Page 1 of Witchbane
Prologue
Dreams weren’t supposed to smell like death.
The late fall, early winter thunderstorms dropping buckets of rain and shaking the house with thunder were messing with my sleep. The few hours of sleep I got were broken up by night terror level adventures through ghoul infested forests. This time stench and all.
And wasn’t that an odd dream to have? Ghouls didn’t gather in forests. They found battlefields strewn with bodies, or graveyards full of fresh graves to sustain them. Unless a serial killer had moved into the forest and been adding bodies daily, the ghouls were out of place.
Each time I slept, I raced through a maze of trees, running in my sleep, hard enough that Liam, my mate, said my heart actually pounded and my breathing labored. He was getting as little sleep as I was, mostly because he tried to wake me when the dreams began. Which meant he was on high alert, even while sleeping himself.
Tonight’s dreams began the same. Only Liam had pack business to attend, so he hadn’t come to bed with me. Too exhausted to wait for him, and praying for a few hours of real rest, I’d taken myself to my camper which was parked several yards from Liam’s back door. Thinking that behind my wards, nestled in a space well-protected against most supernatural powers, maybe I’d sleep.
There were guards outside. I could feel them moving through the edges of the pack bonds. I was as safe and secure as I could be without Liam. I wasn’t certain my troubles were external. Something inside me had been awoken recently. A kitsune most called it, some sort of magical fox creature with powers no one quite understood. However, I thought of it more as a demon—reckless, destructive, and uncontrollable.
I spent hours trying to meditate, to focus and control the energy. A chance meeting with some sort of earth elemental had locked it away. But it seemed to be a cage of ice, in which it continued to fight and demand a way free. Maybe that’s where the nightmares came from? The creature’s desire to be free. But wasn’t it a part of me?
Twice that evening, I’d already been awakened by disturbing dreams, reaching for Liam, but only finding the tie between us. His wolf, more than the human side of him. On the edge of sleep, his wolf tucked around me, inside my head, and felt real. His giant presence covered me with the warm thickness of fur and an almost purring like hum of vibration. Liam found it helped me fall asleep if he wrapped his wolf presence around me. He was much better at this mate bond thing than I was. But the wolf vanished when I dreamed, leaving me alone, afraid, and very lost. Running, always running.
The third time sleep drew me down, I’d been focusing on the wolf, imagining I was petting the thick dark fur of my mate and rolling his scent around me.
It began with comfort and that dark lull of unconsciousness that came fast and walloped with a hard hit of deep sleep. But something crept in. Cold and icy, sort of slithering on the edge of my senses. It tiptoed around, leaving a layer of sludge that felt thick and heavy. I even batted it away in my sleep, thinking maybe I was associating the blanket or the edge of my pillowcase with the odd sensation.
Although the sudden click in my brain that there might be a slug on me while I was in my camper had me jolting wide awake, swatting, and terrified. Yeah, I was kind of a baby when it came to slimy things. Snakes, slugs, fish, or the nasty wriggling selkies of a recent confrontation.
But I wasn’t in my camper, and the slime wasn’t from a bug. It was mud and rain. I landed back in the forest, on four fox paws rather than human feet. Not awake then, I thought. One of those dreams where I thought I woke up, but had only shifted forms.
And this time I was fox rather than kitsune; the tiny red fox most wouldn’t glance twice at, a predator, yet still I felt small. Alone again, I looked around for the wolf, but was battered by rain, like I’d gotten myself outside. I really hoped the nightmares hadn’t turned into sleepwalking.
The chill of the icy downpour made me shiver despite my thick coat of fur. It seemed to reach all the way inside, carving a frigid path echoing that ooze inside of me. It was an unnerving feeling I couldn’t shake. I tried to clear my head and focus.
The smell of rain deadened my senses to everything else, pounding down hard enough to almost hurt, but there was no shelter in sight. Trees too far apart, canopy above not thick enough, and no structures or fallen trunks to hide beneath. I started off slowly, even though my heart was already racing. Exploring cautiously, trying to rationalize the fear that filled my gut with apprehension.
Darkness and rain left the forest empty, or so it seemed. No darting squirrels or birds to sing. Everything hiding from the sheets of water pouring between the trees. Then I caught a whiff of something not kosher, a foul odor of stuff newly decayed and rotting; then a flash of white. Not like a sheet or any cloth, more the flash of graying, dead flesh weaving through the trees. I didn’t need to see the razor-sharp teeth and talons, to know what it was. A ghoul.
Fucking hell. Flashes of gray all around now, darting around the trees, like they were surrounding me. My heart sped up, and the fox reacted before my human brain could catch up. The animal part of me, even as much as everyone liked to believe I was always human in thought, acted like any animal would with the looming prospect of being cornered.
We ran.
It was a racing zip as always, familiar now after the endless nightmares. Like I was running, not away from them but being pulled toward something. The fox assured me we were running away. Ghoul equaled death and not in a fun way. I let the fox have control.
The deluge of rain couldn’t muffle the chase now. The ghouls ripped through the woods behind me, nails in tree trunks sounding like an axe grinding through the wood, their snarls more guttural and wet, unlike any other animal I’d ever heard. The worst of the rain made it damn near impossible to see and the ground slick with mud. Several times I slid sideways, fumbling to keep my feet, twice running into a tree with enough speed and stinging force to spin me off track. The ghouls were catching up.
Ghouls didn’t normally have that sort of dexterity. The way they curved around trees, some even climbing up the sides to try to launch themselves from overhead, was unlike anything I’d seen them ever do in the past. Ghouls were ground creatures, living and breeding in the dirt, burrowing into the earth like the most terrifying moles you’d ever imagined.
The modern world caught glimpses of them from time to time, a snapshot on a security camera or a shaky camera phone. People named it “the Rake”. I’d seen enough of the real thing to know what the pictures captured a glimpse of. Had I ever encountered a pack of them this large?
No. Five maybe, but I could hear over a dozen of them. Maybe more. It was hard to tell from the rain and the echoing of the sound through the forest, even muted as it was.
One jumped into my path in a display of horrific, emaciated limbs, almost humanoid, but a face like something out of a tabloid with a shrieking “Bat Boy” scrawled across the cover. I didn’t need moonlight to see teeth like a saw blade, or a break in the rain to smell the death on its breath lambasting me as it screamed and took a swipe.
I swerved, rolling low, under its reach and tumbling down the side of an embankment I hadn’t seen. The mud made it less graceful than I’d intended, and the second my paws touched the bottom, I burst forward again.
Blood pounded in my ears, becoming a distraction, and deafening me to their proximity. But I kept moving, sucking in air with labored breath and struggling to fill my overworked lungs. My side ached like someone had shoved a hot dagger into it. I didn’t have the stamina I used to. How was that possible when I hadn’t even been off the road all that long?
Again, I felt a tug of direction, shifting my aim a little to match, and realized I wasn’t running from the ghouls so much as they were chasing where I ran. What was I headed for? Why was I running in the opposite direction from home? Up a hill was not home, but I knew if I turned around, I’d be faced with ghouls and a sense that I was going the wrong way. Was this a replay of what had happened only a few weeks prior? Some mesh of theWild Huntchasing me, turned ghouls?
What the hell?
Usually, I’d have woken by now. The pounding of my heart and labored breath would have had Liam shaking me awake. Or even one of the pack. But I was alone in the camper that no one but Robin had unlimited access to. Not even Liam. Would Robin wake me? I hadn’t seen him in the camper before I’d curled up to sleep. The fae puck in cat form often sat on top of the shelves, fridge, or even in my bed. Hard to miss so I didn’t think he’d been there.