There’s magic at work in the restraints too, I think, because my full,
inhuman strength isn’t enough to even weaken them. They hold fast, and I
have to wobble my way to an upright position without the use of my arms.
There’s barely enough room to manage it in the cramped space; my elbows
scrape the rough stone wall behind me as I rock to my knees and then to my
feet.
In front of me is a black door.
Near the top of the room is a small window with bars so thick that the
amount of light they let in is basically pointless. There are no windows on
the walls above me, either, but when I look up I see a ceiling made of glass,
impossibly high above my narrow prison; it’s like I’ve fallen into a deep
well, and that pinprick of night sky that I can see is cruel and mocking and
impossibly far away.
Panic swells in me and makes breathing difficult for a moment.
I close my eyes and try to calm myself down.
My stomach twists with hunger. My mouth is so dry I can hardly
swallow. Even after I’ve managed a few deep breaths, and to get my hands
to stop shaking, my vision still dances wildly when I open my eyes again a
minute later.
I agreed to be restrained. To come to prison and be held here, for
safety’s sake. I remember that much.
Did I agree to torture, too?
 To starvation and dehydration?
My mark burns. It feels like the ground around me is shifting a bit.
Maybe I imagined it.
But after a few more agonizing minutes of lying there, I still have a
crazy thought: that I might be able to shift that ground more—really shift it
— if I just tried a little bit. That this prison isn’t nearly as formidable and
depressing as it looks; it’s just waiting for me to embrace the strength inside
me and tear it down.
Somewhere inside me is a voice saying no, we agreed to be locked up.
But my survival instincts are overpowering it.
I don’t want to die here.
So I start to rattle the bars of my cage a bit.
I let my mind slip, giving in to that power I feel sleeping, waking, rising
up in me. It shifts my fingers to claws that I manage to scrape against the
solid walls despite my handcuffs. It makes my muscles ripple, makes the
skin of my arms and legs suddenly feel too tight as those muscles grow
larger, stronger—
The ground rocks beneath me.
The lighting changes, as high above me the sky changes to a weird
shade of light purple.
I’m definitely not imagining it this time.
Then I hear a bored voice say: “It’s working, then.”
I notice a shadow passing over my thickly-barred window—a person.
My mind snaps back to a bit of clarity, to enough restraint that I can fall
fully back into my normal human shape. I deeply inhale, exhale several
times before I manage to call out in a scratchy voice that doesn’t sound like
mine at all.
“Who’s there?”
There’s a light thump against the prison door, as if someone just
casually plopped back against it. “The person assigned to guard this door,
obviously. Why? Were you expecting someone else?”
Oh good, smartassery.
The trait that bonds us all, regardless of species.
“What did you mean by it’s working?” I demand.
“They were trying to tear you down to the point that you might slip and
cause a fissure. They had a theory that if they starved and dehydrated you
enough, it might weaken you to the point that your sleeping power would
insist on unleashing itself, causing that aforementioned fissure. And it
seems they were right. You must be terribly weak by this point; it’s been
nearly three days since they brought you here.”
I lean against that door myself, pressing my cheek to the cold metal. I
close my eyes and focus on burying that sleeping power further down inside
me.
I don’t even know who they are, but I still want to prove them wrong.
I am not that weak.
“What they are you talking about, precisely?” I ask mysterious other-
side-of-the-door guy. “I was taken by the Blackwood sorcerers.”
“Yeah. Us. I say they, but technically I guess it should have been us,
because I’m one of them too, despite my mind constantly rejecting this
fact.”
“Well you…they…y’all—”
“Cute southern accent.”
“Shut up. It’s not cute. It only comes out when I get mad.”
The door vibrates slightly as he laughs while apparently still leaning
against it.
“You all,” I continue, trying not to sound flustered, “that is, the
Blackwood Sorcerers. They brought me here specifically because of the
danger of me creating those fissures. So why would they try to provoke me
now that I’m here? It makes no sense.”
“Oh, you fell for that, huh?” His voice is full of the sort of sympathy
that makes it clear he thinks I’m rather dumb. “The whole ‘we can’t let her
destroy the world’ bit.”
“Well why else would they have insisted on taking me—practically
starting a war over me—if not for some sort of greater good?”
He laughs again. I think it was my use of the words greater good that
did it.
“Not really seeing the humor in the situation,” I growl.
“Maybe it started off nobly enough, when you were younger. But you
want to know the truth?”
“I asked for it, didn’t I?”
“The truth is that you have a lot to learn, Little Wolf—”
“Yeah, don’t call me that.”
“—starting with the fact that the only good most of my kind now care
about is the kind of power that can prove good and useful to them. Which in
this case, is…well, you. And your potential talent for ripping apart worlds.”
Talent?
What the hell?
This curse is not a talent.
I stare up at what I can see of the sky. It’s back to a normal shade of
midnight, twinkling with stars. I have a terrible vision of that sky shifting
and those stars burning out, and I have to close my eyes and give my head a
little shake, trying to keep fear from paralyzing me.
“They want to harness your ability to summon terrible things from the
otherworld, and use that power for the greater evil.”
“I get it,” I hiss. “You don’t have to keep spelling it out.”
“Well you weren’t saying anything, so—”
“So I was thinking. Do you know how to do that?”
He laughs again, and I swear I’ve never been so annoyed by someone I
can’t even see.
But after a moment he asks, in a voice more thoughtful than I would
have believed him capable of: “What were you thinking of, precisely?”
I don’t hesitate. “I was thinking I would rather die than let them use me
like that.”
Quiet settles over us. It lasts for almost a full minute before I hear him
move away from the door.
I hold my breath, scared of losing this last anchor to the world outside,
even if he was annoying me.
Then I hear him messing with the lock.
He opens the door.
My eyes blink, adjusting to the sudden brightness of the relatively well-
lit halls that stretch away from my cell. And there he stands, with his head
tilted to the side, studying me for a moment before beckoning me out. I
don’t mean for my eyes to stay on him once they’ve finished adjusting, but
I can’t help it.
He is… good looking.
Painfully good looking.
A messy-yet-stylish tousle of sandy-blonde hair frames his strong jaw,
his deep grey eyes, his sun-bronzed complexion. He folds his arms across
his chest—a motion that emphasizes the well-toned muscles of his arms and
pulls his white shirt taut across his flat stomach—and he arches an eyebrow.
“I’m handsome, I get it. Stop staring, it’s rude.”
 “Assuming people think you’re handsome is rude,” I snap back.
He gives a careless nod, as if to say fair point. And then he fixes his
own stare back on me, studying me so intently that my face flushes
uncomfortably hot, and I can’t help but mumble: “So I can’t stare, but you
can?”
“I’m just making observations. Sorry, but I’ve heard your name so many
times, it’s just strange to finally put a face to it. You look different than I
imagined.”
“Different?”
“Shorter.”
“I’m still tall enough to kick your ass.”
He laughs again. “Okay, Little Wolf—”
“Seriously, stop it with that nickname.”
“—here’s what we are going to do.”
“We?”
“Uh-huh. Unless you want to stay here and figure this out on your
own?”
I do not.
So I manage to bite my tongue and listen, despite a million questions
and misgivings about the situation.
“I don’t agree with our so-called king’s plans for using you, so I’m
going to help you get out of this mess, but only if you agree to help me after
we’re clear of this place.”
“Help you with what, precisely?”
He glances around, checking for eavesdroppers I assume, and then
moves forward, backing me into the prison cell once more. I’m reluctant to
go, but his body pressing close to me makes me feel lightheaded and stupid.
So I quickly choose confinement over contact, and I take a step back.
I’m intensely aware of the binding around my wrists suddenly. And of
how much bigger he is, and how he moves with such deliberate, almost
intimidating motions.
I stand up straighter, trying to appear more formidable as he closes the
door behind us—not all the way; just enough that it conceals us and our
voices, although he still keeps his own voice low as he says, “I truly want
what some of my kind have claimed: Stability. No more chances of that
other world leaking through and destroying things and people that I care
about.”
 “I want the same thing. Obviously.”
Misgivings or no, my heart still flutters a bit at the way his eyes seem to
lighten with my words.
But then it sinks just as quickly, because I remember what I’ve heard
my entire life: That the world would be more stable if I had never been
born.
Or if I was dead.
“So I could just kill you, right?” he says. “That’s what you’re thinking.”
I try to contain the tremor that this statement sends spiking through my
blood.
“Except not,” he says. “Because you see how the world reacts to you
being under stress, right? There are a lot of people who have predicted that
you being killed might actually rip open an incredible, irreparable fissure—
one way more powerful and unpredictable than the ones they’re trying to
use you to trigger. So, that’s out.”
“Lucky me.”
“Right?” he says, either not hearing the sarcasm in my voice or else
choosing to ignore it. “What’s really lucky though,” he continues, “is that
there’s another option.”
“Which is…?”
“The curatorian keys.”
I hesitate. “Curatorian? Why does it sound like you just made that word
up? Wait…Are you making all of this up? Is this a trick?”
“Trust me, I’m not creative enough to come up with this sort of thing.
Because this is complicated stuff—I’ve spent years gathering as much
information as I can about it all. But we only have time for the short version
at the moment.” He does another sweeping check for listeners, and then
continues. “So the short version is that there are three of these ‘keys’,
spread across the world. Maybe more. But I’m sure of at least three, all of
them created at points where the other world—Canath— bled into ours for
a prolonged period of time before being closed up.
“During the ‘closing up’ part, these objects were created as a sort of
side-effect. Basically, the immense energy created by the break in the world
had to go somewhere—so it went into those three keys. And the lingering
existence of these objects is responsible for the link between Canath and
our earth being as strong as it currently is—strong enough that
abnormalities like you can trigger things like fissures.”
 “So if the keys were destroyed…”
“Then bam, the world becomes much, much more stable. Even with you
in it.”
It all sounds too easy. Too good to be true. Too obvious for me to have
never heard of it all before. Because I know my parents, my aunts and
uncles…they’ve all poured over every book in Uncle Eli’s vast library,
trying to come up with some sort of solution to me.
And for eighteen years, they’ve come up with nothing.
So I can’t help but ask, “But why couldn’t you just destroy them
yourself? Why do you need me?”
He steps closer.
I try to back up again, but there’s nowhere to go but into the wall.
He wavers, hands lifting a bit as if to say he means no harm, and then he
reaches for my arm. I tense, but for some reason I don’t try to draw away
again. “That mark on your wrist,” he says, his tone quiet and thoughtful in a
way that reminds me a bit of Uncle Eli—or his daughter— when he’s about
to go off on one of his theoretical rants. “If I’m right, it should help us track
down the locations of these keys, and then get them to reveal themselves to
us. Along with revealing whatever might be guarding them.”
“And what is guarding them, exactly?”
“Long story, those guardians—maybe we save it for later?”
I start to protest, but in the same instant, a shrill alarm sounds in the
hallway, and dread clenches my heart. “What is that?”
“That would be the security system. Goes off after the door’s been open
too long.”
“Then why in the hell didn’t you close it?”
“Honestly?”
I glare at him.
“Honestly, I forgot. I’m sort of new to breaking people out of prison.”
I shake my head in disbelief, but he’s not looking at me; he’s leaning out
of the cell and coolly darting his gaze back and forth.
“So you don’t really have a plan for breaking me out? Seriously?
None?”
“Well, I have magic.”
“And I have basically nothing! I’m trapped in this human form—you
get that, right? And I don’t even have any weapons!”
 “I also have this lucky dagger of mine, if that helps.” He retrieves the
blade in question from a sheath hidden against his lower back. It has a
slight, elegant curve to it and a hilt of beautiful gold that’s embedded with
blue jewels.
I stare at it for at least as long as I got caught up staring at him.
What can I say? I have an equal appreciation for pretty boys and pretty
weapons.
“And you did say you would rather die as opposed to them keeping you
here and using you, right?” he asks.
“Yes, but so—”
“So that’s a good thing, because we might actually be about to die.”
“Wow.”
He flashes me a smile that makes him look more attractive than
anybody has a right to be in a situation like this. “But in the event that we
don’t: You’re agreeing to help me, right?
“This is crazy. You’re crazy.”
“Yeah, but you’re probably at least a little less likely to die if you stick
with me, and I promise I won’t torture you, either. So. Decision time. Chop
chop.”
“Okay, fine, yes! If the alternative is death or torture, then obviously I
choose you!”
“Good.” He reaches into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out a small,
strangely-shaped black key, and works it into the magical cuffs binding me.
They disintegrate at the key’s turn, falling as ash against my skin.
I take a moment to rub the soreness from my wrists before snatching for
that beautiful dagger. He hands it over after only a second’s hesitation.
“That was my mom’s. Don’t lose it. And don’t mess it up.”
“The only thing I plan to mess up is anybody who gets between me and
the exit of this place. Now let’s go.”
He nods, and together we throw open the cell door.
 SEVEN

Deals and Decisions

WE MAKE it about a half of a step out of the cell before he grabs my arm.
“Hold up. I almost forgot something else.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah…do you ever feel like you have a million different windows
open in your brain—like on a computer, I mean, and there’s distracting
music playing on one, and you know that on another one there’s that
Wikipedia article on puffins that you were in the middle of reading, but you
can’t for the life of you find it, and it’s basically driving you crazy?”
I start to answer, but at that moment he takes my face in his hands and,
I’ll be honest, my thoughts get a little fuzzy.
“Well that’s been me for the past week, trying to plan all this,” he
mumbles, obviously struggling to concentrate.
The alarms are still sounding, and he’s still focused on my face. On
tracing the curve of my jaw with his fingers. On staring into my eyes so
intently, so carefully—like he’s trying to memorize every swirl of color in
them.
It would all seem very romantic if he hadn’t just mentioned that we
were probably going to die.
I try to swat his hand away.
He pulls back just for a second—just quickly enough to avoid getting
smacked—and then his hands are immediately back on my face, taking an
even more commanding grip this time. He presses his forehead to mine.
Whispers words that I’m too flustered to understand.
 “Are you insane?” I gasp.
“No, just a bit scattered at the moment.” His mouth is entirely too close
to mine as he speaks. I don’t breathe normally again until he finally draws
back and asks, “Did you not get my metaphor?”
“What are you even trying to…” I trail off as I feel a strange tingling
spreading over my skin. An odd tugging sensation on the corners of my
eyes. And then the weirdest thing: my hair— which up until this point had
been wound into a messy bun on top of my head—suddenly drops free and
cascades down my shoulders, and all the way down to the middle of my
back. It feels at least a foot longer than it should.
I hold up the dagger and I see something impossible in its gleaming
surface: I’ve been…transformed.
Darker skin; wider eyes that are brown instead of blue and that show no
trace of the exhaustion I’m still fighting; hair that’s reddish-brown instead
of my usual almost-black.
He closes the cell door with a quiet click, then leans over my shoulder,
surveys my reflection along with me for a second before he nods
approvingly. “I’m pretty damn good, aren’t I?”
I contain an eye roll at his arrogance, still focused on running my
fingers through what is not-my-hair. I can’t help but be a little awestruck,
because it is good. It doesn’t just look different; it feels different, too. A
shiver passes over my skin.
This is incredibly advanced illusionary magic.
What else does he know how to do?
“You did this just by touching me?”
“Physical contact with the object you’re trying to illusion helps,” he
says, giving me a little pat on the head for emphasis. “Along with reciting
certain words.”
I hear footsteps in the distance, and my awe turns to alarm. “I don’t…
who am I, what am I supposed to do here? I look different, but I’m not a
different person, really, so how can I—”
“Just walk normally. And don’t say anything stupid to anybody.”
“Says the guy who was stupidly rambling about puffin articles a minute
ago.”
“Or maybe just don’t talk at all,” he says under his breath. Then he
starts to walk, discreetly motioning for me to follow.
And what else am I going to do at this point?
 I take a deep, resolved breath and a second to find my balance in the
middle of my tired, dizzying thoughts. Then I tuck the dagger into my
sleeve and casually stroll after this strange boy.
Side by side, we pass several people walking briskly toward the cell I
left behind. They’re arguing with each other, or else arguing into phones or
handheld radios. None of them seem particularly interested in us. At first
I’m grateful for this. I keep my head down and keep walking.
But after a few minutes, it starts to seem strange.
So I wait until we reach a clear hallway, and then in a quiet voice I ask,
“I’m guessing that whatever you did to me, you’ve also done to yourself?
Because none of them seem to recognize you, or notice that you—my
supposed guard—have left your position outside my cell.”
He waits until we reach a door, one that leads to a covered walkway
between the grey building we were in and yet another grey building, before
he glances over at me and says, “Clever, aren’t you?”
“Well I’m not stupid,” I say dryly. “I don’t know what you really look
like, and I don’t even know your real name. So yeah, consider me
skeptical.”
“My name is Soren Blackwood, if it helps.”
“That could be an illusion, too—you could be making that up.”
“Technically all names are made up. All other words, too.”
“Yes, but what name was made up for you by your parents, smart ass?”
“I don’t have parents. I was grown in a lab.” He obviously means it as a
joke, but there’s a hard edge to the word parents that makes me think it
wouldn’t be wise to keep asking about his heritage at the moment.
So instead, I say, “And I also think it’s weird that you were the only one
who was guarding me.”
“I wasn’t.” He immediately tenses and starts to walk faster, as if he’s
trying to escape the fact that he just said that out loud.
I, on the other hand, slow down and start looking for other possible
exits. Ones that don’t involve him.
“What are you doing?” he asks, just barely tilting his head back enough
to see me.
“What happened to the other guards? What did you do to them so you
could get me alone, precisely?”
His eyes dart around, losing that unnaturally calm and collected
demeanor of his for a split second. Then he walks to me, splays his fingers
against my back, and steers me back into motion.
“Hey! Quit pushing me.”
“Hey, quit making so much noise.”
As if to prove I was being too loud, a man suddenly opens the door in
front of us. His eyes immediately land on the two of us. Soren relaxes his
pushing hand, drapes it more casually around my waist instead. I try to give
the man by the door what I hope is a casual nod and smile as we stroll by
him.
But his eyes linger too long on us.
I can feel those eyes burning into my back until we walk into the other
building. Once the door is shut, Soren and I both hesitate. I can tell he
wants to turn back to make sure we aren’t being followed, but he doesn’t.
Neither of us do.
“Illusion magic doesn’t last forever,” he says after we’ve walked a few
more steps and it’s clear that man we passed isn’t coming after us. Not
immediately, anyway. “It fades slowly, starting with the things that a
person’s sense of smell and hearing can pick up on. Well, those things and
the things they could touch—touch is the hardest sense to trick. Sight is the
easiest, and outward appearance is the easiest thing to change, and the last
thing that changes back. Sight alone is enough to fool the average person,
but the ones in here are better at spotting illusions than most, obviously.
There are marks that can give these spells away. And if they get suspicious,
they’ll….”
The sound of distant, braying dogs interrupts him, and he sighs.
“…They’ll get the dogs, or some other similar, equally nasty creature
that has better senses than they do.”
The hair on the nape of my neck stands up. Dizzying pressure dances
against the back of my skull and spreads in a shiver down my spine and
arms. My wolf side, trying to react. It realizes how tired I am, even as I’m
trudging on and refusing to admit that exhaustion. And it wants to be let
out. To somehow protect us.
I reach for my marked wrist and wrap a shaky hand around it. I try to
focus on the sharp curve of the dagger I’m holding below that marked wrist,
because I find thoughts of it protecting me much more comforting.
“These particular dogs are a pet project of one of the blood king’s
closest advisors,” Soren says of the still-braying creatures. He’s walking
faster now. “Dogs mixed with DNA from other creatures, and fortified with
some questionable, technically illegal magic. Man-eaters. Bred specifically
to enjoy the taste of blood.”
“Lovely.”
He looks like he has another smart-ass comment waiting, just for me,
but before he can get it out, we hear the sound of a door opening and
closing behind us. And then whimpering and the scrambling of clawed feet
and barking—all of it definitely in this building.
“Okay. Forget what I said about acting natural,” Soren whispers.
We run.
I’m faster than he is (thanks, werewolf genes), and even with my head
spinning from lack of sleep and food I still manage to get way ahead—until
I come to a dead end and then I remember that, oh yeah, I have no idea
where the hell I’m going.
I stop, and he catches up, grabs my arm without a word, and jerks me
back toward a spiral staircase that leads down into a storage area lit with
hazy florescent lights. There’s a wide door on the opposite side of the room.
He makes a beeline for it.
I follow soon after, but stop short as two men appear to Soren’s right, so
suddenly that I’m ninety-eight percent sure they just materialized out of thin
air. One slams into his side hard enough to send him crashing into a stack of
crates. As the crates topple around him, Soren regains his balance just in
time to intercept the second guy diving for him. He grabs the guy’s
shoulders and throws him to the ground with a surprising amount of force.
Then he trips his way through the scattered crates and continues toward the
door.
But there’s magic sparking around the hands of the assailant who’s still
standing. Black, nasty looking bolts of it.
He lifts his hands, taking aim.
And I’m not convinced Soren doesn’t deserve to get struck by lightning,
or that he’s anymore a hero than the ones attacking him.
But I am convinced he’s my ticket out of this place.
So I sprint forward, swoop up a crate, and slam the corner of it into the
side of Lightning Man’s head. I nearly lose my grip on the dagger in the
process; I consider using it to finish the job, but I’d rather avoid killing
anyone today if I can help it. So I just readjust my balance and my grip on
that weapon.
As I’m doing that, the man on the ground grabs for my ankles.
 I jump out of his encircling arms, plant one foot on the ground and then
kick the other one into his nose. Hard. It’s kind of unsettling how far my
foot sinks into his rat-like face. Like, there’s a chance that I might have just
left a permanent indentation in that face.
I shake off the morbid thought of that and race after Soren, who’s
waiting at the door, holding it open for me.
We burst into the humid, sticky summer night. Behind us, the prison
compound towers so high I can’t see the top of it, a black silhouette of sharp
angles and a stone face that makes it look like it belongs more in medieval
England than in northern Maine. I wonder what sort of tricks they’re pulling
to keep something like this hidden from the general public.
There’s a wide open field in front of us, and far, far in the distance I can
hear the sound of cars and other signs of civilization. Civilization that I’m
desperate to reach after the horror of that tiny little isolated cell.
The only problem is that no less than seven people are standing in front
of us, blocking my path to it. Two of them hold chains attached to those
beasts Soren was talking about. They’re just a tiny bit smaller than a
werewolf (like that’s saying much) and their eyes are glowing like red-hot
coals. Instead of fur they have scaly skin, and barbed tails—both of which
make them look like some sort of weird dragon/dog hybrid.
And somehow I don’t think I’d be surprised if it started spitting fire,
either.
A women holding one of the thick chains steps forward. She wraps that
chain a little tighter around her hand and gives it a sharp, commanding tug,
which seems to aggravate the beast further. It snaps at the air. Foamy drool
dribbles from the corners of its mouth.
“The dogs are uneasy,” the woman says. “They seem to think you’re
hiding something.” Her eyes narrow directly at me. “Reveal your true
selves. Now.”
Soren takes a step back and reaches for my hand.
“Do you trust me?” he whispers, his eyes still on the blockade in front
of us.
“What? I’ve known you for all of like five minutes, so I’m going to
have to go with ‘no, not freaking really’.”
“Well too bad. Hold on to me and close your eyes. Tightly.”
“I’m—”
“Now!”
 There’s an eye-wateringly bright flash of greyish-white light. Bright
enough to cause actual pain, and to make me let out a strangled cry along
with what sounds like every person who was facing us.
“You didn’t close your eyes, did you?” I hear Soren mutter.
Before I can answer, I’m jerked back into motion.
We sprint our way over a concrete path that feels increasingly broken
the longer we run. I’m half blind, nauseatingly dizzy, and I keep tripping
over stone chunks and potholes. I nearly break my ankle at least three times
before we slam to a stop. Then he basically throws me into what I’m pretty
sure is a massive pine tree— judging mostly by scent, since my world is
still just a blur of colors and vague shapes.
“You didn’t catch the full power of it, at least.”
“What was it, exactly?” I squint, trying to focus on the fuzzy shape of
him as he peers around the tree.
“Just a simple light spell. Elemental magic is not really my forte; it’s not
in my blood, so I know I’ll never be great at it— but I’ve been dabbling in
different magic disciplines for a while now. And this spell is one I’ve gotten
pretty confident at. It should disorient most of that group for a little while at
least. But of course, there will be others coming behind them, so we’re
going to need to move more quickly.”
“Okay, sure, just let me pop in my replacement eyes and I’ll be all set to
go.”
I can hear him already moving away from me, ignoring my sarcasm. I
squeeze my eyes open and shut, hard, several times, which is more or less a
useless exercise. I hold in an irritable sigh.
Sight is your weakest sense anyway, I remind myself. I try to focus on
using those other senses to track quickly after Soren.
It becomes obvious, after only a moment of focus, that his footsteps are
not the only ones close to me.
I spin around, dagger striking forward, at the exact moment the brush
behind me stirs with the sound of someone taking a flying leap at me.
My blade sinks into something thin and muscular—an arm, it feels like.
Hell if I can see it, but I can definitely feel the blood that flows over my
hand. It oozes down between my skin and the dagger’s hilt and makes my
grip slippery. I hold more tightly. Claw my other hand into that arm that my
weapon remains stuck in. Then I swing my attacker over my shoulder and
into the ground.
 A gasp of surprise rushes out of them.
Nearly blind or not, I’m still stronger than I look.
But still, yeah, nearly blind—so I don’t see the foot sweeping toward
my ankles in a counterattack.
It rips me off balance and I nearly do a face plant, jarring my wrists as I
try to break my fall. My grip on my dagger weakens, and before I can
recover it I’m yanked sideways. My head slams into a rock, which does
absolutely nothing to help my dizzy vision.
I blink and look in the direction I think is up. I find a massive shape
looming over me. Their knee is resting against my stomach and their hands
are wrestling for a grip on me, trying to pin my arms to my sides.
I feel that forbidden power stirring in my chest.
The trees bend and creak with a sudden gust of wind. Tiny rocks and
pine needles shiver and shake and bump into my skin.
No, I repeat to myself, over and over. No magic, no shifting.
I need a different weapon.
I grope for my fallen dagger. Don’t find it. All I find are lots and lots of
pinecones, scraping into my skin, digging uncomfortably into my back.
Their edges are sharp enough, I think.
So I improvise.
I slam my head forward into my attacker’s, and while he’s momentarily
stunned by it, I grab pinecone after pinecone and fling them as hard as I can
at his face, aiming specifically for his eyes. I channel all of my anger from
these past days into it, until they’re like little bullets, as hard as I’m
throwing them.
My eyesight is slowly returning— enough that I can see him stumbling
backward beneath my assault. It’s almost comical the way he’s falling all
himself to get away from me, and honestly I’m probably having a little too
much fun using pinecones as a deadly weapon. So much fun that Soren’s
sudden hand on my shoulder makes me jump.
“Close your eyes,” he says. “Run faster. These aren’t difficult
instructions I’ve been giving you—and yet I turn around, and you’re
somehow not behind me.”
“I had to pinecone this guy first,” I say, holding up one of said weapons
and giving it a little shake. The guy in question is backing away, looking
from us to over his shoulder, repeatedly. Checking to see if he has
reinforcements coming, I’d guess.
 I turn and jog after Soren before those reinforcements have time to
show up.
“First the crate, and now pinecones,” Soren says as I catch up—only
tripping on a few roots that I don’t quite see in the process. “I’m impressed
at your versatility.”
“Anything’s a weapon if you throw it hard enough.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Now hurry up. Getaway car’s ahead.”
“A getaway car? So you did plan at least part of this escape operation.”
“I planned a lot of it, actually. But you know what they say about the
best-laid plans, right? Anyway, a friend of mine is taking us as far as
Augusta, and then we’re hopping a train.”
“A train?”
“Less predictable and traceable than an airplane.”
“If you say so, I-Sort-of-Have-a-Plan Man.”
We race on in silence—save for the shouts and barks of our pursuers—
for another minute before my earlier misgivings start to make my stomach
clench uncomfortably. “But, you know, my mother would probably object
to me getting in a car with a strange boy,” I muse aloud.
“She’d probably also object to you dying at the hands of the people
we’re outrunning, right?”
“Those are not my only two options, you know. I feel pretty confident I
could manage to avoid dying, even without your help.”
He snorts out a laugh. “You’re underestimating the people chasing us.”
“We escaped them easily enough.”
“As soon as that illusion I put on you wears off, every sorcerer and ally
of my kind in the area—and there are a lot of them—is going to recognize
you. And good luck outrunning all of them. Especially once they send the
more experienced ones after you, and not just the few lackeys who were on
guard duty.”
He makes a decent point.
So I’m quiet for another moment, and then I comment: “It seems like
it’s lasted a long time already. Longer than I thought most of these sort of
spells could last.”
“I’m not like most sorts of spell-casters.”
I could have guessed that, after the advanced magic he used to
transform my actual, physical appearance. The way he doesn’t bother to
deny it…I can’t decide if that makes me feel better or worse.
 “Who are you, precisely?” I ask. “Not just your made-up name, either. I
want more than that.”
“I’m the person you agreed to help. And what else matters? I did my
part: I got you out. And we had a deal.” He stops suddenly, spins around to
face me so quickly that I nearly crash into him.
The edges of my vision are still a bit blurry, but I have no trouble
picking out his intense gaze among the forest’s shadows. It’s changed colors
a bit—to a darker, steelier grey that’s shot through with wolfish yellow.
“I hope you’re not turning your back on that deal already,” he says.
“I didn’t say that,” I mumble, shoving my way past him.
“Good,” he says. “Because we can’t let you fall back into their hands.
While you were in that cell, things were…Well, things were getting a bit
shaky before you woke up. And all the plans of our king we’re escalating
dangerously alongside your power.”
I bite my lip. I’m curious about what sort of fissures or other disasters I
might have caused while I was suffering in my unconscious state.
But I’m not brave enough to ask for any more details.
“I’m not going back,” I tell him. “Not alive, anyway. But I’m still not
convinced that you’re any more trustworthy than the ones we escaped, just
for the record.”
“Fair enough.”
“And these keys that you mentioned—yeah, not convinced you’re not
making all that up, either.”
“What would convince you, then?”
I think about it for a moment. “Maybe if I heard it from someone else.”
“Like who?”
I hesitate, even though I think of ‘who’ it would be almost immediately
— Carys. Who else?
She’s the smartest person I know.
And I’m not sure that involving her or any of my other pack members is
a good idea at this point, but I also have a feeling Carys—and Liam, too—
would freak if they found out I was running off with this Soren guy without
even dropping in at least for a quick hi, hello, I’m not dead so don’t worry.
Plus, if I’m going to go running off to save the world or whatever, I’m
going to need to pack a few of my favorite things first.
Soren glances over at me, expectant.
 And I’m out of ideas, so I stare back and in an even voice I ask, “What
are the chances that you could help me sneak back on to my own territory
for a bit?”
 EIGHT

Walls and Weightiness

“THIS IS INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS.”

“Yeah, you’ve mentioned that. Like what, twenty times now?” I check
my reflection in the still pool of water once more. Silvery-blonde hair and
bright green eyes this time.
It’s not a bad look on me.
We grabbed different clothes before hopping on our train, too, to help
mask my smell along with the spells Soren’s used. I opted for a pink shirt
and some of those preppy, pre-ripped jeans—not my style at all, which is all
the better in case someone other than Liam or Carys happens to see me.
Although despite Soren’s concerns, I don’t actually think that’s going to
happen. This pool is at the base of the same waterfall Liam and I have
trekked to several times in the past—Linville falls. And it’s technically
Laurel Cove pack territory, but those guys tend to roam to higher, cooler
elevations in the summer time. The scent of them is here, but it’s faint. Even
as a human I can tell that—though I don’t seem to have Soren convinced of
it.
“I keep mentioning it because you don’t seem to be growing any more
concerned, no matter how many times I point this out to you,” he says.
“And yet you keep saying it. You know what the definition of insanity
is, right? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different
results?”
“I just want to be sure you heard me.”
“My sense of hearing is almost as good as my sense of smell.”
 He occupies himself with waving a hand around a shock of grass jutting
out from under the rocks we’re perched upon. The blades change from
green to blue, then back to green again. A simple enough trick—especially
after the other things I’ve seen him do—but I still can’t help but be
distracted by it. I’m looking for a distraction, I think; trying not to focus on
how my friends aren’t here yet, and on what they’re going to say when they
do show up and witness my latest mess.
“How do you do that, exactly?”
He doesn’t take his attention off the grass. “It’s very… technical.
Compared to elemental magic which, as maybe you know, is more tied to
your heart and emotions. This is like…I look at something, and in my head
I can see the thing I want to transform it into, and my brain connects the
two—it sees all the similarities between the beginning object and what it
will eventually be. There are a remarkable number of similarities between
even the most different-looking objects, really, when you start talking about
atomic make-up and properties and such. And the well-trained, illusion-
magic-inclined mind can automatically find and grab hold of those
similarities.
“Then it just takes a bit of concentrated energy to twist the properties
the way you want them twisted. Almost like rewriting a computer code; a
few small changes can result in an entirely different appearance. That’s the
best way I can think to describe it, anyway.”
“It makes sense,” I say. “Sort of.”
“As much sense as the fact that you can really hear the voices of these
friends in your head through…what did you call it?”
“Thoughtspeech. And yes, I really can. I guess our different kinds each
have their own equally weird talents.”
“But they can’t hear all your thoughts, right?”
I shake my head. “You can keep people out. Most of the time. It’s harder
when you’re emotionally close to people or when you get worked up or
whatever, but not impossible. And I’m particularly good at keeping people
out.”
“Oh?”
“I think it’s because I’ve had a lot of practice shutting down my
emotions.”
I didn’t mean to say that last part out loud. Because it sounded a little
too angsty for my taste. And now Soren’s looking at me like he feels sorry
for me, and it kind of makes me want to dunk his head into the freezing
cold water and see how long he can hold his breath.
Also, I’m a little tired and grumpy.
Trains are about the only place I can’t fall asleep, turns out.
“I just meant because of, you know, this stupid thing.” I keep my tone
bored, and my movements casual, as I lift my arm and flash my cursed
mark toward him.
“I know what you meant.”
“So I’m basically a wall, when need be.”
“There has to be someone who can break it down.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “No. There isn’t. Not when I really put my
mind to it, anyway. Which is lucky for us, okay? Because that’s the reason I
was able to pinpoint my thoughts directly toward my two friends that I told
you about, instead of making some emotional declaration to my whole
freaking pack that I’m back, because trust me, that’s what I want to do. But
that would be a bad, messy idea. No matter how much I might miss them.”
My voice is stony. Not really inviting commentary, in other words.
But he is, I’m noticing, pretty much bursting with commentary that he
can’t seem to keep to himself.
“Agreed,” he says. “Family tends to be messy.”
I can’t stop myself from answering him. “I guess. But for me, there’s a
pack dynamic that you probably wouldn’t understand, and it makes all the
messiness worth it.”
He pulls a few of those blades of grass—now blue again—from the
ground with a few sharp yanks. “I don’t refer to my family as my pack, but
that doesn’t mean it’s any less complicated.”
“So what is that family going to say when they realize you’re missing,
and that you helped break me out of prison?”
He lets the wind sweep the grass from his hand and scatter it into the
water. Watches the spreading rings it creates for a moment, and then, in a
voice weirdly devoid of emotion he says: “My mom would be happy to hear
it, I think. My dad will probably want to kill me when he finds out. And
he’ll probably try to.”
“Wow.”
“Messy, like I said.”
“So I take it you’re not close with—”
 He holds up a hand and his mouth twists into a tight-lipped smile.
“Nope.”
“Nope?”
“Nope, I’m not talking about my family with you. Or about my hopes
and dreams or beliefs or any of that crap—you and I are business partners,
essentially.”
“Um, you’re the one who mentioned the word family first, not me.”
“Still, for the good of the world, let’s just focus on our mission, how
about? Three keys, and then we seal off the other world from ours, and
everybody lives happily ever after.”
“Except for you, because your father would rather kill you than see that
other world permanently closed off, apparently?”
He shrugs. “Well we can’t all be happy, now can we? Happiness can’t
exist without some sadness.”
“That’s very poetic.” Poetic might be a stretch, but I don’t really
disagree with what he’s saying. And I’m not really the type to try and push
people into being optimistic. Personally I find it annoying when people tell
me to smile—what is this obsession some people have with appearing
happy all the time? Sometimes I just want to be grumpy or whatever.
Besides, I can’t really tell if he’s truly upset, or if he’s just messing with
me. It’s something I’ve been battling with for these past forty-eight hours or
so that we’ve been traveling together; not only do I not know what he truly
looks like, but I also can’t get a handle on his true personality. He’s
incredibly hard to read, and I wonder if it’s somehow also thanks to his
illusion magic.
Either way, Liam is better at this emotional stuff, and I wish he and
Carys would hurry up.
I look to the woods, and I carefully focus my thoughts toward just the
two of them. They should be close enough that keeping our thoughts
between us should be easier now. Less risky than earlier, at least, when I’d
had to keep my message short and cryptic. I’d crept as close to our house as
I dared, and I’d told Liam to meet me in that microbe-infested water that
Carys had lectured us about.
After a minute of what I assume was shock, he had thought back two
short words: (We’ll hurry.)
“Your friends and I have different definitions of hurry,” Soren says, as if
he’s capable of reading my thoughts as well.
 “It’s thirty miles to our house from here. And they would have had to
take the time to make sure no one followed them or got suspicious.”
“Can you at least…I don’t know, smell for them? See if they’re close?”
“I have been. There’s nothing in the wind; but it’s probably because
they’re using something to mask their scent so that they don’t draw any
extra attention to themselves. We can do that without illusionary magic, you
know. Just need the right ingredients.”
We jokingly call Carys’s mom ‘the potions master’ because she’s
particularly good at concocting lots of different serums and such that help
us stay hidden in our territory when we need to; things like those ones we
use to suppress scent, but also ones that do things like subdue the full-moon
craziness that some of our kind suffer from. Our race is incredibly old. You
don’t exist as long as we have without picking up a few tricks to help you
out along the way.
So I don’t smell them.
But a minute later, I hear them: paws sprinting lightly through the
overgrowth. Relatively silent considering the size of the bodies being
supported by those paws.
They break through the trees and leap onto the rocks across from us a
minute later, and that massive size is enough to make Soren draw back just
a bit. He quickly recovers and regains his balance, but his eyes still look a
little wider than normal as he takes in the sight of my two best friends. They
linger the longest on Carys, who I think is the most intimidating of the two,
with her jet-black fur and piercing golden eyes.
It’s kind of…adorable, really—Soren’s previously nonchalant demeanor
going poof! and being replaced by the almost kid-like wonder on his face.
Not adorable, I scold myself. He’s not adorable, he’s a sorcerer, and
he’s almost definitely full of dangerous magic and secrets, and we’re only
together because we have a mission to focus on.
But that look on his face isn’t sorcerer-like at all. I’m used to his kind
looking at mine with nothing but scornfulness, but the longer he stares, the
more his features fall into mere curiosity.
Maybe he really is different than the rest of them.
Or maybe this is just another one of his illusions.
Carys and Liam don’t seem taken in by it, illusion or not. Their hackles
are raised, teeth bared. There’s a low whine building in Carys’s throat, and
Liam is looking at me in a way that manages to look disappointed. Which
doesn’t seem like something wolves should be capable of, but there it is.
(I thought I smelled a sorcerer,) he thinks toward me. (And I still smell
you, underneath that ridiculous exterior he’s conjured up for you.)
(I think you look good as a blonde,) Carys offers, her body language
still betraying her nervousness, even though her voice is light.
“Okay: I can explain all of this,” I say.
Soren nods, taking a step toward me as if to present a bit more
solidarity. His movement makes Carys give an uneasy bark and then bound
to my side. I quickly take her giant head in my hands and lean against it,
both to try and contain and calm her.
“He was my guard,” I say quickly. “But he helped me escape.”
(Why?) Liam demands.
“I’ll get to that. Just keep calm and listen, please?”
And they do. For the most part, anyway. After a little coaxing, they both
shift back to their human forms as I speed through the explanation I’ve been
rehearsing for the past two days that it took us to get this point—from the
revelation about Maric Blackwood’s true goals, to Soren’s plans to counter
them, to my escape, and finally to my decision to come here first.
Once I’ve finished spilling all the details I can think of, I hold my breath
and wait for someone—anyone—else to say something.
“I wish you would just come home,” Carys says quietly.
Not what I wanted to hear, but not unexpected, either. We’re pack
animals, after all. Or they are, at least. I’m feeling less and less like I belong
to that pack by the minute, but I still understand why they want the comfort
of that group. And I get why they don’t feel nearly as composed as I do
about teaming up with—of all things—a sorcerer.
But that doesn’t change my mind about any of this.
“I can’t,” I say. “Trust me: I’ve thought this through. I can’t go back
home and put the pack in danger again. I just wanted to come here tonight
so you could both see me and know that I was safe. But this is it for me and
this territory. I have a new plan, and I’m a little unsure and fuzzy about the
details, but it definitely doesn’t involve staying home or anywhere near it.”
“I don’t know if hunting down these key things counts as a plan,” Liam
says. “It sounds more like reckless, wishful thinking. You collect three little
objects and suddenly everything is right with the world again? Come on,
Elle.”
 “You say that like collecting them will be easy,” Soren says dryly.
“I didn’t say everything would be right,” I say through clenched teeth.
“But it would be nice if I could just do something right. You know, for once
in my life.”
Soren averts his eyes, and Carys and Liam are both speechless for a
moment until Carys finally says, “You do plenty right. And I don’t think
you’re crazy.”
Liam gives her an exasperated look.
“What?” Carys shoots back. “I don’t. Because I’ve heard of these
curatorian keys before. I don’t know much about them, I’ll admit. And yes,
everyone just assumes they’re legends, but most people don’t have the
connection that Elle has to Canath—to that otherworld. So if what Soren
said about that connection being able to awaken these artifacts is true, then
maybe she could find them even though nobody else has ever come close to
doing so.”
I feel warmth spreading all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes,
radiating out from a pool of it deep in my belly.
She said almost exactly what I was hoping she would.
I’m going to miss her. Terribly.
And Liam too, even though he’s still giving me that disappointed look
that I kind of want to knock off his face.
“Miss us?” Liam says, and I realize too late that I wasn’t guarding my
thoughts the way I should have been. “Don’t be stupid. You aren’t going to
miss us.”
“I—”
“Because if you’re going to insist on doing something so crazy, we’re
obviously coming with you.”
Carys nods quickly, though her eyes look slightly terrified. “We already
talked about it on the way here. Whatever you needed, we would do.
Wherever you planned to go…we’re going too.”
I start to argue, but Soren shushes me before I can get a word out. He
points to the woods, and signals for us to listen.
We do.
I immediately hear the sound of a wolf barreling through the forest
toward us.
“Okay, so maybe we should explain now,” Liam says sheepishly.
I spin frantically toward him. “Explain what?”
 “Well, we smelled a sorcerer, and we thought you might be in trouble
but unable to tell us, and with all the chaos and mess going on back at the
pack house we thought there was no way we couldn’t tell them that you—”
“Oh, you didn’t.”
But they did, apparently.
Because a moment later a sleek, reddish-brown wolf leaps from the
woods. She lands a few feet away, kneads her claws into the stone and gives
herself a shake to throw off the leaves and twigs clinging to her.
And then my mom turns her one good eye directly toward me.
The woods seem very quiet—like I could pick out each individual drop
of water falling into the pool behind me. I feel that weightiness that I’m
used to with Mom growing, crushing even worse than usual. Then she
finally loosens her stance a bit, throws a glance and a sniff over her
shoulder, and shifts back to her human form. Her movements are a bit
stiffer than usual, maybe. But otherwise she doesn’t seem to be
experiencing any lingering pain from the catastrophe of a few days ago,
which allows me to exhale at least some of the breath I’m holding.
Her gaze darts directly to Soren.
“Sorcerer,” she says—more to herself than anyone, though there’s a hint
of disbelief and exasperation in her voice that I’m pretty sure are meant for
me.
“Guilty as charged,” Soren says.
Mom frowns at his casual tone, then fixes a stern look on me.
“Explain.”
I have Liam and Carys to help me ramble through my plans this time,
which makes it a little easier to get through it all, at least. And Mom is
surprisingly quiet throughout our rambling. Piecing a lecture together in her
mind, I assume.
But once I’ve finished, she surprises me, because all she says is: “This
is not how I wanted your life to go.”
I start to answer her several times before I finally find the right words.
“I know. But it’s not finished. I can do this. I can fix everything that went
wrong because of me.”
“Not because of you,” she says sharply. “Don’t you dare ever think that
you somehow deserved this, okay? You can’t help the circumstances of
your own birth. You can only control where you go from here.” She glances
around at the four of us and is thoughtful for a minute, as if trying to
convince herself that this ragtag group of us stands any chance of actually
stabilizing the entire supernatural world. Then she sighs in a defeated sort
of way and says, “Your father will not be happy with me if I let you go.”
“I know.”
“Even though he and I had our share of world-saving adventures in the
past, you know. And he’ll come around eventually, I’m sure. He always
does.”
I can’t help a small smile, even if the situation’s grim. It’s a nostalgic
smile, one that comes from thinking about all of the stories they’ve told me
over the years. Although they always censored the ugliest parts; I’m aware
of that.
I try not to think of those ugly parts now.
Or about what I might really be getting myself into.
“And I wish I could, but I can’t go with you,” my mom adds.
“Everything is a mess. Maric is threatening war, and our own kind are
almost as bad. Dozens of them at our door every day, wanting to ‘help’ me
make plans or wanting to know why I haven’t annihilated every sorcerer on
the planet yet—as though I could. I barely managed to sneak away with all
the people at my throat and I just—” She cuts herself off abruptly and takes
a deep breath. It’s not like her to talk about what we refer to as work-stuff
with me. “Anyway, my point is that I agree with you: I don’t think you’re
any safer at our home than you would be leaving. So.” She wraps me in a
tight hug. Takes several deep breaths that I’m pretty sure are attempts to
fight tears, and then finally she pulls back and says, “I can’t go with you,
but I’ll bring you your sword.”
“The French saber?”
“I assumed,” she says with an arch of her brow that clearly says I’m
your mother. Obviously I know what your favorite sword is; I know
everything about you.
“She’ll be safe with us,” Carys pipes up, and my mom gives her a warm
—if dubious—smile.
Liam says nothing. His eyes are on Soren. He looks as though he wants
my mother to say something harsher, to maybe condemn the sorcerer, and to
try to talk me out of doing this while she’s at it.
But I know Mom won’t. Because despite her personal feelings toward
the ones like Soren, Mom has always taught me not to assume things about
people just because of the sort of blood they happen to have.
 The vast majority of my kind would freak out at the thought of me
partnering up with him, yeah. But most of them also freaked when my mom
and dad got together, because my dad is different than mom; he’s a
werewolf. Not a natural-born lycan shifter like my mom, but an ‘unnatural’
mutation of his originally human existence. It’s kind of a long story. But the
bottom line is, there were people who didn’t like it, my mom didn’t care,
they fell in love and saved the world together anyway, and now here we are
decades later.
So yeah, she isn’t really flinching at the sight of the sorcerer standing to
my left.
And thank the gods for that, because I really don’t have the time or
energy to convince anyone else of any other part of these plans of mine.
“I need to report back for more damage control,” she says. Our gazes
lock for a second, neither of us really sure what else to say; we aren’t really
the mushy goodbye speech type. So I just wrap her up in another quick hug.
“Tell Dad…Tell him I’m sorry about all this.”
She squeezes me one last time. “I’ll tell him you love him,” she says,
and then she looks back over her shoulder toward our house, sighs, and
shifts back into her wolf form once more.
“We’ll go back too, and get more supplies,” Carys suggests, “and meet
you somewhere in a few hours, okay?”
“Let’s just meet outside the airport.” I turn to Soren, who is stepping
from rock to rock, his gaze sweeping the woods around us and starting to
look impatient. “Will we be able to pull some sort of illusion trick on any
weapons we bring?” I ask. “Somehow I feel like that will be easier than
dealing with airport security.”
He shrugs. “I can come up with something, I’m sure.”
“Easy enough then.” I sound a lot more confident than I feel. “Don’t
forget the passports,” I remind my friends in that same fake-confident voice
as I give them a quick hug.
On the way here, and with further input from Carys, we managed to
narrow down the location of where the first key is hiding—we think. And it
isn’t going to be a short trek. It’s going to require a trip across the ocean,
actually.
But hey, at least we all love traveling.
 NINE

Dreams and Demons

Four Days Later

“R EALLY DON ’ T GET how you can sleep so soundly out here,” Carys says
through chattering teeth.
I sit the rest of the way up, yawning and stretching after what was
apparently a very long nap—it was the middle of the afternoon when I fell
asleep. Now it’s pitch black. And I mean pitch black; not much light
pollution here on the west coast of Ireland, and the moon is three-quarters
full, but it’s buried behind thick rain clouds. More rain clouds. Always with
the rain clouds in this place.
Also? It’s eerie as hell.
It’s made more eerie by the knowledge of what happened here twenty-
something years ago.
See, I’ve been here before. My parents and a handful of the rest of our
pack come here every year, and sometimes I come with them; this is the
spot of the last great battle they all fought together. The spot where my
mom was exposed to the evil of that other world in the form of a portal,
which is what ultimately led to me being born with this mark on my wrist.
That portal my mom confronted is obviously closed, now. She sent the
monsters that came out of it back through to the other side, and it’s been
sealed ever since. But there are still reports of weird weather patterns here,
and of a strange red mist that sometimes falls over the sea at sunset.
I’ve seen that mist myself—just a glimpse of it, back when I was
eleven.
It was the last time a lot of our pack came to this place. Including Liam
—although I think his reason for not wanting to be here ever again has less
to do with the creepy mist and more to do with the fact that his father was
killed here during that aforementioned battle.
I don’t think he’s ever liked coming here, for obvious reasons. If he
didn’t seem so convinced that Soren planned to murder me in a gruesome
manner, I seriously doubt he’d be here now. I haven’t questioned him about
it, because I know he’d rather just not talk about it.
But it’s hard to just forget about it, because every time Carys glances at
him, she looks like she wants to cry on his behalf.
At least she’s focused on me at the moment, though—practically glaring
at me thanks to my enhanced sleeping abilities.
“It’s because she can sleep through anything,” Liam says.
“It’s one of my special talents, if you’ll remember.”
Liam grins, and it sends a flood of warmth through me; I’ve been
missing that grin. It’s been so rare in the days leading up to our arrival here.
And his current smile might mostly be because he’s trying to pretend he
isn’t thinking about his dad, but I’ll take it, anyways.
“Your talents should also include being able to sense the keys and other
things that have crossed over from Canath, if you’ll remember,” Soren says
as he tromps his way up the slick, grassy hillside that leads to our chosen
campsite. “So, are you even trying to see if you can feel anything weird?”
“Like what, precisely?”
“I don’t know. Just a feeling in your gut, perhaps?”
“Maybe. I’m pretty sure it’s just indigestion, though, from that
questionable stew we ate back in that village…”
Carys stifles a giggle.
Soren sighs and looks considerably less amused.
“What about you?” Liam asks, the smile gone from his face as he
glances sideways at Soren. I can tell he’s trying to keep the suspicion from
his voice. Making an effort to try and get along with the sorcerer, at least,
presumably because I’ve asked him to about eighty times now. “You said
you were heading out to search for clues, right? And you’ve been gone for
like two hours. So what did you find?”
“Nothing definite.” He rummages through one of our backpacks while
he talks, eventually helping himself to an apple out of mine, and taking
several bites of it before he continues: “But there are some local legends
about different beast sightings that make me wonder if they might be
connected to the key that we believe is in this region. And there’s a lake
nearby that’s rumored to have a mysterious glow to it on some nights.”
“Seems like the sort of thing we should check out,” I say, grabbing my
sword and getting to my feet.
“My thoughts exactly,” Soren says.
I feel incredibly anxious, suddenly; a pulling in my gut that I don’t
know if I can attribute to indigestion. “How far is it?”
“Less than three miles from here.”
“I’ll stay and guard the camp,” Carys suggests with a yawn.
“Are you going to be able to stay awake?”
“Again: Like I could really sleep in these conditions,” she grumbles,
pulling off her glasses and wiping them on the inside of her jacket with a
sigh. Then she taps a finger to her head and adds, “I’ll keep in touch
through thoughtspeech, no worries.”
I nod, and the rest of us set off into the night.

T HE GROUND GETS MORE treacherous with every step we put between us and
camp. It’s all soggy, downright flooded in some places, and my feet keep
getting stuck in the mud. The thick haze of fog that’s rolled in isn’t helping
anything, either; I keep having flashbacks to the time we visited a museum
in Dublin when I was younger, where I saw these creepy bodies that had
been essentially mummified after sinking to their deaths in peat bogs.
It doesn’t seem like a particularly pleasant way to die, if there is such a
thing.
“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” I ask, stopping short of a
particularly questionable patch of ground.
“Not really, no,” Soren answers. “It wasn’t quite this foggy when I came
out here earlier. But I think the lake should be right on the other side of this
ridge…”
 “You’re walking awful confidentially for someone who doesn’t know
where he’s going.”
“And that,” Soren says, tilting his head back toward us, “is essentially
the story of my life.”
(I can’t believe we’re trusting this guy,) Liam thinks to me, and I can
practically hear the eyeroll in his voice.
(Trust is a strong word. It’s more like we’re…united against a common
problem.)
(I hope you’re right.)
(I usually am.)
He gives me a playful nudge. I resist the urge to shove him back, only
because the ground to his right looks awfully muddy, and I’d rather him not
end up a mummy.
We silently pick our way forward for another few minutes, and when we
finally reach the top of the ridge, I can see a smidge of glassy lake surface
beneath its blanket of fog. I’d swear it has a light glow to it, too—though
that might just be because I’m still thinking of that legend Soren mentioned.
I fix my eyes on it. Pause, just for a moment, to see if I really could feel
something in my gut that might make me confident that we’re in the right
place.
I don’t feel anything.
But I hear something.
I reach for Liam’s arm, pulling him to a stop. “Do you guys hear that?” I
ask, twisting around and half expecting to see that someone else has
somehow managed to creep right up behind us. “Like somebody whispering
right in my ear, I swear…”
“You’re hearing voices in your head?” Soren asks.
“It wasn’t in my head,” I whisper—but my insistence doesn’t have the
bite I meant it to have.
Because I can’t help but wonder if he’s right.
“I didn’t hear anything either,” Liam says without taking his eyes off the
lake. “What did they say?”
“I…I don’t know. It was in a weird language.”
“Maybe it was a bog mummy?” he suggests, glancing back with a wry
smile.
“And maybe you should stop listening in on my thoughts without
permission.”
 “Sorry. But you smelled like fear. I was curious what you were thinking
about.”
“Of course I smell like fear, dummy. Have you been paying any
attention to our surroundings? Any at all?”
“Not really; I’ve really just been enjoying the stroll. Not getting caught
up in the details, you know.”
“It’s good that you’ve enjoyed it while you could,” Soren interrupts,
“because there’s a small detail ahead that I don’t think we’re going to be
able to ignore.” He points a finger, and my gaze follows it to the lake.
That small patch of visible surface is spreading, the fog clearing in a
way that looks like steam rolling off a pot of boiling water.
“That’s…weird,” Liam says.
A moment later it gets weirder, because that light glow emanating from
beneath the lake’s surface begins to glow more brightly.
The mark on my wrist begins to burn.
I slap a hand over it with enough intensity that it manages to draw both
Soren and Liam’s attention away from the lake and onto me. They exchange
a look that makes me feel a bit like I’m the drunk friend at a party and
they’re trying to figure out how best to deal with me.
“For the record, I’m perfectly in control here,” I say. “It’s just…burning.
Pinching. It feels weird.”
Soren looks back to the lake for a minute, and then to me he says, “Try
walking closer to the lake.”
I take a few timid steps forward.
The lake glows brighter.
I step backward, and the light dims.
I do this several times, and every time, the result is the same.
“You’re like a living version of those fancy dimmer switches Eli has in
his library back home,” Liam remarks with a humorless chuckle.
I stare at the glow, a heaviness settling over me as I realize what this
means. “So,” I say, slowly looking back to Soren, “at least part of what you
said about me seems to be true, I guess. If that really is one of the keys, it
seems like it’s reacting to my presence.”
He nods, and starts down the steep slope to the lake’s edge.
Liam and I start to follow, but Carys’s voice stops us a moment later.
(So, just so you know, I’m pretty sure there are people heading toward
you.)
 (People?)
(A couple of dumb teenagers, it looked like. They were getting close to
the campsite, but then they veered left and headed off in the direction y’all
did. Which is kind of a bummer, because I’m getting bored. I was going to
shift and scare the crap out of them.)
(We’re trying to keep a low profile here,) I remind her. It’s why we’d
decided to camp instead of staying in the lone inn that was somewhat close
to this desolate place.
(Yeah, but I’m pretty sure I saw one of them litter. So they probably
deserve to be terrified, is all I’m saying.)
“Are you two coming?” Soren calls without turning back, or even
slowing down, in his pursuit of the shoreline.
“Maybe you should go check it out?” I suggest to Liam, who’s looking
into the darkness behind us and anxiously sniffing at the air. “Whatever
trouble we’re about to unleash here, it would probably be better if we didn’t
have humans witnessing it or getting in the way, right?”
He nods, but his expression is less decisive as he glances at Soren.
“I’ll be fine,” I assure him. “I have my sword. If he tries anything funny,
I’ll just cut him into lots of unrecognizable pieces and then drown them in
separate corners of the lake.”
“You’re terrifying sometimes; do you know that?”
I flash a quick smile, then shoo him away with a flick of that sword.
“I’ll see you in a few minutes.”
He finally gives in—probably in part because he also wants to have
some fun terrorizing the teenagers—and shifts into his white wolf form that,
giant as he is, still blends surprisingly well with the fog and hazy
moonlight.
I half jog, half slide my way down the slippery hill, crashing into Soren
and nearly sending him face first into the water.
“Graceful, aren’t you?” he says, jerking his foot from the muddy pool
that’s attempting to claim it.
“Grace is my middle name.”
“Really?”
“No, it’s Ann, actually. After my mom’s mom. What’s yours?”
“Nothing matters less in this moment,” he says drolly.
“Just trying to make conversation.”
 “Let’s converse about how we’re going to retrieve whatever is causing
that glow, how about?”
“All business with you, isn’t it?”
“I thought we’d already established that, oh business partner of mine.”
“I just thought we might make a better team if we knew more about
each other. Think of it as a trust-building exercise, maybe?”
“You would trust me more if you knew my middle name? Honestly?”
“That was just an example—I just meant we could talk about general
stuff.”
“Like?”
“Like…I don’t know. What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“A wizard.”
“Hardy har har.”
“I’m serious.”
I flick my ankle and send bits of mud flying from it and plopping into
the water. “What are your dreams and stuff?”
“Once I dreamed that I was standing naked in the middle of Times
Square, offering freshly-baked cookies to people. And everyone raved
about them, too—said they were the most delicious things they’d ever
eaten.”
“You know what I meant, smartass. Dreams for the future. Hopes.”
“Mostly I just hope this conversation will end soon.”
“Okay, fine, consider it ended—I give up.” I sigh. “Back to business:
kind of seems like our business is under the water, doesn’t it? All the way at
the bottom of the lake, knowing my luck.”
“So how long can you hold your breath?” he says with a quiet laugh.
I can’t tell if he’s joking or not.
“Surely you don’t expect me to dive after this thing,” I say.
“Unless you can think of something better.”
“I can think of lots of things that sound better than diving into a freezing
cold lake that’s full of mud and probably like…dead bodies and snakes and
—”
“There are no snakes in Ireland. Haven’t you ever heard of St. Patrick?
He supposedly drove them all out, according to legend.”
“I’m pretty sure there aren’t supposed to be any wolves in Ireland
anymore either, and yet here me and my friends are all the same.”
 “Anyway, I was thinking I’d let you go first,” he says, ignoring my
totally-valid snake fear. “Since you’re a lady and all.”
“And they say chivalry is dead.”
“My cousin once told me that was something only girls who dated
assholes said.”
“And you’re not an asshole, apparently?”
“I don’t strive to be.” I can feel his glance shift to me, and even though I
don’t look back, I can still picture that particular way he arches his
eyebrows as he says, “Unless that’s your type?”
I let out an amused snort, my eyes still on the glowing lake. “Why do
you care what my type is?”
It was an offhanded comment, but the longer he takes to answer it, the
more curious I find myself growing about his answer.
Determined not to let myself focus on it, I instead take a deep breath,
sheath my sword and set it carefully on a nearby rock. I feel naked without
it, but I’m not risking the rust and other deterioration caused by the gods
know what is in this lake. Plus, I need both hands free for balancing as I
chance a few steps forward into the water. Just to acclimate myself. Just in
case we can’t come up with a better plan.
We really need to come up with a better plan.
“Holy hell, this water is freezing. And I can barely walk in this mud.
Ugh—” The lake bottom drops off suddenly, and I slip on the sudden edge.
The only thing that keeps me from a shockingly cold and muddy
awakening is the way Soren somehow moves faster than my fall and
manages to catch me. His grip on my waist is firm, and his arms steady
even as I’m flailing about and trying to find grip in the slippery mud.
“Be still for a second,” he whispers as his fingers dig a little more
securely into my sides.
I still haven’t found my footing, and so the only way I can manage
stillness is to completely relax into his arms. And suddenly the water I’m
knee-deep in doesn’t seem so cold, because all I’m aware of is the heat
that’s radiating out from his touch.
“Do you hear that?” he asks.
“Hear what?”
I’d been too busy listening to his pounding heart, his quickening breaths
—and completely misinterpreting them, it seems.
Get it together, Elle.
 I make myself completely still and listen more closely to the sounds
filling the night: the soft breeze splashing water against the bank, the
slightly mournful call of what I’m pretty sure is a loon…
And then the sound of something large wading its way through the
water.
I squint into the fog, trying to see what that something large might be. I
see nothing, but a moment later I hear the distinct clip clop squish of hooves
in the mud, followed by a distant, echoing, whinny-like sound.
“Is that…a horse?”
If it is, it sounds sick. But I don’t know how else to describe it, other
than vaguely horse-like.
He slowly backs toward the shore, pulling me steadily out of the water
alongside him. Even once we’re relatively safe and steady on that shore, he
doesn’t let go of my arm. “Shouldn’t your hearing be better than mine?” he
muses under his breath.
“I might have heard it first if I wasn’t busy freezing to death in that
water.”
“I’m just saying, your situational awareness needs work.”
I wrench my arm from his grip and, without answering him, I crane my
neck toward the direction where I thought the possible-horse sounded like it
was approaching from.
There’s no sound of it or its movement.
There’s no sound of anything anymore, it seems; it’s like we’ve stepped
into a void.
“Is this one of your weird illusion tricks at work again?” I whisper.
“We’re on the same side, you know. Why would I be trying to trick
you?”
“Well you say that, and yet on the plane ride over here I distinctly
remember waking up to the illusion of a giant bug crawling across my hand,
so…”
“That was different,” he says, his lips quirking into an almost-smile as I
glance back. “That was funny. This is clearly not a laughing matter.”
“The other passengers didn’t think my scream was funny.”
We’d played it off as me simply waking up from a nightmare. I’d almost
—almost—forgiven him for doing it, too, because it was harmless enough,
and because practicing magic was his way of coping with the anxiety that
flying had been causing him. I’d fallen asleep on that plane with his hand
beside mine, both of our palms open toward the ceiling while he danced a
mesmerizing illusion of black stars and swirls across them.
It had been almost romantic.
At least until I’d woken up to him playing dumb tricks on me instead.
And I haven’t decided how I’m going to repay the favor of him scaring
the crap out of me yet, but I’ve given him fair warning to sleep with one eye
open.
“Besides,” he whispers to me, “do you know how difficult it is to create
illusions of sound and silence? I’m definitely not doing…” He trails off as
the sound of water slapping against rocks reaches us. “…That,” he finishes.
A moment later, the creature we’ve been hearing actually appears
It is a horse.
A silvery-white beast of a horse with black eyes rimmed in glowing
green. As it walks through the water, that water parts with greater force than
normal. It rolls into rough waves, like the kind a speeding boat leaves in its
wake, even though the horse’s movements are slow and subtle.
“What is wrong with that thing’s eyes?” I back my way toward the rock
where I placed my sword, not taking my gaze off the creature. “Please tell
me that at least that part is an illusion that you’re—”
My hand, reaching backward for my sword, suddenly hits a human
instead. I let out a yelp, and the horse-creature stops. It gives an angry snort
and a toss of its head, and suddenly its terrifying eyes are narrowed in my
direction.
“I don’t think it’s an illusion,” says Carys—the person I bumped into.
Apparently she talked Liam into guarding the campsite instead, switching
places with her to help combat her boredom. “There are a lot of myths
about demon water horses in this part of the world.”
“Kelpie?” Soren guesses.
Carys shakes her head. “Kelpies are generally believed to dwell near
rivers—near running water. This is a lake. So that would make this guy an
each-uisce. Similar to a kelpie, but much more vicious in nature.”
“Oh good,” I say.
“I know right?” She sounds almost like she really thinks it is a good
thing. Her endless nerd fascination at work again. “Sightings of this kind
are much less common. And it seems really interested in you, doesn’t it
Elle?”
 I start to reach again for my sword, and I see what she means: the
demon horse’s head follows my every moment.
“So I wonder if it showed up because you’re here?” she guesses.
“If it—oh. Right.” Somehow I’d almost forgotten what Soren had said
about there being guardians around the three keys we’re trying to track
down.
Is that what this thing is?
If so, I guess it confirms that we aren’t leaving here without whatever is
glowing at the bottom of this lake.
“So what is that demon going to do if I try diving into the water?”
“Diving into the water?” Carys gives me an incredulous look. “That was
your plan?”
I shift my weight from side to side. “Well it was the beginning of my
plan.”
“This is why I should have come along in the first place,” she says with
a sigh. “Do you have any idea how deep this lake is?”
“No, but I’m guessing you do, since you’re full of those sort of random
factoids.”
“Well, I don’t know the exact depth,” she says in that sort of mumbling,
offhanded way that she does sometimes—the one that means she actually
does know the answer and she’s just trying to pretend she doesn’t. Trying to
make herself look less smart so she’s less intimidating, I know. I’ve told her
before not to do that. And I’m about to tell her again, but she’s talking too
fast for me to interrupt.
“But I’m almost positive it’s too deep for you to dive to the bottom,”
she continues “even if you didn’t have a demonic horse chasing after you.”
“So it would probably chase me?” I think aloud, sizing up the creature
and trying to imagine myself in a swordfight against it.
“I didn’t…Well that’s not generally how the legends go, no.”
“No?”
The creature is still watching me, turning slow circles in its place some
fifteen feet away from us. It feels like each circle is coiling the tension in
the air tighter and tighter, like it’s just waiting for me to make one wrong
move, and then it’s going to spring at me and tear me to pieces.
“Is that legend similar to the kelpie myth, too?” Soren asks.
She nods. “The legend claims that it tries to lure weary travelers onto its
back, and then it drags them to the bottom of the lake to drown them and rip
their body apart.”
“…To the bottom of the lake?” I hear myself repeating the words
without thinking, and I instantly realize how crazy that hopeful tone of my
voice is.
But I can’t help it, nor can I stop the crazy plan forming in my mind.
“Yes, to drown them and rip their body apart,” Carys repeats. “Did you
hear that last part?”
“Yeah, but back to that part about it taking riders to the bottom of the
lake…and the fact that the key we’re searching for is also most likely at the
bottom of the lake. I mean, come on, this is sort of a no-brainer, isn’t it?”
I try to look as confident as I sound as I grab my sword and secure it in
the sheathe at my hip. I’ll just have to risk exposing it to this gross water, I
guess.
I still have the dagger Soren loaned me, too, secured in a separate sheath
around my ankle. I tried to give it back, but he told me I’d probably need it
again. And I’m not one to turn down a free weapon.
So at least I’m reasonably well-armed as I step back into the water.
“Are you sure about this?” Soren asks.
I’d steeled myself, and was prepared to walk toward that demon
guardian without stopping or looking back, but the strange tone of his voice
manages to make me hesitate.
It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him sound even a little bit afraid, I
think.
And that fear causes a weird stirring in the pit of my stomach.
Is it fear for me, or simply fear that I won’t be able to accomplish these
tasks we set out to do? Either way, I don’t really know what to do with it, so
I just keep walking.
“Never been more sure of anything in my life,” I say, waving a
dismissive hand without looking back.
“Elle…” Carys begins in a slightly pleading voice.
But I don’t hear the rest of her plea, because at that moment the demon
horse stops its circling and squares its body up with my approaching one.
It lets out another snort. Lifts one of its front legs. As it stomps it back
into the water, that water darkens and churns and folds away from it. Wave
after wave folds away until the creature is standing in mud instead of water.
And then that muddy island extends, reaching toward me, the water rolling
apart until there is a very clear, very obvious path inviting me toward the
demon.
I step from the water and onto that muddy path.
One step after the other. With every one, the parted water collapses
behind me, splashing cool drops against the backs of my legs and closing
off any chance at a quick escape.
The mark on my wrist tingles a warning.
Every wolfish instinct I have, however buried it might be, is telling me
to turn around.
The glow the lake is throwing off is so bright that it’s near blinding me.
The creature in front of me is unnaturally still.
It doesn’t move as I reach it; it barely even breathes as I stretch a hand
forward. My fingers brush skin that feels rubbery, and then they cautiously
curl around a mane that feels like its made of seaweed. Or like maybe it’s
made of snakes, judging by the way it seems to move and, I swear, to
tighten around my wrist and try to squeeze the life out of my veins. I hear
shouting from the shoreline; it sounds like Liam, but I don’t turn around to
check, because I don’t need his concern distracting me right now.
Water drips down my arm, so dirty and thick with mud that it looks
more like blood in the moonlight.
The demon’s nostrils flare.
Its eyes burn a bolder shade of white.
I picture that last beast I fought—the one I let in, the one that left my
mom bloody and beaten and my pack facing the threat of war from the
entire supernatural community.
And then I think of my sword and dagger.
I brace a hand against the demon’s neck, and I hoist myself onto its
back.
 TEN

Light and Possibility

FOR THE RECORD, I don’t suggest hopping onto the backs of demons.
This was a terribly reckless, dangerous idea, and the creature wastes no
time in showing me why: after a vicious shake that flings mud and what
looks like gallons of water in every direction, it lunges forward into a
deeper part of the lake.
I barely have a chance to take a breath before it dives.
That snaky seaweed mane tangles around both my wrists and fastens me
to its body, so that I have no choice but to press flat against its back and
bury my face in its neck, trying to protect my eyes from the dirt and wood
and other debris littering the water.
We dive deeper and deeper.
Just as I start to panic at the thought that this lake might actually be
bottomless, we slam against that bottom. A cloud of leafy mud erupts
around us. I’m flung against the ground hard enough to jar my shoulder
despite the water slowing my fall.
The demon is looming over me a moment later, its hooves pressing
against my chest, body buoyant in the water but still heavy enough to push
me down into a watery grave.
Mud collapses in around me, filling that grave in.
I feel fear like a physical presence. Like chains draped over me,
weighing me further down, down, down into that grave—
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, a definite 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 the 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.
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 magic 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—and I am not resurfacing without it.
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 spilling into 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 terribly 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.
Then I’m moving.
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 started
crying myself.
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, before you destroy your parents and everything else.
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 natural
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.
 ELEVEN

Trust and Prejudice

“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 those trees.
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.
Liam and Carys take this obligation 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 then 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, but also 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 before 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.
And that’s when he finally says: “The second time that mark appeared
on your skin, there were several fissures that came with it. And not just
close to you, but in several places across the world.” He swallows hard.
“You know that, right?”
I sit back down.
“I’ve heard stories,” I say quietly. “And the council came for me right
after that.”
“Right. I was too young to remember it personally myself, but I’ve
heard the stories, too. One of the places where the world split was close to
my home.” He hesitates, absently knocking his fists together. “Do you
know what an animaclepta is?”
“No.”
“A soul-taker—like the reapers of some local mythologies you’re
probably more familiar with. Except they don’t just collect souls that are
ready to die. They’re known to feed on them, too. To steal them. And there
are legends that say they’re particularly drawn to those with magic in their
blood; some even say they’re complete parasites that need the magic of
other supernatural creatures to survive.
“They used to cross regularly into our world in their carriages, and they
would seek out the people they wanted to steal—souls they wanted to feed
on or take back to their otherworld and sacrifice to gain their power or
whatever. All these animas had to do in this world was speak the true names
of their targets, and just like that, those targets were dead and ready for
gathering. And that night when your mark appeared and the fissures
opened, one of these creatures escaped Canath.”
“And it came to collect?” I guess in a whisper.
He nods.
“I…”
“My mother made herself a target, really. She showed them exactly how
powerful she was while she was trying to protect me and my sister and
everyone else. So of course, they wanted her magic. They took her first.
And then they took my sister, too.” His words are clipped, tense; but he still
attempts to shrug, as if he isn’t bothered to talk about this anymore—like
enough time could possibly have passed to make him feel okay about this.
The movement is, of course, unconvincing to us both.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly.
He lowers his gaze to mine. “We lost ten people that night. And I grew
up hearing stories that blamed you and your kind for it. Everybody I knew,
it seemed, at first just wanted to destroy you for the mess you’d caused all
of us. So I blamed you too, before I really even understood who you were
or what you’d done—and what you hadn’t done. I was just angry, and I
needed someone to be angry at.”
I shuffle uncomfortably under his gaze.
He looks almost like he’s waiting for me to say something, but what
could I possibly say?
I can’t change what happened.
I can’t bring his mom or his sister back.
And even though I didn’t do any of this on purpose, I still feel
desperately, crushingly awful about it all. My hands are shaking, my mouth
too dry to speak.
“I stopped blaming you some time ago, for what it’s worth,” he says.
“Because it wasn’t doing me any good. Particularly once I started to think
about what I wanted to do about everything that had happened.”
“What you wanted to do?”
“Yeah. Which, I decided, was to make sure nothing like that night ever
happened again. So I started to research, and I found out about the keys, and
I decided that it made a lot more sense to see if you would help me, rather
than to just keep blaming and being angry at you about things you didn’t
have control over.”
 I stare at him, speechless again for a moment—but not really because
I’m uncomfortable now. It’s more because I…
Well, I’m not used to people so completely giving me the benefit of the
doubt.
I’m used to most people—including my pack—tiptoeing around my
feelings and trying to protect me at best, and being frightened and disturbed
by my existence at worst. Even Liam and Carys and my own parents…they
support me, and they’d probably go to the ends of the earth for me, but I’ve
never really felt like they believed in me. Like they thought I could help
them do anything.
But now here is this boy who should be my enemy, and he is suddenly
looking at me like he has no doubt in his mind that I could—and would—
save the world with him.
I wish I could get over my skepticism, but it’s so ingrained at this point
that I can’t help but ask: “Why do you have so much faith in me?”
“Honestly? I didn’t at first. It had only been a wild hope.” He shrugs—
the attempted casualness is much more convincing this time—and adds,
“But then I heard that you’d volunteered yourself to go to prison to keep
your family and your world safe. And, just now, I watched you march
yourself toward a demon without flinching. So I guess you could say I’m
now reasonably convinced that you’re worth having faith in. And so, no—I
am not going to steal anything from you and run away, Elle. Because I think
I’d rather we stay together.”
He gazes at the key clenched in my still-slightly-shaking hand for a long
moment.
Then he lays his hand over my trembling fingers, and I finally manage
to hold them steady underneath his touch. Everything seems steadier under
his touch all of a sudden; my head stops spinning, and the wolf in me settles
and calmly curls up to rest, finally convinced that it’s safe to relax for a
moment.
“I think I’d rather we did too,” I say.
He glances up at me.
His eyes are the most brilliant shade of green I’ve ever seen.
“Your eyes have changed again.” I’m past the point of being startled by
the changing thing, really, but they’re so much bolder than the dark grey
shade they were earlier that I can’t help but sound a little awestruck.
“Have they?”
 “You didn’t do it on purpose?”
“Sometimes I…lose focus. And my magic slips, or otherwise gets a
mind of its own.”
“Right. Like mine. Sometimes I can’t control my magic side either. The
difference, of course, is that your uncontrolled magic makes things
beautiful, and mine might destroy the world.”
He gives me a crooked smile. “We’re practically the same person,
really.”
I start to laugh, but it’s cut off by a grimace of pain as I try to stand and
I accidently put too much weight on my hurt leg.
“Still not healing?” he asks with a frown as he offers an arm to brace
myself against.
“Most of my kind just switch to their wolf selves when they need to
heal something as bad as this.” I try to mask the frustration in my voice as
best I can. “Our supernatural healing ability is even more accelerated in that
form, so a cut this deep would fare a lot better if I was a wolf.”
“But that’s not an option.”
“Nope. So pain it is.” I glance down at my leg, wrapped in the
makeshift bandages made mostly from Liam’s jacket. I expect it to be
stained with fresh blood; but luckily, it’s mostly dry—it looks no worse than
it did before I trudged my way up to these rocks. “At least the bleeding
hasn’t started back.”
“I can try to help with the pain, if you’d like.”
“Help? How?”
“There are spells that are technically powerful illusionary magic…
things that alter a person’s state of mind, so that even a little bit of say,
elemental healing magic ability, feels amplified. More effective.”
“That sounds…scary.”
I think of the night of my last test, of how completely taken in I was by
all of the illusions around me; it was because Maric had gotten into my
mind somehow, too, wasn’t it?
Do I really trust Soren enough to let him do the same?
“It is,” he says. “Very complicated stuff, and I’m not saying I’m an
expert at it. Not many are. I just wanted to mention it…” He hesitates,
rubbing a hand across the back of his neck, those beautiful green eyes
commanding my attention again as he finishes with, “I guess I don’t like
seeing you in pain, is all.”
 “Oh.”
“I mean, I still need your help. And we can’t afford to waste time
waiting for you to limp to our next target.”
“Right.”
“So hold still for a second, maybe?” His voice has dropped to a whisper,
one that’s almost more to himself than me. He hesitates, waiting until I give
a slight nod of permission. Then his hands reach up and cup my face, same
as they did outside of the prison cell he broke me out of on the night we
met.
Physical contact with the object you’re trying to illusion helps.
I remember him saying that.
I don’t remember his touch lingering quite as long that last time. And
that touch wasn’t as daring as it is now, as he’s tracing a path down to the
hollow of my throat with one hand, while the other one pushes back into my
hair. I feel warmth radiating through the fingers he’s curled through those
locks of my hair. It spreads over my skull, tingles down my neck, and an
image falls into my mind; blurry shapes of blue and green tumbling and
rushing over one another in a way that reminds me of the ocean. It’s
soothing. My eyelids flutter, and my breathing rises and falls with the wave
of blue I decide to focus on.
“Is that helping?”
I can’t find the words to answer his whisper, but I have a thought: that I
should be panicking at his closeness, afraid of the way he seems to have
rendered me so dull and useless. But that thought is distant. Almost as
distant as my own movements; I’m only vaguely aware of the way my body
slumps toward him, finally giving in to the collective exhaustion of the past
week.
I don’t know how much time passes, but eventually, the soothing
thoughts and the humming that had accompanied them both begin to flicker
and fade. I blink several times, trying to bring the scene back into focus.
That’s when I realize I’m curled up practically in his lap.
And that his hands are moving over the inside of my thigh and inching
dangerously far up—because he’s unwrapping the makeshift bandage tied
around it and inspecting the wound underneath in a very doctor-like
manner. Nothing sensual about it, really. But that doesn’t stop the blush
from burning its way across my face.
 “It seems to have helped the healing along, even if that relaxation spell
didn’t last very long,” he comments.
I laugh. Nervously. “I kind of feel like I need to make a joke about your
inability to last longer. Are we at the stage in our friendship where I can
make sex jokes? I don’t really know about your kind; shifters can be a
raunchy bunch, but it kind of seems like you sorcerers are all the easily-
offended type.”
He makes an amused noise deep in his throat; more of a grunt than a
laugh. “Why would I be offended by you insinuating something that’s not
true?”
“Touché.” My face burns a little hotter, and I pretend to cough to cover
up fact that I can’t think of anything clever to say. I’m not sure why I
suddenly care so much about looking clever in front of him.
I give my head a little shake and try to calm my racing pulse, try to
center my attention back on my wound.
He’s right; it’s mostly healed now, the edges of it already looking like a
scar that’s several months old. The sight of my dried blood around it doesn’t
seem to be grossing him out as much as I would have expected it to; but
then, it doesn’t really gross me out either. I guess we’ve both seen our share
of violence and gore.
“You could probably stand to relax for a few more minutes, to let the
center of this finish healing up,” he says.
The suggestion has the opposite effect on me. I can’t help it. Something
about that low tone of voice he’s still using makes my pulse start pounding
again.
“I’m finding relaxing a bit difficult at the moment,” I mumble,
squirming a bit beneath his lingering touch.
“Oh? And why would that be?” His gaze flickers up to me, and I swear
there’s a hint of a wicked little grin on his lips. It goes infuriatingly well
with that latest shade of his eyes.
“Don’t do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“Play stupid. You’re not convincing as a stupid person.”
He laughs. And damn if it isn’t a beautiful, intoxicating sound.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he says. “But I wasn’t trying to be
stupid; it was an honest enough question. I want to know why your heart is
pounding like that.”
 “Because you’re a shameless flirt.” I wave a frustrated hand over his
too-perfect body. “And this? Every time I see you something’s changed, but
I swear somehow you’re making yourself increasingly attractive, and I’m
not convinced you aren’t actually some sort of demon trying to seduce me
and—”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re an incredibly paranoid person?”
His smile wilts a bit. “My eyes are naturally this green, if that makes you
feel any better. Not everything is an illusion.”
“Well, whoever you are and whatever you really look like, I just don’t
want…”
I trail off and stare at the safety of the ground, because in that moment I
realize what I do want.
And there’s no way it’s going to happen.
It’s a bad idea. There are a million reasons why it’s a terrible idea.
“We’re business partners, remember?” I say. “Mission first and all that.”
“Of course I remember. I’m the one who said it first.” There’s a strange
hint of thoughtfulness in his voice, and I can’t help but look up at him again
when I hear it.
Mistake.
Such a mistake.
The way he’s looking at me makes that heat in my cheeks spread over
my entire body.
He leans a little bit closer.
I’m frozen in place. I have to fight to remember my reasonable side—all
my very sane excuses as to why I can’t do this. “I’m just not a fan of that
whole star-crossed lovers trope, you know?” I mutter. “My pack would still
freak if I brought home a sorcerer, even after we’d saved the world together.
And I feel like I’ve freaked them all out enough already.”
“Who said you had to bring me home?”
I open my mouth to reply.
Nothing comes out.
My breathing is shallow, quick with growing desire that I can’t really
deny, however hard I might try. I shuffle a bit, ungraceful and so very aware
of his nearness. I expect the movement to cause pain. But the pain in my leg
is gone. I can’t help but think of how he’s the reason for that, and about how
tenderly he’d touched me, and the warmth and comfort of him and his
spell…
 Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve leaned toward him. One of his
hands falls back to my leg, fingers resting just as gently as before. The other
finds the small of my back in a bolder, more possessive grip that he uses to
pull me even closer, eliminating almost all the space between us.
Our noses bump.
His warm breath tickles my skin.
Our lips brush once, twice—
The sound of footsteps squishing through the mud reaches us. We pull
away from each other and turn to see Liam walking toward us.
“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t realize I was interrupting something.” His
voice is flat, even though he attempts to give me his usual carefree smile.
“You weren’t,” I say, jumping to my feet and putting a little space
between Soren and myself. I do my best to crush the rebellious desire still
shivering through me. Taking a few more steps away from Soren helps.
Sort of.
“Well you weren’t answering me or Carys. So I have to assume you
were too…busy.”
“I didn’t hear you,” I say, frowning.
Liam gives up on his attempted smile and mirrors my frown instead.
“The spell’s fault, probably,” Soren says, under his breath and more to
me than Liam—though, of course, Liam can still hear it.
“What spell?” He gives me a dubious look— like he can’t believe I
could possibly have been stupid enough to let my guard down and willingly
let a sorcerer cast a spell on me. And now that I’m not distracted by pain or
the closeness of Soren’s body, my brain insists on reminding me that Liam
is right.
I knew I was being stupid.
I knew it was a terrible idea.
But that hadn’t stopped me, and it’s not stopping part of me from
wishing we could have had just a few more minutes to finish what we’d
started.
Still, I fumble for an answer, an explanation to make myself look less
reckless and dumb and to try and alleviate that exasperated look on my best
friend’s face.
“I was just trying to help her relax,” Soren says, his voice smooth and
suggestive in that way that just seems to come naturally from him, but that
also does nothing to make Liam look any happier about finding the two of
us together.
“It was a harmless spell,” I insist.
Liam stares at me for a moment—almost glaring, really, which is a
weird look on him—and then through thoughtspeech he says, (There’s no
such thing as a harmless spell.)
(Your prejudice is showing,) I think back. (Just because he’s—)
“Anyway,” he interrupts out loud, “We got what we came for, right?
And the lake seems to be back to normal now. So we were thinking it’s
probably time to pack up and get out of this dreary country. Preferably
before we attract anymore unwanted attention.”
I nod, holding back a sigh as I safely pocket the key before moving to
his side.
One down, two to go.
And that is what I should be focusing on.
 TWELVE

Anarchy and Secrets

“YOU’RE STILL mad at me, aren’t you?”

Liam takes another sip of his water and leans away from the table,
rolling the tension from his shoulders as he squints toward a couple walking
a dog on the sidewalk across from us. “Mad? No. I was never mad at you to
begin with, stupid.”
“Just disappointed, right?” I say with a half-hearted grin, because we
both know that sounds like something his mother—or mine— would say.
“I’m not your parent.”
“And yet your gee-I-wish-Eleanor-wouldn’t-do-such-dumb-things look
is scarily similar to my dad’s.”
He cocks an eyebrow, but says nothing to that, just leans further back in
his chair and closes his eyes as if he’s really into the Romanian pop music
that this café is serenading its customers with.
“It’s been three days,” I say, “I figured you would have dropped it by
now.”
Three days of traveling from Ireland to this quaint little village in the
shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, and the two of us have hardly spoken.
Every attempt at our normal sort of interaction that I’ve made, he’s
managed to deflect, usually by dragging Carys into the conversation and
finding some way to get her to start talking about the things she’s been
researching in our attempt to zero in on our next target.
It isn’t exactly hard to get her to talk about those things, either. We
decided on the general location of the next key, and over the past few days,
Carys has essentially downloaded an entire database of Romanian
mythology into her brain, hoping to give us an edge on discovering and
fighting whatever nasty guardian might be in store for us next.
And I’m glad for it.
Because again: it’s what I should be focusing on.
I shouldn’t be sitting here thinking about how Liam and Soren have kept
as much distance as two people traveling together could possibly manage to
keep. Or how, every time they have gotten too close to each other, the end
result has been clenched fists and threats that Carys and I have just barely
managed to deescalate in time.
“If you’re waiting for me to stop being concerned about you, you’re
going to be waiting for a lot longer than three days,” Liam says without
opening his eyes.
“He helped me that night, you know. Like I told you before. Like twelve
times before, I think it’s been now?”
“I don’t like him messing with your mind. Even if he claims it was to
heal you. I don’t trust his brand of healing.”
I sink a little deeper into my chair.
“I’m accepting the fact that he’s a necessary evil,” he says, eyes
blinking open but still avoiding mine. “I’m accepting that he knows more
about the keys and how they work than we do, and so we need him to help
possibly cure you or whatever—which I want so badly that I’m willing to
put up with the little twerp for as long as I have to. But I don’t like the way
he looks at you. Because I swear, he constantly looks like he’s plotting
something.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you might feel that way just because
you’ve been raised to feel that way? The entire pack has done nothing but
fill your head with terrible things about the Blackwood sorcerers, but what
if they aren’t all like that? What if we’d all really tried working together a
long time ago?”
“The pack has its reasons for the things they’ve said. And maybe you
should have been paying attention to what they had to say—they’re your
pack too, you know.”
“Are they?” The words snap out of my mouth before I can stop them,
leaving us both stunned and silent for a minute.
I should try to take them back, maybe.
But I can’t seem to get myself to do that.
 He starts to get up.
“Liam, I didn’t mean that you—”
“I’ll see you back at the inn,” he says, abruptly dropping his credit card
beside my plate, leaving me with nothing for company except the
electronic, slightly static beat of foreign pop music.

I DO GO BACK to the rustic little inn we stayed in last night.

But not so I can meet up with Liam again.
Not yet.
Not feeling like I really belong with most of my own pack…that I was
used to, even if he didn’t want to hear me say that. But I’m not sure how to
handle feeling like I can’t be comfortable next to my best friend, either.
I feel weak admitting it, but I desperately need to be somewhere where I
feel like I belong. So the first thing I do when I reach the inn is find Carys.
Hopefully I’ll have better luck with her than Liam, conversation-wise, since
she’s the more level-headed of the two of them. And she’s been in a
particularly good mood today, since she actually got to sleep in a real bed
last night—after using every argument in her arsenal to convince us to risk
staying in an actual inn.
She’s in a predictable place: the little fireplace room off the lobby, with
its squishy armchairs and weathered wooden table that she’s covered in
books.
This is where she camped out most of yesterday evening, too, pouring
over those books that the innkeeper lent her, and occasionally dragging that
innkeeper into her research as well. I witnessed a few of their conversations
— Carys attempting to use the few Romanian phrases she’s managed to
learn, and the innkeeper’s daughter trying her best to interpret Cary’s
enthusiastically quick questions.
That innkeeper seems to be steering clear of her study room today.
I doubt Carys has noticed, though. Hell, she barely notices me until I’m
hanging right over her, and even then, she doesn’t look up from her book.
“Liam came back a half hour ago, and then left again in a hurry,” she
says as she flags a page with a bright green post-it note. “I thought you two
were having breakfast together?”
“We walked back separately.”
“You fought again?”
 “I don’t want to talk about it.” I flop onto the couch in as dramatic a
fashion as I can manage. “Quick: distract me with random facts about
Romanian mythological creatures.”
She looks thoughtful for a moment, sighs, and then dutifully recites:
“The furat-diavol are also referred to as changelings or body-snatchers.
They’re a legend known mostly just in this village—tiny little devil things
with the ability to take the souls of weak-willed, lost people who wander
too deep into the forest.”
“Weak-willed?”
“Mmhm. So basically, anytime someone around here does something
bad—something that weakens their soul or whatever, they’re said to be
making themselves furat-bait.”
“I’ll try to refrain from soul-compromising activities while I’m here,
then.”
“You probably should. But it wouldn’t save you from the balaur— a
creature in Romanian mythology that’s similar to a European dragon. It has
three heads in most stories, but there are some stories that say it has as
many as twelve.”
“Ooh, that sounds fun,” I deadpan. “I hope we get to fight that.”
“It could be worse.”
“Am I imagining this, or do you sound way too enthusiastic about the
fact that there are even worse creatures that might be awaiting us?”
She holds up the page she’s just flagged, tapping an entry headed Giants
of Romania with all the excitement of a kid showing off an award she’s just
won.
“Go on,” I say with a bemused smile.
“Novaci,” she says. “A designation for the giants specific to this region
of the Carpathians. They’re known to skin their victims alive and use their
bones to build shrines that they horde treasures in.”
“Well that sounds terrifying.”
“I know, but shrines. And treasures. Exactly what we’re looking for,
right?”
“Maybe. No mention of any giants by any of the locals we’ve talked to,
though. Seems like they would have mentioned something that big when we
asked them about local stories and legends.”
“Maybe they just don’t want to scare away the tourists? Or there could
be some sort of magic at work, hiding them from humans.” She shrugs, but
goes back to her book, flipping through pages and assumedly searching for
a backup answer in case her first guess really is wrong.
“Skinning their victims alive…geez.”
“I know,” she says. “Kind of puts the little fight you had into
perspective, huh?”
“I don’t know. I might consider being skinned alive if it means I don’t
have to talk to Liam again anytime soon.”
“Oh, come on. Fights between you two never last long. This time won’t
be any different.”
“Circumstances are a little different.”
An extra player has entered the game, I think to myself. Or I meant for
it to be to myself, anyway. But I’m picturing Soren so strongly in my mind
now that I apparently don’t manage to keep this—or the rush of emotions it
causes me—from Carys’s attention.
“Yeah, he’s not a fan of that guy. But…it isn’t just Soren that’s
bothering him, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed? He’s been weird ever since Ireland. We came too
close to the place it all happened, I think. And then you practically drowned
there too, which didn’t make the visit anymore pleasant, and I think he’s
just struggling with all of that.”
She means the place where our parents fought that otherworldly evil, of
course— where my mother was poisoned by the Canath monsters that
escaped that portal, and Liam’s father was killed by them.
And I’d already thought about his aversion to being there, but then I’d
gotten distracted by Soren and everything else, and so I’ve yet to find the
right moment—or the right courage—to actually bring it up with Liam.
“I’m kind of a terrible friend,” I say, picking up the stack of post-it
notes and absently sticking a trail of them along my arm. They look kind of
like feathers. I’m tempted to see if they can help me fly away from all this
craziness.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.” She snatches the post-it notes, muttering
something about me being wasteful. “You’re a little distracted by other
things, right?” she says. “I don’t think he expects you to have a therapy
session with him about any of this. Just give him time. He’ll be back to his
usual self after we get a little more distance from that first guardian battle.
Focusing on the next battle would probably help.”
 “Aye-aye, captain.” I sigh wistfully. “I’m glad I have you to keep me in
line, at least.” My tone is a bit teasing, but I mean what I say. She’s younger
than all of us, but she’s still basically the adult chaperone on this crazy field
trip.
“Someone has to,” she says, echoing my sigh.
“So where to next?”
She flips through the dog-eared notebook in her lap for a moment, finds
a page with a bulleted list, and then presents it to me. “I’ve narrowed down
promising locations for us to check out, based on these books and a
conversation I had with the innkeeper’s daughter. She mentioned the
Cambio Forest—that’s the one at the bottom of list there, the one that I
starred. Said hardly anyone goes in there at night, because of weird things
like lights and music that apparently come from nowhere. The locals
apparently put mirrors around the edges of the forest to confuse evil spirits,
to keep them lost in the trees so they can’t reach the villages and people
outside. So, you know, that’s creepy.”
“Sounds like exactly the sort of place we should find some more trouble
— slash otherworldly artifacts.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, perfect. I say we head there first. Also, you’re a godsend.”
“I know I am.”
“I’m going to go start packing up.”
“I’ll catch up. I need to call home first and let them know we’re all still
alive.”
“And also so you can nerd out with your dad about Romanian giants
and dragons?”
“Obviously.”
I’ve always thought it was kind of adorable, the way the only person
that out-dorks Carys is her own father. Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree
and all that.
I feel a twang of homesickness myself as I watch her pull out her phone
and flip through her contacts. It’s been two days since I last called home;
when I did, I only talked to my dad, and it had been a brief conversation.
Mom had been gone, on her way to meet with the alphas of two other local
packs. Still doing damage control thanks to all the trouble I’ve caused, I
think— though Dad only kept insisting that things were fine.
He always says that, though.
 Particularly when things are not fine.
I consider suggesting Carys ask her dad for more details about what’s
happening back home—Uncle Eli has always been the type to offer up
straight facts without holding back for fear of frightening or upsetting
people.
But in the end, I decide that maybe I don’t want to know all the details
this time.
I can only focus on fighting so many battles at once, you know?
So instead I just give Carys a weak smile. “Tell him I said hello,” I say,
and then I leave her and head for our room.

B ACK IN THE room the four of us shared, I find Soren neatly folding
blankets and stacking pillows on the pull-out sofa he slept on last night.
“You know housekeeping is just going to unfold those so they can wash
them, right?”
He shrugs. “I’m in the habit of keeping things tidy. My dad was
essentially a drill sergeant about chores.”
“Fold on, then.” I move to the corner, where I’ve stacked all my things
in a decidedly less neat fashion, including my trusty sword. That sword has
lost the illusion Soren casted over it when we arrived. We thought we might
raise some eyebrows by carrying weapons and stuff in here. And my
weapon doesn’t fit very easily into my suitcase, so for these past twenty-
four hours or so, it’s appeared to all the world as a harmless guitar that I
could sling onto my back.
Seeing the blade back to its normal appearance and sharpness settles
some of the unease that had started rolling around in my stomach once I
started thinking about home. There’s something reassuring about this
reminder that I’m out here to fight.
The first key to Canath is in the small lockbox the inn provided in
addition to a floor safe, and the literal key to that lockbox is in the zippered
pocket of my jacket. I reach for it now. Aside from my weapons, it should
be the first thing I pack and secure. That’s what I decided on the way up
here.
Honestly, I probably shouldn’t have let it out of my sight in the first
place—and I wouldn’t have, if not for the weird feeling it gives me
whenever I hold on to it for too long.
 Even with the neutralizing sealing spell Soren used still at work, I swear
it’s like I can feel the energy of the otherworld every time I touch the tiny,
unassuming little stone. I seriously thought it was going to electrocute me
the first time I accidentally brushed my fingers across that actual mark of
Canath that appeared on the object’s surface. And even just being near it
creates a pulling sensation in that matching mark that I carry on my wrist,
as if it’s trying to pull me into it, same as it somehow did with that first
guardian.
Which is why I wanted to destroy this first key immediately. But all of
Soren’s research suggests that all three of the keys need to be in contact
with each other when we perform the final spell to destroy them, or else the
energy of them might just end up slipping away and manifesting in some
other object.
And then we would get to play ‘find-the-key’ all over again.
So obviously, key number one is still intact, despite my love-hate
relationship with it.
My hand rests on the lockbox. I sense Soren watching me, and I divert
my attention to him so I can avoid touching the key for a little bit longer.
He glances from the door back to my questioning eyes, and then he
explains his staring: “I couldn’t help but notice that you came in alone.
After you—”
“Left with Liam. Yes. I know. Everybody is apparently really interested
in how we decided to walk back from that dumb café separately. Which is
kind of crazy when you consider how many more actually interesting things
we’re dealing with—you know, guardians and fissures and the possible
destruction of life as we know it—things that you all could be focusing on
instead.”
“You seem upset.”
“Well I have this really annoying character flaw,” I grumble, “where for
some reason I can’t help but care about what my friends think of me.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
I snort out a laugh. I’m far from amused. But there’s just…something
about the way that he’s casually made me realize that I’m more exhausted
and upset about Liam than I thought, and that something makes me feel too
helpless to do anything except laugh about it all.
“It is,” I sigh.
 He smiles. It’s a bit softer, a bit more hesitant than his usual one. And I
can’t help but fall a little in love with it. Even though I’m trying not to,
same as I was trying not to three days ago. I don’t want to deal with these
butterflies that feel like they’re going to war in my stomach over him. I
don’t need the extra distraction.
But he isn’t exactly helping me win my battle.
He’s folded his hands behind his head and is leaning back against the
wall with a thoughtful look on his face. The stretched pose puts every bit of
his lean muscle on display, and it lifts his shirt a little higher than his low-
slung sweatpants, revealing a strip of his bare, tanned skin. I force my gaze
up to his face instead. His eyes are still green—the color he said was as
genuine as that softer smile he just gave me.
I’d told him I liked them that color.
I can’t help but wonder if that’s why they haven’t changed again; this is
the longest they’ve stayed one color since the night we met.
“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment of silence.
The apology catches me off guard.
My confusion must be obvious on my face, too, because he follows up
with: “I didn’t mean to cause problems between the two of you.”
“It’s okay. You’re far from our only problem.”
“Right…but still, I’ve been thinking.”
“Not about me again, I hope?” I say with a wry smile. “That’s what got
us into trouble last time, if you remember.”
“I know.” He pushes away from the wall. For a minute he looks as if
what he’s thinking about is closing the space between us and maybe picking
up where we left off the other night. He hesitates, though, and in the end he
just throws an almost frustrated look out the window instead. “But I can’t
seem to help myself.”
The low tone of his voice sends heat sneaking up the back of my neck.
“We’re business partners,” I say quietly. “That’s all.”
He nods. “That’s all I wanted.”
“Me too,” I reply.
But I sound really, really unconvincing.
It’s like when you write a word over and over, repeating it so many
times that it doesn’t seem real anymore.
He turns away from the window. Studies me for a moment. Then he
takes a deep breath, shakes his head, grabs his backpack from the couch and
slings it over his shoulder. “We’re leaving soon, right?”
“We’ve more or less decided on our next destination, so yeah. I was
coming up to get my stuff.”
His eyes fall on the lockbox next to my hand. “Is it still bothering you?
The key’s energy?”
“I wish I could say it wasn’t. But I can feel it through the box,
even….and I’m sort of afraid to open it. Wonder if they’d notice if we just
stole the whole box? It’s not that big. I could fit it in my backpack.”
He comes closer, his focus still on that box. “Maybe I can try to
neutralize it further.”
“It seemed like that spell kind of wore you out last time.”
“You noticed.”
“Sorry. I won’t tell anyone else you aren’t invincible. It can be our little
secret.”
His gaze flickers away from the box and takes mine.
I swallow hard, unable to keep myself from thinking about what other
sort of little secrets I’d like to keep with him.
“Well,” he says, still looking at me and not the box and key in question,
“I’m not above thievery as an option, either.”
“Somehow I had a feeling you wouldn’t be.”
And somehow I don’t think we’re talking about lockboxes anymore,
either.
His lips part with a sly little smile as he takes a step closer. The door to
our room is still cracked. I can hear people chattering and walking by
outside, though they’re just barely audible over the sound of my own
pounding heart. But I hear them. I smell them. I feel the vibrations of their
movements—all of my already-heightened senses seem to be in overdrive
mode, and I’m simultaneously afraid of being caught while getting drunk
off the idea of being this close to him, keeping these secrets in almost plain
sight.
My mind races, warring over these thoughts, trying to decide whether to
stay or to run.
Then he presses his mouth to mine, and there’s no more war.
There’s no more anything for a moment.
Time seems frozen along with my body, until he takes my face in his
hands and pulls me deeper into the kiss. Then everything comes back at
once: the morning dew scent of him, the taste of coffee and cream on his
lips, the feel of his fingertips pressing into my skin and sending every
nerve-ending in my body quivering to life—every part of him collected,
rushing over me like a wave that leaves me breathless and unsteady for a
moment.
He steadies me by backing me against the wall.
Then he leans away, just far enough that he can see my face. He tucks a
strand of hair behind my ear and lets his fingers linger there, teasing and
tickling my earlobe for a moment before he says, “I don’t like leaving
things unfinished.” His voice is low and raspy through his heavy breathing.
“So I’ve been thinking about this since we were interrupted the other
night.”
“This is essentially anarchy,” I breathe. “I hope you realize that.”
“I do, my rebellious Little Wolf.”
I cover his smirk with a swift, more aggressive kiss. “Still don’t like that
nickname,” I growl, which makes him laugh and kiss me back even harder.
We tangle more completely together, movements hungry and quick for
fear of another interruption. My hands grip his hips, and then slide to the
warm skin of his hard stomach as he trails his lips down the side of my
neck. I feel his teeth on my skin, and my vision blurs a bit as something
beastly and insatiable surges up in me, bringing dangerous strength with it.
The strength of a wolf.
Before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve twisted our position and pressed
him against the wall instead. My vision changes again—not blurring, but
clearing as the colors around me shift.
His hands are around my wrists a moment later, pushing against the grip
I’ve claimed on his waist.
I instinctively growl and try to twist away from him.
He’s surprisingly strong.
But I know I’m stronger.
I jerk free of his hands. I’m prepared to pounce, to crush him against the
wall in a show of dominance that I can’t help but want to put on. Before I
can, he stubbornly reaches for my arms and pins them awkwardly to my
sides—but it’s his voice that actually gets me to stop.
“Easy,” he whispers. “Look at what you’re doing.”
I squirm free of his grip, but I don’t attack him again. My sight slides
back to normal human vision, and I manage to find enough focus to follow
his gaze as he narrows it on the window.
 Through the crack in the curtains, I can just barely see a group of
people, huddled together on one of the many flower-lined paths that
crisscross their way around this quaint little inn.
All of them are pointing at something I can’t see.
I sprint to the window, fear skipping through me and making the room
spin and making my steps unsteady. I slam into that window and clutch the
velvety light-blocking curtains for support, holding my breath as I survey
the damage that I’ve done.
Or that we’ve done, I guess.
Luckily, it isn’t much. Just enough to catch people’s attention, it seems;
the spot they were pointing to is just a scar of strangely-red sky, though in
the sunlight I think I catch a sparkle of the ash-like fissure residue falling
from it.
I scan that sky, the yard, the distant mountains—everywhere I can see—
searching for any sign of any creature I might have inadvertently unleashed
on this poor village. There’s nothing to see. After a moment that group
outside begins to disperse, and I finally remember how to breathe properly.
And then I promptly forget again as I sense my accomplice moving into
the space behind me.
His hand just barely brushes my hip. Not even on purpose, but it still
sends electricity shimmering over my skin and thoughts of the past few
minutes rushing through my head.
I close my eyes and bite my lip, frustrated at myself for almost losing
control, frustrated at him for standing so damn close right now, even if all
he’s doing is looking out the window for himself.
“World’s still in one piece,” he remarks.
“I almost lost control.”
He turns and studies me for a moment before he says, “Yeah. I thought
that only happened when you were in danger or distress?”
“Apparently my inner wolf can’t tell the difference. It just senses my
heart racing, and then you cornered me and I…I just… I’ve never…”
He reaches and casually picks a loose thread from my sleeve. I’d swear
there’s a hint of a grin flirting with the corners of his mouth. “Never gotten
quite as worked up before over something like this?” he guesses.
“Stop looking so pleased with yourself,” I mutter.
“Sorry.”
“Are you?”
 “Yes. But…”
“But what?”
“But it’s also interesting to know I have this sort of effect on you.”
“It’s dangerous, apparently.” I wish I could get rid of that low note of
desire still humming underneath my every word. Because I know he hears
it. And the way that he’s looking at me…it feels like he’s hearing
everything else I’ve never actually said to him, too. Like he knows entirely
too much, and I’m not entirely sure how I let this happen.
But to his credit, he doesn’t try to argue my point.
“Yes. Obviously, that was very dangerous. And that’s disappointing.”
“So we’re agreed.” I take a deep breath. Swallow hard, like I might be
able to choke that desire down my throat. “No more touching like that.”
“I’ll do my best.” He says it with the smile of a saint, but his tone is
perfectly sinful as he adds: “Though it probably wouldn’t hurt you to
practice more of what we were doing so we could work on you keeping
control. Practice makes perfect and all that.”
I roll my eyes at him, but before I can come up with a proper retort, a
flustered-looking Carys throws open the door to our room. I don’t have to
guess what’s made her eyes so wide and her breathing so heavy.
“I’m fine,” I say quickly.
It doesn’t stop the harried looks she’s tossing back and forth between
Soren and me.
And it occurs to me then that I probably should have been coming up
with an explanation for this inevitable moment instead of bantering with
Soren.
“We tried taking the key out of the lockbox,” he lies for me, “and its
energy was a little too much for her.”
“I just slipped for a moment,” I agree.
“I thought you’d used a neutralizing spell? What happened to that?” She
takes a step closer to Soren, arms crossing and then her hand lifting, balling
into a fist that she rests her chin on. Leave it to Carys to demand further
evidence.
Soren doesn’t falter under her interrogative gaze, at least. “The spell
isn’t indefinite. I was just about to reinforce it. But that required taking it
out of the box.”
“It probably wouldn’t have effected me,” I add, “but I’m just overly
tired, I think. And with everything on my mind…”
 She slowly lets her gaze slide away from Soren and fix on me instead,
and a moment later I hear her voice in my mind, (Are you sure you’re
okay?)
(I’m perfect.)
She slowly nods, finally letting it go—which should be a relief, but
honestly it just makes me feel a little sick to my stomach.
Because let’s make a list, shall we?
So far, I’ve managed to alienate one of my best friends, nearly rip a hole
in the sky, and now I’ve added successfully lying straight to the face of my
other best friend. A real banner day for Eleanor McLelland, in other words.
Before I can do any more damage, I gather my things in silence—
which neither of them interrupts, thankfully—and we head for the nearest
exit.
 THIRTEEN

Spells and Mirrors

IT’S RAINING, and the four of us are crammed into a dented black taxi cab,
on our way to the Cambio Forest Visitor’s Center—which is apparently a
lot farther away than it looked on the map that was hanging on the inn’s
wall.
Carys volunteered to take the front seat with our driver, in hopes of
solidifying some of the Romanian that she’s learned over the past days.
It’s been kind of entertaining watching her attempt this, since our driver
has thus far spoken approximately zero English, aside from a few super
friendly greetings.
In addition to her memorized lines, Carys has been making use of a
translator app on her phone, and the friendly old man has been finding this
endlessly hilarious; either because the translations are way off, or because
the robotic voice of the translated words. Not sure which, but I’m trying to
focus on the sound of his deep laughter, whatever’s causing it.
Because the alternative is focusing on the fact that I’m currently
squished between Liam and Soren with barely an inch to spare on either
side.
The latter has his head resting against the foggy window, his eyes
closed. Asleep, I think. His legs are stretched diagonally across the center
floorboard and pressing lightly against mine. I can’t so much as take a deep
breath without causing him to stir too, and to readjust and brush against me,
inviting dangerous memories of the hotel room to come flooding back into
my mind.
 Meanwhile, to my right, Liam is still uncharacteristically quiet. We
exchanged a few words before crawling into the car, but ever since then
he’s been staring out the window like he’s trying to memorize every tree
and its position in every rolling field we’re driving past. I keep waiting for
his thoughtspeech to shove its way into my head, for him to privately insist
we finish the argument we started earlier.
A half hour of this so far.
Soren yawns and shuffles his position a bit. His hand falls lazily to his
side, brushing mine as it does.
Our knuckles rest lightly together.
I should pull away, but I don’t.
I shouldn’t be watching him out of the corner of my eye, either, but I’m
doing that too. I’m ninety-eight percent sure he’s actually asleep; he never
looks quite this vulnerable or peaceful when he’s awake, no matter how
much magic he might use to hide himself. And how much of it is still an
illusion at this point, I wonder? How much of his real self have I seen?
I shouldn’t be wondering.
I shouldn’t care about him like this. Nothing beyond how he’s going to
help me finish this mission we set out on. Because it doesn’t matter—
especially not after what after what happened earlier, which just proved that
caring, and getting too close to him, is going to have disastrous
consequences, one way or another.
But it’s hard not to think about him when he’s, you know, right there.
Also, if you were wondering what the definition of hell is—it’s this.
It’s exactly this.
I mean maybe just the first circle of hell, but still. Or does lust land you
in the second circle? I can’t remember. I probably should have paid more
attention during our homeschool study group’s discussions of Dante’s
Inferno.
I stare ahead, zeroing in on the rearview mirror and what I can see of
our driver. He still seems happy, at least. He’s laughing so hard at whatever
Carys just said in Romanian that he nearly swerves off the edge of the
narrow road.
(You’re positive this guy knows where he’s going, right?) I think. (And
that he’s not just bored and driving us around as an entertaining practical
joke or something? Like maybe we’re on one of those hidden camera shows
or something…)
 (Or maybe he’s kidnapping us?) Liam suggests. (How do you say ‘we
aren’t worth any real ransom money’ in Romanian?)
(I trust him,) Carys replies, undeterred. (He seems nice. Apparently he’s
a real family man—he has six kids. Or maybe six goats. I’m not one
hundred percent sure I’m not mixing up the words for ‘children’ and ‘goat’.
But either way, I don’t think he’s going to kidnap us or murder us or
anything.)
(Well if nothing else, the Nice Goat Man seems to be taking the long
way around, doesn’t he?) I ask.
(You could just enjoy the scenery,) she suggests.
(There’s nothing to my left but empty fields, and Liam’s giant head is
blocking the window to my right.)
To my surprise, after a second of hesitation, Liam gives me a crooked
smile and takes my teasing bait. (You should feel grateful that you get to
stare at me,) he replies. (A lot of people would kill for this view.)
(Behave, children,) Carys scolds.
(I will, as long as Elle stays on her side of the car.)
(Tell Liam to stop touching me please.)
(I will turn this car around!)
(Do you even know how to ask our driver to do that?)
(…No. But I have an app for that.)
I barely contain a laugh—the tricky thing about having amusing
conversations entirely in your head. If our driver thought we were strange
and entertaining before, he’d really lose it if we all started laughing for
seemingly no reason at all.
Maybe because he’s thinking the same thing, Liam decides to start a
new conversation out loud. “I was going to give this to you earlier, by the
way,” he says, leaning over and digging into the brown paper bag at his
feet. “But I didn’t get the chance.”
The way he says that last part basically translates his message to: I was
going to give it to you at breakfast, but that ended disastrously before I
could, so here we are.
“I found it at this random little shop in the village square.” He
withdraws his hand, and then unwraps the tissue-paper-protected figurine
that he’s retrieved. It’s a small little lizard carved out of wood and painted
in brilliant shades of turquoise and grey.
Because of course it is.
 “Oh, you’re hilarious.”
He grins. “I thought it had been awhile since I reminded you of your
finest hour.”
The lizard thing is a running joke between us. And the finest hour he’s
referring to is the moment it all started: two years ago, when I’d woken up
in the dead of night because I felt something crawling on my leg. I’d
screamed. Obviously. And then, when I’d seen what it actually was—a
damn lizard— I’d screamed even louder, tripped my way out of my bed,
gotten tangled in my covers, and smashed my head into my dresser hard
enough to knock myself out.
Because, confession time: reptiles of all shapes and sizes freak me out.
I want to toss all snakes into a fiery inferno.
I won’t go into any body of water if there’s even the slightest chance
that I might spot a turtle bobbing its creepy little head in and out of its shell.
And freaking lizards. I do not like the way they move. I do not like the
way they dart their eyes around. I want to cringe at the thought of that weird
little neck pouch thingy that some of them have going on—seriously, what
is that?
All of this, of course, Liam finds hilarious. He was the one who’d
reached my room first that night, expecting to find someone murdering me.
I’d come back to my senses while in his arms, and after I’d told him what
had made me knock myself out, he’d laughed for at least a solid minute
before finally agreeing to hunt down the creature responsible. Then he’d
insisted on releasing it outside instead of killing it, and I’ve never really
forgiven him for that.
Ever since then, he likes to surprise me with dumb little lizard-themed
gifts like this. I have a small shrine of them in my room—stuffed, glass,
metal. All in my closet. So I can shut them out of sight, because just
looking at them gives me the creeps.
This newest one is exceptionally creepy, with its black eyes made of
shiny, thick dollops of paint. I shiver and squirm as Liam insists on walking
it up and down my arm. I’d snatch it and fling it out the window, but I know
it’s more than just a silly gift—it’s a peace offering. A reminder of all our
silly inside jokes and all our good moments that vastly outnumber these
past few uneasy days. So instead I bare my teeth at him in the closest thing I
can manage to a smile while that thing is touching me.
“I hate you so much,” I say, lovingly.
 “I know you do.”
I lean my head into his shoulder and sigh, and he finally takes that gross
thing off my skin.
Our taxi pulls to a stop outside the small castle-like visitor’s center a
few minutes later.
After Liam does his best to freak me out with the carving a few more
times, and gets several more laughs out of it, I finally manage to grab the
lizard and bury it deep in the corner of one of my bags, next to the stolen
lockbox and the key it holds. I direct him to the visitor’s center to procure a
map, and Carys goes with him while I take care of paying our driver and
unloading the bags.
“Seems like the two of you made up,” Soren says, yawning as he comes
around to help me with the bags.
I shrug. “We never stay mad at each other long. He gets too bored when
he isn’t able to tease and torment me for his own amusement.”
I think I see something like jealousy flash in his eyes, but I tell myself I
imagined it.
He says nothing else, only gives me a small, sleepy little smile as we
finish piling our stuff out of the trunk.
I take a deep breath through my nose, sling several of the bags on my
shoulder, give our driver a friendly little wave, and then start toward the
visitor’s center. My steps are quick and determined. Soren has to jog to
catch up with me.
“We can still talk to each other, you know,” he says. “And I promise I’m
not going to jump you and force you to make out with me just because
we’re standing within a few feet of each other.”
“I’m just trying to focus on our mission. And nothing else.”
“As am I.”
Before I can express my doubts about this, we’re rejoined by Carys and
Liam. Carys is waving the map I asked for. It has several red stars and
circles marked on it, apparently thanks to a particularly helpful visitor
center employee.
“The people here are incredibly friendly,” Liam says, casting a look
back at that center.
“He means the girls here are incredibly pretty,” Carys corrects. “The
chick that gave us this map was doing some hardcore flirting. She was
being more than just friendly.”
 Liam sighs. “This beautiful face is a burden sometimes.”
“Is it possible to cause permanent eye strain from rolling them too
much?” I ask. “Because if so I’m sending you my doctor bill.”
He elbows me in the side, and I laugh, happy that we’re all back to our
semi-normal interaction with each other.
That happiness doesn’t last.
We make it maybe halfway to the trailhead we plan to take into the
forest before I sense something odd. Carys and Liam both stop too,
listening intently and taking deep breaths of the air, tasting it and studying it
for a moment. The three of us exchange a look.
“Magic-blood?” Carys guesses, frowning.
“There was a hint of this scent back at the inn, too,” Liam says. “It was
faint, though—not from anyone recent, I didn’t think. But this is definitely
the same scent. Definitely a sorcerer.”
“We’re being followed?”
“Kind of surprised it took them this long to catch up with us, to be
honest,” Liam says, his gaze sliding to Soren. “Magic leaves a trail, right?
Your kind can sense the energy you leave behind every time you use a spell,
is what I’ve always heard.”
“To an extent, yes,” Soren says, calmly ushering us toward an
outbuilding behind the main visitor’s center. “But there are ways you can
cover your tracks, which I’ve been trying to do. So they shouldn’t be able to
pinpoint us exactly, and we can do other things to throw off their search.”
He throws a glance over his shoulder, makes sure no one is watching us,
and then directs us into the weedy bit of yard behind the building.
“Are there snakes in Romania?” I ask, nervously eyeing the overgrowth
he’s stomping through. “I’m not afraid. Just asking for a friend.”
“There are like ten different types,” Carys says.
“Cool. My friend will be thrilled. She loves snakes.”
Carys gives me a wry smile, then takes my hand and pulls me fearlessly
into the brush and out of sight of anybody who might happen by.
Soren has already started doing those ‘other things’ to throw off our
pursuers; his appearance is changing again. I watch, still mesmerized by
this increasingly-familiar magic, as his hair grows shorter and darker, while
his skin pales to an ivory complexion that makes his newly-blue eyes seem
incredibly vibrant. I still prefer the green, but I wouldn’t say this looks bad.
 He turns to me next, but I’m hesitant. “You were already exhausted
earlier, from doing those neutralizing spells,” I point out. “You keep this up
and you’re going to end up passing out.”
“The alternative is being easy targets,” he says with a shrug.
I can’t think of another decent protest fast enough to stop him from
going to work.
He’s quick and efficient with his spells, even though I can see the
fatigue steadily creeping and taking a more commanding grip on his
features.
Soon, I have long tresses of silvery blonde hair and eyes a similar
goldish-green of Carys’s natural color, while Carys bares a striking
resemblance to that red-haired chick who was in The Breakfast Club. She
keeps running her fingers through her hair and over her face, and pressing
them against her skin like she expects it to give way like its some kind of
hologram.
“This is so…fascinating,” she says.
“You mean weird,” Liam says.
“No, I mean fascinating. We shift and change in our own way, of
course, but only into one thing, really. Still, I wonder how similar the
elements of our different transformations are? When you break innate
magic down to its most basic components, there’s really—”
“Friendly reminder that we’re being pursued by dangerous sorcerers,” I
interrupt. “And I really don’t want to go back to prison, nor do I want to be
tortured again anytime soon, so can we focus, please?”
She nods, somewhat begrudgingly. Then she redirects her intense focus
to Liam, who’s standing with his arms folded across his chest, still looking
like his normal self.
“I plan on shifting as soon as possible,” he says in response to our
pointed looks, “There’s no sense in him wasting his energy… illusioning
me or whatever.”
“You won’t be able to do that until we’re way deep into the woods,”
Carys says, “and even then, it will depend on whether or not there are any
normal people hanging around that might witness you.”
Soren cracks his knuckles, blinks several times and then closes his eyes,
obviously trying to keep the last of his focus from slipping away. “It isn’t
going to hurt,” he says.
 Liam exhales a defeated breath. “Fine. Just do whatever you have to
do.”
“Make him ugly,” Carys suggests, “so he’s not burdened with that
beautiful face he was so distraught over earlier.”
The corner of Soren’s mouth quirks, and, just for a moment, he doesn’t
look so tired. He looks like the powerful, confident guy I met outside my
prison that night—even if those basic features have changed again.
I look away, studying the trees instead.
When I look back, the last of the magic is done. Liam appears older, his
warm brown eyes hardened to the color of stone, and his wide, easygoing
smile sharper looking with the absence of his usual dimples. And his scent
is different, too, just like mine and Carys’s. It makes the wolf in me
desperately uneasy.
He examines himself in a shiny scrap of metal that’s serving as
patchwork against the back of the shed. “As I suspected,” he says, rubbing a
hand of his now-slightly-stronger jawline. “It’s impossible to make me look
ugly.”
“Whatever,” Carys says. “Your eyes are creepy.”
I nod in agreement. “You look like a guy I’d give a fake number to.”
“Well I’m not really into blondes,” he counters, “so I probably wouldn’t
ask for your number anyway.”
“The woods are waiting,” Soren reminds us.
The air quickly turns solemn again as we trek our way across the broken
pavement and into those woods—though we try to keep up some of the
chatter, at least, so that we look like average backpacking college kids on a
European road trip or whatever.
The scent of the following sorcerers only grows more obvious. Part of it
is because the wind has picked up, whistling in from the south and carrying
the scents of the visitor’s center with it, too. This is unfamiliar territory, and
it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where anything is coming from—whether those
magical scents are still at the visitor’s center, or if they’ve followed us into
the woods. We leave a twisted path full of decoys just in case, with Soren
pausing every half mile or so to trek off in another direction and perform
spells meant to lure our pursuers toward those spell’s energies instead of
toward us.
We walk as fast as we can without seeming weird, heading deeper and
deeper into the trees—to a section of the forest that the pretty visitor center
lady forcefully scribbled out with her red pen, warning us not to go that
deep without a local guide. Local guides who are apparently in short supply,
because even they don’t like going there.
It’s at the edge of this ominous area that we see the first evidence of the
local tradition Carys told me about earlier.
There are mirrors all over the place.
Ornate and plain ones; rectangular and circular ones; some propped
against rocks and roots, others tied and hanging from the trees. There are a
few that look like they were hanging at some point, too, but now they’re
lying on the ground, cracked or in pieces.
And then Liam adds to those broken ones, accidentally bumping his
backpack against a too-loosely-tied one and sending it plummeting to the
ground.
“Oops. That’s bad luck, right?” he asks, nudging the shattered mirror
with the toe of his shoe. “For some reason?”
“In most cultures, yes,” Carys says. “The belief is generally that the
mirror reflects the soul, and so to break a mirror is to break part of your
soul. Parts of which will then be trapped in the mirror shards. Though you
can heal said soul and restore it by grinding up the broken pieces so they
don’t reflect anything, supposedly, if you’re feeling particularly
superstitious.”
“Interesting,” he says.
But for a supernatural creature, Liam has always been decidedly un-
superstitious, so the mirror and its pieces stay where they all fell.
“Yup,” Carys agrees. “And so is this—” She picks up a mirror framed in
a garish border of fake gold, and she holds it up so Liam and I can see
ourselves—our actual selves, and not the illusions Soren created for us.
“A properly-made and ritualistically-blessed mirror can’t lie.”
“So the locals believe these mirrors are somehow containing whatever
evil is here?”
“Reflecting it back into the woods,” she says, nodding. “Apparently
whatever evil is in here doesn’t like what it sees in the mirror, and won’t
cross this makeshift wall of them.”
She continues rambling off the facts and folklore she knows about
mirrors, but my attention has started to drift toward Soren. Without so much
as a comment about broken mirrors or souls, he’s already crossed through
all those mirrors and put at least fifty feet between himself and them. Like
he’s avoiding his own reflection. Or avoiding letting us see that true
reflection.
I should have expected as much, I guess; I already knew he hadn’t
shown me his true appearance since we met.
Still, this extra effort to avoid it makes me uneasy.
Carys and Liam are caught up enough in their own conversation that
they don’t seem to notice his strange behavior. I don’t say anything for the
moment, because the four of us are getting along as well as we ever have,
and I don’t want to mess that up if I can help it.
But I do find a small, folding compact mirror, and I discreetly slide it
into my back pocket.
Then I jog casually after him. The other two catch up, and at almost the
exact moment they reach us, a second mirror crashes to the ground.
The sound of it cracking echoes eerily through the quiet forest.
“More bad luck,” Carys mutters. And the fact that she looks anxious
about it—when she’s usually the most rational one among us—chills me to
the point that I can’t get the goosebumps on my arm to settle, no matter how
hard I try to rub them away.
“It was just the wind,” Liam insists.
“Mirrors falling and breaking on their own is worse luck than you
breaking one. It supposedly means that someone among you is going to die
soon.”
“Not it,” Liam and Soren and I all say, almost in unison, and Carys
looks unamused as the three of us share a quiet laugh.
“This place is giving me the creeps,” she says, “let’s just get this search
over with.”
“We haven’t seen any humans for miles,” Liam says, stretching, and
wiggling his fingers in front of him until they start to shift into black claws.
“And I’d feel much more comfortable searching as a wolf.”
“Probably faster, too,” Carys agrees, and after a hesitant glance around
and a few sniffs at the air, she joins him in transforming.
The two bound circles around Soren and me for a moment before
streaking deeper into the trees, one on either side of the increasingly-
overgrown path we’ve been traveling on.
They don’t go far—at least not at first. I can hear them crashing through
the brush, and for several minutes I occasionally catch glimpses of them;
Liam’s white fur is particularly easy to keep track of.
 But eventually, something must catch their senses, because they both
slip out of sight, leaving me with only my sense of smell and hearing to
keep a general idea of their location.
I run a hand over the hilt of my sword. I try to hold in a sigh, but I don’t
quite manage it.
“Sad to be stuck here with me?” Soren asks, giving me a small,
somewhat distracted smile.
“It’s just weird to not be able to go with them. We do everything else
together. But then, it’s always been this way when they shift, so... It’s
whatever.” I grip my sword more tightly and attempt a shrug.
He nods, and after walking for a bit in silence he says, “You have
everything else, at least.”
“True.” His voice is as distracted as his smile. Not guarded, in other
words. I think of the mirror in my pocket, and I wonder if I could coax
something real out of him if he isn’t paying complete attention. “Was there
anyone you were close to back home?”
He’s quiet, but he still doesn’t seem completely closed off, so I keep
pushing.
“What about your sister, before…you know?” I fumble a bit toward the
end, immediately wishing I hadn’t mentioned his sister, and hoping that I
haven’t upset him.
He’s perfectly emotionless in his response, though: “I was young when
she was taken. I essentially grew up an only child.” Those now-blue eyes
glance my way for the faintest of moments before refocusing on the path
ahead. “And I grew up very much alone, to answer your other question.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. There are worse things than being alone.” The lines still
sound practiced, emotionless; it’s clear he doesn’t want any sympathy from
me.
But I can’t help the frown that’s etched its way onto my face. Or the
sinking feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I think about him alone.
About his mother and sister gone, leaving him with no one to talk to. No
one to listen to his doubts about the things all the rest of the Blackwood
sorcerers seem to believe in.
And I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t belong to your own kind
—although he’s right: at least I have Liam and Carys by my side for most of
it.
 He apparently has nobody.
I mean, assuming everything he’s told me is true.
I absently slow my step and reach into my back pocket, running my
fingers over the smooth cover of the mirror I took.
He slows too, looking happy to stop for a minute.
“Do you want to rest?” I ask.
“As long as we’re still keeping the secret about my not being invincible,
I’ll admit that I wouldn’t mind it.”
I nod toward a fallen tree that looks like it would make a decent seat.
We shrug all of the gear we’re carrying to the ground with one heavy thump
after the other, and then we sit in silence for a few minutes; I try reaching
out to Liam and Carys through thoughtspeech, to ask for a search report, but
I don’t get an immediate response.
I’m not too worried about it, because I know they’re both in hunting
mode, and the wolf mind can turn very one-track during those moments. So
I soon take to studying our own surroundings instead.
And then, because I can’t stop thinking about it, I pull the mirror out of
my pocket.
Beside me, Soren’s arms are folded across his chest and his shoulders
are slumped. His eyes are closed. And maybe it’s wrong—an invasion of
privacy or something like that—but curiosity gets the better of me.
I flip the mirror open.
I hold it in front of us.
And in its properly-crafted and ritual-blessed reflection, I truly see
Soren Blackwood for the first time.
I see olive-toned skin and a jagged little scar running along the side of
his face, almost but not quite covered by hair blacker than the blackest
coffee. High cheekbones, full lips, a nose that from this angle appears just
the tiniest bit bent.
He’s as beautiful as any of the illusions he’s put on so far, but there’s
something about the way the forest shadows fall on his true face…
something that makes him seem darker than he should, even in the late
afternoon light.
Something that makes me want to move away from him.
The second I move, his eyes blink open.
Green.
He was telling the truth about that much, then—this is his natural color.
 But the longer I stare at him, at those eyes and the rest of the face
around them, the more I wish he’d been lying. Because suddenly I realize: I
recognize those eyes.
“I’ve seen you before,” I whisper. “The real you.”
He starts to his feet, his hand moving like he’s going to reach for me.
I jump up and stumble backward before he can touch me.
“I had a vision of you. An awful vision. And then you were there…. at
my house that night when everything went wrong. I knew I hadn’t imagined
you. And you look exactly like… like….”
“Maric Blackwood,” he says quietly.
I back further away. He doesn’t try to close the space between us again.
“It’s because I’m his son.”
 FOURTEEN

Beasts and Brokeness

“GET AWAY FROM ME.”

“I’m sorry Elle, I should have told you—”
“Get away from me.”
He takes a few steps backward, hands lifting slightly.
It doesn’t calm me down. “Do you know what that man has done to me?
Do you know how he’s tormented my parents? And not just that last time,
either, when he finally managed to take me away from my home—for my
entire life, it’s been him haunting me, using his power to convince everyone
else that I’m a danger that needed to be eliminated.”
“You are dangerous, that’s—”
“Shut-up. That isn’t the point. Because would it even have mattered if I
wasn’t? Your father never wanted peace, even before I came along. He
comes from a long line of instigators, doesn’t he? I’m not completely
ignorant of your history, you know. I know what your ancestors have done.
And you. You’re Of the Blood, just like Maric is—I should have known you
weren’t just a dumb prison guard who felt like rebelling. God, how could I
have been so stupid?”
‘Of the Blood’. Everything Carys has told me about this flashes through
my mind again. That’s how they refer to the descendants of Orion
Blackwood. They all carry the last name Blackwood in his honor, but they
aren’t all actually related to him the way Maric and Soren are. They aren’t
all as powerful as him. They don’t all carry that craving for wickedness that
people say went hand in hand with Orion’s incredible power. Absolute
power corrupts absolutely, they say, and there hasn’t been a true blood
sorcerer yet that hasn’t proven that statement right.
And now all I can think about is how Soren might prove that
wickedness to me.
How stupid I’ve been to let my guard down the way I have around him.
“I can’t help what my ancestors have done anymore than you can help
the fact that your mom gave you a curse as a welcome-to-the-world
present,” he snaps.
And I’m speechless for a moment, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen
him look so upset.
I snap the mirror shut and shove it back into my pocket. My hand strays
to my sword’s handle, but I try to keep my voice somewhat rational as I say,
“How could you not tell me the truth?”
He glares at me. “Well, you just answered that, didn’t you?”
“I—”
“You would never have come with me if I’d told you.”
I bite my lip, a million harsh words hacking through my brain and
trying to fight their way from my mouth. But I hold them back. Because
he’s right. It doesn’t excuse his lying by omission, but he’s right.
“And I needed you to come with me,” he says, somewhat softer now. “I
still need you.”
We study each other for a long, tense moment.
I can’t seem to unclench my fists. Or my heart. I can’t think of anything
else to say, and with every second that passes I feel a little more stupid
about it all—a feeling I can’t really stand. At all. So I search for a
distraction.
I think I see a flash of white in the trees to my left.
“I’m going to go catch up with Liam and see what he’s found.”
“You shouldn’t go alone, just—”
“Yes,” I growl, twisting back so I can shoot him one last glare. “I
absolutely should go alone. I want to be alone. Stay here and watch the
bags, and maybe, if you’re lucky, I’ll come back for you. Or at least for
those bags.”
“I’m sorry,” he calls to my retreating back.
I bristle automatically at the words and his slightly-begging tone of
voice, unable to bring myself to accept the apology just yet. Or to stop
thinking about what this latest development means.
 Can I still trust him?
What about that strange vision I had of him, before we’d even met?
One thing at a time.
I take a deep breath and focus on finding Liam.
I’m not worried about being by myself as I track him; I have my sword
—and besides, my sense of smell confirms that it was Liam I saw. And he
isn’t far away. Within minutes I not only smell him, but I hear him shuffling
around, muttering something to himself.
He’s back in his human form, for some reason.
I push through thick vines draped in moss, and I find myself in a
clearing with his back to me.
“Liam? Is everything okay?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah— I just thought I’d found something promising, but
then I lost track of it.” He turns and gives me that disarming smile of his.
Soren’s illusion spell seems to have faded through the transformation from
human to wolf to human, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that; Liam’s
actual, genuine smile is exactly what I needed to see right now.
But the longer he studies me, the more forced that smile seems to
become.
“You’re alone?” he says.
“I just wanted to check on you. Soren’s resting.”
He doesn’t buy my lie. “What did he do?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly, not ready to talk about any of it at the
moment. “What did you think you’d found? Maybe we can pick up the trail
again together.”
Instead of agreeing, he beckons me toward him.
I sigh, but ultimately I give in and go to his side, and I let him wrap me
up in his arms. I bury my face in his chest, breathing in the comforting scent
of him without even trying to speak for a moment.
“I wish you would stay away from him,” he mutters into my hair. “At
least as much as you can.”
And I repeat the familiar, tired-out lie, because I don’t know what else
to say: “We’re business partners.”
“You’re more than business partners,” he growls.
“I…”
Not anymore, I think.
 I don’t know if I’ve successfully kept this last thought from Liam, but
he says nothing else. After a moment, though, his hands move to the small
of my back. His fingers slide beneath my jacket and trace across the silky
cotton of my t-shirt. Softly at first, but the movement slowly becomes more
and more possessive, his fingers clenching harder until, annoyed, I try to
step back.
He holds me tighter.
I lean my head away from his, as far as I can get. “What are you
doing?” I demand. “I’m not in the mood for games right now.”
He opens his mouth to answer.
But just then, the wind changes directions, and it carries the
unmistakable scent of blood on it.
“Is that…Liam, does that smell like Carys’s blood to you?”
“She’s fine.” His voice sounds so chillingly detached that I stop sniffing
the wind for a moment and turn back to meet his eyes.
They’re…strange.
No illusion covering them, but they’re glassy and hard and they still
don’t look like his.
“Are you sure? Shouldn’t we at least—”
He cuts me off by slamming me against the nearest tree, pinning my
arms awkwardly to my sides.
My breath leaves me in a gasp, and for a minute I’m too stunned to even
think about fighting back.
Then he relaxes the pressure on one of my arms. Reaches and rips my
sword from its sheath. Flings it away. It clangs against a nearby rock with a
tinny echo that reverberates deep into my bones. My mouth falls open as I
stare at his strange eyes.
He knows better than to screw with my weapons.
So apparently this is not one of his games.
But then what the hell is this?
My first racing thought is that this must be an illusion. That Soren must
have followed me after our fight, and he’s given up all attempts at pretenses
and he’s wicked and we’re really, truly enemies now—and this is how he’s
decided to start fighting me.
I hate that thought.
I want it out of my head.
But it’s the only explanation my frantic mind can think of.
 Both of Liam’s hands are suddenly on my arms again. I feel claws
springing out, twisting in, blood rushing down my skin.
I instinctively jerk my knee up into his gut. Hard. He flinches, falls back
just enough that I manage to squirm out from under him.
He tries to grab hold of my arm again, but I twist and aim a kick at the
back of his knee. The blow causes his balance to buckle, and I knock it the
rest of the way off with a powerful shove. While he tries to regain his
footing, I bounce back and away.
Out of the corner of my eye, my sword glints in the rising moonlight.
It’s close—too close—to Liam.
And could I really use it against him, anyway?
His eyes are narrowed, following my every movement.
I can’t be unarmed, I decide.
I dart hard to my left. Sprint at least thirty feet, until I’m positive he’s
following. Until he’s practically breathing down my neck. Then I bank
right, spin around and race back toward my fallen weapon. I hardly slow
down as I scoop it up, but the motion is clumsy and sluggish enough that
Liam catches up.
His elbow drops into my back. It feels like a knife being rammed
between my shoulder blades, the way the fiery pain radiates out from the
point of contact. I end up on the ground, chest heaving for breath and my
hand just barely clinging to my collected weapon.
I roll onto my back and meet his swinging fist with the broad side of my
sword. The metal vibrates as he hits it, shakes my arm so hard that I’m
surprised it doesn’t break either blade or bone.
It also shoves that blade unsettling close to my throat.
I brace my arms and try to push back against his strength. Blood wells
in the puncture wounds his claws left in my skin, one drip after the other
splashing down against my chest.
“What the hell is going on?” I demand through clenched teeth.
He doesn’t answer. He just pushes harder. My strength in my weaker
arm—my left one—gives out, and my sword dips diagonally, stabbing
through the edge of my shoulder. It catches more of my jacket than my skin,
but the pain is still enough to make me cry out. And it’s enough to make me
completely lose my composure.
The skin around my marked wrist feels hotter all of sudden.
The ground beneath me trembles.
 There’s a massive crack in the distance—like the sound of lightning
striking a tree. Liam draws away, staring at my wrist like this is the first
time he’s ever noticed the mark of Canath that graces it.
I shove him the rest of the way off of me and scramble to my feet,
sword drawn and heart pounding.
“You’ve lost your mind,” I pant.
I don’t expect him to even speak by this point. But he does. In that some
detached whisper as before, he says, “You shouldn’t have that mark. Why
do you have that mark?”
I glare at him. “What the hell are you even talking about? Seriously?
Who are you and what have you done with my best friend?”
Those weird eyes seem to shift and darken for a moment. He moves as
if to come toward me, but I point the tip of my sword into his chest,
stopping him mid-step. My whole body is shaking. The blade remains
surprisingly level.
At least for now.
But I don’t know what I’m going to do next.
What I’m going to do if he tries to move.
“Please stop this,” I whisper. “I can’t make sense of this on top of
everything else, I—”
He tries to sidestep around my blade.
I’m faster than he is.
I curl around behind him and slam my fist as hard as I can into the side
of his head. He stumbles. His muscles ripple and spasm the way they do
before a shift, and that telltale wolfish fierceness overtakes his expression.
I back away. Quickly.
I don’t know how to fight him like this, much less as an actual beast.
So as he transforms, I run.
The trees blur by. The scent of Carys’s blood is still overwhelmingly
strong. I try to think critically—I need to find her, help her, can’t lead Liam
to her—but eventually all these thoughts just become a steady stream of
curse words because seriously how did everything go so completely to shit?
I can hear paws slamming against the forest floor, and what sounds like
small trees breaking and being practically uprooted as he tears straight
through them.
If we were both humans, I’d be faster than him.
But like this?
 He’s going to catch me.
I push that thought out of my head. Leap across a small creek and land
hard on the muddy bank, sliding a bit before I find my footing and tear
forward—directly into a thick wall of thorn-covered vines. They carve up
my arms and face as I hack my way through. One of them catches directly
in a claw mark on my arm, and the pain that rips through is blinding. The
woods spin with it. I keep hacking and clawing until the brambles and vines
finally spit me out on the other side, into relatively clear forest—and into
Soren, who is standing with his arm raised and his eyes narrowed in the
direction I just sprinted from.
He offers no explanation, just throws me behind him without breaking
his gaze. An instant later there’s a little pop, and the briar bushes I just
fought my way through start to shift in color and size, waving a bit like
distant things do on sweltering summer days. Soon it no longer resembles
vegetation, but a steep bank of rock and dirt that stretches as far as I can see
in both directions.
He turns to me like he’s just noticed me, and he heaves a deep breath.
“Gods, you’re hard to catch up with,” he says.
“Not for a wolf,” I say, eyes darting anxiously toward the sound of Liam
coming closer and closer.
“Well that spell should confuse him and slow him down. Though not for
long, given how good his senses are.” He grabs my arm and pulls me into a
quick jog. “So let’s hurry. Carys is this way, and she’s still alive—”
“Still alive?” I repeat, dazed.
He said it like we’re incredibly lucky about that fact.
Feeling like I’m going to throw up, I race after him. It’s not hard to
catch up. He’s slow—too slow, and obviously struggling; I can’t imagine
how much power it must have taken to create such an elaborate illusion on
top of everything else he’s done today.
Luckily, we don’t have to go far to find Carys.
Unluckily, she’s in even worse shape than I’d prepared myself for.
She’s tucked back into a shallow cave—it’s more of an overhang of
rock, really. Her black fur is damp with blood, glistening in the little bit of
sunlight reaching her resting spot.
I hold my breath at the sight of her, not releasing it until she finally
shows movement—one single, pitiful thump of her feathered tail.
“Carys?”
 She lifts her head a few inches, only to drop it almost immediately back
to the ground. She closes her eyes.
“Stay awake,” I command. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened. Or
just…I don’t know, finish telling me about mirror legends or something.
Please?”
She snorts.
I choose to interpret that as a laugh. And I choose to ignore the thin line
of drool and blood that’s dribbling from the corner of her mouth.
I try thoughtspeech, thinking it might be easier for her to understand and
focus on. (Carys? Did you hear me?)
Awful silence for several seconds, and then: (I heard you.)
(Then what the hell are you waiting for? Random mirror facts! Now!
Go!)
(I’m tired. I just want to sleep.)
(No you don’t!)
(You’re so annoying,) she muses. And then she’s quiet for another
moment before she begins with: (Random mirror fact number one: Some
cultures believe that it’s imperative to cover mirrors after a loved one’s
died, so that their departing soul can’t get confused by the mirrors or even
trapped in them.)
(Fascinating.)
“Should we try moving her someplace safer?” Soren asks, but I wave
him off; I’m terrified that moving her might break her completely. And
right now I just want to keep hearing her not-dead voice.
(Number two.) Her voice is a distant echo in my head. (The number two
fact…I don’t know, I think I remember reading something about breaking
mirrors in turn breaking souls. Or did we already talk about that earlier?)
(You said a properly blessed mirror reflects a person’s soul. And that if
they break it then parts of that soul will be trapped in…)
I get slowly to my feet, realization dawning over me and a plan rapidly
forming in my mind.
“What’s with that look on your face?” Soren asks.
“He broke one of the mirrors.” I close my eyes, trying to sift through all
of the mythology facts that Carys has been feeding me these past twenty-
four hours, until I finally remember one creature in particular. “Furat-
diavol,” I whisper. “He compromised his soul by breaking the mirror, and
now it’s taken him, and I…We have to…”
 “What in the world are you talking about?”
I take a deep breath. Crouch, and put a hand on Carys’s head. Then to
Soren I say, “I know you’re tired, but can you protect this little cave for a
bit? And keep talking to her. Keep her awake.”
“I—” He stops short at what must be a crazy, desperate look on my
face. “Yes,” he says. “For a few minutes, at least.”
“Good. I should be able to draw him away.”
“And then what?”
I don’t answer, except to promise Carys that I’ll be right back. A
promise I might not be able to keep, but it’s better than telling them the
actual plan running through my head. Because spoiler alert: it’s kind of a
crazy plan.
And I’m just really hoping it doesn’t end with me killing my best friend.
 FIFTEEN

Shadows and Souls

IT’S STARTED to drizzle rain again by the time I make it back to the wall of
mirrors.
I crouch immediately and start to sift through the mud and broken
shards, trying, somehow, to remember exactly which one he broke. Exactly
which one Liam’s soul might be trapped in, if the legend is true. I thought I
had a general idea of where that one had fallen. Of what it looked like.
Now that I’m here, they all look the same.
And there are dozens of the broken ones scattered around.
The rain and wind continue to pick up, obscuring the sounds of Liam’s
approach. I managed to lure him away from the other two, and I’m sure he
was following me; I can still hear the distinctly light lifting and falling of
his paws. I can’t tell exactly how far away he is.
But it definitely sounds like he’s getting closer.
I grab a rock and start smashing shards of glass into dust that reflects
nothing. I think I see thin wisps of grayish-white float up from a few of the
crushed pieces, but it may just be a trick of the light—or the lack of light,
really—mixed with the misty rain. That mist coats my skin, joining the
sweat that makes my grip on the rock and pieces of glass slippery. But I
don’t stop.
Grab the glass, crush it, repeat.
Over and over until the motions are manic, desperate and without
thought.
Until my vision blurs and my hands feel numb.
 “What are you doing?”
The sound of Liam’s voice—when I know it’s not really his voice at all
—breaks me out of my rock-crushing trance.
I glance over my shoulder, almost hoping I’d imagined that sound.
But there he is—human again, probably because that demon inside him
knows that the sight of his crooked human grin makes it even more difficult
to think about fighting him.
I turn back, intending to quickly crush the last few pieces of broken
mirrors. But the ones still hanging above me catch my attention before I
can.
They’re reflecting him, of course.
His current, true reflection—which doesn’t feature that crooked grin at
all. Instead his smile is wicked looking, paired with eyes that look almost
red and skin that’s crawling with living shadows.
When I look over my shoulder, he still appears normal.
Back at the mirror, and I see those bits of shadowy blackness writhing
on his skin, wrapping his arms and neck in a poisonous embrace.
I jerk down one of the hanging mirrors and run forward, thrusting it into
his face, desperately hoping that the real Liam is still buried beneath those
shadows. That he might be able to do something—to fight— if he just sees
what’s going on.
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 wounded 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.
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 my body 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, stumbling 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.
The last of its curves appears, and 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.
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 desperately 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.
 SIXTEEN

Reason and Fear

MY AWARENESS RETURNS in one swift, painful swoop.

All at once I’m incredibly conscious of the pain in my back, in my
shoulder, 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 stomach-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.
I trudge my way through the driving rain, through wind that whips
leaves and limbs into my face, and I follow the few familiar scents that I
can still pick out over the overwhelming aroma of blood.
I finally make it back to where we left our bags, and I lay Soren down
beneath a particularly leafy tree that provides some shelter from the rain,
and then I dig my way through our medical bag—thankful, once again, that
Carys insisted we pack it as full as possible.
(Have you found her?) I think toward Liam, multitasking as I collect
bandages and potions and salves.
(Just did,) he replies quickly. (We’re okay. She’s resting still; we’re
going to hang out in this little cave for a bit. It’s cozy.)
I take a deep, relieved breath—he doesn’t sound like he’s afraid for her
life, at least.
So I set to work on Soren.
 He probably needs a hospital, really. His skin definitely isn’t pulling
itself back together the way a shifter’s can.
But human hospitals are always a tricky thing to navigate.
We usually avoid them, because it saves the mess of having to explain,
or somehow magic away, the aforementioned weird anatomy business of
the supernatural existence. If Soren has something like two hearts going on
under his skin, I don’t want to be the one to have to convince the doctor
he’s seeing things.
Besides, given the fact that we’re being followed—and that there’s no
way Soren’s going to be able to hide us anytime soon—it doesn’t seem like
a particularly bright idea to check into a hospital.
Fueled by a surge of desperation at the thought of our earlier pursuers
catching up with us, I dab a bit of a balm that smells like licorice
underneath his nose. I’m not sure what’s in it, but I know Carys has used it
on me before, when my attempts to control my shifter side ended with me
passing out. It’s a terrible smell to wake up to.
But it’s better than not waking up at all.
It doesn’t seem to have much of an immediate effect on him, though.
Undeterred, I reach for the next jar, and I slather pain-relieving ointment
over his wounds. Then I wrap his chest as best I can, trying to be gentle, but
inevitably being awkward— and then accidentally a bit rough as I try to lift
him to get the bandages smoothed properly against his back. My grip on
him fumbles as I attempt to gather the ends of the bandages and tie them
off. I tighten my hold again, but not quickly enough to keep him from
slipping and thumping hard against the ground with only my hands—hastily
shoved underneath him—to break his fall.
So I’m a freaking terrible nurse, basically.
I struggle to push myself off of him without doing further bodily harm.
It’s a slow, awkward struggle. And that fainting balm seems to be working,
suddenly—so me awkwardly-straddled-on-top-of-him is the position he
wakes up to find me in, of course.
He blinks, several times, and then he says, in a weak voice, “There are
easier ways to get me half-naked and underneath you, you know.”
I don’t even care to make a snarky response back for once.
All I can manage to do is breathe a sigh of relief.
“You could have just asked, for example,” he says.
 I tumble off of him. “I’m so glad you’re awake,” I say, and I’m a little
overwhelmed at how deeply I find myself feeling those words—and how
panicky I start to feel when I think, what if I didn’t get to say them? What if
he hadn’t woken up?
I give my head a little shake to dispel those last thoughts, and I try to
switch back to nurse mode. “Can you sit up?” I ask.
He breathes in deeply, bracing himself for the motion.
I offer him my arm. He squeezes it every time his face contorts in pain,
so that by the time he’s properly upright, I can barely feel it anymore. He
tries several additional deep breaths. Each one makes his eyes clench shut
for a moment, and I find myself wincing in pain along with him, still
wishing there was a way to use my healing abilities on him.
He’s such a mess that he’s hard to look at. I find my gaze drifting
between him and safer things like the rain-slicked leaves and the muddy
toes of my boots.
“Why’d you come after me?” I ask quietly.
He slowly lets go of my arm. His fingers trail instead to tenderly feel
along his bandaged chest, and he’s lost in thought for a moment before he
says, “Because what else could I have done?”
I look away again, scrubbing away some of the partially-dried blood on
my arm with some help from the rainy mist that’s collected on my skin.
“Liam is mortified about what he did.”
“I didn’t think you’d be able to fight him. I wouldn’t have been able to,
if I were you. That’s a more concrete reason for what I did, if you want it.”
I nod, standing and pulling the key from my back pocket. Even through
its container, its power pulses through my body like an electric current. I
squeeze it tighter, and double-check that the drawstring of the bag is pulled
completely closed.
“It’s bothering you?” he guesses.
“It isn’t incredibly pleasant, being around it, no.”
“I can try to…”
“Don’t even think about it,” I say, digging through our stuff until I find
the bag with the lockbox that the first key is in. I pause with my hand on the
lid, anticipating the power inside of it. “You’re way too weak to be dealing
out any spells at the moment.”
“At least let me be the one to lock it up. The two keys combined might
be overwhelming for you.”
 I sigh, but relinquish my hold on the key and back away as he fiddles
with the lockbox’s fastenings.
“Was kind of hoping I might build up a tolerance to it by the time we
found this second key,” I mutter. “I wonder what sort of power the third
one’s going to have? It might just completely make me lose my mind, if this
last round is any indication.”
“If it wasn’t for you, they wouldn’t be giving off that power, and we
probably never would have found them. So it’s a good thing you react to
them they way you do, and vice versa.”
“I’m just ready to feel in control.”
“Well, only one more key left to collect for a stabilized you, right?”
I nod, and offer him a half-hearted smile. I mean hey—if he can still
keep an optimistic eye on the prize after nearly having his entire insides
ripped out, then I guess I can too.
I let him rest for a few more minutes while I pack up the medical
supplies and wipe the rain from all of our bags. That rain has stopped, and
it’s left a chill hanging in the air in its place. Kind of crisp and refreshing
though; much more so than North Carolina rain, which is usually followed
by lingering humidity so thick you can hardly breath in it.
My breathing is labored, still, but not from the humidity.
It’s from a stubborn, persistent fear that’s now eating at the back of my
mind, despite my attempts to cling to Soren’s optimism. A fear over how
our torn up group can possibly manage to battle whatever guardian creature
from hell awaits us at that final key’s hiding spot— and a worry that we
might not even make it to that spot, if we can’t outrun the things chasing us.
“So, back to the States, right?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual.
He nods, eyes closed in a meditative sort of way.
I already knew the answer was yes, of course; we decided in the
beginning of all this that we’d save the key located near the Florida
Everglades for last. It was the one location that he was certain of from the
beginning, so there should be little tracking to do, at least.
The idea behind leaving it until the end was to get out of America as
fast as possible, in hopes that the ones trailing us after my prison break
would have a harder time following if we jetted immediately overseas.
Part of me was afraid, too, that if I was somewhere as close as Florida,
my dad might try hunting me down himself, despite my mom technically
giving me her blessing for this mission I set off on.
 But if I could finish said mission first, and then come back home after
fixing the problem of me….
Well, hopefully even Dad will understand why I left.
And all of this will be worth it in the end.
“We need to get to someplace safer than these woods,” I say.
“Preferably someplace in the direction of an airport, if you think you’ll
survive the trip?”
“I’ll manage,” Soren says.
I think the same message in Liam’s direction, and he hesitates for only a
moment before replying that they’re on their way to us.
I start shrugging bags onto my shoulder, and then I reach for Soren’s
hand. I’m already wincing at the thought of his pain, of having to move him
so quickly.
But I know we have to.
He knows it too, judging by the way he takes my hand and lets me pull
him to his feet
“One more key,” he says, his speech a bit slurred as he presses his
forehead to mine. For support, I know; his head has to still be spinning from
blood loss. So I let him rest against me for a moment, even though it makes
my skin flush uncomfortably hot.
“I’m sorry about earlier, by the way,” I say quietly.
“Sorry?”
“For getting mad. You still should have told me the truth about who you
were but…. But I understand why you didn’t. Just…no more secrets,
okay?”
He leans back, and after some difficulty, he manages to focus his pain-
filled eyes on me. His true, brilliantly green, pained eyes.
Then he gives the slightest of nods.
I want it to be enough to convince me that he doesn’t have any more
secrets.
But in the crisp after-rain air of the Romanian night, I think I see his lips
twitch, fighting off a frown.
And so I’m not entirely sure.
 SEVENTEEN

Lies and Leaving

THE PLANE RIDE back feels considerably different than the first one we
all took together.
The first was filled with cautious optimism, with Liam making dumb
jokes and Soren playing dumber pranks and Carys rolling her eyes and
trying to hide her amusement at it all, same as me.
Neither of us is amused, now.
I get up and pretend I need to use the restroom three times within the
first hours of takeoff, just so I can check on my two best friends.
Carys is passed out all three times, her complexion far too similar to a
corpse and the scent of blood much too prominent on her.
The first two times, Liam attempts to give me small smile. But I can’t
focus on it past the awful, lingering shock in his eyes.
The third time, he just stares blankly out the window, pretending he
hasn’t noticed me when I know at least one of his senses must have.
They’re wrecked. Exhausted. Horrified at the things they’ve done and
seen.
I am too.
The only difference is that none of this was their idea.
So by the time we’ve landed, I’ve made up my mind about something.
Liam and Carys’s seats are half-a-plane back. And in between us there’s
a crying baby and a lady loudly complaining about it—the latter of which is
way more annoying than the poor kiddo—along with a dozen
conversations.
 I still lower my voice just in case.
“I’m going to send them home,” I tell Soren, who’s been awake since
we touched down for that bumpy landing—though just barely.
He looks almost as bad as Carys, but manages to lift his head away from
the window and look at me. So a slightly more animated corpse, essentially.
“What do you mean?” he asks, yawning.
“I’m going to suggest that they go back and see their parents, that Carys
gets her mom to check on her more thoroughly—my Aunt Katie is a nurse
—and I’ll tell them we’ll meet them somewhere like we did before. No
man’s land, neutral territory. Someplace they’ll be relatively safe going to.”
“…But then you won’t be there to meet them.”
A lump forms in my throat.
After several failed attempts to swallow it, I simply nod instead.
“Do you think they’ll try to follow you further?” he asks. “They have a
vague idea of where the last key is, same as us.”
“A couple of weeks ago they would have, no question. But now…”
“You think we might have turned them off of adventuring for good?” he
asks with a tired, wry grin.
“I really hope so.”
It feels painfully strange to hope that my best friends will have given up
on sticking by my side.
But I honestly hope they have.
The more I think about it, the more selfish and guilty I feel for not
trying harder to talk them into staying home in the first place.
“What about you?” Soren asks. “Are you planning to go back at all?”
I should have a ready answer to give him, because I’ve been thinking
about this pretty much the entire plane ride back. Thinking that I want to
see my parents again. That I should see them again, because talking on the
phone is one thing, but I know they’re still worried and convinced that I’m
not really in one piece. Really, it’s almost cruel not to go see them, if only
briefly.
But it’s not that simple.
“I’m…afraid,” I say, voice even lower than before as I stare at the dog-
eared pages of the airline magazine tucked into the seat in front of me. “I’m
scared of what they’ll say if I come back with things still unfinished. They
might try to talk me out of going on, or worse—they might just insist on
locking me up while they deal with it. They’ve basically been doing that my
whole life, you know? Telling me to stay out of the way, to stay where it’s
safe, to not come out until they and the council say it’s okay. And it hasn’t
solved anything, so…”
“So that’s a no, then?”
I shrug. “I volunteered to leave home so I could protect that home and
my pack. I’m not done securing that protection. Going back just drags
things out, and it could potentially complicate things, if some of of your
sorcerer friends show up there, looking for me. Or if they find out I’ve been
there and my parents kept it from the rest of the council, all of whom
consider me a wanted fugitive.”
“All good points,” he admits.
“Yup. So it’s better if you and I just hurry up and get this over with
ourselves. We managed to break out of jail with just each other for
company, right?”
He nods, slowly agreeing. “They’ve been helpful, but it will be less
work for me, magically, if I don’t have to try and hide four people. So
there’s that to consider as well.”
I feel like he’s saying that at least partly to make me feel more
confident, more justified, in my decision to leave them behind.
“If you’re sure, then…” he begins, with the slightest hint of an uncertain
frown.
I’m not.
But the flight attendants have just thanked us for flying with them. The
doors are open, and people are filing out, and I’m rehearsing lies in my
head as I go with them.

N ORTH of the mountainous city of Asheville is one of my favorite places in

the world: a place known as Craggy Gardens. A winding road, and a short
hike through tunnels of flowers and blueberry patches, and you’ll find
yourself on the bald top of the mountain with sweeping views of the
Appalachians in every direction.
Twenty years ago, my parents had a private wedding ceremony on top
of this mountain; there’s a picture of it hanging in the hall outside my room,
my mom’s white dress flowing dramatically in the wind, and my dad with
eyes only for her, completely oblivious to the gorgeous sunset behind them.
It feels almost like seeing them again, coming here. Plus, it’s a relatively
remote spot, and it’s also neutral territory among shifter kind, though it’s
only about forty-five minutes from our house if you’re running full speed.
So this is where I bring the other three.
This is where I tell Liam and Carys I plan to wait; I tell them to go see
their parents, and to tell mine that I’ll be here for as long as I can safely
stay, if they want to see me.
It takes several attempts to convince them, but ultimately the
homesickness in Carys’s exhausted voice wins Liam over, and he agrees.
And once I’m sure the two of them are miles away from me, Soren and
I turn and run as fast as we can in the other direction.

L ATER THAT NIGHT , in a hotel somewhere near Savannah, Georgia, I’m

trying my hardest to keep it together.
I feel like the world’s worst daughter.
The world’s worst friend.
I keep picturing my parents racing to the top of that mountain that
means so much to them—the one that we’ve hiked and picnicked on as a
family so many times—and expecting another moment of joy. A reunion.
And then not getting it.
I grab a pillow that smells strongly of bleach and bury the lower half of
my face in it, muffling the sniffs and whimpers trying to escape me. I don’t
cry often, as a rule. It doesn’t seem to accomplish much, and I usually feel
worse after doing it.
But I can’t keep the tears from welling up in my eyes this time.
Everything about my existence suddenly feels unbearably heavy in a way
that seems to be pulling those tears out, rolling them one, big, fat drop at a
time down my cheek.
Soren is out ‘securing the perimeters’ as he called it—which basically
means he’s setting up illusionary charms around this hotel to cover our
tracks and otherwise convince anyone pursuing us that there’s nothing
worth finding in here.
So I’m alone in this room with nothing but uninspired, mass-produced
artwork on the walls and a TV that’s blaring Family Feud reruns.
 So I bury the rest of my face in that awful-smelling pillow, and I allow
myself a couple of body-rocking sobs. Which then become more sobs, of
course, because once you let one out, the rest always take advantage of that,
don’t they? Like a crack in a dam that expands rapidly once the first trickles
of water press through. The tears pour out faster and faster, until the
pillowcase is so wet I feel like I could die in it and be ruled a drowning
victim by the coroner.
I hear the door knob rattling.
I jump up and run to the bathroom, emerging a minute later with hastily
normalized breathing, a face that’s been washed clean, and a smile that I’m
hoping will make up for the fact that my eyes are still swollen and puffy.
But Soren only meets that smile with a frown, and he cants his head
back toward the door and asks, “You want to go for a walk?”
“Is it safe?” I fold my arms across my chest, feeling vulnerable at the
state he’s found me in. Which seems stupid, considering he’s seen me look
much worse at this point. But still.
“Seemed like it while I was making my rounds. No one and nothing
suspicious, and I’ve pulled a few tricks to divert any suspicious characters
who might show up. Also? I’ve found something I want to show you. So
come on, let me distract you with a moonlight stroll.”
“Moonlight stroll?” I sniff away the last of my sob-fest, and my smile
turns a little more genuine. “Kind of sounds like you’re asking me on a
date.”
His eyes—hidden by a deep shade of blue, now—widen just the tiniest
bit.
I only notice it because the wolfish, predator side of my brain is wired
to notice things like that. Nervousness, fear, uncertainty—anything that
might give me the advantage if I ended up needing to overpower or escape
someone.
If I were a regular girl, and he were a regular boy, I would have noticed
nothing except how bright those eyes suddenly look, and how confidently
he smiles and says, “Maybe I am.”
I exhale a long breath, trying to breathe out all the lingering negative
energy in my body with it. And then I grab my coat and follow him out the
door.
 EIGHTEEN

Stars and Apologies

OUR HOTEL IS RELATIVELY SECLUDED. Off this particular exit of I-95,

there’s nothing except that hotel, a gas station, and a diner that looks
questionably grubby (I swear the sanitation grade hanging on the wall looks
like it’s been forged). We’re so hungry that in the end we decide we don’t
care about the grubbiness, and Soren grabs some to-go food while I keep
watch outside the diner. Then we trek, greasy white bags in hand, down a
road with a sand and shell-littered shoulder.
“Where exactly are we headed?”
“We’re closer to the ocean than I realized,” he says.
“I know. I can smell it,” I say. Actually, I could smell the salty, slightly
fishy smell all the way back at our hotel. As we walk farther, individual
scents become clearer—everything from the sand and the critters crawling
through it to the many lovely hints of seagull poop.
“Well there’s an inlet up ahead,” he explains, “just off this road. And
there are all these massive pine trees there.”
“Pine trees? You’re taking me on a date to pine trees?”
“The tallest I’ve ever seen,” he says, stretching an arm high for
emphasis. He sounds like a kid who just discovered candy exists or
something. It’s kind of cute, and I can’t help but laugh softly to myself.
I continue to humor him, shuffling along beside him, trying to appear
just as enthusiastic about pine trees and indifferent to the way my heart
forgets to beat every time I accidentally think of home.
 We pass no one—no cars, no people—for at least a mile. The last
streetlights lighting our way are long gone, but it’s a clear night with a
nearly full moon, and between that and my inhuman eyesight I can see fine.
As we walk, Soren makes more light for us by picking up stones and
running his fingers across them until they glow with a soft silvery hue.
“So you seem to have recovered some more strength,” I comment.
“Still a bit sore,” he says, his hand gingerly touching his chest. “But
magic-wise, yes. The interesting thing about being…Well, what I am, you
know…”
“A blood sorcerer?”
“Right. That.” He eyes me warily for a moment, as if expecting me to
start shouting at him like I did before.
“I’m over it,” I say dryly. “You remember what I myself am, right?” I
hold up my arm and pull back the sleeve of my jacket to reveal my mark.
“A walking curse?”
“That’s being a little harsh on yourself, isn’t it?”
It’s hard to agree with him when I can feel that curse all the time now,
as long as I’m anywhere near those two keys we’ve collected. They’re
currently in that bag we stole from the second guardian. Under a
neutralizing spell, secured to Soren’s belt, and hidden beneath his jacket
alongside a dagger similar to the one he gave me.
I can’t see them.
They have no real scent, oddly enough.
But I can definitely still sense them as an occasional wave of power that
threatens to pull me off my feet if I’m not constantly fighting against it.
I shrug. “Point is, it takes a lot of scary supernaturalness to shake me up
for very long. So go on. Tell me what’s interesting about your kind.”
“What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Literally. Kind of like how
people claim that a bone that’s broken will grow back stronger? Well, that’s
not actually true for humans, but it sort of is for blood sorcerers of all the
different lineages.”
“Exactly how many of these blood lineages are there?”
“Three that I know of. Orion Blackwood is the most ancient. Then you
have the Graylock family tree, and the Ravenmar. None of us associate with
each other anymore; it’s not like shifter packs, where you usually have at
least some alliances and cooperation. We usually don’t cooperate with
anyone outside of those associated with our namesake. But, of course, in the
case of the Council of Supernatural Cooperatives, my father saw an
opportunity to use you for his gain. So he showed up at your parent’s
door…”
His fist clenches, covering up the glowing rock’s light. He suddenly
seems a long way from the kid who was excited about pine trees. And I
want to get back to that kid, but I also can’t stop my burning curiosity—I
do, however, have enough sense to not let the conversation dwell on his
father.
“And all these other lineages,” I begin, “All the descendants like you…
they all have this ability to grow their power through basically getting beat
up in battle or whatever?”
He nods. “Something like that. That’s part of why the ones ‘Of the
Blood’ are said to crave violence and pain. Because spilling blood in the
name of battle— if we survive that battle— almost always leads to our
magic getting stronger. It’s also another reason why the name blood
sorcerer is appropriate.”
“That’s pretty hardcore.”
He snorts out a laugh at my choice of words. “That’s one way to
describe it I guess.”
“And then, I assume, once you’ve been through enough battles and
spilled some blood but still survived, then….”
“Then you eventually become like my parents. Like my older sister.
Practically invincible. Until the day you’re not.”
I try again to redirect the conversation, this time away from memories
that I’m sure are too painful for me to imagine. “You’re not exactly weak
yourself,” I point out.
“I’m incredibly weak for one Of the Blood, actually,” he says, matter-
of-factly.
“Oh. Well, I couldn’t tell.”
“It won’t matter soon, though.”
“Won’t matter?”
“It won’t matter that I was too weak to save my mother and sister,” he
says quietly, staring straight ahead and walking with steps that suddenly
seem full of ruthless determination. “Because I am going to fix it.”
I jog a bit to catch up with him. And without really thinking about it, I
slip my hand into his.
He slows his pace, muscles tensing a bit.
 “We are going to fix it,” I correct. “Now, hurry up and show me these
trees. And they better be as amazing as you claim, because we really should
be saving the world right now, you know.”
For a moment I think he’s going to pull away from me. But then he slips
his fingers into the spaces between mine instead, and that’s how we walk
the rest of the way down that dark and sand-dusted road.
It’s how we remain, too, even several moments after we’ve stopped at
the edge of the grove of trees.
He was right: they’re massive. Dizzying to look at. They sway and
creak a bit in the gentle ocean breeze, and when the branches part just right
we catch glimpses of the almost-full moon reflected on a dark ocean. The
whole scene is mesmerizing, even after the countless mesmerizing things
we’ve seen over the past couple of weeks.
“Wow,” I say softly.
“Sometimes I see places like this, and it makes me want to be able to
practice stronger magic just so that I can recreate it exactly in the future.”
“Sort of like an artist painting a place from memory?”
“I suppose, yes.”
“You should take your magic power from that inspiration instead of
from spilling blood,” I muse. “Much less messy.”
He smiles, but for some reason, it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
I guess because it’s impossible, maybe, to rewire the way his magic
works. That he would even smile at the thought reminds me of how much
of an outcast he is among his own kind, same as me. He’s a pacifist among
monsters, basically.
So what will happen to him when the rest of his kind find out what he’s
done?
I think of the way that, back when this all started, he casually suggested
that his father would likely kill him for teaming up with me. And I realize
now: He hasn’t mentioned it ever since.
I have a feeling he hasn’t given that nearly enough thought. That he’s
already made up his mind to do what’s right, regardless of what it costs
him, and now he’s holding as tightly to that plan as he is to my hand.
And that’s when I realize I might be falling a little bit in love with him.
And I’m really glad he isn’t capable of hearing my thoughts.
I hastily slip out of his grip, masking the motion by putting my
suddenly-free hand on the bag of food I’m carrying. “I’m still starving,” I
say. “Picnic time?”
“Sure.”
We search out a spot that’s relatively free of pinecones and raised roots,
and we eat our way through greasy fries and burgers and some sort of meat
pie thing that I think contains like nine-hundred percent of the suggested
daily amount of fat based on a two-thousand calorie diet.
But it’s delicious, so whatever.
Pretty sure I’ve burned enough calories lately, what with all the
globetrotting and slaying monsters and almost dying. And I’m not done yet.
At least not with those first two things.
But I do think my stomach might explode if I don’t stretch it out or
something. So I lean back in the sparse, spiny grass, and I focus on the stars
twinkling above me.
There are some random, slow-moving clouds moving across the
otherwise clear sky, interrupting my stargazing a bit. At least until Soren
lies down next to me, lifts a hand in the air, and gives it a lazy twirl. Tiny
pinpricks of light drift from his fingertips and float upwards for a bit before
fixing at still points, mimicking stars against the dark clouds.
“My own private star-filled sky,” I murmur. “Not bad.”
“The pine trees didn’t seem to impress you enough, so this was plan B.”
I laugh. “I’m impressed by the trees, I promise.”
He starts to reply, but I cut him off by abruptly sitting up; I hear voices
in the distance, suddenly.
“Not exactly as private as it seems, apparently,” I say.
“It’s not?”
“I hear people. There’s a beach nearby, I think; I smell the concentrated
sand and lots of dead crabs in it—that last scent isn’t particularly pleasant,
if you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t wondering, but thanks for sharing.”
“The joys of having a wolf’s nose.”
“Maybe I can help with that?”
“Help?”
He stands and looks up through the dizzying heights of tree trunks
again. “I can paint one more picture for you,” he says. “One last, more
complete distraction. And then we’ll have to go. But for now…” His voice
is soft with thought. Exactly how I imagine a great artist would consult with
himself before embarking on an attempt at a masterpiece.
 “Let’s see it then, Van Gogh,” I say, resting back on my palms and
watching him work.
He moves his hands as if he’s holding a brush; swift expert strokes that
spill shadows instead of paint into the air. It’s subtle, almost, the way it all
melds at first with our surroundings; from a distance I imagine it would
look like the clouds causing the moonlight to bend strangely around the
existing trees.
But I’m close enough that I can clearly see those shadows he’s conjured,
the way they start to turn more solid and then to take on bark patterns and
sprout pine-needles of their own.
He ‘plants’ at least dozen more trees in this way, raising them up from
thin air and encircling them into our own, private grove-among-the-grove.
The look incredibly real. They smell incredibly real—so much so that they
do almost completely distract me from anything in the distance.
I feel that familiar sense of awe and attraction to him and his power,
tempered by just the slightest bit of trepidation over how easily he makes
my mind forget what’s real and what’s not.
“Now we have a little more privacy, at least,” he says, and when he
looks down, his eyes are back to their real, green color. It makes this space
seem that much more private and only for us. “I don’t think anyone on the
beach could have seen us to begin with, but now they definitely can’t.”
“You’re terrifyingly good,” I say, marveling at the way the illusion-trees
even seem to dance and creak in the breeze the same way as their real
counterparts. “I swear I can’t tell the difference between the real and the
fake.”
“I know.” His eyes flash back to blue, and he smiles and offers me his
hand.
I think he’s going to pull me into another kiss that tastes like anarchy
and destruction. I want him to do that, as stupid as I know it would be, and
he almost does—but then he stops just close enough for our noses to bump,
and for me to get lost in the blue of those eyes for a minute.
He kisses me very softly—safely— on the lips, pulls back, and he says,
“And I’m glad. But I’m also sorry about that, Little Wolf.”
His tone is all wrong.
I try to laugh it off. “The only thing you have to be sorry for is that
stupid nickname.”
He shakes his head.
 Before I can speak or move or hardly even think, his hand reaches
behind his back, under his jacket, and he grabs hold of something and jerks.
I remember the dagger he’s carrying, and I instinctively slam my knee
up toward his groin.
But he’s anticipating that— he lets me go and jumps back before my
strike hits.
And it isn’t the dagger in his hand.
It’s the bag of keys.
I stare in shock as he dumps the two of them onto the ground between
us. They’re still neutralized, but the two of them combined and outside of
the protective bag is enough to immediately make me want to shut my eyes
to try and block out the pain that screams through my head. It’s a pain that
I’m almost convinced will go away if I give into that pull I feel building
inside of me, yanking my hands toward those keys and begging me to take
them.
Control, I remind myself, same as I’ve been doing for most of my
existence.
I manage to gain enough of that control to fall back against the ground,
and to glare up at Soren and fiercely demand, “What are you doing?”
“There’s a particular energy about this place that makes me think there’s
a strong connection to Canath here. So here seems like as good a place as
any to use these keys and perform the necessary spell to finish what I set
out to do.”
“You can’t,” I say through clenched teeth. “We need the third! You said
it yourself, we can’t do it until we have them all gathered together, or things
could backfire, and we—”
“Oh, Little Wolf,” he mutters, crouching down next to the neutralized
keys and letting his hand hover over them. “Haven’t you figured it out yet?”
I want to run, but all I can do is stare in horror.
“It’s you. You’re the last key.”
 NINETEEN

Power and Peace

I DON’T REMEMBER FALLING.

But somehow I end up on the ground. My senses are dulled, every sight
and smell and sound fading away until there’s only the sensation of pain.
It’s only on my wrist at first. On my mark. It feels like someone is
trying to rip the bones from my wrist out, one by one by one—
Then that same ripping sensation spreads up my arm, to my shoulder,
across my chest. Everything inside of me is being torn out. I would swear
on it. The pain is so terrible, so excruciating, that all I can think about is
death.
I want to die.
I don’t.
The pain disappears abruptly.
I know I didn’t imagine it, though, because there’s blood all over my
shirt, in my lap, on my hands.
My whole body is shaking.
But the world seems surprisingly still as I lift my head, and my eyes
manage to focus on a bright red object, shaped like a four-pointed star,
resting several feet away from me.
It’s in the same shape as the mark of Canath.
The mark that has now disappeared from my skin.
“I should correct my earlier statement,” Soren says, and it sounds as if
he’s at the other end of a tunnel, whispering words I can barely hear. I
desperately want to hear them. I desperately want to hear some sort of
explanation. Something that could undo this ache in my chest and make this
blood all over me disappear.
“You aren’t so much the key as the former carrier of that key,” he
continues. “A sort of guardian, like the others we faced—though you’re a
slightly special case, obviously. One I almost overlooked.” He kneels down
in front of me and retrieves that third key. “For what it’s worth,” he adds,
“I’m glad it didn’t kill you, drawing it out like that. I was afraid it might.”
What I want to ask is how could you? But I refuse to let him know how
badly he’s hurt me. So instead I choose to focus on the question that started
this entire expedition: “Why was it in me to begin with?”
He lines the keys up side-by-side, studying them for a moment and
muttering things—parts of spells?— under his breath.
“You at least owe me an explanation.” My voice is surprisingly calm.
Everything around me is still surprisingly calm. Despite my pain, despite
my anguish, despite my fear—the ground isn’t shaking.
The sky isn’t splitting.
The world isn’t ending.
I lift my hand in front of my face to better study the wrist that once
carried my mark. I still can’t believe it’s gone. That I actually feel
something like stable, even after everything that’s just happened.
I should be celebrating.
But this isn’t at all how I pictured this moment going.
“Your mother was the original ‘guardian’ of this key,” Soren finally
says. “My theory is that she was too powerful to be contained within it, the
way the other guardians where eventually re-contained within their
respective keys; so when it first manifested—after she dealt with that portal
to Canath all those years ago—she alone absorbed its power. And then she
unknowingly passed that power to you when you were born. But you were
just a child, not nearly as strong as her. So the otherworldly essence of this
key has essentially been fighting with you, making itself known through
that mark on your skin. It was poison in you, making your powers unstable
and unusable and skewing their development. And now I’ve done you the
favor of drawing the poison out.”
“Favor?” I snap, jumping to my feet. “If it was such a favor, then why
didn’t you just tell me you planned on doing it?”
“I told you: I thought it might kill you. And honestly I wasn’t sure how I
was going to draw it out, or if I’d even be able to, until just recently. Not
until I saw the way you reacted to the other keys. Then it became obvious
that your power was drawn to theirs, even while they were in their
neutralized state.”
“You could have explained that to me. I should have had a say in this!”
“Maybe. But I wasn’t sure you would have agreed to help me if you
thought there was a chance you’d die in the end.”
The trees continue to moan and creak around us, nearly drowning out
my voice as I quietly say, “I was never afraid of dying. I only wanted to fix
this world, whatever it took. And I thought you wanted the same thing.”
He smiles. It’s small—the subtle reaction he has when he realizes he’s
right about something. When one of his illusions has successfully tricked
someone.
It fills me with a pulsing, aching dread.
“What else have you lied about?” I demand. “Was it all a lie?
Everything you told me about yourself? Everything we did when we were
alone together?”
For a fraction of a second his smile is replaced by something
uncomfortable, and then his expression turns stony.
Instead of answering me, he focuses on running his hand across each of
the keys, stripping the spells he’s casted over them.
I can feel their power building. It’s not pulling me, not driving me crazy
anymore, but I still feel almost overwhelmed by it.
They shouldn’t be collected like this. I can’t stop thinking that. It’s too
much power in one place.
And suddenly I realize the only question that I should have been asking
—the only one that really matters now: “Did you even want to fix this
world at all?”
Black flames twist around his hands, reminding me entirely too much of
the last time I faced his father. Maric Blackwood. The enemy I thought I
was fighting. The one I thought I could outrun and outsmart. That I could
defeat.
How can I even think about defeating his son, when just minutes ago I
thought I was falling in love with him?
“There are things that I plan to fix,” Soren says. “But how this particular
world holds up…Well, that’s not really my concern, because I don’t plan on
staying in it much longer. Though, for your sake, I hope it lasts.”
 I realize what he’s going to do the instant those black flames start to
twist away from his hands and encircle the keys instead.
I don’t think. I just throw myself forward, slamming my shoulder into
his chest and knocking him backward. A cheap shot at his existing wounds,
maybe, but it scatters his magic and allows me to step protectively between
him and the keys.
“Destroying them isn’t going to close the link to the other world, is it?”
I demand. “You said it yourself when we first met: if I had been killed, it
might have ripped open a permanent fissure. And that’s exactly what you
plan to do, isn’t it? You obnoxious, piece of—”
“I don’t think it will be permanent.” He climbs back to his feet, wincing
and holding his side. “And less like a tear and more like a stable bridge,
now that I’ve collected enough power to do it, along with researching the
proper spell, but—”
I punch him. I aim straight for his head this time.
He manages to twist so that I’m only able to land a glancing blow, but
it’s enough to disorient him long enough that it gives me time to grab one of
the keys—the one that came out of me—and I shove it into my pocket. As I
finish securing it, I see him diving for the others.
I kick them both as hard as I can in opposite directions.
He abandons his pursuit of the keys and turns furiously after me instead.
“You’re going to force me to deal with you, aren’t you?”
“You should have seen that coming, asshole. If I didn’t back down to
the demons we fought, what made you think I would I would let you get
away with this?”
He narrows his eyes and lifts his hand, bending his fingers as if
beckoning magic to them. The air around him shimmers and swelters.
I lift my hand as well, focusing on my nails, thinking of all the times
I’ve almost transformed them to claws in the past. I can’t help the fear that
skips through me out of habit, warning me, repeating those three words that
have been my existence for so long: Human. Control. Peace.
But I’m more than human.
I’m in control, now.
And the only way I’m going to find peace is by stopping him.
However I have to do it.
So as Soren steps toward me, I draw back and prepare to strike, and as I
do I feel thick black claws curving out from my fingertips.
 He clenches his fist, and two mirror images of himself materialize in
that shimmering air around him. All three versions of him reach for the
dagger at his back. I bolt forward before any of them can draw the weapon,
and I swing toward the center Soren—the real one that I haven’t taken my
eyes off of—and my claws slice easily through his clothing and catch him
just above the hip as he tries to spin away. They carve into him as easily as
if he’s made of water. The scent of his blood explodes into my nostrils, and
the memory of the last time I smelled so much of this blood crashes into my
head along with it.
I’d been so afraid of losing him.
I’d thought he was actually mine to lose.
I feel the raw, stabbing pain of his betrayal all over again.
A hot rush of fury follows it. It makes me blind and stupid for a split
second—enough time for him to counterattack by hooking an arm around
me and slamming me to the ground.
I roll over and spring immediately back up, but by this point, the three
different versions of him have mixed themselves up. And they’re all
bleeding, suddenly. They all have torn clothing, like I attacked all three of
them.
My heart skips several beats faster.
“Go home, Elle,” says one of the Sorens.
“No,” I snarl back, wiping away the dirt and pine needles sticking to my
arm.
“You’re cured,” says the Soren to my right. “That’s what you wanted,
isn’t it? You’re stable. You can go home and live your life in peace and
forget about me.”
“If you do something stupid with those keys, it’s still my fault! I’m the
one who gave them to you. The one who was stupid enough to trust you!”
My eyes dart frantically between the three of him, trying to come up with a
plan. Trying to see the real him, somehow.
And then I realize—none of these are real.
They all still have those deep blue eyes that I know don’t really belong
to him.
I’ve made his illusion slip before. So maybe there was something real
between us that night on the Irish hillside, and maybe I can use it to draw
him out again.
 It makes me cringe inwardly to do it, but I lower my voice and my
claws, and in the most vulnerable tone I can manage, I say, “I thought I was
falling in love with you, you know.”
All three of his bodies draw back half a step. But then they quickly
redistribute their weight back to a casual stance, and they all regard me with
the same relaxed smile as the center one says, “You should have known
better than to fall in love with someone that’s constantly changing. It could
only have ended poorly.”
“I’ve seen the real you. There are things about you that you can’t
change. And those things we did—you can’t change those, either. I know
you felt something. Even if almost everything else about you was fake, at
least tell me those feelings weren’t. The two of us almost split the sky open
that day at the inn. That was real.”
He’s silent for a moment.
Hardly even breathing.
I can hear those voices on the beach again, and the steady ebb and flow
of the ocean waves, and the way my heart seems to have paused along with
his breathing.
“Go home,” that center Soren repeats, quieter this time.
“I want to see the real you first. One more time. Please?” I lock eyes
with the one closest to me. Still blue. I’m scared to look away, because I’m
afraid I might miss them changing. But then I hear the one to my left move
—just the tiniest bit of uncertain shuffling.
I spin around, and I immediately find his eyes.
Green.
My breath catches at the sight. I don’t hesitate long enough to think
about all the reasons why.
I just jump forward, claws outstretched. And this time I make sure they
sink more completely in, deeply into his shoulder.
He tries to grab me and throw me to the ground again.
I dig in and hold on, dragging him down with me. We roll several feet,
kicking and punching and scrambling for position, until he manages to get a
hand tangled in my hair. He uses that grip to slam my head into a gnarled,
protruding tree root. The jarring pain that shoots through my temple makes
my vision dance and my stomach lurch, threatening to throw up all that
questionably greasy food I ate earlier.
I sense him looming over me.
 My inner wolf surges up, and for once, I don’t bother trying to keep it
chained.
I let my instincts take over, let my beastly strength throw him off me. It
springs me to my hands and knees in the next instant. I’m still shaped like a
human, but my mind is all wolf, sending me scrabbling on all fours until
I’m close enough to pounce on his chest and pin his squirming body
underneath me.
I feel sharpness in my mouth. Fangs sprouting, jaw unhinging and
shifting and growing powerful enough to crush.
He throws his hands up and takes my face in a vicious grip. He yanks it
closer to his, almost as if for a violent kiss, and he harshly whispers, “I
really didn’t want to have to hurt you this way. But you’ve left me no
choice.”
His fingers clench tighter into my skull.
Electricity tingles across my scalp.
I let out an involuntary whimper that sounds more canine than human. I
remember the way he tricked my mind into feeling comforted, and I have a
feeling I know what’s coming next—and it isn’t going to be a brief
relaxation spell—but my mind is a strange mix of human and wolf, and it’s
too confused to stop him.
He overpowers me, and he injects the sensation of pain directly into my
mind.
I feel my body convulsing with it, over and over again until I can’t feel
anything anymore, just a strange weightless sensation. My mind blanks.
The trees towering around me become blurs of shadows that collapse over
my still body, plunging me into total, unconscious darkness that lasts for I
don’t know how long.
When I manage to blink my eyes, to actually see again, Soren is far
away, bending to pick up something in the grass.
But my first coherent thought isn’t of him.
The first coherent thought I manage is, Liam was right. I was so stupid
to let that boy mess with my mind. And suddenly all I can think about is my
best friend, and how I wish he was here. I would almost swear he is here—
would swear I can smell him, feel him all around me—because I’m thinking
so clearly of his voice, his words, that argument.
There’s no such thing as a harmless spell.
 I try not to think about the lingering harm this latest spell has done to
my mind. My head is throbbing, and I don’t know if it’s with real or
imagined pain, but I push myself through it, rising up onto shaking hands
and knees.
“Don’t move,” Soren says, his back still to me as he stands, one of the
keys now clenched in his hand. There’s one in his other hand too, I notice.
How long was I out for?
“Stay where you are, and I won’t hurt you again,” he says. “I won’t hurt
any of them.”
“Any of…?”
(ELLE!)
I twist around—too fast for my throbbing head, and I almost pass out
again. But the sight of the people running toward me helps me find my
balance. I wasn’t imagining Liam’s smell. And it isn’t just Liam. Carys is
there too.
And my parents are right behind them.
I try to get to my feet, but Soren’s quiet, threatening voice stops me
cold: “Tell them to stop. Or they’ll regret it.”
I jerk my head toward him. And that’s when I realize: he doesn’t just
have two keys.
He has all three.
They’re hovering just above his outstretched hands, each one emitting a
menacing cloud of black, swirling energy.
“Last chance,” he says.
But there’s really no chance. It all happens too quick. Before I can shout
at him to stop, before I can warn my family to look out, before I can even
turn away myself, it happens: the energy of those keys seems to overwhelm
Soren, and he’s thrown back against the ground. He fights to keep his arms
stretched above him, trying to keep the keys steady in the air.
There’s a low rumble—like distant thunder.
It grows louder. Closer. It builds and builds until it gives one final,
massive BOOM.
And then all the stars above us go out.
 TWENTY

Darkness and Falling

THAT DARK EXPANSE of no stars stretches further and further, until I’m
afraid it might engulf this entire world in an endless, impenetrable night.
But just when it all starts to look completely hopeless, I see the first of
the showering dust—like fissure residue, except that it glows as bright as
any of those stars that were driven away. Just scattered, tiny specks of it at
first, but soon it’s falling faster and thicker, gathering into a waterfall of
stardust that cascades down to where the three keys now rest against the
ground.
Soren staggers to his feet, and he starts toward the bottom of that
cascade.
I run after him.
My mom is faster than me.
I’m less than ten feet away from Soren when she grabs hold of my arm
and jerks me back. She wraps me into a tight embrace without taking her
eyes off the scene before us.
“What in the world is going on?” she whispers.
I can’t even begin to explain, so I just lean against her arms to steady
myself, and we watch as Soren takes out his dagger and stabs two of the
keys, over and over, directly in the center of their respective marks. Magic
sparks from his hands and down along the blade as he does.
And soon enough, those two keys shatter.
The waterfall of dust weakens, most of its light flickering out save for a
wobbly stream still collected in its center.
 He steps to within a few feet of that center.
My heart seizes with fear for him, even after everything he’s put me
through. I can’t help it. Especially not after his eyes, with all their true,
brilliant color, drift from the final key and up to me.
“This path only goes one way. After I’m gone, destroy that last key for
me, will you? And hopefully it will close everything up and stabilize
things.”
I don’t know what to say.
The path only goes one way. There are none of Canath’s monsters
coming out of it—so he must be telling the truth. He wasn’t trying to use
me to unleash anything, the way the rest of his kind wanted to.
But then why?
Why would he do this?
Everything seems to be moving too fast all of a sudden. I wriggle my
way out of my mom’s embrace. She’s too confused, too stunned to really
fight me over it. I don’t go far, anyway; the rest of my pack folds in around
me, and together we stare at the strange sorcerer boy who just tore a hole in
the world, all of us completely unsure of what to do about it.
He hesitates before stepping into the dust, just long enough to stare back
at us.
And I’ve seen that look on his face before: jealousy. Last time, I’d
thought it was because of my relationship with Liam—that it was some silly
lust and unwanted love triangle thing that was making his jaw clench and
his gaze harden this way.
But now a deeper truth occurs to me: he’s jealous of my family.
Which explains exactly why he’s doing this.
“You think they’re still alive,” I breathe in sudden realization, just loud
enough that maybe he hears it, maybe he doesn’t. “You think your mom and
your sister are alive in the other world.”
He meets my eyes and gives me that soft smile of his one last time.
“Good-bye, Elle,” he says. “And thank you, and I’m sorry, and you know—
everything else I should have said.”
What if he’s wrong? The thought slams through my brain. What if he
ends up even more alone on the other side? What if he can’t find them on
his own?
He steps under the showering dust, lifting his hands as if trying to catch
their little bits of light.
 And within seconds, he’s gone.
For a long time after, I can’t seem to look anywhere other than where he
was standing. Can’t seem to manage a deep breath, either. I hear my mom
take one, though, and a moment later she says, “Let’s destroy it, then.”
My dad moves toward it first.
I stop him by throwing my arms around him the way I’ve been wanting
to do for weeks now. It startles him a bit at first, I think. And he’s not really
the hugging type, but he relaxes after a moment and then crushes me so
tightly against him that I can hardly breathe. I manage to grab my mom’s
arm and pull her into the embrace as well. And Carys has always been a fan
of group hugs, so she’s there a second later, too.
The only one who doesn’t join in is Liam. He stands just a few feet
away, watching me. Suspiciously.
He always could read me better than anyone else.
(Don’t you dare,) he thinks at me.
(I’m really, really sorry,) I think back.
“I love you all so much,” I say out loud.
And then I jump back, and I sprint for the falling dust. I draw my dagger
as the first cold flecks of that dust fall over me, and I focus all my energy on
trying to summon that once-forbidden elemental magic that I know dwells
in my blood. I only manage to transfer a few flashes of it to the dagger. I
can only hope that it’s enough. Because I’m not letting anyone else follow
me this time.
They all try.
But I’m too fast, and my aim is far too good.
I fling the dagger.
It pierces the center of the final key just as a burst of light and cold
swallows me up and sweeps me away.
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