Blood and Wolf Read online

  “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.”

  “Like ten different types,” Carys says.

  “Cool.”

  She 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. 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 boy 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 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 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, cra
cked 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 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. 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’m occasionally catching a glimpse 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, so. 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. I can’t help the frown that’s etched its way onto my face, though. 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. But 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 above his dark eyebrows, 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 telli
ng 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.

  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.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “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.