Page 60 of WitchBorn
Wesley cursed fate as unchangeable. Everything? No. I wouldn’t become the heartless beast standing before me. “You let everyone die, Isawwhat kind of monster we could become. It’s not the blight. It’s part of what we are, still you let them die, andI’mthe weak one?”
It snarled, jaws gaping wide as if to swallow me whole. I folded my arms across my chest. “You kill me and we both die. Right?”
It glared at me, eyes a swirl of black with hints of red. Rage. My beast, a gift from my sire, perhaps, touched with my mother, as the memories had been filled with a dozen shifts of form, a wolf, a bear, a dragon, and something much darker. This thing I stared at was part of me. A nightmare I’d unleashed a thousand times and this place was a graveyard of those memories.
Was I supposed to defeat the wolf or become it?
I dropped down to sit at the base of my father’s statue, refusing to advance through the gauntlet of blood and pain. “You offer me no hope, what is the point of continuing?”
“Grow strong.”
“Speech not your strong point, eh? Grow strong how? By remembering all the terrible things in our past? Where are the good things? It can’t be all bad.” I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared out at the path, the only hint of light glowing around the Summer king’s statue, but his memory had been pain, too. “What’s the point if all you offer is pain?”
The wolf crouched over me, looming and shifting into the dragon, shadows dripping dark ooze which sizzled and destroyed the growing plants. Each drop that touched my skin turned my nerves to needles of pain, but I wasn’t backing down. “Give me a reason.”
It huffed and a wave of wind swept through the sanctuary with an icy blast I feared would lead to some movie-quality arrival of the ice queen to end us. But the blast slammed into the end of the path and blew away a curtain of ivy, revealing a statue of Wesley. I gasped and got to my feet. An aura of shielding pulsed in visible waves of rippling magic around him locking him behind a barrier a dozen meters deep. Mushrooms and moss curling around the base of his statue. His expression serene as I’d never seen it while he was awake, but he stared down, not at me, and the foliage overhead gave way, illuminating him in sunlight.
“Is this some sort of game to you?” I asked the wolf. “A gauntlet of horrors to reach the princess in the castle?” Wesley would snap at me for calling him a princess, but I figured him for a high maintenance sort of guy. If I ever got out of this nightmare, I’d show him how good I could be at taking care of him.
“Mate,” the wolf growled.
“Yeah, yeah. Why did you send him away then?”
“Safe.”
“From what? Who? Us?” I glared at the beast and realized that was exactly it. The ground around us sizzled, dying beneathour feet. My mother’s and father’s statues expressions had changed to one of fear and horror, as the ooze began to coat the bases of their carving. “Fuck! Stop it! You’re hurting them!”
The wolf vanished in a plume of smoke and ash, leaving me standing in the silent grove, watching the ground to see if it would regrow. I was some sort of fae king, right? Shouldn’t I have power?
Nothing happened. The sizzling stopped, but the ground at the base of the first two carvings remained dry and cracked, dead earth. Needles of numb pain ran up and down my body adding a Gumby-like sensation of unstable mobility to my movement. The fawn had lived. Had that been Wesley? He never mentioned us meeting before. Would he have known?
I took a hesitant step away from my parents, gaze focused on the vague wriggle of magic shielding. The next statue open was down a path to the left, a stag.
“Fuck,” I cursed, dreading whatever nightmare it would bring. “Wait for me, Wesley,” I told the statue at the end and wondered if he could hear me at all. “Pray that I don’t come out of this some batshit crazy human version of the wolf.” I could almost hear Wesley commenting that I was already there, and since I was imagining his voice and talking to myself, maybe I was.
Forty
WESLEY
Ipaced the room more like a caged cat than the Stag I was. Magic crackled around me, the full weight of it returning after a forced nap that had me growling at Seb, and brought his mate upstairs to tell me off. Upsetting the omega turned the whole pack against me as the tension in the house raged until Seb soothed them with cookies and sweet words. That his mate could easily refocus him from ready to turn me inside out to the Martha Stewart of werewolf omegas, made me worry about Finn.
Sally Homemaker I was not. He was so screwed with me as a mate.
Ari appeared with a plate of cookies and a huge glass of oat milk.
“I’m not hungry,” I snapped, eyeing the plate for signs of magic. Robin slipped through the door behind them, disdain and irritation clearly displayed on his cat face. The Cheshire cat guise was only slightly less disturbing than his creepy kid form. Pucks were wild magic and chaos wrapped into one. “No,” I told the cat.
“Robin’s trying to help Xiao get in.”
“Who’s Xiao again?” I waved my hands banishing answers I didn’t need to clarify, “I mean I know he’s that cat you sent, but he’s fae?”
“Part fae, like most of us,” Ari agreed.
Strong for part fae if he could breech the realm of a king who wanted no one in but himself. I met Ari’s gaze, though they said nothing more about Xiao.
“He didn’t seem to like Finn much.”
“Xiao could sense Finn was part of the Autumn king. I asked Xiao to protectyou. I didn’t know you were mated to the Autumn king.”