Lord of the Wolfyn
Lord of the Wolfyn
Jessica Andersen
Dayn: The Dark Wolf Reda couldn’t explain how she’d been catapulted into another realm – face-to-fang with a legendary werewolf. A wolf who transformed into a dark, gorgeous man… Dayn despised the Sorcerer who’d turned him wolfyn and damned him to a lonely fate. As a beast, he mated with many women to gain strength, strength that would help to rescue his royal parents. Even though in his heart the only touch he craved was Reda’s.Now, saving his kingdom means embracing his inner wild wolf, but to find true love and happiness with Reda he’ll have to use all his power to fight his true animal nature.
Soft warmth against his lips. Silky heat on his tongue. Spice and flowers. Curves.
The sensations rocketed through Dayn. Gone was any hint of reserve or control. Growling low in his throat, he crowded Reda back against the tree until their bodies were aligned, touching from knee to chest. He kept his hands on her face, willing them to stay there with the last threads of his control, knowing that if he touched her—really touched her—he would be truly lost.
It had been two decades since he had held a woman out of anything other than necessity. But now, as their tongues touched and slid, as his body went tight, tense and hard, he wasn’t just kissing a woman. He was kissing a dream he hadn’t been aware of having.
About the Author
After going from research scientist to riding instructor and then on to romance novelist, JESSICA ANDERSEN is now the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels. She writes both romance suspense and dark, sexy paranormals, and loves both genres. When people ask her to describe her books, she says, “I’m always writing about two people finding the love of their lifetime in the middle of high-stakes action and suspense.” For more on Jessica and her books, please check out www.jessicaandersen.com.
Dear Reader,
Blood drinkers, werewolves and warlocks. Oh, my! Welcome to the Royal House of Shadows … Do you dare enter this dark, dangerous and sexy world?
I loved, loved, loved writing the story of a secretive magical prince and a redheaded cop with a penchant for archery and no luck with men. When sorcery plucks them from their rightful homes and prophecy throws them together, mayhem, adventure and a hot, sexy romance ensues … and asks the age-old question: who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
Lord of the Wolfyn follows Gena Showalter’s Lord of the Vampires and Jill Monroe’s Lord of Rage, and next month comes Nalini Singh’s Lord of the Abyss. It was an absolute blast working with these talented ladies and imagining how these royal siblings would avenge their parents and save their kingdom.
Happy reading,
Jessica Andersen
Lord of the Wolfyn
Jessica Andersen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To lone wolves and life mates
Prologue
Once upon a time in a magical land, a dark sorcerer—the Blood Sorcerer—coveted the only power denied him: the right to rule. So he led his army in a vicious attack on the Royal Castle of Elden, vowing to wipe out the royal family and take the throne. But he hadn’t counted on the king and queen’s love for their children, particularly the rebellious, headstrong Prince Dayn….
Branches stung Dayn’s face and lashed at the bloodred chestnut stallion he rode, but neither of them flinched. They were trained for this, had been born for it: Dayn was the king’s second son, Hart a royal war-horse descended from generations of beast-chasers. Together, they guarded Castle Island and the villages surrounding Blood Lake and kept the foul monsters of sorcery trapped in the Dead Forest.
It was a noble role, a dangerous calling … and an incredible rush. At least, it usually was. Tonight, though, he rode in anger with his reins white-knuckled in one hand and his loaded crossbow in the other, his mind not on protecting his castle or the country folk, but on the kill itself.
Full of his master’s mood, Hart snorted, grabbed the bit in his teeth and leaped a thorny tangle they normally would have dodged around. Dayn shouted and grabbed the sturdy beast-chaser’s flowing mane, and the two landed together and pounded away, now with a clear view of the monster they pursued.
The bristling, pony-size gray creature could have been one of the giant wolves that hunted the high country beyond Elden, save for the saddle of reddish fur at its heavy nape and the golden stripe that ran along its spine. Those things marked it as something else entirely: a wolfyn.
The older hunters told of the wolfyn taking human form and seducing the most beautiful women they could find … and then killing and eating them. Those were just stories, though. And the legendary shape-shifting was a way to explain why, back when they first set out to exterminate the creatures, the ravenous beasts would retaliate by attacking at a village’s weakest point and go straight for the strongest warriors and then their beautiful wives, as if they were at war, not hunting.
Those days were gone now, the wolfyn nearly wiped from the kingdoms. The few that remained, though, were deadly and had to be killed for the safety of all.
At the moment, though, all Dayn cared about was riding hard enough to leave everything else behind—his father’s anger, his mother’s disappointment … and the look on Twilla’s face when he’d broken it off with her after hinting at marriage.
His father’s words echoed in his mind. You must wed a proper princess. You are the protector of the royal forest and your brother’s right hand. And the gods knew that dark, seductive Nicolai wasn’t settling down anytime soon, so the king and queen—and their advisers—had pinned their hopes for profitable alliances on Dayn and his sister, Breena. The very thought of it—and the argument he’d had just now with his parents—had Dayn riding hard away from the castle and its politics. He was twenty and six, and his kind lived for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. Yet his parents wanted to sell his life to whichever royal house bid highest. Gods and the Abyss, he wished he had been common-born.
But he hadn’t been, so he kicked on until the wind stung his face and the ground blurred beneath Hart’s hooves.
His man-at-arms, Malachai, who was riding well behind them on his sturdy gray gelding, whipped around the thorny brake Dayn and Hart had just sailed over, bellowing, “Damn it, wait!”
Dayn’s former-tutor-turned-companion said something more, but it was lost beneath Hart’s loud snort as the trees thinned and they caught another glimpse of the wolfyn. The stallion accelerated after the beast, which looked back at them with too-intelligent amber eyes, and Dayn gripped with his knees and raised his crossbow as the gap narrowed. The trees opened up around him, but he focused on the reddish saddle mark, which outlined the target for a kill shot.
The wolfyn gathered itself for a last burst of speed, and—
Mindspeak screamed suddenly in Dayn’s skull, filling him with pounding emotions that weren’t his own: rage, defiance, fear, betrayal. Before he could do more than jerk with surprise, wind whipped up around him, squeezing him in a giant’s fist of spell-power, and then yanking him clear out of the saddle and up into a rapidly forming whirlwind that suddenly spun overhead.
“Ambush!” Malachai shouted, his voice wind-distorted and quickly growing faint as the tornado sucked Dayn inward and air screamed past him.
He fought the magic that held him, but it was too powerful, too all-encompassing, a physical force that roared and keened, and then flattened, reverberating in his soul as he reached the calm at the center of the whirlwind. There, he hung suspended—seeing nothing but the moving wall of gray-brown surrounding him, feeling nothing but the magic. His pulse hammered and his muscles screamed for him to fight or run. But there was nothing to fight, nowhere to escape. Gods. What was happening? Mindspeaking was usually nothing more than shared thoughts between blood-drinking kinsmen. He and his father shared the bond most strongly, though he also had it with Nicolai. But this was something different entirely. “Hello?” he shouted. “Father? Are you doing this?” Maybe his sire sought to punish him for refusing to—
The chaos of battle sounds suddenly rang clear in his head: terrible screams, bloodcurdling roars he couldn’t place, the clash of steel on steel, bow-twangs and bellowed battle commands. And his blood ran cold at the realization that this was no punishment. It was a warning.
“Alvina!” he heard his father shout to his mother, “Go back, damn it!” Then there was a wrenching jolt of magic and Dayn was suddenly inside his father’s head, seeing what he was seeing, feeling what he was feeling.
Horror and grim determination thudded in Aelfric’s veins as he slashed at the creature confronting him on the narrow open staircase. He didn’t know how the Blood Sorcerer had gotten his army onto the island undetected, but the castle was overrun.
Monstrous scorpion creatures filled the great hall below the curving staircase, knocking aside elite guard-soldiers with their poison-tipped tails, then slicing through their armor with razor-sharp claws. As blood splashed and men screamed and died, the king slammed a bolt of magic down the stairs, driving back the ettins that were trying to win their way up the steps to the upper level. The huge three-headed ogres stumbled back, dazed, but not for long.
Aelfric spun to charge up the stairs and found himself on his wife’s heels. Which didn’t surprise him, because his lovely Alvina was a fighter, fierce and powerful in both love and war. What surprised him was the panicked ache he felt at the sight of her rushing up the stone steps ahead of him, the inner whisper of, Please, gods, no. I’m not ready for this.
Worse, he saw the same emotions reflected in her eyes when she ducked into an alcove just short of their chambers and turned to him, holding out her hands for his. “We must act quickly,” she whispered as the stones trembled beneath their feet with the force of the battle. “We can still save the children.”
He wanted to argue, but knew in his heart that it would only waste time.
Folding his hands around hers, he moved in close and laid his cheek on her brow. “Ah, my queen. My love. I am sorry.” Sorry that he had waited too long to go after the Blood Sorcerer. Sorry that he had no hope to offer. Sorry that they had so quickly gone from talking about little Micah’s fifth birthday to this.
Her next breath was a sob, but she said only, “We must hurry.”
He eased away, keeping hold of her hands, which trembled in his. “Tell me what to do.”
“No!” Dayn shouted, pain searing through his chest as the vision dissolved. “Gods, no!” More, as the mindspeak faded he heard the distinctive buzz that said it was a memory, that what he saw had already happened. He struggled against the invisible force that held him at the center of the whirlwind, lashing at it, cursing it. “Malachai!” he shouted. “To the castle!” But there was no response, and the forest suddenly seemed very far away.
Dayn. The word was spoken inside his head, in a familiar low, rumbling voice.
“Father?” Hope burst through him. “Thank the gods. Get me out of here. I can gather the villagers and—”
It is too late. The castle has fallen, and us with it.
“Don’t say that.” His voice went ragged, his breathing choppy. “Hang on. Just hang on. I’ll get Nicolai. If we work together—”
The spell is cast, our lifeblood gone. I don’t even know how much longer I’ll be able to reach you, so you must listen.
“No!” Dayn shook his head wildly, denying both the statement and the whisper of echoes that said his father had passed on to the psychic space between dead and alive. “Father … Mother … gods …” He felt no shame in the sobs that tore from his throat, jumbling his words with terrible, awful guilt. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper, shouldn’t have ridden out. If I had been there—”
Cease! Aelfric snapped, much as he did to his men in battle.
Dayn came to attention, but his voice shook when he said, “I await your orders.” He had said the words many times before, though most often lately with resentment. Now it took on a new, sharper meaning, because he didn’t know what to do next. Find Nicolai? Muster an army? A magical attack? A retreat? Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined the castle taken, his parents gone. But he couldn’t waste whatever time his father had left in the in-between, so he whispered, “Speak, Father. I will do whatever you tell me.”
Good, then listen well. Because of our wounds and the sorcerer’s power, the spell turned warped as your mother and I cast it. The magic has sent you and your brothers and sister far away, as we intended, but it has also tied the four of you to the castle and begun a countdown. When this count enters its final four nights—and not before then—you must all return to the island, retake the castle and kill the Blood Sorcerer. If you do not, you will die and Elden will be lost. But you must wait until the time is right.
Dayn’s breath rasped in his lungs; his mind spun. “How will I know?” Gods, was this really happening?
A woman will come to guide you home. The countdown begins when she arrives and ends on the fourth night. You must let her guide you, but remember: stay true to yourself and know your priorities. Promise me that.
A sob backed up in his throat. “I promise. Gods, Father—” He was cut off as the tornado suddenly accelerated with a roar. Seconds later, he was flying away from the calm center and back out toward the whipping wall of air. “No!” he howled as the wind grabbed him, latched on and flung him forward into the spin. In an instant he was moving, tumbling over and over, leaving him to shout into the roaring wind, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help fight!”
Thunder cracked and energy detonated inside him, searing his flesh and driving the breath from his lungs. Pain consumed him, convulsed him, as his body suddenly sought to tear itself apart from the inside out. Flesh and muscle ripped; sinews snapped from one place to another and his bones bent. There was a sharp jolt, and agony javelined through him, so terrible that he screamed and his senses went dim for a few seconds.
Then, between one second and the next, the howling stopped and the tornado disappeared, blinking out of existence as if it had never been. He hung for a second facedown in midair, eight or ten feet above a grassy clearing surrounded by strange stone pillars. Then his weight returned and he fell.
“Son of a—” He hit hard, with a rushing boom of impact that made his eyes blur, his ears ring and his brain spin. Surely that explained why, as he struggled to his hands and knees, the world around him seemed too bright, the sky too pale, the trees too tall. But no head injury could explain the cold that cut through his tunic or the way he could see his breath on the air. Or why the sky was a strange color and the ringed stones and tall, thin trees didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before.
Where was he? Had the spell sent him to the High Reaches? Even farther? Gods, what if he was all the way out by the Barrens? It would take him months to get home. His father had said he needed to wait for a woman guide and a four-night countdown that started when she arrived, but impatience stirred at the thought. What if he didn’t wait? What if he returned on his own? He was a hunter, a Forestal. If anyone could make it safely through the kingdoms alone, it was him. What if—
He jolted when movement blurred in his peripheral vision, and his pulse thudded thickly in his ears as he turned, hoping to see his guide.
Instead, men emerged from the trees. One was a gangly youth in his late teens, while the other appeared to be in his third or fourth decade. They shared long-nosed, forbidding features that suggested they were related, and they wore brightly colored clothing that wasn’t made of any hide or textile Dayn had ever seen before. The strange fabric crinkled like parchment when they moved, coming toward him.
Dayn dragged himself to his feet, belatedly realizing that the magic had stripped him of everything but his clothing, leaving him unarmed and wearing only the common laborer’s homespun he favored. But if he was in hostile territory, that was probably for the best. He needed to lay low and keep his true identity hidden until he knew whether it was safe for him to reveal himself as a prince of Elden.
“Ho, there,” the older man called. “Don’t be afraid. We’re here to help you.” Aside to the younger man, he said, “Okay, pop quiz. What do you make of him?”
Dayn frowned. He understood the man’s hard-edged, almost guttural accent, but what was a “pop quiz?”
“Well, the outfit says he’s from the kingdom realm.” The teen’s teeth flashed. “Or maybe a human renaissance faire. But I’m going with the kingdoms. Homespun, nothing fancy, no weapons? Probably just a regular guy who stumbled into a vortex with zero clue what just happened. I say we drug him and send him home, no harm, no foul.”
“I’m not sure about that. There’s something in his eyes.”
“You know how most of them are when they come through. Hell, half of them are so whacked from the trip that they don’t need the drugs. I bet that’s his deal. I mean the kingdomites don’t believe in science, never mind the realms or realm travel, so it’s not like he’s got any point of reference to start from.”
“Maybe.” The older man paused at the edge of the stone ring. “You, there. What is your name, and who is your king?”
“King—” Dayn broke off as his throat closed on the knowledge that the answer wasn’t “Aelfric” anymore. His older brother was the rightful king now. Gods, Nicolai. Where are you? What has happened to us all?
“See?” the youth said. “He doesn’t remember jack shit.”
“Language, youngling,” the older one chided. “You’ve been spending too much time with the human guests again.”
“Better to borrow from the humans than the kingdoms. They’re backward, their magic is unpredictable and half of them are led by those foul bloodsucking parasites.” The teen made a gesture near his heart, as if warding off evil.
Dayn was suddenly very glad that he’d been unable to name his king. Where was he that blood drinkers were reviled so?
Before he could figure out how to ask the question, a blur flew out of the woods and came toward the men: a gangling, puppyish creature with gray-buff fur. It wasn’t until it skidded to a halt, furiously wagging its tail in greeting, that Dayn saw the pale reddish saddle and the hint of a golden stripe. He couldn’t hide his flinch at that, or his gasp when the young wolfyn reared up on hind legs that became suddenly fluid as its outline stretched straight and tall and its fur shimmered all over … and then became strange, shiny blue fabric, glossy black boots and gloves and the pale oval of a boy’s face.
Dayn stared, stunned. Dear gods, it was true. The wolfyn were shape-shifters. Did that mean that the other stories were true, too? Was this their homeland?
The child’s eyes were alight with curiosity, his features a younger version of the others’. “Aw, I missed a vortex? Bummer. Where did he come from? Is he staying?”
The teen tousled the youngster’s reddish-buff hair. “We’re working on it. Though I’d say from his reaction just now, we can safely say he’s from the kingdoms.”
The older man’s eyes narrowed. “Question is whether or not he’s one of those murderous bloodsucking bastards or not.” He and the others moved forward, stepping into the circle drawn out by the standing stones. Dayn’s heart thudded but he held his ground and willed his secondary canines deep into hiding, so not even their small bumps could be felt if the men checked his gums. Because if they figured out who and what he truly was, he wouldn’t live long enough to return home.
Chapter 1
Twenty years later Human realm
Reda Weston stalled on the sidewalk outside the Cat Black Curiosity Shop with her hand on the latch and her stomach in knots.
The wide-eyed reflection that stared back from the tinted window wasn’t anyone she recognized. Yes, the stranger had a wavy red-shot ponytail the same as hers, and she was wearing the ratty jeans and beat-up leather jacket Reda had pulled out of her closet that morning because there was no reason for her to dress like a cop these days. And yeah, those were her deep blue eyes at the back of the dark hollows that had taken up permanent residence. But if that was her, what the hell was she doing?
Normally, she wouldn’t go anywhere near the kitschy magic, witchcraft and whatnot shops that lined the Salem waterfront unless someone called 9-1-1 … but then again, normal circumstances had hit the bricks six weeks earlier. And she had asked MacEvoy, the owner of Cat Black, to find the book for her.
“It’s here,” his phone message had said. “And if you liked the picture you bought, you’re going to love the rest of it.”
Like it? Heck, she’d spent the past four days staring at the framed woodcutting of a dark, eerie forest of gnarled and twisted trees, with just a hint of eyes in the shadows. More, she had dreamed about the image … and others like it.
A clatter startled her and she flinched for the weapon she wasn’t carrying, then winced when she saw that the noise had come from the shaking of her hand on the door latch. Worse, she didn’t know how long she had been standing there.
“Don’t be surprised if you have sleep disturbances, panic attacks, behavioral changes, even compulsions,” the department shrink had told her. And yeah, she’d had all of the above … except for the last one. This was her first full-blown compulsion. Or rather, the strange urge that practically dragged her into the creepy-ass store earlier in the week had been the first. This was her second. And it was much stronger.
It’s not the same book, she told herself. It’s just another copy. Except that her maman had said it was one of a kind. You’re just transferring, trying to solve something that’s solvable because you know the real stuff isn’t. That was the practical part of her talking, her father’s daughter. And suddenly she saw the major in the shape of the blue eyes that stared back at her, and in the ramrod posture that made her look taller than her true five-six. Inwardly, though, her mother’s voice whispered, At least take a look. What have you got to lose?
“My sanity,” she muttered under her breath, ignoring the ache that fisted beneath her heart. She hesitated another moment, then shook her head and pushed through the door, causing a distant bell to ring in the back of the cluttered shop.
As before, the place smelled disconcertingly like foot powder—gritty talc with a cloying perfumed undertone that made her think of funerals. Display racks near the door held the usual suspects: artsy postcards, books on the witch trials, copies of The House of the Seven Gables and such. But the racks themselves were made of wood rather than the usual cheesy wire, and the sides were carved with strange, sinuous curves and the hint of scales and teeth. The walls were painted black, with greenish white accents she bet glowed in the dark when MacEvoy turned off the lights. It would make the perfect backdrop for him to pull out the three-foot-high grim reaper statue that was locked in a glass case behind the register at the back of the store, and which she’d bet a hundred bucks converted, Transformer-like, into a giant bong.
Yeah. This was so not her scene. She should just leave.
“Miss Weston!” MacEvoy came through an employees-only door with his hands outstretched and his red-rimmed eyes holding an expression of pleasure that might or might not be faked.
A middle-size, middle-age grasshopper of a man, he was all arms and angles inside a faded black suit that made him look like a Victorian mortician and, she suspected, had come from the clearance rack at Cosby’s Costumes a few doors down.
Don’t be bitchy, she told herself as she shook his hand and returned his greeting. It’s not like he came looking for you. And it wasn’t his fault she felt totally out of place. The problem wasn’t with the location, or with him.
“Right this way.” He headed to the register area, where a wood-and-glass case held a collection of impressively ugly silver-and-moonstone jewelry, along with a sterling frog whose garnet eyes seemed to follow Reda when she moved. But that was just her imagination.
Right?
Holding back a shiver, she reminded herself that she didn’t believe in magic, that this was all just a put-on for the tourists. If the atmosphere was working on her, it meant that MacEvoy was better at his shtick than she would’ve thought.
Disappearing behind the case, he rummaged around for a moment, then made a satisfied noise. When he straightened, he was holding a black, metal-edged cardboard clamshell box that was marked Acid-Free Archival Storage on the spine.
Reda’s mental cash register went cha-ching and she wondered whether she should do a “thanks but I’ve changed my mind,” and have another session with the shrink instead. Certainly be cheaper. Or she could go home and fill out the paperwork on her desk—applications to the forensic-science programs at Colby and New Haven. That wasn’t the same as saying she was wimping out. It was just exploring options.
But those practical thoughts exited stage left the second MacEvoy set the box on the counter and flipped it open … and a skim of heat washed through her, followed by a prickle of gooseflesh that made her feel suddenly awake, though she hadn’t been aware of being sleepy.
The shopkeeper grinned. “You like it?”
“Oh, yes,” she breathed. “Yes, I do.” Because it wasn’t just any book. It was the book. It had to be.
The cover was intricately carved with another forest scene, this one with an achingly lovely girl front and center, running along a narrow path. She was wearing a long, flowing cloak over a peasant dress, and was looking back over her shoulder with an expression of mingled terror and excitement. There were no authors’ names, just a title that stood up a little taller than the rest of the carving. Rutakoppchen.
“Red Riding Hood,” she whispered, hearing the words in her mother’s voice. Not just one of a kind, her maman had said on that long-ago birthday, but yours alone. It was sent to me, darling, to give to you when the time is right.
MacEvoy looked surprised. “You speak the language? The paperwork says it’s some obscure Western European dialect, and doesn’t make any promises on the translation.”
“I don’t need a translation.” She already knew the story by heart. Pulse thrumming, she reached for the book.
The shopkeeper hooked the box with a spindly finger and tugged it back an inch. “You going to buy it?”
Her plastic was on the counter before she was even aware of having made the decision. More, she didn’t yank it back when MacEvoy two-fingered it, even though her smarter self was inwardly screeching that they hadn’t talked price.
She didn’t care. She had to have it, regardless of whether it was really the same one or not, really one of a kind. Not because of the strange, fragmentary dreams she’d been having every night since she brought home the print—a circle of stones like Stonehenge only not, a sense of pounding urgency, a flash of green eyes that brought heat and left her to wake up alone and aching—but because it was a missing part of her past. And if that was transference, she didn’t give a crap right now.
As he swiped her card, she brushed her fingertips across the carved wood, and got a jolt of strange excitement. Nerves jangled and her smarter self asked what the hell was going on here, why was she acting like this?
“Is it true that the wolf doesn’t just eat Red in this version?” MacEvoy asked as he waited for the slip to print. He glanced over at her, getting a gleam in his red-rimmed eyes. “The paperwork said that he seduces her first, enslaves her, plays with her until he gets bored … and then he eats her.”
“Something like that,” she said. She was dying to page through, but didn’t want to do it in front of him, though she didn’t know why, just as she couldn’t explain the sudden pounding of her heart and faint clamminess of her hands, or the liquid churn low in her belly. All she knew for sure was that her hands were shaking as she scrawled on the slip, and then flipped the clamshell shut and tucked it under her arm. “Thanks. See you around.” Or not.
“Wait,” he said as she headed for the exit. “I wanted to ask you … Aren’t you that cop? The one—”
She put her head down, clutched the box and bee-lined it out of the shop.
The short walk to her apartment on the outskirts of the “cool” district where the old houses were still getting restored seemed to take forever, especially when two of her neighbors pretended they didn’t see her. Guilt stung, but Reda told herself—as the shrink had told her—that they weren’t acting that way because they thought she was to blame for her partner’s death in a liquor-store robbery gone bad. Like most of her friends and family, they just didn’t know what to say anymore given that Benz had been dead for months now, and she was still ghosting around looking as if her best friend had died.
Except that he had. And it was her fault. Not because she’d done anything wrong, but because she hadn’t done anything. She had frozen. Just stood there while a strung-out meth head looking at his third strike opened fire.
The news reports had said she was lucky to get away. The other cops hadn’t said anything, really. Just like her neighbors didn’t now as she hurried past them. But for a change the uneven thudding of her heart didn’t have anything to do with the sidelong looks and whispers, or the knowledge that her father and brothers had been right when they said she wasn’t the save-the-world type. Instead, it was the heavy weight of the box she held clutched to her chest, gripping it so tightly her fingers had gone numb.
She was breathing so fast she was practically lightheaded by the time she let herself into her small, homey apartment. Not even pausing to shuck out of her leather jacket, she dumped her purse near the door and crossed to the narrow galley kitchen. The hollow sound the box made on the butcher-block counter reminded her that she hadn’t looked at the credit-card slip, didn’t know how much she had dropped on the thing. Didn’t care.
“So open it,” she told herself, the words sounding far too loud on air that had gone still around her, like the world was holding its breath. Or maybe—probably—that was just her. She was turning this into a way bigger deal than it needed to be.
Still, her fingers trembled as she flipped open the box, then reached in and touched the wooden cover. She told herself the faint tingle was her imagination, just as the hot dreams she’d been having the past few nights had been nothing more than memories of her girlish rescue fantasies with the temperature turned up by her adult experiences.
She traced the raised lettering. Rutakoppchen. A version of Red Riding Hood with the wolf as both sinner and seducer, the woodsman as the hero who saves the girl and takes her away from her old life to a new, better one. Seeing the book, touching it, made her mother feel closer than she had in years. Even if it turned out to be just a copy, it was worth whatever she had paid.
But she had to know, so she opened it. The cover creaked like an unoiled door, her throat became suddenly parched and tight … and then her eyes filled at the sight of a blank page with two lines of elegant script right in the center, done in blue ink that had faded over the past two decades.
To my sweet Alfreda on her eighth birthday, with the rest of the story to come when you turn sixteen.
—Your maman
Reda’s heart thudda-thudded in her chest as she brushed her fingers across the last word. Maman. Her older brothers had teased her about putting on airs, calling her “princess” and poking at her because there was nothing remotely royal about any of them. They were army brats and proud of it.
You’ll never get anywhere by looking backward. The major’s voice suddenly came so clear he might have been standing right behind her. Which he wasn’t; he was overseas. It was just that the words were such a familiar refrain: eyes up and ahead; one foot in front of the other; look ahead, not back. Words to live by.
“You’re right,” she said softly. “I know you’re right.” She should put the book back in its box and set it aside, maybe even lock it in the fireproof safe where she kept her unused passport. She should take comfort in knowing she had a cherished memory back, and then focus on more important things—like filling out those applications.
But she turned the page, anyway, unable not to glance at a picture of the young, innocent girl with her hamper. Then one of a huge wolf—her maman had called it a wolfyn—stalking her along the pathway and watching with too-human eyes as she entered her grandmother’s cabin, only to find it empty. The next few pages showed the wolfyn and girl together, the story relying on the text more than pictures. But then the huge beast morphed to a shaggy-haired man with hot, feral eyes, and the girl looked up at him, face bright and excited, like she was looking at a handsome prince, not a leering wolfyn. But now Reda saw something she hadn’t before: the girl looked disconnected, and she was almost smiling past the wolfyn, not at him.
Reda’s stomach dipped. She had seen that look on the faces of roofie victims.
She skimmed the next few panels, realizing that her maman must have skipped some pages. Or had she seen the pictures as a child and not really realized what they meant? Because now, looking at them with an adult’s perspective—and that of a cop who had worked rape cases, though mercifully far fewer than would be the norm in a larger, grittier city—the girl’s vacant, glassy expression and rag-doll compliance to the wolfyn’s G-rated yet highly suggestive demands smacked of drugs or brainwashing. Or both.
She hadn’t been seduced. She had been compelled.
Reda shuddered. “That’s not really the way I remembered this part.” But then again, most fairy tales had started out dark and bloody, rarely reaching mainstream puppies-and-kittens territory until Disney got hold of them.
Something buzzed in the back of her brain, like a trapped bumblebee of a thought that wouldn’t land long enough for her to catch its meaning.
“Poor girl,” she murmured, touching an image of the young woman lying heavy-lidded near the hearth of the cottage, where a fire burned low. The wolfyn was halfway between his two forms, looking out a window with the fur at his nape erect as if searching the shadows for danger. It was hard to tell if he was protecting her or holding her captive. Probably both, depending on who you asked.
Reda found herself getting far too caught up in feeling sick for a two-dimensional character who had suddenly become a stand-in for too many of the victims she had worked with. She was so wrapped up in that theme, in fact, that when she turned the next page and saw the woodsman looking up at her from the page, she simply stared for a few heartbeats.
Then she whispered, “There you are.” Which was ridiculous because, just like the girl, the woodsman wasn’t anything more than a picture in a storybook.
Only he was more than that. He was the hero.
Standing in the cabin doorway with a long-handled ax held across his body, he should have looked like a lumberjack stereotype. Instead, he looked strangely out of place, as if a knight errant had been dropped into this story from another. His forearms, bared by rolled-up sleeves, were corded with a tension that carried from his taut-knuckled grip on the ax handle throughout the rest of his big, rangy body and up to his face, which was etched with disgust and determination as he took in the scene within the cabin.
Reda’s perceptions tunneled down to the tousle of dark hair atop his noble brow and wide cheekbones, his narrow-bridged, aristocratic nose, full lips and square jaw, and his eyes … dear God, his eyes. They stared out of the page and cut right into her, seeming alive even though it was just an illustration, and a black-and-white one at that.
She knew those eyes, though. “Green,” she whispered, suddenly yearning in a way that made no sense, for a man who didn’t really exist. “His eyes are green.”
Help him. The thought came in a voice that sounded like her own breathing turned into words that weren’t hers.
A shudder coursed through her body.
“Great, now you’re imagining things while you’re wide awake,” she said aloud, trying to use the words to chase away the sudden crackle that laced the air.
It didn’t work. The air stayed heavy and thunder rumbled, hollowing the space beneath her diaphragm and stealing her breath.
This time it was the whistle of the rising wind outside that said, Help him. Save him.
Her heart stuttered when she looked out her apartment window and saw that the sky was as clear and bright as it had been when she left MacEvoy’s shop. Yet thunder rumbled again, vibrating through the soles of her boots and up through her body, making her feel suddenly empty and alone.
He is alone, too. Help him. It was the sound of wind, yet the neighborhood trees weren’t moving and the light, fluffy clouds hung motionless in the sky.
A whimper lodged itself in her throat, the weak noise unuttered, but the panic that spawned it remained, bringing a memory so deeply buried that she didn’t remember even having it until it was right there, full-blown in her mind.
“So what do you think—is she nuts?” her father asked the doctor. She could see them both from the waiting room through the partly open office door, could hear them clearly, though their voices were hushed.
“We don’t use labels like that,” the stern-faced doctor said, but that made her father nod as if he’d gotten the answer he expected. The doctor sighed. “Look. The mind has a sort of framework it uses to deal with trauma and loss, a way of rationalizing how it happened, why and what it means. In this case, Reda’s mind has chosen an atypical framework, one where she believes that her mother is not dead, but rather trapped in a land of magic beyond our own. Things like this can happen following the loss of a parent, especially in children her age. Usually it goes away on its own.”
“How long?”
“Months, sometimes longer. In the meantime, it’s basically harmless.”
“You call sleepwalking out the back door and into the woods ‘harmless’? What if she got lost? Or, worse, got found by the wrong sort of person?” The major’s voice gained volume at the end, but then he glanced out at her and lowered his voice once more to say, “Help me out here, Doc. I need this to stop. The boys need it to stop. We all need to move on.”
The doctor didn’t say anything, and Reda’s heart went bumpity-bump at the thought that he was going to tell the major that she was right, the kingdoms really did exist, and that sometimes visitors accidentally fell through the gates connecting the realms. Suddenly excited, she leaned forward in her chair.
“There are a few things we could try,” the doctor said finally. “The first thing I would recommend is getting rid of the book.”
The memory wavered and disintegrated, but the heartache remained, along with Reda’s dull surprise at remembering how it had happened. Not because the major had tried to pretend otherwise, but because the months of therapy that followed had trained her not to think about the book, magic or monsters.
Or, really, even her mother.
The police shrink had wanted to talk about her mother’s death, of course, but Reda had just shrugged and said, “It was a long time ago.” And it would have stayed that way … if she hadn’t found the book. Or rather, if it hadn’t found her.
Thunder rumbled, closer now, though the sun still shone. Unbidden, her eyes went to the picture of the woodsman standing in the doorway, staring up out of the page at her and making her yearn. “Repressed memories,” she said softly. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
Benz’s death had put a crack in the dam, and the strange, cosmic coincidence of her seeing the woodcutting in MacEvoy’s shop had washed out its base of support, meaning that now the entire construct was poised to come crashing down on her. Oddly, considering how much she used to pride herself on control and self-discipline, she didn’t really mind. Since the shooting she had felt like she was running in place, or maybe hunkered down inside herself, waiting for something. And this was it.
Or was it? What if this was all just happening in her head? What then?
The rational, logical part of her said to call the shrink and have herself checked in somewhere. Instead, reaching out with a hand that suddenly didn’t shake at all, she touched the page, resting her fingers on the woodcutter’s chest.
It didn’t take any effort now to remember the magic words her maman had taught her. The two of them used to sit on a mossy bank down by the duck pond, cross-legged, knees touching. “Concentrate,” her maman would say, over and over again, though somehow it never seemed like a lecture, never like work. “Close your eyes, visualize the doorway and say the spell, and when you open your eyes again you’ll find yourself where you were meant to be.”
The words weren’t magic, of course, wouldn’t conjure some strange passageway to a magical realm. But they were exactly what her mind needed in order to wash away the dam once and for all.
So she thought, What the hell? And she said the words.
Crack! Lightning split the air around her and incredibly, impossibly, wind whipped past her, around her, though she was standing inside her apartment. Panic lashed through her and she froze, paralyzed by the fear. Her heart hammered in her ears, but that inner pulsation was the only movement she could manage.
She tried to call for help but couldn’t, tried to tear her eyes from the book but couldn’t do that, either. She was snapping, losing it. She screamed but made no sound, fought but didn’t move. The woodcutter’s eyes grew larger and larger in her vision, until she saw nothing but the inky black, heard nothing but the wind, and felt …
Nothing.
Kingdom realm
Moragh snapped out of her trance as the divination was interrupted by magic of another kind—a blood-linked power the likes of which she hadn’t sensed in many years.
“The prince!” she hissed, excitement firing in her veins as she recognized the signal’s source. Finally—finally—after all this time she could feel the spell that had snatched her prey from her. More, she could follow it. Even after the first flare of power leveled off, the connection remained inside her, throbbing like a heartbeat. One that said, This way. I can lead you to him.
The spell had reactivated. Thank the dark lords.
Her lips curved in a smile that the ornate, gilt-edged divination mirror showed as feral, with a hint of fang gleaming from behind the lips of a coolly gorgeous brunette in her forties. She had survived the Blood Sorcerer’s wrath over her failure to kill Prince Dayn the first time, and had eventually won her way back into his graces. But she hadn’t ever escaped the failure. And now … “Redemption,” she said, the word echoing off the cool stone walls of the castle’s upper reaches.
Over near the hearth, her servant, Nasri, looked up from his mopping. The old, crooked-fingered gnome—who now had only seven of those crooked fingers, having recently been caught filching a meat pie he’d had plenty of coin to buy—was cleaning last night’s bloodstains up off the stonework. The water in his bucket was dark, the gray mop gory. “Mistress?”
“Send word to the bestiary. I want the largest two ettins ready to hunt in an hour.” The three-headed giants were pure rage wrapped up with hunger, killing machines that need only be pointed toward their target. “And have the beast master reinforce their collars and control spells. I’ll be handling them myself, with you along to help tend them.”
He cringed and whined low in his throat. “Wouldn’t you rather—”
“Go,” she snapped with enough force to have him squealing and bolting out the door. When he was gone, she smiled again into the warped mirror. “By my life and blood, I’ll get him this time.”
She had missed before. She wouldn’t miss again.
Chapter 2
Wolfyn realm
As the blood moon edged over the dark tree line, a perfect blue-white circle visible through the windowed wall of the big bedroom, Dayn did up the last button of his plaid shirt and shrugged into his fleece-lined bomber jacket.
“You could stay, you know. Be here when I get back.” He glanced over. A cut-glass lamp shone from the bedside table—a Tiffany knockoff that had been imported from the human realm and converted to run off the quasi-magical energy that powered the wolfyn’s gadgets. The pale glow lit the room’s earthy brown walls and finely carved furniture, both of which were subtly worked with the Scratch-Eye pack’s sigil: four parallel bloodred slashes crossing an amber wolf’s eye. The bed was piled with luxurious crimson-dyed furs, but the room’s true centerpiece was Keely. The pack’s alpha bitch lay stretched, sinuous and satisfied, her scent musky with arousal and the magic of the blood moon. Graced with the toned body of a huntress and the ruddy hair of a bitch in her prime, she was unmated and independent, just like him.
Except that she was nothing like him. Not really.
They met and mated this one night each year, when sex sparked the strongest of changes and the wolfyn stayed largely in wolf form for the next three days, running together, renewing their magic and making or breaking new alliances. She didn’t dare mate with a male of her kind during the blood moon lest he claim the Right of Challenge for the pack leadership, which had gone to her brother, Kenar, rather than down through her as was traditional. So, as the Scratch-Eye pack’s “guest”—that was the name given to the few accidental realm travelers who by some quirk of the vortex magic couldn’t return home through the standing stones—Dayn had become Keely’s choice. She had laid it out with the blunt practicality of a wolfyn: sex once a year, nothing more or less. Which worked just fine for him for a number of reasons.
Their relationship might have begun as a transaction, but over time it had mellowed to friendship. Or what did the humans call it? Friends with benefits. But, friends or not, he didn’t tell her that he was almost certain this had been the last time. He didn’t dare. Instead, he said, “Thanks but no thanks on the staying over. And you wouldn’t have asked if you didn’t know that would be my answer.”
“You understand me too well. So … same time next year?”
“Of course,” he said, and then added, as he always did, “unless you’re mated by then.”
Her eyes flashed. “Kenar is a good alpha.”
That was debatable, but Dayn wasn’t going to get Keely or any of the other pack members to admit that their alpha was more interested in himself than the pack or its traditions. Or that it had been wrong for him to twist those traditions around in order to run off the male Keely’s father had brought in from an outside pack to be her mate and his successor. Granted, the male—Roloff—shouldn’t have left. But that didn’t make Kenar right.
Since there was no point in picking the fight, though—“been there, done that” was a particularly apt human saying in this case—he blew her a kiss. “Until next year, then.” Which was a lie, but a necessary one. In the entire wolfyn realm, only the pack’s wisewolfyn, Candida, knew who and what he truly was, and that it was almost time for him to go home.
“Of course,” Keely agreed. “That is, unless you find a mate between now and then.”
He had his hand on the door, but looked back, surprised. “Me? No. Not in the cards.”
“The Stone-Turn pack’s new guest is pretty.”
“I’m not interested in taking a mate.” Besides, the newcomer wasn’t the woman he was waiting for, the one he’d been dreaming of more clearly every night over the past week, waking each morning with the image of a heart-shaped face, dimpled chin and go-to-hell attitude topped with curly, red-streaked hair. Hurry, he wanted to tell her. Please, hurry.
Keely looked at him quizzically. “If that’s not it, then what’s bothering you?” To the wolfyn, problems always boiled down to politics or family. Since he wasn’t involved in pack politics, that left family—or, in his case, his lack of one.
“I’m fine. I promise.” Sketching a half salute in her direction, he said softly, “Have a good run.” Already, he could see the amber fire at the back of her eyes. And, as he let himself out of her place, he could feel the hum of change magic on the air. It crinkled along his skin, stirring the restlessness that had been riding him harder and harder as the days passed and there was no sign of his guide. Frustration gnawed at him, making him feel itchy, twitchy. He wanted to race through the darkness, pick a fight, howl at the moon….
Instead, he headed for the small log cabin he’d built near the standing stones, zipping his jacket and shoving his hands in his pockets as he hiked along the two-mile path. The blood moon lit the night with the eerie blue-white light that was almost as bright as day, though monochromatic. By the time his cabin came into view, the air already carried a chorus of excited yips and deeper, spine-shivering howls.
His cabin, little more than a single long room with a central chimney and big hearth, was laughably rustic as far as the pack members were concerned. He had used human-style insulated windows, though, and had a wolfyn-tech generator for power. He had left the lights off tonight, though, and the moonlight that bathed the cabin lit it blue-white, making it seem like it was …
Oh, shit. Glowing. Dayn’s pulse kicked, because he knew from past experience that it wasn’t the cabin doing the glowing. There was a vortex forming in the standing stones!
He took off at a run. As he came around the corner, thunder rumbled, vibrating up through the soles of his boots even though the sky was clear. He nearly cheered at the sight of blue-white lightning sparking among the standing stones. The electricity lit the air, charging the ozone and making his hair bristle as if he, too, were going through the change.
Magic surrounded him as he charged up the hill, suffusing him and running foxfire glows along his skin when he came to a halt just outside the circle. Electricity arced from one stone to the next and the next, lighting the entire circle with blue-white power. Then, suddenly, the grass and empty air within the circle grew blurry and started to move, making a slow inward spiral at first, but then spinning faster and faster, tightening within seconds to a gray tornado of everything and nothing.
Magic tugged at him, beckoning. Come, the vortex seemed to be saying. Say the words and come.
Dayn hesitated, though. The vortices had never worked for him before, even with the spell that should return him home to Elden. But what if it was finally time? Maybe his guide wasn’t supposed to come to him, but rather the reverse. Please, gods.
Thunder boomed and magic churned as he pictured the forest he had been snatched from and said the spell. Then, braced for anything, he stepped into the stone circle.
The wind surrounded him instantly, grabbing him up and tumbling him head over ass in a whirling maelstrom of power. Excitement seared through him. It was working! Thunder roared and lightning arced and snapped, and the universe seemed to hold its breath for an instant. In that moment, he glimpsed a modern, human-style kitchen and jolted with dismay. No, not the human realm. Take me to Elden!
Even as he thought that, pain flared behind his eyes, lashing through his skull … and everything winked out.
For a second, there was only darkness. Stillness. Silence. He couldn’t even hear his own heartbeat.
Then everything jolted back into existence around him, and there was blue-white light in his eyes and the springy press of grass-covered earth beneath him. He blinked into the light, gut fisting on disappointment as things came into focus and he recognized the full moon pouring down on the familiar ring of standing stones.
“Son of a bitch.” He hadn’t gone anywhere, after all. He was still in the wolfyn realm. “Son of a sucking—”
A soft moan cut him off. A soft, very feminine moan.
His heart started to thud in his chest as he turned toward the sound, telling himself not to hope, but hoping nonetheless.
And there she was. After all this time, there she was.
She lay curled on the grass with her cheek pillowed on her hands, but he recognized the oval of her face, the stubborn dent in her chin and the strong yet subtly curved lines of her body. More, he knew without seeing it in the light of day that her wavy hair was red-shot, her eyes a clear blue, like the deepest part of the Elden sky after a rainstorm. Not that it mattered whether or not she was beautiful—she was his guide, and he had his priorities well in mind.
Her clothes said she was human, which surprised him. Of the three known realms, the human realm was the most technologically advanced and used the least magic, which put them the farthest away from the pure magic of the kingdoms. Given that, how was she supposed to guide him?
Have faith, he told himself. His father had promised a guide, and here she was.
Which also meant that the four-night countdown had begun, and they needed to get moving. But there was a problem with that: she was out cold, and the Scratch-Eye pack was gathering for their run, which would include an hour-long serenade at the stones. Although the wolfyn were largely civilized on a day-to-day basis—in their home realm, at least—the blood moon unleashed the other aspects of their personalities. And while Keely probably wouldn’t have a problem seeing him with another woman during the blood moon, others wouldn’t be so forgiving.
Making a snap decision, though he would have rather stayed and called a new vortex right away, Dayn gathered the woman in his arms. She was lighter boned and smaller than Keely, and seemed to fit naturally against him as he carried her from the circle, with her head tucked against his neck and her curly hair brushing his cheek.
Inside his cabin, he put her gently on the couch near the hearth, where the remains of the fire were still warm. Then he shucked out of his too-hot jacket and knelt beside her, part of him still unable to believe that he had dreamed of her, and here she was. His eyes lingered on the fullness of her lips, and the faint blush of color on her cheeks. He reached for her, intending to try again to wake her, but instead he found himself easing a few fallen strands of her hair away from where they had caught on her eyelashes. Her skin was soft and warm, and although he told himself he shouldn’t be touching her, not like this, he couldn’t make himself pull away.
She stirred beneath his touch, and let out a soft sigh. He caught his breath, then held it as her eyes opened and locked on his. The entire universe telescoped down to those blue, blue eyes and her look of shock … and then recognition.
The woodsman smiled down at her. “Thank the gods you’re finally here.”
Reda stared mutely up at him as her head spun and the world tilted a few degrees away from normal.
It was the same dream she’d been having all week, where she would wake in a log cabin to find this man crouched over her while a fire hiss-popped nearby. He looked like she had dreamed him: rumpled dark hair fell forward over his brow and curled below his ears, accenting his sharply defined features and emerald-green eyes. He had a rawboned yet powerful body, wide-shouldered and long-limbed, with lean, loose muscles that folded economically where he knelt beside her. His skin was smooth and bronze, with a light dusting of masculine hair visible where the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. And, as in her dreams, the air smelled of wood, smoke and cinnamon. Fluid warmth coursed through her body, concentrating at the point where his fingers rested softly on her cheek.
But as the spins settled, nerves took their place … because the overall picture was right, but the details were wrong.
The cabin was made of rough-hewn logs, yes, but she was lying on a plush sofa rather than a cot, and on a nearby end table, a mosaic lamp gave off muted amber light. And the man was wearing clothes straight out of the Bean catalog rather than homespun. More, even the details of the details were off. The couch she was lying on had the soft nap of velvet, but the fabric moved oddly, as did the stuffing beneath. And the lamp didn’t have a cord.
What the hell?
“I’m going to kill MacEvoy.” The idiot must’ve juiced the shop’s incense burner with something really funky and hallucinogenic.
Like, say, acid.
“Who is MacEvoy?” The woodsman’s voice was a smooth baritone with a raspy undertone that seemed to stroke her skin. But the question put another dose of nerves into the mix, as did the look in his eyes as he rocked back on his heels and stared down at her with a wary, confused air.
He’d never spoken before, never looked baffled before.
They were way off the script, and she didn’t like it.
“He’s … It doesn’t matter.” She pushed herself upright on the couch, waving him off when he made a move to help. “I’m good. I’m fine.” Only she wasn’t fine. This was all wrong, because whatever the hell was going on, the dream—hallucination?—seemed way too real.
“Fine enough to get moving?”
“Moving?”
He nodded. “We have four nights counting tonight, so we should get started as soon as possible.”
Reda breathed deeply and told herself not to panic. There was some logical explanation for this. There had to be. “I’m not having sex with you.” And oh, holy crap, she didn’t know why that had been the first thing out of her mouth. Or, rather, she did: it was because of the dreams.
His eyebrows rose. “Of course not. You’re my guide.”
She flushed, but pushed on. “Seriously. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” And she also didn’t know why she was arguing with a figment of her over-stressed mind.
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“Who’s joking?” She wasn’t kidding around; she was confused as all hell. “Wait. Am I being punked?” Who would bother?
Expression suddenly clearing, he said, “Damnation. Vortex sickness.”
“Vor-what?”
He rose and started to pace. “Sometimes when travelers come through the vortices from one realm to another, they become confused or even forget pieces of their past.”
A low burn fisted beneath her heart. “I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were,” he said, which she guessed was true as far as it went. But then he continued, “Memory loss and insanity aren’t the same thing. I believe you call it ‘apples and limes,’ yes?”
“Oranges. Apples and oranges.” His speech pattern was an odd mix of formality and slang, which just added to the weirdness. “Who are you?”
He stopped pacing and looked slightly shamefaced. “Sorry. I’m Dayn. Well, Prince Dayn, Forestal of Elden. But if anyone here knew that, they’d rip me to shreds.” He said it so matter-of-factly that it took a moment to register. As her jaw dropped, he held out a hand. “So let’s just go with ‘Dayn,’ okay?”
“I’m Reda.” Head spinning, she took his hand on autopilot, registering the warm strength of his wide palm and long, elegant fingers. But instead of shaking, he lifted her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss over her knuckles. It was an unselfconscious move, as if he’d done it a thousand times before and it meant nothing more than a fist bump on the T platform or a cuff on the arm between buddies at Downtown Pizza. But her gasp brought his eyes to hers and made it far more than casual, as did the sizzle that tightened her skin and reminded her that this was a dream. More, it was her fantasy. He was her fantasy, had been since she was a little girl and dreamed of someone coming to her rescue.
He dropped her hand and took a big step back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Why not? It’s my fantasy. But he wasn’t playing his part. He should have been whispering sweetly to her, kissing her, stroking—
The cabin door blew open with a bang, making her jolt as a cold gust of wind puffed ashes into the hearth and swirled smoke into the air. But that wasn’t what had opened the door. Because as Dayn spun toward the commotion, a huge figure darkened the doorway. Reda shot to her feet. Then she froze and a three-headed giant stepped through.
So tall that it had to duck through the door, the monstrous creature had the body of a man, huge and muscular, but its skin was cement-gray and its broad shoulders supported three ogre-faced heads with protruding lower jaws, curved upthrusting teeth and fierce black eyes framing moist, snubbed noses. The thing was dressed in a leathery loincloth, boots the size of mailboxes and studded wristbands and neck collars, and it carried a huge, blunt-headed club that was ringed with spikes and banded with iron. When it caught sight of her and Dayn, all three faces grinned horribly.
Dayn lunged for a rack of weapons her mind had initially dismissed as decor, grabbed a crossbow and yelled, “Run!”
The middle head locked on him while the other two stayed leering at her. Which made it tough to figure out who was the target as the creature bellowed a roar, drew back and swung its enormous club of death.
“Down!” Dayn plowed into her. They slammed against the back of the sofa, which overbalanced and fell, taking them with it.
The club screamed over their heads and crashed into the chimney above the hearth, sending chunks of brick spattering around the room. Nearly flattened beneath Dayn—he might be rangy, but he was solid—Reda struggled to breathe through the white-hot grip of panic. This isn’t happening, can’t be happening. It’s just a dream, not real, none of this is real.
Heavy footsteps thudded as the creature came toward them, growling low in its three-way throat.
Not real. A dream. I’m waking up now. On the count of three, I’m going to open my eyes and everything will be back to normal.
“Stay down,” Dayn whispered in her ear, shifting as the monster stumped nearer, shoving furniture and knocking things crashing to the floor.
One.
Three heads came into view, six eyes locked on and the creature roared, reared back and swung. Dayn shouted something, lunged to his feet and fired his crossbow from the hip. The bolt buried itself at the top of the giant’s middle throat.
Shaking, Reda flattened herself. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but count.
Two.
The monster screeched, tossed the club, grabbed for its blood-spurting throat and reeled back. The club smashed into a window and hung up on the frame as Dayn fired a second bolt into the same head, turning the creature’s roar into a high-pitched mewl that grated on her soul.
Please, God. Three.
Chapter 3
Reda didn’t wake up.
Instead, she watched in frozen horror as the three-headed giant staggered and went to its knees, and Dayn methodically fired bolts into the other two heads. As if that had finally hit the kill switch, the creature plummeted to the cabin floor, where it lay for a moment, twitching in its death throes, and then finally going still.
The sudden silence rang in her ears as she stared at the monstrous corpse, which smelled like chicken breasts gone very bad.
She yanked her eyes to Dayn, who stood looking down at the creature with an expression of pity, but also excitement, as if the attack had been partly a good thing.
Who was he? What in God’s name was going on? She wanted to ask him but couldn’t get out the words. She was locked in place. Frozen. Once and always a coward under fire. Was this, then, what her subconscious wanted her to see?
Maybe. But she’d seen it and the dream wasn’t ending.
“You can get up now.” He said it without looking at her, but she thought she saw the twitch of a smile. “There’s a bag in the pantry. How about you load up some provisions while I take care of the other stuff?”
As he turned away, she slowly levered herself to her feet, suddenly wishing that a herd of pink elephants would walk past the broken window, so she could point at them and say, Ha, I told you so. It’s a dream. Hallucination. Whatever. What mattered was that this wasn’t really happening. It was all in her mind.
Except there weren’t any pink elephants. Which left her with a stinky dead giant with two too many heads, and a really hot guy who thought they were going somewhere.
MacEvoy, when I get through with you, you’d wish you just mailed me the damn book for free, she thought. And then, because she couldn’t think of a good reason not to, she went to pack some food.
The bag proved to be a single-strap rucksack, and the provisions at hand were heavy on the hard rolls, dried protein—she didn’t ask, didn’t want to know—and trail mix. She loaded up whatever she sort of recognized, trying to focus on the similarities rather than cataloging the differences. Her brain, though, kept a running tally that twisted the knots in her stomach increasingly tight.
And all the while, she was entirely aware of Dayn as he pulled on a sweater followed by his heavy leather coat, loaded a rucksack with his crossbow and bolts and strapped on a narrow leather belt that held an unusually short sword on one side, pouches on the other. As she finished up her packing, he slung a sloshing crescent-shaped leather pouch over his shoulder, glanced over at her and nodded.
He didn’t seem to expect a reply, though, because his attention moved on to the overturned couch and smashed end table, the broken window and the scattered other things that defined a life: a journal bound in what looked like nylon but wasn’t, a bunch of interesting rocks in a jar, a huge antler with a picture of a beautiful stallion carved into it, only half-finished. And while he looked at the room, she was looking at him. Decked out in a strange mix of modern clothing and archaic equipment, he should have looked as if he was late for Halloween. Instead, he appeared utterly comfortable in his own skin and—as evidenced by the giant’s corpse—deadly capable. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
He turned abruptly toward the door. “Let’s go.”
She held her ground. “Go where?” They were the first two words she had managed to utter since the attack. Her mind might be racing but her body was still mostly vapor locked. That was the way it worked when she went into curl-up-and-die mode.
He tipped his head toward the dead creature. “That was an ettin, which isn’t native to this realm. It had to have come from the kingdoms, which means the vortex has probably opened back up. And that means we need to go. Now.”
Vortex? Realms? How could he stand there wearing a crossbow and sword and talk about things that belonged in science fiction? It didn’t make any sense.
Of course not, her rational self said. It’s a dream, or a hallucination or something. But since counting to three didn’t work, maybe this vortex will.
So she nodded and followed him out of the cabin, her boots crunching on broken glass and then echoing on the short steps leading down.
“This way,” he said, urging her along a wide path. His breath fogged the air. “If we can get back through the stones—Shit.” His face fell. “It’s not glowing.”
“Which means?”
“The vortex is already gone.” He glanced at her. “You know how to call one, right?”
“I …” She thought of the whirling wind in her kitchen, the spell her mother taught her. “Yeah.”
“Then let’s go. If we hurry we can be gone before the pack gets there.” But he hadn’t gone more than a few paces before a wolf’s high, eerie howl rose into the clear night air, coming from very nearby. First one, then another and another joined in, swelling the note to a harmony, then to a chorus, as if they were intentionally singing together.
The hair on the back of her neck shivered at the sound, which was wild, feral and hauntingly beautiful. But at the same time, nerves twined through her, turning her skin to gooseflesh.
Dayn stopped in the middle of the pathway. “Damn it, we’re already too late to get ahead of them, and we really don’t want to interrupt the blood-moon ritual.” He paused, considering. “Given that I don’t want to cross paths with them tonight, especially not with you, we’re going to need to hole up somewhere out of sight.” He glanced back at the cabin.
“Not there,” she said quickly.
He nodded, then pointed off to one side, where the trees ran up a steep, rocky hill. “There’s a cave I use sometimes. We’ll be okay there for an hour or two.”
“A cave,” she repeated, apparently only able to string together two words at a time, preferably one syllable each. Suddenly very aware of the cold that bit through her shirt and lightweight leather, she hugged herself tightly. This couldn’t be happening; it was all too unreal. Yet, strangely, Dayn seemed more real to her than anyone had in a very long time. He was bright and vivid; he drew her eyes and made her want to stare, made her want to touch. She’d felt inner sparklers when he kissed her hand. What would happen if he kissed her lips? What if he did more?
Focus. Stop transferring. You need to get out of here, not fantasize.
“Here.” He dug into his rucksack and pulled out a second sweater. “Figured you’d want another layer, unless your coat is one of those fancy jobs with the really thin insulation.”
“It’s not.” She slipped out of her leather and took the sweater from him. It was dark in color, thick and lightweight, almost airy, and the material had a faint rasp that suggested some dream-version of wool. Needing to say something that involved more than two syllables and might defuse the strangeness of wearing his clothes, she said, “Okay, so you carry a sword but you know about Thinsulate. What’s the deal here?”
He hesitated, then said, “There’s some travel between your realm and this one, so a certain amount of your technology has leaked over and been adapted to work here. I’m from the kingdom realm, which is pure magic. Thus, the sword.”
“Is there the same sort of sharing between your realm and this one?” She was stalling, asking about things she didn’t begin to believe in because she had been having sex dreams about him while he’d apparently been waiting for her to show up and lead him somewhere. And she didn’t want to wear his sweater. Except she did, because it was freezing out, and the sweater smelled like him—a mix of pine, moss and mint.
I really am losing my mind, aren’t I? The thought brought a jab of new fear.
He glanced in the direction of the howls. “Things are far more complicated between my realm and this one. And we should get moving before a pack scout catches sight of us.”
“Sorry.” Holding her breath, she pulled on his sweater and smoothed it down her body, where it clung unexpectedly to her rather blatant curves. But she didn’t care about that because she was already warmer, on the way to growing toasty. Letting out a soft sigh, she said, “Ahh, yes. That’s good.” Not letting herself snuggle or even take a deep breath, she nodded. “Okay. Lead on.”
He made a quiet noise at the back of his throat, adjusted his burdens and headed across the track and into the moon-dappled forest. There must have been some sort of path; she couldn’t see any markings, but he led her up the steep, rocky slope with a neat economy of effort, his near-silent footsteps making her feel loud and awkward in comparison. After ten, maybe fifteen minutes, he motioned for her to join him on a wide, flat ledge near a triangular cave mouth.
“Wait here. I’ve got some lights and other supplies inside.” He slipped into the darkness. Moments later a muted glow sprang to life and he called. “Come on in.”
She ducked to follow him in, found him crouched at roughly the midpoint of a low tunnel that was formed where two huge slabs of smooth, porous stone leaned against each other. In his palm he held a small rectangular unit that emitted blue-white light and a low background hum.
“The wolfyn won’t come up here,” he said. “After they’re done with the ritual, they’ll run the lowlands for the rest of the night. Moon time, you know.”
She only heard part of it, though, because the moment he said “wolfyn,” her stomach hollowed out and she flashed back to the woodcutting and the sly, evil creature that had seduced innocent Red. She sank down opposite him, and then leaned against the wall when her head spun. “Those were wolfyn back there?”
He nodded. “You’d call them werewolves. They’re shape-shifters. Human. Wolf. Back again.” He paused, fiddling with the little light. “I don’t know what the legends are like where you come from, but you don’t need to be afraid of them here. They treat guests well in their own realm. It’s part of the tradition they live by.”
Her heart was beating so hard her chest hurt, and her legs and arms tingled with an oncoming panic attack. A big one. Breathe, she told herself. You can deal with this. The wolfyn were just part of the hallucination. They couldn’t hurt her, couldn’t roofie her into sexual submission and then eat her when their other needs were satisfied. So far, all they were was just noise on the horizon. Besides, her mother’s stories about them taking young girls had been allegories about not giving it up too early or to the wrong guy.
Right?
Breathe. Don’t lose it. He wasn’t her fantasy prince and she wasn’t really in another realm. She wasn’t even really wearing his sweater, even though she was far warmer now, both because of the extra layer and the intimacy of the little cave, which forced them to bump knees and kept her system on a low rev of awareness. Her racing mind was scared, confused and frustrated, but her body was entirely aware of his.
When he shifted back, so he was leaning on the opposite wall, his movements were controlled; after he settled in, he went very still, almost looking as though he wasn’t even breathing. He moved like a martial artist, she thought … or a predator. A hunter. The realization stirred her blood far more than it should, and she caught herself collecting small details, like how his aristocratic nose had a faint ridge where it had been broken and just slightly offset, and the way his hands were long-fingered and elegant, yet tough and callused with hard labor.
Benz had used to tease her that she would need genetic engineering to create her perfect guy, because she wanted the whole package: brains, compassion, honor and romance in a laborer’s strong, muscular body. And he wasn’t far off, because that would have been a real-life approximation of her woodcutter hero … Like the one sitting opposite her now, staring out into the night.
Except that he’s not really here, is he? said her logical, rational self. And the heat buzzing through her body racheted down because it was right. Her brain was tricking her, just like it had when she was a little girl and thought she heard her maman’s voice whispering to her, sending her into the woods looking for answers. She didn’t need the department shrink to tell her that.
You have to get to the vortex, logic reminded her. He said that was the way home. And if her mind had bought in so deeply to the illusion, then the rules of the illusion should work. Maybe. Hopefully.
But the place where the vortex formed was crawling with wolfyn, and … wait. “If the wolfyn are harmless, why are we hiding up here?”
He looked back at her for a moment, seeming to be measuring her mental state. Or maybe deciding how much to tell her. “There’s some personal stuff between me and the pack leader. Tempers can run high this time of year, so I think it’s better if he and I stay out of each other’s way.”
“And?” she prompted when her cop’s instincts told her there was more.
He shifted, stretching his legs out beside hers, almost but not quite touching. The alignment of her battered jeans against his turned the differences in fabric and stitching from subtle to a shout as he said, “You know how I said things were complicated between my realm and the wolfyn? Well, there was a war. I don’t even know what really started it—nobody here seems to, and it was a long time ago. But it was ruthless and bloody, and didn’t end until a group of kingdom magic-users, the Ilth, got together and changed the nature of the vortices so that when wolfyn come through to the kingdoms they wind up stuck in the wolf form, unable to change back or cast the spell to return home. Eventually, they even lose their human thoughts, becoming purely feral.” He paused. “The wolfyn came up with a counterspell, but by that time they had discovered the human realm and become fascinated with your science. For the past few generations—and my people have very long generations—contact has been limited to the few wolfyn who get sucked up into the vortices without the counterspell, and the occasional guest who shows up here, like me. In fact, the people of the kingdoms don’t even believe in realm travel anymore—it’s faded to legend status, just like the wolfyns’ abilities to shape-shift and enthrall beautiful women.”
A shiver crawled up Reda’s spine as the hallucination suddenly gained an uncomfortable amount of detail that dovetailed with the stories she knew. “Can they do that? Enthrall women, I mean.”
He shook his head. “They wouldn’t do that to a guest, not even during the moon time. The traditions are very clear on when and how enthrallment can be used.”
Which wasn’t a “no.” Feeling the cold more than she had been moments before, she tucked her hands under her arms beneath her jacket, warming them in a sweater that was uncomfortably peltlike all of a sudden.
He continued, “So while the wolfyn are generally tolerant, they prefer humans over kingdomites, and there are certain bloodlines from the kingdom that remain kill-on-sight.”
“Which is why you don’t want them to know that you’re a prince,” she said, remembering his earlier comment. Then, without warning, a bubble of half-hysterical laughter rose up inside her, sticking in her throat and threatening to turn into a sob. “You’re a prince,” she repeated. “Of course you are.” She used to dream of charming princes, ethereal princesses and magical adventures, so maybe it was no wonder her mind had gone back there now, turning her fantasy man into not only the woodcutter, but also a handsome prince. She buried her face in her hands. “You’re not real. None of this is real. Go away and let me wake up in my real bed in the middle of my real life.” She felt a tug of wistfulness at the thought of leaving the dream behind, and that couldn’t be good.
“It’s just vortex sickness,” he said soothingly. “Don’t worry. Just relax—it’ll all come back to you soon.”
She lifted her head to glare at him. “I haven’t forgotten anything, damn it. My name is Reda Weston, my father is Major Michael Weston and my mother’s name was Freddy. See? No gaps. No blank spots. And this isn’t real.”
“By the gods and the Abyss, this is real.” A hint of temper licked at the back of his eyes, which had gone very green in the pale illumination. His voice gained an edge. “And it’s going to stay real whether you believe in it or not, so how about you chuck the ‘science is God’ human attitude and consider that maybe this is happening, and that you’re here for a reason? Because unless you help me out here, people are going to die.”
“I …” She stared at him, throat drying to dust. “What?”
“People. Will. Die,” he said, spacing the words through gritted teeth. “I need to get my ass back to Castle Island within the next seventy-two hours, and you’re supposed to be helping me.”
Her throat closed, but she forced out, “I’ve never heard of Castle Island.” Then, seeing it in his eyes, she held up a hand. “And if you say ‘vortex sickness’ one more time, I’m going to scream.”
His expression eased. “Okay. At least you’re listening.”
“I’m …” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I am, besides scared and confused. What’s going on here? What’s on Castle Island and why do you need to be there? And why does it involve me?” This doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s just an illusion.
“I don’t know how you’re involved, really, or why. But I can tell you about Castle Island.” He waited for her nod. When he got it, he made a rueful, bitter face, and began. “There once was a prince who thought the world should revolve around him….” Her blood chilled as he described his home being attacked by a vile sorcerer and his parents casting a massive spell that had saved him and his siblings, yet went awry, binding them to the castle and cursing the kingdom if they failed to return in time. He recited a message from his father’s spirit, telling him to wait for a guide, and that when she arrived he needed to be back on Castle Island by the fourth night, to reunite with his siblings and kill the sorcerer. He paused, expression going hollow. “The next thing I knew, I was stuck here in the wolfyn realm, doing my damnedest to make them believe I’d lost my memory in the vortex and keep them from guessing that I was a member of a royal house … and all the while, waiting for my guide to show up. Then, about a week ago, I started having these dreams.”
“Dreams,” she whispered, body heating suddenly.
He nodded. “I saw you, Reda. Your face. Your eyes. The magic was making sure I would recognize you when you arrived.”
She moved restlessly, shifting her legs away from his. “There’s no such thing as magic.”
“Maybe there isn’t in your world. But there is in mine.”
Her pulse thudded loudly in her ears. The department shrink had talked about hospitalization but in the end had signed off on an outpatient program with intensive sessions that had started off daily and tapered from there. Now, she wondered whether that had been a mistake, whether she had faked her way through her recovery, fooling even herself, until now. Was she in a hospital room somewhere, staring blankly out a window while her mind roamed free? Panic sparked in her chest as she tried to imagine it but couldn’t, tried to connect with her “real” mind trapped somewhere else, but couldn’t do that, either. The cave, the man and his story felt entirely real. Which would mean …
“No,” she said, pushing herself up to the hunched-over crouch that was all the cave allowed, which made her feel trapped and squirrelly. “This isn’t … I’m not your guide. There’s been some sort of mistake.”
He hadn’t moved a muscle, except to follow her with his eyes. “When you first woke up in the cabin, you recognized me. I saw it in your face.”
“I …” dreamed of you, lusted after you, imagined you were all the things I haven’t been able to find in a flesh-and-blood guy. “Okay, maybe there were a couple of dreams, but there wasn’t anything about me guiding you anywhere.” She didn’t mention waking up hot, bothered and alone. Clearly, their dreams had been very different: she had dreamed of finding love; he had dreamed of saving his people. Was that what her subconscious wanted her to see? That she was too wrapped up in her own problems? That one resonated a little too well, making her queasy. Pressing a hand to her stomach, she said, “I need to … you know. Outside.”
He touched her free hand briefly in support. “Go out the back and stay close. There’s a grove of borer trees on the other side of the stones, and you don’t want to mess with borers.”
She didn’t ask why, didn’t intend to find out. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I think I just need some air.” And some space without him there to remind her how numb she’d been for too long, just going through the motions, stuck in her own little world.
Outside of the cave, the air was cold, stark and silent, with none of the howling of earlier. The huge moon lit her path as she picked her way over the rocks, getting clear of Dayn’s sight as if looking for someplace to relieve herself. Then, with her heart pounding and fear souring the back of her throat, she looped around and headed back downhill, stumbling in her haste to get to the stones and break out of the hallucination before she did something really stupid … Like buy into it.
With Reda gone, the cave was cooler and far less interesting, drained of the intense, compressed energy that practically shimmered around her. But it was also a whole hell of a lot calmer.
Dayn exhaled slowly, telling himself that it was going to be okay. This was going to work. She finally seemed ready to consider that she wasn’t caught in some strange and elaborate dream, and once they got past that, he was sure her memories would resurface and she would be able to guide him. At least he hoped to the Abyss that it would work that way. He was starting to fear it might not, because a human seemed a very strange choice for someone to guide him through the magical realm of Elden. Which made him think that this part of the spell, too, had been damaged by the sorcerer’s magic.
Not that she was damaged; exactly the opposite, in fact. She might have some human suspicions and disbelief when it came to the magic, and an apparent tendency to go wide-eyed and catatonic under fire, but she drew him, compelled him. Unlike the willowy, aloof wolfyn females he had spent the past two decades with, she was compact and curvy, and her emotions were written so clearly on her heart-shaped face. He had caught himself staring into her eyes, which reminded him of the deep blue skies of home, and basking in her voice, which was sweet, soft and wholly feminine.
Which was why she wasn’t the only one who had needed a minute alone. Because he needed to get a grip on himself, needed to regain some perspective. This wasn’t about him being a man and her a woman; it was about him getting his ass home and taking care of business there. And after that he would be back to being a prince of the realm, with all that the title implied. Which meant there was no benefit to him noticing how his sweater clung to the curves of her breasts and hips, and that the hitch of her breath when she caught him looking at her told him the attraction wasn’t one-sided.
“Priorities,” he said to himself, hearing the word echo through the otherwise silent cave, the air empty of wolf howls. The ritual was done, then, and it was time for him and Reda to head back down to the stones. Maybe she wouldn’t even need to remember. Maybe her just being there would cause the vortex spell to work for him as it hadn’t before.
Rising to the crouched-over crabwalk required by the cave, he eased out and straightened, calling softly, “Reda?”
There was no answer, but she wouldn’t have gone far, given that he had mindspoken her to stay close.
Not long after he arrived in the wolfyn realm, he had discovered that his mindspeak powers worked on all females, regardless of what realm they came from. When he had physical contact—as he had just now, touching Reda’s hand—he could implant suggestions, even orders. That was how he’d kept Keely from knowing certain things he didn’t want her to, and how he’d initially pushed Candida to protect him—until she had figured out what he was doing, and went for his throat. After that, he had told her everything, and instead of killing him, she had decided to help him, instead. And thank the gods for that.
Although the pack’s wisewoman hadn’t been able to send him home, she had given him the vortex counterspell, and more recently had been working on some new poisons she thought would work on beings of dark magic, like the Blood Sorcerer. More, she had helped him work out the limits of his mindspeaking powers in the wolfyn realm, and they had discovered that while he couldn’t make a female do something she was against or prevent her from doing something she really wanted to, he could influence other, less definitive emotions. That was why he hadn’t been able to push Reda into opening up to him—she was too set against it. But given her obvious fear of the wolfyn and the fact that she was starting to warm up to him, she would obey his command to stick around. She ought to be right nearby.
Only she wasn’t.
Cursing under his breath, growing increasingly anxious when there was no sign of her, he walked all the way out to the edge of the borer grove, where the ground started to go hollow. Then he backtracked and circled around the cave. And he picked up her trail heading back down the incline, beelining straight for the standing stones.
“Son of a bitch.” He had underestimated her mental strength, her disbelief and her determination to break free of what she thought was an illusion. Scrambling back to the cave, he grabbed his supplies and weapons, hoping to hell he hadn’t just made a fatal mistake. Worse, as he pelted downhill, the horizon beyond his tree-hidden cabin started to glow.
His stomach plummeted. He was going to be too damn late.
Standing just inside the stone circle, Moragh threw her head back and laughed with delight as fat blue sparks leaped from one stone to the next and wind stirred her hair, fanning it out around her face.
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Jessica Andersen
Dayn: The Dark Wolf Reda couldn’t explain how she’d been catapulted into another realm – face-to-fang with a legendary werewolf. A wolf who transformed into a dark, gorgeous man… Dayn despised the Sorcerer who’d turned him wolfyn and damned him to a lonely fate. As a beast, he mated with many women to gain strength, strength that would help to rescue his royal parents. Even though in his heart the only touch he craved was Reda’s.Now, saving his kingdom means embracing his inner wild wolf, but to find true love and happiness with Reda he’ll have to use all his power to fight his true animal nature.
Soft warmth against his lips. Silky heat on his tongue. Spice and flowers. Curves.
The sensations rocketed through Dayn. Gone was any hint of reserve or control. Growling low in his throat, he crowded Reda back against the tree until their bodies were aligned, touching from knee to chest. He kept his hands on her face, willing them to stay there with the last threads of his control, knowing that if he touched her—really touched her—he would be truly lost.
It had been two decades since he had held a woman out of anything other than necessity. But now, as their tongues touched and slid, as his body went tight, tense and hard, he wasn’t just kissing a woman. He was kissing a dream he hadn’t been aware of having.
About the Author
After going from research scientist to riding instructor and then on to romance novelist, JESSICA ANDERSEN is now the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty novels. She writes both romance suspense and dark, sexy paranormals, and loves both genres. When people ask her to describe her books, she says, “I’m always writing about two people finding the love of their lifetime in the middle of high-stakes action and suspense.” For more on Jessica and her books, please check out www.jessicaandersen.com.
Dear Reader,
Blood drinkers, werewolves and warlocks. Oh, my! Welcome to the Royal House of Shadows … Do you dare enter this dark, dangerous and sexy world?
I loved, loved, loved writing the story of a secretive magical prince and a redheaded cop with a penchant for archery and no luck with men. When sorcery plucks them from their rightful homes and prophecy throws them together, mayhem, adventure and a hot, sexy romance ensues … and asks the age-old question: who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?
Lord of the Wolfyn follows Gena Showalter’s Lord of the Vampires and Jill Monroe’s Lord of Rage, and next month comes Nalini Singh’s Lord of the Abyss. It was an absolute blast working with these talented ladies and imagining how these royal siblings would avenge their parents and save their kingdom.
Happy reading,
Jessica Andersen
Lord of the Wolfyn
Jessica Andersen
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To lone wolves and life mates
Prologue
Once upon a time in a magical land, a dark sorcerer—the Blood Sorcerer—coveted the only power denied him: the right to rule. So he led his army in a vicious attack on the Royal Castle of Elden, vowing to wipe out the royal family and take the throne. But he hadn’t counted on the king and queen’s love for their children, particularly the rebellious, headstrong Prince Dayn….
Branches stung Dayn’s face and lashed at the bloodred chestnut stallion he rode, but neither of them flinched. They were trained for this, had been born for it: Dayn was the king’s second son, Hart a royal war-horse descended from generations of beast-chasers. Together, they guarded Castle Island and the villages surrounding Blood Lake and kept the foul monsters of sorcery trapped in the Dead Forest.
It was a noble role, a dangerous calling … and an incredible rush. At least, it usually was. Tonight, though, he rode in anger with his reins white-knuckled in one hand and his loaded crossbow in the other, his mind not on protecting his castle or the country folk, but on the kill itself.
Full of his master’s mood, Hart snorted, grabbed the bit in his teeth and leaped a thorny tangle they normally would have dodged around. Dayn shouted and grabbed the sturdy beast-chaser’s flowing mane, and the two landed together and pounded away, now with a clear view of the monster they pursued.
The bristling, pony-size gray creature could have been one of the giant wolves that hunted the high country beyond Elden, save for the saddle of reddish fur at its heavy nape and the golden stripe that ran along its spine. Those things marked it as something else entirely: a wolfyn.
The older hunters told of the wolfyn taking human form and seducing the most beautiful women they could find … and then killing and eating them. Those were just stories, though. And the legendary shape-shifting was a way to explain why, back when they first set out to exterminate the creatures, the ravenous beasts would retaliate by attacking at a village’s weakest point and go straight for the strongest warriors and then their beautiful wives, as if they were at war, not hunting.
Those days were gone now, the wolfyn nearly wiped from the kingdoms. The few that remained, though, were deadly and had to be killed for the safety of all.
At the moment, though, all Dayn cared about was riding hard enough to leave everything else behind—his father’s anger, his mother’s disappointment … and the look on Twilla’s face when he’d broken it off with her after hinting at marriage.
His father’s words echoed in his mind. You must wed a proper princess. You are the protector of the royal forest and your brother’s right hand. And the gods knew that dark, seductive Nicolai wasn’t settling down anytime soon, so the king and queen—and their advisers—had pinned their hopes for profitable alliances on Dayn and his sister, Breena. The very thought of it—and the argument he’d had just now with his parents—had Dayn riding hard away from the castle and its politics. He was twenty and six, and his kind lived for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. Yet his parents wanted to sell his life to whichever royal house bid highest. Gods and the Abyss, he wished he had been common-born.
But he hadn’t been, so he kicked on until the wind stung his face and the ground blurred beneath Hart’s hooves.
His man-at-arms, Malachai, who was riding well behind them on his sturdy gray gelding, whipped around the thorny brake Dayn and Hart had just sailed over, bellowing, “Damn it, wait!”
Dayn’s former-tutor-turned-companion said something more, but it was lost beneath Hart’s loud snort as the trees thinned and they caught another glimpse of the wolfyn. The stallion accelerated after the beast, which looked back at them with too-intelligent amber eyes, and Dayn gripped with his knees and raised his crossbow as the gap narrowed. The trees opened up around him, but he focused on the reddish saddle mark, which outlined the target for a kill shot.
The wolfyn gathered itself for a last burst of speed, and—
Mindspeak screamed suddenly in Dayn’s skull, filling him with pounding emotions that weren’t his own: rage, defiance, fear, betrayal. Before he could do more than jerk with surprise, wind whipped up around him, squeezing him in a giant’s fist of spell-power, and then yanking him clear out of the saddle and up into a rapidly forming whirlwind that suddenly spun overhead.
“Ambush!” Malachai shouted, his voice wind-distorted and quickly growing faint as the tornado sucked Dayn inward and air screamed past him.
He fought the magic that held him, but it was too powerful, too all-encompassing, a physical force that roared and keened, and then flattened, reverberating in his soul as he reached the calm at the center of the whirlwind. There, he hung suspended—seeing nothing but the moving wall of gray-brown surrounding him, feeling nothing but the magic. His pulse hammered and his muscles screamed for him to fight or run. But there was nothing to fight, nowhere to escape. Gods. What was happening? Mindspeaking was usually nothing more than shared thoughts between blood-drinking kinsmen. He and his father shared the bond most strongly, though he also had it with Nicolai. But this was something different entirely. “Hello?” he shouted. “Father? Are you doing this?” Maybe his sire sought to punish him for refusing to—
The chaos of battle sounds suddenly rang clear in his head: terrible screams, bloodcurdling roars he couldn’t place, the clash of steel on steel, bow-twangs and bellowed battle commands. And his blood ran cold at the realization that this was no punishment. It was a warning.
“Alvina!” he heard his father shout to his mother, “Go back, damn it!” Then there was a wrenching jolt of magic and Dayn was suddenly inside his father’s head, seeing what he was seeing, feeling what he was feeling.
Horror and grim determination thudded in Aelfric’s veins as he slashed at the creature confronting him on the narrow open staircase. He didn’t know how the Blood Sorcerer had gotten his army onto the island undetected, but the castle was overrun.
Monstrous scorpion creatures filled the great hall below the curving staircase, knocking aside elite guard-soldiers with their poison-tipped tails, then slicing through their armor with razor-sharp claws. As blood splashed and men screamed and died, the king slammed a bolt of magic down the stairs, driving back the ettins that were trying to win their way up the steps to the upper level. The huge three-headed ogres stumbled back, dazed, but not for long.
Aelfric spun to charge up the stairs and found himself on his wife’s heels. Which didn’t surprise him, because his lovely Alvina was a fighter, fierce and powerful in both love and war. What surprised him was the panicked ache he felt at the sight of her rushing up the stone steps ahead of him, the inner whisper of, Please, gods, no. I’m not ready for this.
Worse, he saw the same emotions reflected in her eyes when she ducked into an alcove just short of their chambers and turned to him, holding out her hands for his. “We must act quickly,” she whispered as the stones trembled beneath their feet with the force of the battle. “We can still save the children.”
He wanted to argue, but knew in his heart that it would only waste time.
Folding his hands around hers, he moved in close and laid his cheek on her brow. “Ah, my queen. My love. I am sorry.” Sorry that he had waited too long to go after the Blood Sorcerer. Sorry that he had no hope to offer. Sorry that they had so quickly gone from talking about little Micah’s fifth birthday to this.
Her next breath was a sob, but she said only, “We must hurry.”
He eased away, keeping hold of her hands, which trembled in his. “Tell me what to do.”
“No!” Dayn shouted, pain searing through his chest as the vision dissolved. “Gods, no!” More, as the mindspeak faded he heard the distinctive buzz that said it was a memory, that what he saw had already happened. He struggled against the invisible force that held him at the center of the whirlwind, lashing at it, cursing it. “Malachai!” he shouted. “To the castle!” But there was no response, and the forest suddenly seemed very far away.
Dayn. The word was spoken inside his head, in a familiar low, rumbling voice.
“Father?” Hope burst through him. “Thank the gods. Get me out of here. I can gather the villagers and—”
It is too late. The castle has fallen, and us with it.
“Don’t say that.” His voice went ragged, his breathing choppy. “Hang on. Just hang on. I’ll get Nicolai. If we work together—”
The spell is cast, our lifeblood gone. I don’t even know how much longer I’ll be able to reach you, so you must listen.
“No!” Dayn shook his head wildly, denying both the statement and the whisper of echoes that said his father had passed on to the psychic space between dead and alive. “Father … Mother … gods …” He felt no shame in the sobs that tore from his throat, jumbling his words with terrible, awful guilt. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper, shouldn’t have ridden out. If I had been there—”
Cease! Aelfric snapped, much as he did to his men in battle.
Dayn came to attention, but his voice shook when he said, “I await your orders.” He had said the words many times before, though most often lately with resentment. Now it took on a new, sharper meaning, because he didn’t know what to do next. Find Nicolai? Muster an army? A magical attack? A retreat? Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined the castle taken, his parents gone. But he couldn’t waste whatever time his father had left in the in-between, so he whispered, “Speak, Father. I will do whatever you tell me.”
Good, then listen well. Because of our wounds and the sorcerer’s power, the spell turned warped as your mother and I cast it. The magic has sent you and your brothers and sister far away, as we intended, but it has also tied the four of you to the castle and begun a countdown. When this count enters its final four nights—and not before then—you must all return to the island, retake the castle and kill the Blood Sorcerer. If you do not, you will die and Elden will be lost. But you must wait until the time is right.
Dayn’s breath rasped in his lungs; his mind spun. “How will I know?” Gods, was this really happening?
A woman will come to guide you home. The countdown begins when she arrives and ends on the fourth night. You must let her guide you, but remember: stay true to yourself and know your priorities. Promise me that.
A sob backed up in his throat. “I promise. Gods, Father—” He was cut off as the tornado suddenly accelerated with a roar. Seconds later, he was flying away from the calm center and back out toward the whipping wall of air. “No!” he howled as the wind grabbed him, latched on and flung him forward into the spin. In an instant he was moving, tumbling over and over, leaving him to shout into the roaring wind, “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to help fight!”
Thunder cracked and energy detonated inside him, searing his flesh and driving the breath from his lungs. Pain consumed him, convulsed him, as his body suddenly sought to tear itself apart from the inside out. Flesh and muscle ripped; sinews snapped from one place to another and his bones bent. There was a sharp jolt, and agony javelined through him, so terrible that he screamed and his senses went dim for a few seconds.
Then, between one second and the next, the howling stopped and the tornado disappeared, blinking out of existence as if it had never been. He hung for a second facedown in midair, eight or ten feet above a grassy clearing surrounded by strange stone pillars. Then his weight returned and he fell.
“Son of a—” He hit hard, with a rushing boom of impact that made his eyes blur, his ears ring and his brain spin. Surely that explained why, as he struggled to his hands and knees, the world around him seemed too bright, the sky too pale, the trees too tall. But no head injury could explain the cold that cut through his tunic or the way he could see his breath on the air. Or why the sky was a strange color and the ringed stones and tall, thin trees didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before.
Where was he? Had the spell sent him to the High Reaches? Even farther? Gods, what if he was all the way out by the Barrens? It would take him months to get home. His father had said he needed to wait for a woman guide and a four-night countdown that started when she arrived, but impatience stirred at the thought. What if he didn’t wait? What if he returned on his own? He was a hunter, a Forestal. If anyone could make it safely through the kingdoms alone, it was him. What if—
He jolted when movement blurred in his peripheral vision, and his pulse thudded thickly in his ears as he turned, hoping to see his guide.
Instead, men emerged from the trees. One was a gangly youth in his late teens, while the other appeared to be in his third or fourth decade. They shared long-nosed, forbidding features that suggested they were related, and they wore brightly colored clothing that wasn’t made of any hide or textile Dayn had ever seen before. The strange fabric crinkled like parchment when they moved, coming toward him.
Dayn dragged himself to his feet, belatedly realizing that the magic had stripped him of everything but his clothing, leaving him unarmed and wearing only the common laborer’s homespun he favored. But if he was in hostile territory, that was probably for the best. He needed to lay low and keep his true identity hidden until he knew whether it was safe for him to reveal himself as a prince of Elden.
“Ho, there,” the older man called. “Don’t be afraid. We’re here to help you.” Aside to the younger man, he said, “Okay, pop quiz. What do you make of him?”
Dayn frowned. He understood the man’s hard-edged, almost guttural accent, but what was a “pop quiz?”
“Well, the outfit says he’s from the kingdom realm.” The teen’s teeth flashed. “Or maybe a human renaissance faire. But I’m going with the kingdoms. Homespun, nothing fancy, no weapons? Probably just a regular guy who stumbled into a vortex with zero clue what just happened. I say we drug him and send him home, no harm, no foul.”
“I’m not sure about that. There’s something in his eyes.”
“You know how most of them are when they come through. Hell, half of them are so whacked from the trip that they don’t need the drugs. I bet that’s his deal. I mean the kingdomites don’t believe in science, never mind the realms or realm travel, so it’s not like he’s got any point of reference to start from.”
“Maybe.” The older man paused at the edge of the stone ring. “You, there. What is your name, and who is your king?”
“King—” Dayn broke off as his throat closed on the knowledge that the answer wasn’t “Aelfric” anymore. His older brother was the rightful king now. Gods, Nicolai. Where are you? What has happened to us all?
“See?” the youth said. “He doesn’t remember jack shit.”
“Language, youngling,” the older one chided. “You’ve been spending too much time with the human guests again.”
“Better to borrow from the humans than the kingdoms. They’re backward, their magic is unpredictable and half of them are led by those foul bloodsucking parasites.” The teen made a gesture near his heart, as if warding off evil.
Dayn was suddenly very glad that he’d been unable to name his king. Where was he that blood drinkers were reviled so?
Before he could figure out how to ask the question, a blur flew out of the woods and came toward the men: a gangling, puppyish creature with gray-buff fur. It wasn’t until it skidded to a halt, furiously wagging its tail in greeting, that Dayn saw the pale reddish saddle and the hint of a golden stripe. He couldn’t hide his flinch at that, or his gasp when the young wolfyn reared up on hind legs that became suddenly fluid as its outline stretched straight and tall and its fur shimmered all over … and then became strange, shiny blue fabric, glossy black boots and gloves and the pale oval of a boy’s face.
Dayn stared, stunned. Dear gods, it was true. The wolfyn were shape-shifters. Did that mean that the other stories were true, too? Was this their homeland?
The child’s eyes were alight with curiosity, his features a younger version of the others’. “Aw, I missed a vortex? Bummer. Where did he come from? Is he staying?”
The teen tousled the youngster’s reddish-buff hair. “We’re working on it. Though I’d say from his reaction just now, we can safely say he’s from the kingdoms.”
The older man’s eyes narrowed. “Question is whether or not he’s one of those murderous bloodsucking bastards or not.” He and the others moved forward, stepping into the circle drawn out by the standing stones. Dayn’s heart thudded but he held his ground and willed his secondary canines deep into hiding, so not even their small bumps could be felt if the men checked his gums. Because if they figured out who and what he truly was, he wouldn’t live long enough to return home.
Chapter 1
Twenty years later Human realm
Reda Weston stalled on the sidewalk outside the Cat Black Curiosity Shop with her hand on the latch and her stomach in knots.
The wide-eyed reflection that stared back from the tinted window wasn’t anyone she recognized. Yes, the stranger had a wavy red-shot ponytail the same as hers, and she was wearing the ratty jeans and beat-up leather jacket Reda had pulled out of her closet that morning because there was no reason for her to dress like a cop these days. And yeah, those were her deep blue eyes at the back of the dark hollows that had taken up permanent residence. But if that was her, what the hell was she doing?
Normally, she wouldn’t go anywhere near the kitschy magic, witchcraft and whatnot shops that lined the Salem waterfront unless someone called 9-1-1 … but then again, normal circumstances had hit the bricks six weeks earlier. And she had asked MacEvoy, the owner of Cat Black, to find the book for her.
“It’s here,” his phone message had said. “And if you liked the picture you bought, you’re going to love the rest of it.”
Like it? Heck, she’d spent the past four days staring at the framed woodcutting of a dark, eerie forest of gnarled and twisted trees, with just a hint of eyes in the shadows. More, she had dreamed about the image … and others like it.
A clatter startled her and she flinched for the weapon she wasn’t carrying, then winced when she saw that the noise had come from the shaking of her hand on the door latch. Worse, she didn’t know how long she had been standing there.
“Don’t be surprised if you have sleep disturbances, panic attacks, behavioral changes, even compulsions,” the department shrink had told her. And yeah, she’d had all of the above … except for the last one. This was her first full-blown compulsion. Or rather, the strange urge that practically dragged her into the creepy-ass store earlier in the week had been the first. This was her second. And it was much stronger.
It’s not the same book, she told herself. It’s just another copy. Except that her maman had said it was one of a kind. You’re just transferring, trying to solve something that’s solvable because you know the real stuff isn’t. That was the practical part of her talking, her father’s daughter. And suddenly she saw the major in the shape of the blue eyes that stared back at her, and in the ramrod posture that made her look taller than her true five-six. Inwardly, though, her mother’s voice whispered, At least take a look. What have you got to lose?
“My sanity,” she muttered under her breath, ignoring the ache that fisted beneath her heart. She hesitated another moment, then shook her head and pushed through the door, causing a distant bell to ring in the back of the cluttered shop.
As before, the place smelled disconcertingly like foot powder—gritty talc with a cloying perfumed undertone that made her think of funerals. Display racks near the door held the usual suspects: artsy postcards, books on the witch trials, copies of The House of the Seven Gables and such. But the racks themselves were made of wood rather than the usual cheesy wire, and the sides were carved with strange, sinuous curves and the hint of scales and teeth. The walls were painted black, with greenish white accents she bet glowed in the dark when MacEvoy turned off the lights. It would make the perfect backdrop for him to pull out the three-foot-high grim reaper statue that was locked in a glass case behind the register at the back of the store, and which she’d bet a hundred bucks converted, Transformer-like, into a giant bong.
Yeah. This was so not her scene. She should just leave.
“Miss Weston!” MacEvoy came through an employees-only door with his hands outstretched and his red-rimmed eyes holding an expression of pleasure that might or might not be faked.
A middle-size, middle-age grasshopper of a man, he was all arms and angles inside a faded black suit that made him look like a Victorian mortician and, she suspected, had come from the clearance rack at Cosby’s Costumes a few doors down.
Don’t be bitchy, she told herself as she shook his hand and returned his greeting. It’s not like he came looking for you. And it wasn’t his fault she felt totally out of place. The problem wasn’t with the location, or with him.
“Right this way.” He headed to the register area, where a wood-and-glass case held a collection of impressively ugly silver-and-moonstone jewelry, along with a sterling frog whose garnet eyes seemed to follow Reda when she moved. But that was just her imagination.
Right?
Holding back a shiver, she reminded herself that she didn’t believe in magic, that this was all just a put-on for the tourists. If the atmosphere was working on her, it meant that MacEvoy was better at his shtick than she would’ve thought.
Disappearing behind the case, he rummaged around for a moment, then made a satisfied noise. When he straightened, he was holding a black, metal-edged cardboard clamshell box that was marked Acid-Free Archival Storage on the spine.
Reda’s mental cash register went cha-ching and she wondered whether she should do a “thanks but I’ve changed my mind,” and have another session with the shrink instead. Certainly be cheaper. Or she could go home and fill out the paperwork on her desk—applications to the forensic-science programs at Colby and New Haven. That wasn’t the same as saying she was wimping out. It was just exploring options.
But those practical thoughts exited stage left the second MacEvoy set the box on the counter and flipped it open … and a skim of heat washed through her, followed by a prickle of gooseflesh that made her feel suddenly awake, though she hadn’t been aware of being sleepy.
The shopkeeper grinned. “You like it?”
“Oh, yes,” she breathed. “Yes, I do.” Because it wasn’t just any book. It was the book. It had to be.
The cover was intricately carved with another forest scene, this one with an achingly lovely girl front and center, running along a narrow path. She was wearing a long, flowing cloak over a peasant dress, and was looking back over her shoulder with an expression of mingled terror and excitement. There were no authors’ names, just a title that stood up a little taller than the rest of the carving. Rutakoppchen.
“Red Riding Hood,” she whispered, hearing the words in her mother’s voice. Not just one of a kind, her maman had said on that long-ago birthday, but yours alone. It was sent to me, darling, to give to you when the time is right.
MacEvoy looked surprised. “You speak the language? The paperwork says it’s some obscure Western European dialect, and doesn’t make any promises on the translation.”
“I don’t need a translation.” She already knew the story by heart. Pulse thrumming, she reached for the book.
The shopkeeper hooked the box with a spindly finger and tugged it back an inch. “You going to buy it?”
Her plastic was on the counter before she was even aware of having made the decision. More, she didn’t yank it back when MacEvoy two-fingered it, even though her smarter self was inwardly screeching that they hadn’t talked price.
She didn’t care. She had to have it, regardless of whether it was really the same one or not, really one of a kind. Not because of the strange, fragmentary dreams she’d been having every night since she brought home the print—a circle of stones like Stonehenge only not, a sense of pounding urgency, a flash of green eyes that brought heat and left her to wake up alone and aching—but because it was a missing part of her past. And if that was transference, she didn’t give a crap right now.
As he swiped her card, she brushed her fingertips across the carved wood, and got a jolt of strange excitement. Nerves jangled and her smarter self asked what the hell was going on here, why was she acting like this?
“Is it true that the wolf doesn’t just eat Red in this version?” MacEvoy asked as he waited for the slip to print. He glanced over at her, getting a gleam in his red-rimmed eyes. “The paperwork said that he seduces her first, enslaves her, plays with her until he gets bored … and then he eats her.”
“Something like that,” she said. She was dying to page through, but didn’t want to do it in front of him, though she didn’t know why, just as she couldn’t explain the sudden pounding of her heart and faint clamminess of her hands, or the liquid churn low in her belly. All she knew for sure was that her hands were shaking as she scrawled on the slip, and then flipped the clamshell shut and tucked it under her arm. “Thanks. See you around.” Or not.
“Wait,” he said as she headed for the exit. “I wanted to ask you … Aren’t you that cop? The one—”
She put her head down, clutched the box and bee-lined it out of the shop.
The short walk to her apartment on the outskirts of the “cool” district where the old houses were still getting restored seemed to take forever, especially when two of her neighbors pretended they didn’t see her. Guilt stung, but Reda told herself—as the shrink had told her—that they weren’t acting that way because they thought she was to blame for her partner’s death in a liquor-store robbery gone bad. Like most of her friends and family, they just didn’t know what to say anymore given that Benz had been dead for months now, and she was still ghosting around looking as if her best friend had died.
Except that he had. And it was her fault. Not because she’d done anything wrong, but because she hadn’t done anything. She had frozen. Just stood there while a strung-out meth head looking at his third strike opened fire.
The news reports had said she was lucky to get away. The other cops hadn’t said anything, really. Just like her neighbors didn’t now as she hurried past them. But for a change the uneven thudding of her heart didn’t have anything to do with the sidelong looks and whispers, or the knowledge that her father and brothers had been right when they said she wasn’t the save-the-world type. Instead, it was the heavy weight of the box she held clutched to her chest, gripping it so tightly her fingers had gone numb.
She was breathing so fast she was practically lightheaded by the time she let herself into her small, homey apartment. Not even pausing to shuck out of her leather jacket, she dumped her purse near the door and crossed to the narrow galley kitchen. The hollow sound the box made on the butcher-block counter reminded her that she hadn’t looked at the credit-card slip, didn’t know how much she had dropped on the thing. Didn’t care.
“So open it,” she told herself, the words sounding far too loud on air that had gone still around her, like the world was holding its breath. Or maybe—probably—that was just her. She was turning this into a way bigger deal than it needed to be.
Still, her fingers trembled as she flipped open the box, then reached in and touched the wooden cover. She told herself the faint tingle was her imagination, just as the hot dreams she’d been having the past few nights had been nothing more than memories of her girlish rescue fantasies with the temperature turned up by her adult experiences.
She traced the raised lettering. Rutakoppchen. A version of Red Riding Hood with the wolf as both sinner and seducer, the woodsman as the hero who saves the girl and takes her away from her old life to a new, better one. Seeing the book, touching it, made her mother feel closer than she had in years. Even if it turned out to be just a copy, it was worth whatever she had paid.
But she had to know, so she opened it. The cover creaked like an unoiled door, her throat became suddenly parched and tight … and then her eyes filled at the sight of a blank page with two lines of elegant script right in the center, done in blue ink that had faded over the past two decades.
To my sweet Alfreda on her eighth birthday, with the rest of the story to come when you turn sixteen.
—Your maman
Reda’s heart thudda-thudded in her chest as she brushed her fingers across the last word. Maman. Her older brothers had teased her about putting on airs, calling her “princess” and poking at her because there was nothing remotely royal about any of them. They were army brats and proud of it.
You’ll never get anywhere by looking backward. The major’s voice suddenly came so clear he might have been standing right behind her. Which he wasn’t; he was overseas. It was just that the words were such a familiar refrain: eyes up and ahead; one foot in front of the other; look ahead, not back. Words to live by.
“You’re right,” she said softly. “I know you’re right.” She should put the book back in its box and set it aside, maybe even lock it in the fireproof safe where she kept her unused passport. She should take comfort in knowing she had a cherished memory back, and then focus on more important things—like filling out those applications.
But she turned the page, anyway, unable not to glance at a picture of the young, innocent girl with her hamper. Then one of a huge wolf—her maman had called it a wolfyn—stalking her along the pathway and watching with too-human eyes as she entered her grandmother’s cabin, only to find it empty. The next few pages showed the wolfyn and girl together, the story relying on the text more than pictures. But then the huge beast morphed to a shaggy-haired man with hot, feral eyes, and the girl looked up at him, face bright and excited, like she was looking at a handsome prince, not a leering wolfyn. But now Reda saw something she hadn’t before: the girl looked disconnected, and she was almost smiling past the wolfyn, not at him.
Reda’s stomach dipped. She had seen that look on the faces of roofie victims.
She skimmed the next few panels, realizing that her maman must have skipped some pages. Or had she seen the pictures as a child and not really realized what they meant? Because now, looking at them with an adult’s perspective—and that of a cop who had worked rape cases, though mercifully far fewer than would be the norm in a larger, grittier city—the girl’s vacant, glassy expression and rag-doll compliance to the wolfyn’s G-rated yet highly suggestive demands smacked of drugs or brainwashing. Or both.
She hadn’t been seduced. She had been compelled.
Reda shuddered. “That’s not really the way I remembered this part.” But then again, most fairy tales had started out dark and bloody, rarely reaching mainstream puppies-and-kittens territory until Disney got hold of them.
Something buzzed in the back of her brain, like a trapped bumblebee of a thought that wouldn’t land long enough for her to catch its meaning.
“Poor girl,” she murmured, touching an image of the young woman lying heavy-lidded near the hearth of the cottage, where a fire burned low. The wolfyn was halfway between his two forms, looking out a window with the fur at his nape erect as if searching the shadows for danger. It was hard to tell if he was protecting her or holding her captive. Probably both, depending on who you asked.
Reda found herself getting far too caught up in feeling sick for a two-dimensional character who had suddenly become a stand-in for too many of the victims she had worked with. She was so wrapped up in that theme, in fact, that when she turned the next page and saw the woodsman looking up at her from the page, she simply stared for a few heartbeats.
Then she whispered, “There you are.” Which was ridiculous because, just like the girl, the woodsman wasn’t anything more than a picture in a storybook.
Only he was more than that. He was the hero.
Standing in the cabin doorway with a long-handled ax held across his body, he should have looked like a lumberjack stereotype. Instead, he looked strangely out of place, as if a knight errant had been dropped into this story from another. His forearms, bared by rolled-up sleeves, were corded with a tension that carried from his taut-knuckled grip on the ax handle throughout the rest of his big, rangy body and up to his face, which was etched with disgust and determination as he took in the scene within the cabin.
Reda’s perceptions tunneled down to the tousle of dark hair atop his noble brow and wide cheekbones, his narrow-bridged, aristocratic nose, full lips and square jaw, and his eyes … dear God, his eyes. They stared out of the page and cut right into her, seeming alive even though it was just an illustration, and a black-and-white one at that.
She knew those eyes, though. “Green,” she whispered, suddenly yearning in a way that made no sense, for a man who didn’t really exist. “His eyes are green.”
Help him. The thought came in a voice that sounded like her own breathing turned into words that weren’t hers.
A shudder coursed through her body.
“Great, now you’re imagining things while you’re wide awake,” she said aloud, trying to use the words to chase away the sudden crackle that laced the air.
It didn’t work. The air stayed heavy and thunder rumbled, hollowing the space beneath her diaphragm and stealing her breath.
This time it was the whistle of the rising wind outside that said, Help him. Save him.
Her heart stuttered when she looked out her apartment window and saw that the sky was as clear and bright as it had been when she left MacEvoy’s shop. Yet thunder rumbled again, vibrating through the soles of her boots and up through her body, making her feel suddenly empty and alone.
He is alone, too. Help him. It was the sound of wind, yet the neighborhood trees weren’t moving and the light, fluffy clouds hung motionless in the sky.
A whimper lodged itself in her throat, the weak noise unuttered, but the panic that spawned it remained, bringing a memory so deeply buried that she didn’t remember even having it until it was right there, full-blown in her mind.
“So what do you think—is she nuts?” her father asked the doctor. She could see them both from the waiting room through the partly open office door, could hear them clearly, though their voices were hushed.
“We don’t use labels like that,” the stern-faced doctor said, but that made her father nod as if he’d gotten the answer he expected. The doctor sighed. “Look. The mind has a sort of framework it uses to deal with trauma and loss, a way of rationalizing how it happened, why and what it means. In this case, Reda’s mind has chosen an atypical framework, one where she believes that her mother is not dead, but rather trapped in a land of magic beyond our own. Things like this can happen following the loss of a parent, especially in children her age. Usually it goes away on its own.”
“How long?”
“Months, sometimes longer. In the meantime, it’s basically harmless.”
“You call sleepwalking out the back door and into the woods ‘harmless’? What if she got lost? Or, worse, got found by the wrong sort of person?” The major’s voice gained volume at the end, but then he glanced out at her and lowered his voice once more to say, “Help me out here, Doc. I need this to stop. The boys need it to stop. We all need to move on.”
The doctor didn’t say anything, and Reda’s heart went bumpity-bump at the thought that he was going to tell the major that she was right, the kingdoms really did exist, and that sometimes visitors accidentally fell through the gates connecting the realms. Suddenly excited, she leaned forward in her chair.
“There are a few things we could try,” the doctor said finally. “The first thing I would recommend is getting rid of the book.”
The memory wavered and disintegrated, but the heartache remained, along with Reda’s dull surprise at remembering how it had happened. Not because the major had tried to pretend otherwise, but because the months of therapy that followed had trained her not to think about the book, magic or monsters.
Or, really, even her mother.
The police shrink had wanted to talk about her mother’s death, of course, but Reda had just shrugged and said, “It was a long time ago.” And it would have stayed that way … if she hadn’t found the book. Or rather, if it hadn’t found her.
Thunder rumbled, closer now, though the sun still shone. Unbidden, her eyes went to the picture of the woodsman standing in the doorway, staring up out of the page at her and making her yearn. “Repressed memories,” she said softly. “That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
Benz’s death had put a crack in the dam, and the strange, cosmic coincidence of her seeing the woodcutting in MacEvoy’s shop had washed out its base of support, meaning that now the entire construct was poised to come crashing down on her. Oddly, considering how much she used to pride herself on control and self-discipline, she didn’t really mind. Since the shooting she had felt like she was running in place, or maybe hunkered down inside herself, waiting for something. And this was it.
Or was it? What if this was all just happening in her head? What then?
The rational, logical part of her said to call the shrink and have herself checked in somewhere. Instead, reaching out with a hand that suddenly didn’t shake at all, she touched the page, resting her fingers on the woodcutter’s chest.
It didn’t take any effort now to remember the magic words her maman had taught her. The two of them used to sit on a mossy bank down by the duck pond, cross-legged, knees touching. “Concentrate,” her maman would say, over and over again, though somehow it never seemed like a lecture, never like work. “Close your eyes, visualize the doorway and say the spell, and when you open your eyes again you’ll find yourself where you were meant to be.”
The words weren’t magic, of course, wouldn’t conjure some strange passageway to a magical realm. But they were exactly what her mind needed in order to wash away the dam once and for all.
So she thought, What the hell? And she said the words.
Crack! Lightning split the air around her and incredibly, impossibly, wind whipped past her, around her, though she was standing inside her apartment. Panic lashed through her and she froze, paralyzed by the fear. Her heart hammered in her ears, but that inner pulsation was the only movement she could manage.
She tried to call for help but couldn’t, tried to tear her eyes from the book but couldn’t do that, either. She was snapping, losing it. She screamed but made no sound, fought but didn’t move. The woodcutter’s eyes grew larger and larger in her vision, until she saw nothing but the inky black, heard nothing but the wind, and felt …
Nothing.
Kingdom realm
Moragh snapped out of her trance as the divination was interrupted by magic of another kind—a blood-linked power the likes of which she hadn’t sensed in many years.
“The prince!” she hissed, excitement firing in her veins as she recognized the signal’s source. Finally—finally—after all this time she could feel the spell that had snatched her prey from her. More, she could follow it. Even after the first flare of power leveled off, the connection remained inside her, throbbing like a heartbeat. One that said, This way. I can lead you to him.
The spell had reactivated. Thank the dark lords.
Her lips curved in a smile that the ornate, gilt-edged divination mirror showed as feral, with a hint of fang gleaming from behind the lips of a coolly gorgeous brunette in her forties. She had survived the Blood Sorcerer’s wrath over her failure to kill Prince Dayn the first time, and had eventually won her way back into his graces. But she hadn’t ever escaped the failure. And now … “Redemption,” she said, the word echoing off the cool stone walls of the castle’s upper reaches.
Over near the hearth, her servant, Nasri, looked up from his mopping. The old, crooked-fingered gnome—who now had only seven of those crooked fingers, having recently been caught filching a meat pie he’d had plenty of coin to buy—was cleaning last night’s bloodstains up off the stonework. The water in his bucket was dark, the gray mop gory. “Mistress?”
“Send word to the bestiary. I want the largest two ettins ready to hunt in an hour.” The three-headed giants were pure rage wrapped up with hunger, killing machines that need only be pointed toward their target. “And have the beast master reinforce their collars and control spells. I’ll be handling them myself, with you along to help tend them.”
He cringed and whined low in his throat. “Wouldn’t you rather—”
“Go,” she snapped with enough force to have him squealing and bolting out the door. When he was gone, she smiled again into the warped mirror. “By my life and blood, I’ll get him this time.”
She had missed before. She wouldn’t miss again.
Chapter 2
Wolfyn realm
As the blood moon edged over the dark tree line, a perfect blue-white circle visible through the windowed wall of the big bedroom, Dayn did up the last button of his plaid shirt and shrugged into his fleece-lined bomber jacket.
“You could stay, you know. Be here when I get back.” He glanced over. A cut-glass lamp shone from the bedside table—a Tiffany knockoff that had been imported from the human realm and converted to run off the quasi-magical energy that powered the wolfyn’s gadgets. The pale glow lit the room’s earthy brown walls and finely carved furniture, both of which were subtly worked with the Scratch-Eye pack’s sigil: four parallel bloodred slashes crossing an amber wolf’s eye. The bed was piled with luxurious crimson-dyed furs, but the room’s true centerpiece was Keely. The pack’s alpha bitch lay stretched, sinuous and satisfied, her scent musky with arousal and the magic of the blood moon. Graced with the toned body of a huntress and the ruddy hair of a bitch in her prime, she was unmated and independent, just like him.
Except that she was nothing like him. Not really.
They met and mated this one night each year, when sex sparked the strongest of changes and the wolfyn stayed largely in wolf form for the next three days, running together, renewing their magic and making or breaking new alliances. She didn’t dare mate with a male of her kind during the blood moon lest he claim the Right of Challenge for the pack leadership, which had gone to her brother, Kenar, rather than down through her as was traditional. So, as the Scratch-Eye pack’s “guest”—that was the name given to the few accidental realm travelers who by some quirk of the vortex magic couldn’t return home through the standing stones—Dayn had become Keely’s choice. She had laid it out with the blunt practicality of a wolfyn: sex once a year, nothing more or less. Which worked just fine for him for a number of reasons.
Their relationship might have begun as a transaction, but over time it had mellowed to friendship. Or what did the humans call it? Friends with benefits. But, friends or not, he didn’t tell her that he was almost certain this had been the last time. He didn’t dare. Instead, he said, “Thanks but no thanks on the staying over. And you wouldn’t have asked if you didn’t know that would be my answer.”
“You understand me too well. So … same time next year?”
“Of course,” he said, and then added, as he always did, “unless you’re mated by then.”
Her eyes flashed. “Kenar is a good alpha.”
That was debatable, but Dayn wasn’t going to get Keely or any of the other pack members to admit that their alpha was more interested in himself than the pack or its traditions. Or that it had been wrong for him to twist those traditions around in order to run off the male Keely’s father had brought in from an outside pack to be her mate and his successor. Granted, the male—Roloff—shouldn’t have left. But that didn’t make Kenar right.
Since there was no point in picking the fight, though—“been there, done that” was a particularly apt human saying in this case—he blew her a kiss. “Until next year, then.” Which was a lie, but a necessary one. In the entire wolfyn realm, only the pack’s wisewolfyn, Candida, knew who and what he truly was, and that it was almost time for him to go home.
“Of course,” Keely agreed. “That is, unless you find a mate between now and then.”
He had his hand on the door, but looked back, surprised. “Me? No. Not in the cards.”
“The Stone-Turn pack’s new guest is pretty.”
“I’m not interested in taking a mate.” Besides, the newcomer wasn’t the woman he was waiting for, the one he’d been dreaming of more clearly every night over the past week, waking each morning with the image of a heart-shaped face, dimpled chin and go-to-hell attitude topped with curly, red-streaked hair. Hurry, he wanted to tell her. Please, hurry.
Keely looked at him quizzically. “If that’s not it, then what’s bothering you?” To the wolfyn, problems always boiled down to politics or family. Since he wasn’t involved in pack politics, that left family—or, in his case, his lack of one.
“I’m fine. I promise.” Sketching a half salute in her direction, he said softly, “Have a good run.” Already, he could see the amber fire at the back of her eyes. And, as he let himself out of her place, he could feel the hum of change magic on the air. It crinkled along his skin, stirring the restlessness that had been riding him harder and harder as the days passed and there was no sign of his guide. Frustration gnawed at him, making him feel itchy, twitchy. He wanted to race through the darkness, pick a fight, howl at the moon….
Instead, he headed for the small log cabin he’d built near the standing stones, zipping his jacket and shoving his hands in his pockets as he hiked along the two-mile path. The blood moon lit the night with the eerie blue-white light that was almost as bright as day, though monochromatic. By the time his cabin came into view, the air already carried a chorus of excited yips and deeper, spine-shivering howls.
His cabin, little more than a single long room with a central chimney and big hearth, was laughably rustic as far as the pack members were concerned. He had used human-style insulated windows, though, and had a wolfyn-tech generator for power. He had left the lights off tonight, though, and the moonlight that bathed the cabin lit it blue-white, making it seem like it was …
Oh, shit. Glowing. Dayn’s pulse kicked, because he knew from past experience that it wasn’t the cabin doing the glowing. There was a vortex forming in the standing stones!
He took off at a run. As he came around the corner, thunder rumbled, vibrating up through the soles of his boots even though the sky was clear. He nearly cheered at the sight of blue-white lightning sparking among the standing stones. The electricity lit the air, charging the ozone and making his hair bristle as if he, too, were going through the change.
Magic surrounded him as he charged up the hill, suffusing him and running foxfire glows along his skin when he came to a halt just outside the circle. Electricity arced from one stone to the next and the next, lighting the entire circle with blue-white power. Then, suddenly, the grass and empty air within the circle grew blurry and started to move, making a slow inward spiral at first, but then spinning faster and faster, tightening within seconds to a gray tornado of everything and nothing.
Magic tugged at him, beckoning. Come, the vortex seemed to be saying. Say the words and come.
Dayn hesitated, though. The vortices had never worked for him before, even with the spell that should return him home to Elden. But what if it was finally time? Maybe his guide wasn’t supposed to come to him, but rather the reverse. Please, gods.
Thunder boomed and magic churned as he pictured the forest he had been snatched from and said the spell. Then, braced for anything, he stepped into the stone circle.
The wind surrounded him instantly, grabbing him up and tumbling him head over ass in a whirling maelstrom of power. Excitement seared through him. It was working! Thunder roared and lightning arced and snapped, and the universe seemed to hold its breath for an instant. In that moment, he glimpsed a modern, human-style kitchen and jolted with dismay. No, not the human realm. Take me to Elden!
Even as he thought that, pain flared behind his eyes, lashing through his skull … and everything winked out.
For a second, there was only darkness. Stillness. Silence. He couldn’t even hear his own heartbeat.
Then everything jolted back into existence around him, and there was blue-white light in his eyes and the springy press of grass-covered earth beneath him. He blinked into the light, gut fisting on disappointment as things came into focus and he recognized the full moon pouring down on the familiar ring of standing stones.
“Son of a bitch.” He hadn’t gone anywhere, after all. He was still in the wolfyn realm. “Son of a sucking—”
A soft moan cut him off. A soft, very feminine moan.
His heart started to thud in his chest as he turned toward the sound, telling himself not to hope, but hoping nonetheless.
And there she was. After all this time, there she was.
She lay curled on the grass with her cheek pillowed on her hands, but he recognized the oval of her face, the stubborn dent in her chin and the strong yet subtly curved lines of her body. More, he knew without seeing it in the light of day that her wavy hair was red-shot, her eyes a clear blue, like the deepest part of the Elden sky after a rainstorm. Not that it mattered whether or not she was beautiful—she was his guide, and he had his priorities well in mind.
Her clothes said she was human, which surprised him. Of the three known realms, the human realm was the most technologically advanced and used the least magic, which put them the farthest away from the pure magic of the kingdoms. Given that, how was she supposed to guide him?
Have faith, he told himself. His father had promised a guide, and here she was.
Which also meant that the four-night countdown had begun, and they needed to get moving. But there was a problem with that: she was out cold, and the Scratch-Eye pack was gathering for their run, which would include an hour-long serenade at the stones. Although the wolfyn were largely civilized on a day-to-day basis—in their home realm, at least—the blood moon unleashed the other aspects of their personalities. And while Keely probably wouldn’t have a problem seeing him with another woman during the blood moon, others wouldn’t be so forgiving.
Making a snap decision, though he would have rather stayed and called a new vortex right away, Dayn gathered the woman in his arms. She was lighter boned and smaller than Keely, and seemed to fit naturally against him as he carried her from the circle, with her head tucked against his neck and her curly hair brushing his cheek.
Inside his cabin, he put her gently on the couch near the hearth, where the remains of the fire were still warm. Then he shucked out of his too-hot jacket and knelt beside her, part of him still unable to believe that he had dreamed of her, and here she was. His eyes lingered on the fullness of her lips, and the faint blush of color on her cheeks. He reached for her, intending to try again to wake her, but instead he found himself easing a few fallen strands of her hair away from where they had caught on her eyelashes. Her skin was soft and warm, and although he told himself he shouldn’t be touching her, not like this, he couldn’t make himself pull away.
She stirred beneath his touch, and let out a soft sigh. He caught his breath, then held it as her eyes opened and locked on his. The entire universe telescoped down to those blue, blue eyes and her look of shock … and then recognition.
The woodsman smiled down at her. “Thank the gods you’re finally here.”
Reda stared mutely up at him as her head spun and the world tilted a few degrees away from normal.
It was the same dream she’d been having all week, where she would wake in a log cabin to find this man crouched over her while a fire hiss-popped nearby. He looked like she had dreamed him: rumpled dark hair fell forward over his brow and curled below his ears, accenting his sharply defined features and emerald-green eyes. He had a rawboned yet powerful body, wide-shouldered and long-limbed, with lean, loose muscles that folded economically where he knelt beside her. His skin was smooth and bronze, with a light dusting of masculine hair visible where the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. And, as in her dreams, the air smelled of wood, smoke and cinnamon. Fluid warmth coursed through her body, concentrating at the point where his fingers rested softly on her cheek.
But as the spins settled, nerves took their place … because the overall picture was right, but the details were wrong.
The cabin was made of rough-hewn logs, yes, but she was lying on a plush sofa rather than a cot, and on a nearby end table, a mosaic lamp gave off muted amber light. And the man was wearing clothes straight out of the Bean catalog rather than homespun. More, even the details of the details were off. The couch she was lying on had the soft nap of velvet, but the fabric moved oddly, as did the stuffing beneath. And the lamp didn’t have a cord.
What the hell?
“I’m going to kill MacEvoy.” The idiot must’ve juiced the shop’s incense burner with something really funky and hallucinogenic.
Like, say, acid.
“Who is MacEvoy?” The woodsman’s voice was a smooth baritone with a raspy undertone that seemed to stroke her skin. But the question put another dose of nerves into the mix, as did the look in his eyes as he rocked back on his heels and stared down at her with a wary, confused air.
He’d never spoken before, never looked baffled before.
They were way off the script, and she didn’t like it.
“He’s … It doesn’t matter.” She pushed herself upright on the couch, waving him off when he made a move to help. “I’m good. I’m fine.” Only she wasn’t fine. This was all wrong, because whatever the hell was going on, the dream—hallucination?—seemed way too real.
“Fine enough to get moving?”
“Moving?”
He nodded. “We have four nights counting tonight, so we should get started as soon as possible.”
Reda breathed deeply and told herself not to panic. There was some logical explanation for this. There had to be. “I’m not having sex with you.” And oh, holy crap, she didn’t know why that had been the first thing out of her mouth. Or, rather, she did: it was because of the dreams.
His eyebrows rose. “Of course not. You’re my guide.”
She flushed, but pushed on. “Seriously. I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.” And she also didn’t know why she was arguing with a figment of her over-stressed mind.
“Don’t even joke about that.”
“Who’s joking?” She wasn’t kidding around; she was confused as all hell. “Wait. Am I being punked?” Who would bother?
Expression suddenly clearing, he said, “Damnation. Vortex sickness.”
“Vor-what?”
He rose and started to pace. “Sometimes when travelers come through the vortices from one realm to another, they become confused or even forget pieces of their past.”
A low burn fisted beneath her heart. “I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were,” he said, which she guessed was true as far as it went. But then he continued, “Memory loss and insanity aren’t the same thing. I believe you call it ‘apples and limes,’ yes?”
“Oranges. Apples and oranges.” His speech pattern was an odd mix of formality and slang, which just added to the weirdness. “Who are you?”
He stopped pacing and looked slightly shamefaced. “Sorry. I’m Dayn. Well, Prince Dayn, Forestal of Elden. But if anyone here knew that, they’d rip me to shreds.” He said it so matter-of-factly that it took a moment to register. As her jaw dropped, he held out a hand. “So let’s just go with ‘Dayn,’ okay?”
“I’m Reda.” Head spinning, she took his hand on autopilot, registering the warm strength of his wide palm and long, elegant fingers. But instead of shaking, he lifted her hand to his lips and brushed a kiss over her knuckles. It was an unselfconscious move, as if he’d done it a thousand times before and it meant nothing more than a fist bump on the T platform or a cuff on the arm between buddies at Downtown Pizza. But her gasp brought his eyes to hers and made it far more than casual, as did the sizzle that tightened her skin and reminded her that this was a dream. More, it was her fantasy. He was her fantasy, had been since she was a little girl and dreamed of someone coming to her rescue.
He dropped her hand and took a big step back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that.”
Why not? It’s my fantasy. But he wasn’t playing his part. He should have been whispering sweetly to her, kissing her, stroking—
The cabin door blew open with a bang, making her jolt as a cold gust of wind puffed ashes into the hearth and swirled smoke into the air. But that wasn’t what had opened the door. Because as Dayn spun toward the commotion, a huge figure darkened the doorway. Reda shot to her feet. Then she froze and a three-headed giant stepped through.
So tall that it had to duck through the door, the monstrous creature had the body of a man, huge and muscular, but its skin was cement-gray and its broad shoulders supported three ogre-faced heads with protruding lower jaws, curved upthrusting teeth and fierce black eyes framing moist, snubbed noses. The thing was dressed in a leathery loincloth, boots the size of mailboxes and studded wristbands and neck collars, and it carried a huge, blunt-headed club that was ringed with spikes and banded with iron. When it caught sight of her and Dayn, all three faces grinned horribly.
Dayn lunged for a rack of weapons her mind had initially dismissed as decor, grabbed a crossbow and yelled, “Run!”
The middle head locked on him while the other two stayed leering at her. Which made it tough to figure out who was the target as the creature bellowed a roar, drew back and swung its enormous club of death.
“Down!” Dayn plowed into her. They slammed against the back of the sofa, which overbalanced and fell, taking them with it.
The club screamed over their heads and crashed into the chimney above the hearth, sending chunks of brick spattering around the room. Nearly flattened beneath Dayn—he might be rangy, but he was solid—Reda struggled to breathe through the white-hot grip of panic. This isn’t happening, can’t be happening. It’s just a dream, not real, none of this is real.
Heavy footsteps thudded as the creature came toward them, growling low in its three-way throat.
Not real. A dream. I’m waking up now. On the count of three, I’m going to open my eyes and everything will be back to normal.
“Stay down,” Dayn whispered in her ear, shifting as the monster stumped nearer, shoving furniture and knocking things crashing to the floor.
One.
Three heads came into view, six eyes locked on and the creature roared, reared back and swung. Dayn shouted something, lunged to his feet and fired his crossbow from the hip. The bolt buried itself at the top of the giant’s middle throat.
Shaking, Reda flattened herself. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but count.
Two.
The monster screeched, tossed the club, grabbed for its blood-spurting throat and reeled back. The club smashed into a window and hung up on the frame as Dayn fired a second bolt into the same head, turning the creature’s roar into a high-pitched mewl that grated on her soul.
Please, God. Three.
Chapter 3
Reda didn’t wake up.
Instead, she watched in frozen horror as the three-headed giant staggered and went to its knees, and Dayn methodically fired bolts into the other two heads. As if that had finally hit the kill switch, the creature plummeted to the cabin floor, where it lay for a moment, twitching in its death throes, and then finally going still.
The sudden silence rang in her ears as she stared at the monstrous corpse, which smelled like chicken breasts gone very bad.
She yanked her eyes to Dayn, who stood looking down at the creature with an expression of pity, but also excitement, as if the attack had been partly a good thing.
Who was he? What in God’s name was going on? She wanted to ask him but couldn’t get out the words. She was locked in place. Frozen. Once and always a coward under fire. Was this, then, what her subconscious wanted her to see?
Maybe. But she’d seen it and the dream wasn’t ending.
“You can get up now.” He said it without looking at her, but she thought she saw the twitch of a smile. “There’s a bag in the pantry. How about you load up some provisions while I take care of the other stuff?”
As he turned away, she slowly levered herself to her feet, suddenly wishing that a herd of pink elephants would walk past the broken window, so she could point at them and say, Ha, I told you so. It’s a dream. Hallucination. Whatever. What mattered was that this wasn’t really happening. It was all in her mind.
Except there weren’t any pink elephants. Which left her with a stinky dead giant with two too many heads, and a really hot guy who thought they were going somewhere.
MacEvoy, when I get through with you, you’d wish you just mailed me the damn book for free, she thought. And then, because she couldn’t think of a good reason not to, she went to pack some food.
The bag proved to be a single-strap rucksack, and the provisions at hand were heavy on the hard rolls, dried protein—she didn’t ask, didn’t want to know—and trail mix. She loaded up whatever she sort of recognized, trying to focus on the similarities rather than cataloging the differences. Her brain, though, kept a running tally that twisted the knots in her stomach increasingly tight.
And all the while, she was entirely aware of Dayn as he pulled on a sweater followed by his heavy leather coat, loaded a rucksack with his crossbow and bolts and strapped on a narrow leather belt that held an unusually short sword on one side, pouches on the other. As she finished up her packing, he slung a sloshing crescent-shaped leather pouch over his shoulder, glanced over at her and nodded.
He didn’t seem to expect a reply, though, because his attention moved on to the overturned couch and smashed end table, the broken window and the scattered other things that defined a life: a journal bound in what looked like nylon but wasn’t, a bunch of interesting rocks in a jar, a huge antler with a picture of a beautiful stallion carved into it, only half-finished. And while he looked at the room, she was looking at him. Decked out in a strange mix of modern clothing and archaic equipment, he should have looked as if he was late for Halloween. Instead, he appeared utterly comfortable in his own skin and—as evidenced by the giant’s corpse—deadly capable. She couldn’t take her eyes off him.
He turned abruptly toward the door. “Let’s go.”
She held her ground. “Go where?” They were the first two words she had managed to utter since the attack. Her mind might be racing but her body was still mostly vapor locked. That was the way it worked when she went into curl-up-and-die mode.
He tipped his head toward the dead creature. “That was an ettin, which isn’t native to this realm. It had to have come from the kingdoms, which means the vortex has probably opened back up. And that means we need to go. Now.”
Vortex? Realms? How could he stand there wearing a crossbow and sword and talk about things that belonged in science fiction? It didn’t make any sense.
Of course not, her rational self said. It’s a dream, or a hallucination or something. But since counting to three didn’t work, maybe this vortex will.
So she nodded and followed him out of the cabin, her boots crunching on broken glass and then echoing on the short steps leading down.
“This way,” he said, urging her along a wide path. His breath fogged the air. “If we can get back through the stones—Shit.” His face fell. “It’s not glowing.”
“Which means?”
“The vortex is already gone.” He glanced at her. “You know how to call one, right?”
“I …” She thought of the whirling wind in her kitchen, the spell her mother taught her. “Yeah.”
“Then let’s go. If we hurry we can be gone before the pack gets there.” But he hadn’t gone more than a few paces before a wolf’s high, eerie howl rose into the clear night air, coming from very nearby. First one, then another and another joined in, swelling the note to a harmony, then to a chorus, as if they were intentionally singing together.
The hair on the back of her neck shivered at the sound, which was wild, feral and hauntingly beautiful. But at the same time, nerves twined through her, turning her skin to gooseflesh.
Dayn stopped in the middle of the pathway. “Damn it, we’re already too late to get ahead of them, and we really don’t want to interrupt the blood-moon ritual.” He paused, considering. “Given that I don’t want to cross paths with them tonight, especially not with you, we’re going to need to hole up somewhere out of sight.” He glanced back at the cabin.
“Not there,” she said quickly.
He nodded, then pointed off to one side, where the trees ran up a steep, rocky hill. “There’s a cave I use sometimes. We’ll be okay there for an hour or two.”
“A cave,” she repeated, apparently only able to string together two words at a time, preferably one syllable each. Suddenly very aware of the cold that bit through her shirt and lightweight leather, she hugged herself tightly. This couldn’t be happening; it was all too unreal. Yet, strangely, Dayn seemed more real to her than anyone had in a very long time. He was bright and vivid; he drew her eyes and made her want to stare, made her want to touch. She’d felt inner sparklers when he kissed her hand. What would happen if he kissed her lips? What if he did more?
Focus. Stop transferring. You need to get out of here, not fantasize.
“Here.” He dug into his rucksack and pulled out a second sweater. “Figured you’d want another layer, unless your coat is one of those fancy jobs with the really thin insulation.”
“It’s not.” She slipped out of her leather and took the sweater from him. It was dark in color, thick and lightweight, almost airy, and the material had a faint rasp that suggested some dream-version of wool. Needing to say something that involved more than two syllables and might defuse the strangeness of wearing his clothes, she said, “Okay, so you carry a sword but you know about Thinsulate. What’s the deal here?”
He hesitated, then said, “There’s some travel between your realm and this one, so a certain amount of your technology has leaked over and been adapted to work here. I’m from the kingdom realm, which is pure magic. Thus, the sword.”
“Is there the same sort of sharing between your realm and this one?” She was stalling, asking about things she didn’t begin to believe in because she had been having sex dreams about him while he’d apparently been waiting for her to show up and lead him somewhere. And she didn’t want to wear his sweater. Except she did, because it was freezing out, and the sweater smelled like him—a mix of pine, moss and mint.
I really am losing my mind, aren’t I? The thought brought a jab of new fear.
He glanced in the direction of the howls. “Things are far more complicated between my realm and this one. And we should get moving before a pack scout catches sight of us.”
“Sorry.” Holding her breath, she pulled on his sweater and smoothed it down her body, where it clung unexpectedly to her rather blatant curves. But she didn’t care about that because she was already warmer, on the way to growing toasty. Letting out a soft sigh, she said, “Ahh, yes. That’s good.” Not letting herself snuggle or even take a deep breath, she nodded. “Okay. Lead on.”
He made a quiet noise at the back of his throat, adjusted his burdens and headed across the track and into the moon-dappled forest. There must have been some sort of path; she couldn’t see any markings, but he led her up the steep, rocky slope with a neat economy of effort, his near-silent footsteps making her feel loud and awkward in comparison. After ten, maybe fifteen minutes, he motioned for her to join him on a wide, flat ledge near a triangular cave mouth.
“Wait here. I’ve got some lights and other supplies inside.” He slipped into the darkness. Moments later a muted glow sprang to life and he called. “Come on in.”
She ducked to follow him in, found him crouched at roughly the midpoint of a low tunnel that was formed where two huge slabs of smooth, porous stone leaned against each other. In his palm he held a small rectangular unit that emitted blue-white light and a low background hum.
“The wolfyn won’t come up here,” he said. “After they’re done with the ritual, they’ll run the lowlands for the rest of the night. Moon time, you know.”
She only heard part of it, though, because the moment he said “wolfyn,” her stomach hollowed out and she flashed back to the woodcutting and the sly, evil creature that had seduced innocent Red. She sank down opposite him, and then leaned against the wall when her head spun. “Those were wolfyn back there?”
He nodded. “You’d call them werewolves. They’re shape-shifters. Human. Wolf. Back again.” He paused, fiddling with the little light. “I don’t know what the legends are like where you come from, but you don’t need to be afraid of them here. They treat guests well in their own realm. It’s part of the tradition they live by.”
Her heart was beating so hard her chest hurt, and her legs and arms tingled with an oncoming panic attack. A big one. Breathe, she told herself. You can deal with this. The wolfyn were just part of the hallucination. They couldn’t hurt her, couldn’t roofie her into sexual submission and then eat her when their other needs were satisfied. So far, all they were was just noise on the horizon. Besides, her mother’s stories about them taking young girls had been allegories about not giving it up too early or to the wrong guy.
Right?
Breathe. Don’t lose it. He wasn’t her fantasy prince and she wasn’t really in another realm. She wasn’t even really wearing his sweater, even though she was far warmer now, both because of the extra layer and the intimacy of the little cave, which forced them to bump knees and kept her system on a low rev of awareness. Her racing mind was scared, confused and frustrated, but her body was entirely aware of his.
When he shifted back, so he was leaning on the opposite wall, his movements were controlled; after he settled in, he went very still, almost looking as though he wasn’t even breathing. He moved like a martial artist, she thought … or a predator. A hunter. The realization stirred her blood far more than it should, and she caught herself collecting small details, like how his aristocratic nose had a faint ridge where it had been broken and just slightly offset, and the way his hands were long-fingered and elegant, yet tough and callused with hard labor.
Benz had used to tease her that she would need genetic engineering to create her perfect guy, because she wanted the whole package: brains, compassion, honor and romance in a laborer’s strong, muscular body. And he wasn’t far off, because that would have been a real-life approximation of her woodcutter hero … Like the one sitting opposite her now, staring out into the night.
Except that he’s not really here, is he? said her logical, rational self. And the heat buzzing through her body racheted down because it was right. Her brain was tricking her, just like it had when she was a little girl and thought she heard her maman’s voice whispering to her, sending her into the woods looking for answers. She didn’t need the department shrink to tell her that.
You have to get to the vortex, logic reminded her. He said that was the way home. And if her mind had bought in so deeply to the illusion, then the rules of the illusion should work. Maybe. Hopefully.
But the place where the vortex formed was crawling with wolfyn, and … wait. “If the wolfyn are harmless, why are we hiding up here?”
He looked back at her for a moment, seeming to be measuring her mental state. Or maybe deciding how much to tell her. “There’s some personal stuff between me and the pack leader. Tempers can run high this time of year, so I think it’s better if he and I stay out of each other’s way.”
“And?” she prompted when her cop’s instincts told her there was more.
He shifted, stretching his legs out beside hers, almost but not quite touching. The alignment of her battered jeans against his turned the differences in fabric and stitching from subtle to a shout as he said, “You know how I said things were complicated between my realm and the wolfyn? Well, there was a war. I don’t even know what really started it—nobody here seems to, and it was a long time ago. But it was ruthless and bloody, and didn’t end until a group of kingdom magic-users, the Ilth, got together and changed the nature of the vortices so that when wolfyn come through to the kingdoms they wind up stuck in the wolf form, unable to change back or cast the spell to return home. Eventually, they even lose their human thoughts, becoming purely feral.” He paused. “The wolfyn came up with a counterspell, but by that time they had discovered the human realm and become fascinated with your science. For the past few generations—and my people have very long generations—contact has been limited to the few wolfyn who get sucked up into the vortices without the counterspell, and the occasional guest who shows up here, like me. In fact, the people of the kingdoms don’t even believe in realm travel anymore—it’s faded to legend status, just like the wolfyns’ abilities to shape-shift and enthrall beautiful women.”
A shiver crawled up Reda’s spine as the hallucination suddenly gained an uncomfortable amount of detail that dovetailed with the stories she knew. “Can they do that? Enthrall women, I mean.”
He shook his head. “They wouldn’t do that to a guest, not even during the moon time. The traditions are very clear on when and how enthrallment can be used.”
Which wasn’t a “no.” Feeling the cold more than she had been moments before, she tucked her hands under her arms beneath her jacket, warming them in a sweater that was uncomfortably peltlike all of a sudden.
He continued, “So while the wolfyn are generally tolerant, they prefer humans over kingdomites, and there are certain bloodlines from the kingdom that remain kill-on-sight.”
“Which is why you don’t want them to know that you’re a prince,” she said, remembering his earlier comment. Then, without warning, a bubble of half-hysterical laughter rose up inside her, sticking in her throat and threatening to turn into a sob. “You’re a prince,” she repeated. “Of course you are.” She used to dream of charming princes, ethereal princesses and magical adventures, so maybe it was no wonder her mind had gone back there now, turning her fantasy man into not only the woodcutter, but also a handsome prince. She buried her face in her hands. “You’re not real. None of this is real. Go away and let me wake up in my real bed in the middle of my real life.” She felt a tug of wistfulness at the thought of leaving the dream behind, and that couldn’t be good.
“It’s just vortex sickness,” he said soothingly. “Don’t worry. Just relax—it’ll all come back to you soon.”
She lifted her head to glare at him. “I haven’t forgotten anything, damn it. My name is Reda Weston, my father is Major Michael Weston and my mother’s name was Freddy. See? No gaps. No blank spots. And this isn’t real.”
“By the gods and the Abyss, this is real.” A hint of temper licked at the back of his eyes, which had gone very green in the pale illumination. His voice gained an edge. “And it’s going to stay real whether you believe in it or not, so how about you chuck the ‘science is God’ human attitude and consider that maybe this is happening, and that you’re here for a reason? Because unless you help me out here, people are going to die.”
“I …” She stared at him, throat drying to dust. “What?”
“People. Will. Die,” he said, spacing the words through gritted teeth. “I need to get my ass back to Castle Island within the next seventy-two hours, and you’re supposed to be helping me.”
Her throat closed, but she forced out, “I’ve never heard of Castle Island.” Then, seeing it in his eyes, she held up a hand. “And if you say ‘vortex sickness’ one more time, I’m going to scream.”
His expression eased. “Okay. At least you’re listening.”
“I’m …” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I am, besides scared and confused. What’s going on here? What’s on Castle Island and why do you need to be there? And why does it involve me?” This doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s just an illusion.
“I don’t know how you’re involved, really, or why. But I can tell you about Castle Island.” He waited for her nod. When he got it, he made a rueful, bitter face, and began. “There once was a prince who thought the world should revolve around him….” Her blood chilled as he described his home being attacked by a vile sorcerer and his parents casting a massive spell that had saved him and his siblings, yet went awry, binding them to the castle and cursing the kingdom if they failed to return in time. He recited a message from his father’s spirit, telling him to wait for a guide, and that when she arrived he needed to be back on Castle Island by the fourth night, to reunite with his siblings and kill the sorcerer. He paused, expression going hollow. “The next thing I knew, I was stuck here in the wolfyn realm, doing my damnedest to make them believe I’d lost my memory in the vortex and keep them from guessing that I was a member of a royal house … and all the while, waiting for my guide to show up. Then, about a week ago, I started having these dreams.”
“Dreams,” she whispered, body heating suddenly.
He nodded. “I saw you, Reda. Your face. Your eyes. The magic was making sure I would recognize you when you arrived.”
She moved restlessly, shifting her legs away from his. “There’s no such thing as magic.”
“Maybe there isn’t in your world. But there is in mine.”
Her pulse thudded loudly in her ears. The department shrink had talked about hospitalization but in the end had signed off on an outpatient program with intensive sessions that had started off daily and tapered from there. Now, she wondered whether that had been a mistake, whether she had faked her way through her recovery, fooling even herself, until now. Was she in a hospital room somewhere, staring blankly out a window while her mind roamed free? Panic sparked in her chest as she tried to imagine it but couldn’t, tried to connect with her “real” mind trapped somewhere else, but couldn’t do that, either. The cave, the man and his story felt entirely real. Which would mean …
“No,” she said, pushing herself up to the hunched-over crouch that was all the cave allowed, which made her feel trapped and squirrelly. “This isn’t … I’m not your guide. There’s been some sort of mistake.”
He hadn’t moved a muscle, except to follow her with his eyes. “When you first woke up in the cabin, you recognized me. I saw it in your face.”
“I …” dreamed of you, lusted after you, imagined you were all the things I haven’t been able to find in a flesh-and-blood guy. “Okay, maybe there were a couple of dreams, but there wasn’t anything about me guiding you anywhere.” She didn’t mention waking up hot, bothered and alone. Clearly, their dreams had been very different: she had dreamed of finding love; he had dreamed of saving his people. Was that what her subconscious wanted her to see? That she was too wrapped up in her own problems? That one resonated a little too well, making her queasy. Pressing a hand to her stomach, she said, “I need to … you know. Outside.”
He touched her free hand briefly in support. “Go out the back and stay close. There’s a grove of borer trees on the other side of the stones, and you don’t want to mess with borers.”
She didn’t ask why, didn’t intend to find out. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I think I just need some air.” And some space without him there to remind her how numb she’d been for too long, just going through the motions, stuck in her own little world.
Outside of the cave, the air was cold, stark and silent, with none of the howling of earlier. The huge moon lit her path as she picked her way over the rocks, getting clear of Dayn’s sight as if looking for someplace to relieve herself. Then, with her heart pounding and fear souring the back of her throat, she looped around and headed back downhill, stumbling in her haste to get to the stones and break out of the hallucination before she did something really stupid … Like buy into it.
With Reda gone, the cave was cooler and far less interesting, drained of the intense, compressed energy that practically shimmered around her. But it was also a whole hell of a lot calmer.
Dayn exhaled slowly, telling himself that it was going to be okay. This was going to work. She finally seemed ready to consider that she wasn’t caught in some strange and elaborate dream, and once they got past that, he was sure her memories would resurface and she would be able to guide him. At least he hoped to the Abyss that it would work that way. He was starting to fear it might not, because a human seemed a very strange choice for someone to guide him through the magical realm of Elden. Which made him think that this part of the spell, too, had been damaged by the sorcerer’s magic.
Not that she was damaged; exactly the opposite, in fact. She might have some human suspicions and disbelief when it came to the magic, and an apparent tendency to go wide-eyed and catatonic under fire, but she drew him, compelled him. Unlike the willowy, aloof wolfyn females he had spent the past two decades with, she was compact and curvy, and her emotions were written so clearly on her heart-shaped face. He had caught himself staring into her eyes, which reminded him of the deep blue skies of home, and basking in her voice, which was sweet, soft and wholly feminine.
Which was why she wasn’t the only one who had needed a minute alone. Because he needed to get a grip on himself, needed to regain some perspective. This wasn’t about him being a man and her a woman; it was about him getting his ass home and taking care of business there. And after that he would be back to being a prince of the realm, with all that the title implied. Which meant there was no benefit to him noticing how his sweater clung to the curves of her breasts and hips, and that the hitch of her breath when she caught him looking at her told him the attraction wasn’t one-sided.
“Priorities,” he said to himself, hearing the word echo through the otherwise silent cave, the air empty of wolf howls. The ritual was done, then, and it was time for him and Reda to head back down to the stones. Maybe she wouldn’t even need to remember. Maybe her just being there would cause the vortex spell to work for him as it hadn’t before.
Rising to the crouched-over crabwalk required by the cave, he eased out and straightened, calling softly, “Reda?”
There was no answer, but she wouldn’t have gone far, given that he had mindspoken her to stay close.
Not long after he arrived in the wolfyn realm, he had discovered that his mindspeak powers worked on all females, regardless of what realm they came from. When he had physical contact—as he had just now, touching Reda’s hand—he could implant suggestions, even orders. That was how he’d kept Keely from knowing certain things he didn’t want her to, and how he’d initially pushed Candida to protect him—until she had figured out what he was doing, and went for his throat. After that, he had told her everything, and instead of killing him, she had decided to help him, instead. And thank the gods for that.
Although the pack’s wisewoman hadn’t been able to send him home, she had given him the vortex counterspell, and more recently had been working on some new poisons she thought would work on beings of dark magic, like the Blood Sorcerer. More, she had helped him work out the limits of his mindspeaking powers in the wolfyn realm, and they had discovered that while he couldn’t make a female do something she was against or prevent her from doing something she really wanted to, he could influence other, less definitive emotions. That was why he hadn’t been able to push Reda into opening up to him—she was too set against it. But given her obvious fear of the wolfyn and the fact that she was starting to warm up to him, she would obey his command to stick around. She ought to be right nearby.
Only she wasn’t.
Cursing under his breath, growing increasingly anxious when there was no sign of her, he walked all the way out to the edge of the borer grove, where the ground started to go hollow. Then he backtracked and circled around the cave. And he picked up her trail heading back down the incline, beelining straight for the standing stones.
“Son of a bitch.” He had underestimated her mental strength, her disbelief and her determination to break free of what she thought was an illusion. Scrambling back to the cave, he grabbed his supplies and weapons, hoping to hell he hadn’t just made a fatal mistake. Worse, as he pelted downhill, the horizon beyond his tree-hidden cabin started to glow.
His stomach plummeted. He was going to be too damn late.
Standing just inside the stone circle, Moragh threw her head back and laughed with delight as fat blue sparks leaped from one stone to the next and wind stirred her hair, fanning it out around her face.
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Jessica Andersen
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Dayn: The Dark Wolf Reda couldn’t explain how she’d been catapulted into another realm – face-to-fang with a legendary werewolf. A wolf who transformed into a dark, gorgeous man… Dayn despised the Sorcerer who’d turned him wolfyn and damned him to a lonely fate. As a beast, he mated with many women to gain strength, strength that would help to rescue his royal parents. Even though in his heart the only touch he craved was Reda’s.Now, saving his kingdom means embracing his inner wild wolf, but to find true love and happiness with Reda he’ll have to use all his power to fight his true animal nature.