Page 77 of WitchBorn
I let out a long breath and sucked the darkness back inside, locking it deep within my soul. The wolf wept within as if my human half bled into his, making his emotions a thousand times stronger. It made sense to blend one to the other, as we shared a soul, and for some reason the wolf’s heart was more delicate than mine.
I stood. The alpha took a single step back, but squared his shoulders as if ready for battle. He would die to protect his pack. I understood. He didn’t have a mate. His pack was his anchor. I nodded to him and headed into the woods in the opposite direction. “Don’t follow,” I said in warning. Nothing would survive when I released the darkness again.
“I am sorry,” the alpha said.
I left it all behind, my wolf silently weeping. We wandered for days, perhaps weeks, with unseeing eyes until we found our way into the mountains and I set free the accrued darkness. The world vanished around us, turning from summer to winter in a rush of raging winds and snow, and then back to sweltering heat. Fire latched on to the trees casting plumes of smoke into the air, raining down ash, and finally a soft blanket of snow. The forest died, trees snuffed and wildlife running from the madness.
Mortals avoided the mountains, their whispers carrying over the wind of a nightmare in the north. Once again, I was that nightmare, teetering between hot and cold, rage and silence. Decades passed before I resurfaced to try again.
Fifty-One
WESLEY
Ipaced the small space, catching glimpses of Finn’s dream, a lover turned, the blood curse tearing them apart. His heartbreak palpable, and yet I could tell that his affection for them was rooted in the wolf’s need for a pack. Finn, the original witchborn being, enjoyed the friendship of his pack, and consulting with Odion, but the relationship had stretched him in ways he didn’t understand.
Was he incapable of love? No, that wasn’t right. The affection and adoration had been there, just varied, as though the bond to the wolf had been greater than the bond to the human. He loved them, his memories of a dozen lovers wove themselves through our bond in memories. Each death causing a gouge in his soul that bled to this day.
As the years passed, he kept himself further and further apart from everyone. Creating packs, linking to them to keep them from changing others, adding the broken and taking their darkness as if it could stop their eventual madness, and burying his emotions in a handful of lovers that would eventually die, leaving him with another soul wound.
How many stories of a monster in the woods had been told around human encampments? Even I, as part fae, had heardmore than my fair share. Perhaps they hadn’t been the Hunt as I’d thought.
I glared at the sanctuary watching for movement at the statue he’d become a part of for him to awaken. Was the other end darker than before?
The sky overhead had shifted to night, but the stars glowed bright above me, as if illuminating my space. My stomach growled, and berries grew at the base of the statue. The sensation of the wolf nearby made me want to snap at him.
“You couldn’t be kinder to him?” I sighed, realizing it had tried, though failed miserably as it had given him a mortal life free from most of this trauma. “I want to save him, too. Can we work together to fix this? He needs you and I need him.”
Finn rematerialized at the base of the other statue, falling to the ground in a heap and lying limp, though I could hear his heartbeat and see his chest rise and fall. He sucked in air, and the breeze wafted a hint of salt to my nose. My little king had a sensitive heart, no wonder he’d tucked it away in an iron box and split himself in half to keep from leaving it vulnerable.
“Finn?” I called.
“Have you lost people you love?” he asked softly.
“Yes.”
“Does it ever stop hurting?”
I let out a long breath. “Yes, and no? Sometimes you’ll be going about your day, life as usual, and everything is fine, and suddenly a memory triggers the heartbreak all over again. The more intense the love, the more agonizing the heartbreak is, even in memory.”
“Hmm,” Finn muttered, still lying at the base of the shadow. “Do you think it’s okay to rest a little?”
“I would prefer if I could hold you. How about you ask your wolf to let me out of this barrier and we can do this together?”
He sat up and turned my way, his face overridden with the blotched darkness. Dammit. Would there be anything left of him after this fucking trip down memory lane? He flinched, catching something on my face I couldn’t hide.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Why?”
“’Cause I still feel powerless. Like the Finn I’ve always been, or at least that is most recent to me,” he said. His words formed a mist of vapor like the temperature had dropped. Cold blanketed the sanctuary, and I knew instantly it wasn’t his wolf causing it.
“Finn, honey, can you come this way please?” My gaze focused beyond him to the statues he’d already completed and the rising icy ooze that entombed them in crystals.
“My legs feel like overcooked noodles.”
Fuck.
Glowing eyes materialized in the darkest corner of the sanctuary. I thought for a half second it was Finn’s wolf, but as it stepped free from the shadows followed by a half dozen other beasts shaped more like Underhill’s lost monsters, I knew what I was looking at, the remainder of the Hunt.