Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Page 7

  She clicked her fingers, and my da crept around out of the trees. His head hung low, and he’d lost weight, a lot of it. His ribs showed, and so did the bones of his hips. His coat, which should have been thick and rich this time of the year, was starred and sparse.

  A year. What had she done to him in a year?

  Da didn’t look at me. All of his attention was focused on the witch. Another person might have thought that she’d broken him as she had broken Dafydd. But I knew my da: if he’d ever looked at me with that expression, I’d have known my days on the earth were numbered on the fingers of one hand.

  “You rescued a fairy maiden, Samuel,” the witch purred. “She freed you, but she could not take your father from me as well.” She smiled gently, rubbing her fingers through the hair on the base of Da’s neck. “Between the two of you—you killed not only the fae lord but the rest of my wolves. I had plans for him—and for them.”

  I stared at her and concentrated hard on her words so that she would not pick out any other of my thoughts.

  “Of course your father told me,” she said. “Did you think him loyal to you?”

  No. I thought him bound against his will, helpless to keep her from ruffling through his memories. How she could think I believed otherwise, with him pinned to her side like the crazed beast she’d made of him, I do not know. Maybe it had been so long since any had courage to call her on her lies that she thought we all believed every word out of her mouth.

  “I will make a bargain with you,” the witch told me. “By an oath of blood.” She took out a knife and pricked her thumb so that a drop fell out. “You take me to this fairy lass, and I will free your da from my magic.”

  There were so many things wrong with what she promised that I could not hide my sneer.

  “My blood oath,” she said coaxingly, “my blood oath that your da will walk free of me to live his life, and you to live yours as well. All you need do is take me to the fairy.” She shuddered and closed her eyes and licked her lips. “I wasted the fairy lord’s pain, not realizing what I had until I had finished with it—the fool angered me too much, and I was not attending my business properly. He told me he was a great lord—but all the fae do that. I didn’t believe him. I have never heard of a great fae lord losing his magic—not while Underhill still stands. They cannot lie, Sawyl, but they can stretch the truth into a lie. Assuming he was less than he claimed, I tried to use the magic his sacrifice gave me. It was too much, and I forfeited the power of it rather than destroy myself.”

  That explained the burnt hut. Magic’s first child is always fire.

  “Your da told me that the fairy lord is dead and his body gone to earth.” She looked down at my da without fondness. “He said he also burned the wolves’ bodies, so they are useless to me. And I must have power.” She held up a wrinkled hand so we could both see it. “Without power, I age, Sawyl.”

  The witch smiled at me. “But the fae lord’s daughter . . . and she owes you a debt. You will take me to her and bid her give what she owes you to me. Fae have to pay their debts.” For a moment, her countenance showed such rapture as she contemplated the power she would gain from Ariana that it made my blood run cold. I was not certain that the witch would be able to take Ariana—and Haida. My experience with magic was nothing that would allow me to predict such things.

  I could not, would not do as she bade me. I took a step backward.

  She dragged the knife against my sire’s side and raised the blade so I could see the blood upon it. “Come back here. If you leave, I will kill your father. Do not think I will not do as I claim.”

  Her fingers might belong to an old woman, but they were strongly wrapped around the haft of the knife. Da, for his part, stood utterly still beside her, not reacting to the pain at all. As I paced slowly forward, my eyes lingered on him.

  Don’t let her touch you. Do not give her access to the fae woman. She broke some larger spell when she threw away the fae lord’s power. Without more fae blood, she will die. She must die.

  I had only once heard my da’s voice so clearly in my head, when he had held me alive when Dafydd’s fangs had changed me into what I now was. The shock of it froze me where I stood.

  Move.

  I dodged aside, and she missed her grab.

  I backed away from her a half dozen steps until I stood on the edge of the hollow. If she needed hair or skin to replace the shackles she’d held me with—as from what I knew of witchcraft seemed likely—I would give her no chance. If she took me prisoner, it would not matter if I could stand up to her or not, Ariana would come for me.

  The witch surveyed me with cold eyes. “Fine. On your head be it.” She looked down at my father, raised her knife, glanced at me, and I saw her change her mind.

  Run.

  “By blood bound you are to me, Bran son of Bran,” she said. “Kill that wolf your son for me.”

  I was already sprinting away as quickly as I could. Driven, not only by my da’s voice in my head but by the understanding of what it would do to my da if he was forced to kill me. He would resist her, I knew, and it would give me a chance to flee.

  He had not left my mind, though there were no more words. Anger rose up from him, rage such as I had never felt before—not my rage, but his. Inflaming my blood so much that I was forced to quit running, held motionless in a murderous unthinking flood of fury. I do not know how long I stood there, heart pounding, growling and ready to rend everything around me into bloody pieces.

  I felt him die.

  We were bound together, not only by the witch’s powers, but by that same thing that had bound us to Dafydd and the rest of the pack. It snapped, and his rage was gone as if it had never been. He was gone. I was alone. Utterly, remorselessly alone.

  I howled, my cry breaking the silence that had fallen in the snow-covered woods. But no one answered me.

  I ran, then, ran to Ariana. Retaining just enough of myself to change back to human as soon as I felt I was near enough to her to grip the chain I wore and chant her name.

  TWELVE

  Ariana

  Three months after he left, just as spring was strewing her flowers over the forest, Ariana discovered Samuel naked upon the ground before the door to her home. His hands and feet were raw and muddied—he lay so still. She dropped to her knees beside him as he drew in a breath.

  In that moment, when she knew that he lived, she understood what she had only worried over before. Human or not, she loved this man who had saved her from her father and washed away the despair of her home with his music.

  When he wouldn’t waken to touch or voice, she summoned Haida. Between the two of them, they got him in and laid him on her bed since it was closest to the door. Haida helped her clean him and cover him.

  “Exhaustion,” said Haida, her hands on his unshaven face. “And despair. Something terrible has happened.”

  He awoke in the middle of the night, when Ariana was sitting beside him. He didn’t say a word, just looked at her with such sorrow that she crawled into bed beside him. When he turned to her, she gave him gladly what comfort he could take from her.

  “He’s gone,” Samuel said afterward, his face buried in her hair where she could not see his pain. “My fault. The witch tried to get him to kill me, and when he rebelled, she killed him.”

  His pain was so different from hers when her father died that she didn’t know what to say at first. She had never seen his father, though Haida had told her he’d had kind eyes and gentle hands.

  “No guilt, surely,” she said finally. “The witch killed him, and his blood is on her. If not for you, he would have lived in thrall to the witch for even longer.”

  “She will die now,” he told her, and his body that had been clenched hard around her softened. “He would be satisfied with that, I think.” And then, in the safe darkness of her room and bed, he told her the full tale,
of which she knew only bits and pieces, of how he and his father came to be enslaved to a dark witch.

  “Stay safe here,” Ariana said when he was done. “She cannot come here without invitation. She will die, and your father’s death will not be without meaning.”

  She held him through the night. Over the next week, she and Haida between them saw that he was seldom alone and never without something to keep his hands or head busy. His hurt was deep, but the wound of his father’s murder did not fester nor mar the sweetness of his temperament. Gradually, as days passed, more laughter and music filled her house, and the nights were passion and fire, and her wounds of the spirit mended in his care.

  One day, he set the drum he played aside and pulled her away from her loom and into the forest. Swinging her by the hand and singing at full voice, he pulled her into an impromptu dance of great silliness and more energy than grace. He stopped her and took her by the shoulders.

  “You,” he said, his blue eyes bright with heady joy.

  “Yes?” She felt unaccountably shy, but he made her that way sometimes.

  “You I love,” he said, his voice a sweet rush that caused her heart to stumble.

  Tears rose to her eyes, she who never cried. This was not a man who would forget that he loved someone in a fit of jealous envy or fear. Still, she couldn’t help but whisper a question just to be certain. “Forever?”

  His hands slid up to cup her jaw. “And always,” he agreed hoarsely. He kissed her openmouthed, and there, in the forest that had once been her father’s, he loved her in the sweet grass.

  • • •

  Ariana watched Samuel tease her Haida and smiled to herself. He was one of those rare people who needed others to take care of. Once he’d decided that they were his, he was easier about his father’s fate. He had a purpose and that suited him.

  He suited her, too. When he held her at night, she didn’t wake up cold and shaking, certain that the red hounds were on her again.

  Like her, Samuel was not happy sitting around doing nothing; soon enough, the tasks around her house would not be enough for him. Already he was restless, getting up as soon as he sat down and pacing rather than sitting still. She decided she wasn’t one for sitting idle, either. Perhaps they should do a little traveling.

  “I think,” she told him as he sang to them after dinner, “we should go traveling, we three.”

  Haida’s eyes grew round. “Oh, they would never let the likes of us into a court, lady. You, of course. But I’m a hobgoblin and he a human. They treat humans with no gentleness.”

  “I’m not talking about visiting my mother,” Ariana told her. “But why shouldn’t we travel throughout the human kingdoms?”

  Samuel smiled sharply, his hands keeping a restless rhythm on the drum. “A stir we’d make, that’s for sure,” he said, his voice oddly cadenced as he talked with the beat of his drumming. “They aren’t used to fairy princesses and hobgoblins in human villages, my lady. Some warlord would try to claim you, and I’d have to take him down.”

  She pulled a glamour over her face and form and spread it over Haida just to watch his jaw drop. “Do you think that fae keep to themselves always, Samuel?” she said behind her guise of a pox-scarred, plain-faced woman. “Just because we are not seen doesn’t mean that we do not go where we please.”

  “I thought your magic was gone,” Samuel said, his face softening. “Is it back?”

  “This isn’t that kind of magic,” she told him. She had expected her magic to start seeping back to her by now, but it had not. Sometimes she worried about that, but Samuel made her feel safe—and magic had brought her enough heartache that she would not be sad if she were never any more than what she was now. Samuel waited for her to explain herself, so she told him, “It’s glamour—a part of me, like music is a part of you.” Then she nodded at Haida. “I could only do that because she does not guard herself against me.”

  Haida put her hands on her cheeks. “Oh dear,” she said, and squeaked when she sounded like an old woman. She laughed and ran off to find the polished-bronze mirror in the hallway to see what Ariana had done to her.

  Samuel set the drum down, got up, and walked all the way around her. He stopped in front of Ariana and reached out to touch her nose. He slid his hands to her cheekbones, then to the corners of her eyes.

  “It feels real,” he said, drawing a deep breath. After a moment he relaxed. “But you smell like yourself.”

  “Samuel,” Ariana said. “How would you like to earn our room and board as we travel from village to village? I can be your meek wife, and Haida can sing with you.”

  He rubbed his face and paced a bit.

  “I have a hard time thinking with the moon singing in the sky,” he said, as if it were a confession.

  She tilted her head—it was still daylight, though the sun hung low in the sky. There were human things, phrases and aphorisms, that seemed odd to her; perhaps Samuel’s odd comment was just such a thing as those.

  “Samuel?” Ariana couldn’t keep the concern out of her voice.

  His eyes half closed. “I am restless tonight, I think. But travel appeals to me. Yes.”

  “We’ll do it,” she said. The floor moved just a little under Ariana’s feet. So it was to her home she spoke the last bit. “Travel the summer and return for autumn and winter.”

  THIRTEEN

  Samuel

  I woke up suddenly, not too long after I had gone to sleep. Beside me, Ariana still slept deeply. I had tired her with my lovemaking this night, trying to drown the strange energy that filled me in her body. I had succeeded insofar that afterward I’d been able to sleep—only to be awakened by the moon’s call.

  I got up out of the bed carefully so as not to awaken Ariana and stepped to the open window, where the moon hung high in the sky. I had learned time passed differently in Ariana’s home than it did in the outside world, but the moon’s song had not changed between the world I knew best and Underhill. I lifted my hand toward the moon as if I might reach it.

  And she reached back.

  A sizzling, burning energy coursed through me, calling the wolf to hunt—and the wolf answered. It was a better change, now that the witch’s power didn’t fight the wolf. Over the years, I had learned to ease my way between wolf and human, but even so, it hurt.

  I dropped to the floor and writhed under the moonlight as the wolf tore through my human flesh with as much care as he would have given the carcass of a deer. In all the years I had been a werewolf, I had never met the full moon in my human flesh. I had not realized that the moon would call the wolf, will I or no. Helpless, I held my silence as long as I could, but wolf and moon between them reft me of my humanity, and I cried out.

  “Samuel?” Ariana’s voice, full of worry and love and all those things that meant I wasn’t alone, should not have filled me with dread.

  The wolf, who eclipsed me in my own mind as he had not since the very early days of my running on four feet, rose to his feet and met Ariana’s eyes. Ariana’s beautiful green fae eyes. The wolf could see in darkness better than my human self. So he watched as her pupils expanded to eat her iris until her entire eye was black.

  Ariana’s scent changed until the smell of terror made the wolf drop his head and growl in pleasure. He bared his teeth, enjoying the spike of fear that followed. He was playing; he knew as well as I that she was not to be hurt. I, caught by surprise and thus overcome by moon-called wolf, was unable to do anything to reassure her.

  Haida knocked on the door, “My lady? My lady?”

  Ariana moved to get off the bed, and the wolf blocked her in, his countermove bringing him closer to the bed. Ariana made a sound then that I hope never to hear again. A keening, sorrowful sound like a rabbit who knows it will be dead before it draws another breath.

  The door to the room opened, and the wolf snarled ferociously, angry at the
intrusion into his game. The little hobgoblin stayed in the doorway, dropping her gaze.

  “Samuel?” she said.

  I felt the pull of my name, felt the wolf begin to give way to my control. I took a step toward Haida.

  No!

  The voice that uttered that word was not my Ariana, though it came from her throat. It was a roar more felt than heard, and it made my wolf think that we were under threat, and he turned again to face the bed and Ariana.

  Her face was oddly distorted; I do not know if it was just the extremity of her fear or if there was some magic at work. Her dark skin was lit by scars that by a trick of magic, because that was thick in the room, or just some oddness of light looked the same color as her silver-lavender hair. The map of her pain was tattooed forever upon her skin, bared to the world.

  My attention was caught by her for a moment too long. I didn’t realize she was gathering more magic until the bed dissolved beneath her and she dropped to the floor. Walls crumbled around us as she pulled magic from Underhill to protect Haida from the wolf she thought was attacking her friend. When she thought Haida was threatened, she protected the little fae with all the power she could draw.

  She thrust it at me in a deadly blast I could see, wine-dark power bearing the scent of death.

  Haida stepped between us and let it hit her instead of me. She hung in the air for a moment, while the magic knocked me through the doorway and into the hall.

  “My lady,” she said and then the only thing left of the little fae who taught me to cook and gained such joy in music was a whiff of foul-smelling smoke.

  The beast who had replaced my Ariana screamed hoarsely. I hesitated, caught by grief and unwilling to leave Ariana alone in her pain, but the wolf knew better than I. He bolted for the front door, which opened before us. A glance over our shoulder showed only a battered lean-to that collapsed as I watched.