1. Sofia

1

Sofia

“ Y ou look like you could use some money,” a rough male voice said in Russian.

The sight of the man had Sofia reeling. She jumped backwards and slammed into a large rock, hitting it so hard that it knocked the breath from her lungs. She didn’t answer the man. Once she could breathe again, she tried to scramble away.

“We can give you two-hundred dollars,” he said, this time in English.

She nearly gasped, but she didn’t have enough energy to even do that. For someone with no money at all, two hundred dollars was a fortune. She had not eaten in days. She had thought the Siberian wilderness would be a good place to hide; no one would ever look for her there. But while she’d been there, she’d had trouble hunting. She hadn’t even found any berries to forage.

The cold did not bother her at all. She could even withstand the negative twenty-degree weather, and the constant blizzards. She was built for it, but the lack of plants and animals to eat—that was a problem. She had not seen a deer, or a fox, or a boar in days.

She’d left the city of Krasnoyarsk a week earlier and run north. The city had been beautiful, but without money, she hadn’t lasted long. If she shifted there, she’d either be shot, which wouldn’t kill her, but would be painful, or sold to a zoo. Normally, she could easily evade capture, but being so weak had left her unsure of her own abilities.

She had tried to hibernate. Real bears hibernated, but shifters did not. So, she could only sleep for a few days at a time before waking up.

The man was still leering at her.

Sluggishly, she ducked behind a tree and shifted into her bear. The man had followed her and had seen her change. He looked impatient, as if he didn’t have the time to waste dealing with her.

So now she was out in the middle of nowhere with this strange man, who wasn’t scared of her bear and wasn’t fazed at all by her transformation. Which meant he must have known what she was. And if he knew what she was, and he wasn’t scared, it meant he also wasn’t human. Finally, she took in his appearance. He was lean and wore only a sweater and jeans, which was not enough to survive out in this climate.

She inhaled, but all she could smell was the scent of the spruce tree next to her. A wave of dizziness hit her. She put her palm on the bark, trying to hold herself up.

“Who are you?” she managed to ask.

“I go by Koryak. Like the mountain range.” Once again, he spoke in Russian, but said the words slowly. She didn’t need them said slowly. She’d understood him earlier, even if she hadn’t responded. Having grown up in so many places, she understood Russian, English, French, German, and Spanish.

“ What are you?” she asked.

He chuckled. “Have you been living under a rock?” He peered at her. “How do you not know one of your own kind? Well. Close to your own kind.”

“You are not a bear shifter.”

“No. I am a wolf shifter. And I can help you.” He held out his hand. “Just come with me. We have plenty of food. We have human food, if you like that. We have pasta, soup, and bread. We have shifter food, if you prefer that, with plenty of rabbits and deer.”

She could have swooned at the mere mention of all that food, so when he held out his hand, she accepted it. He took her to a compound nestled in the woods.

At first, living with the wolves in their compound was fine. They gave her food and water, and they were friendly. But as the days wore on, things changed. They had her repeat incantations from musty old books, and they made her recite spells, which made no sense to her. She was a bear shifter, not a witch. But they insisted that she keep going. Sometimes they kept her up all night, working on spells and enchantments. When she started to fall asleep, they dumped water on her. Then, they became harsh with their punishments.

She was nodding off, even as she read the Latin words from an old tome. Her head fell forward and landed on one of the pages of parchment.

“Sofia. Get up,” growled the female wolf who was working with her.

“Can’t,” she muttered. “Sleepy.”

Then an electric shock tore through her entire body, throwing her from the chair. She landed on her side with a thud. They dragged her down a set of stone steps and tossed her to the basement floor. While she was trapped in the basement, she learned what they were doing with the spells.

They weren’t actually spells at all. They were curses, and the wolves were using them to hurt humans and other shifters.

Why me? Why did they want me?

Her bear cried out in distress, hoping for someone to come find her and rescue her. But there was no one. Her clan too, had never lived up to the title. It was the same with her family. The adults in the clan frequently left the cubs alone for long stretches of time. And when they wanted something, they’d force the cubs to shift into the bear forms and raid human campgrounds. It amused them to watch the campers scream.

When they were bored with the campers, they’d send their cubs into town in their human forms and make them steal from the stores. Groceries, clothes, entertainment. If it could be bought, her clan wanted it.

The cubs had been caught more than once. Yes, they could escape easily, but it meant another move. So, Sofia had lived all over the world, as her clan burned one bridge after another. Finally, when they were in Ukraine, she’d had enough, and she’d left them for good.

She’d invited a few others to come with her, but they’d mocked her. Most of the cubs had grown to crave the excitement of stealing. So, she was alone. Until now, until the compound, which wasn’t any better.

“You idiot,” a female voice said from above, knocking Sofia out of her memories.

Sofia could hear the wolves above fighting upstairs. There was a loud smacking sound.

“Why did you hit me?” a male voice yelled.

“Because the bear is our ticket to success. You do not shock her, or beat her, or throw her in the basement! If Koryak finds out what you’ve done, he’ll rip your throat out! Without her, we have nothing!”

The bear? Was that her ? What did they mean?

There was more shouting and more hitting, and then someone came clattering down the stairs to Sofia.

A woman reached down and pulled Sofia to her feet. “Come on. Let’s get you a warm bath. I’m sorry about those idiots.”

“I heard you say I was useful. Why?”

The female studied Sofia. “You really don’t know?”

“No. I don’t know anything.”

“You’re half witch. You may shift like a bear, but you have as much innate magical ability as any witch I’ve ever met.”

“What?” Surely Sofia had heard wrong. She was disoriented from being tossed in the basement; it would be easy to get confused.

The female wolf repeated what she’d just said.

Her blood froze. Her parents had always said she had a pure bloodline, because no one in their family had ever mated with anyone but bear shifters. “But that’s not possible.”

The wolf shrugged. “I suppose it has to be. Your talent doesn’t lie. It cannot be faked.”

“But I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Doesn’t matter. You said the words, and you are full of magic.” The female waved her arms around Sofia’s head. “You are positively brimming with untrained magic.”

Untrained magic? What did that mean? She wanted to ask, but she wasn’t sure she’d get the truth. Sofia thought back over the clues she’d missed over the last few weeks. Despite the earlier incident, now that she’d eaten and slept, she was able to think more clearly.

“Come on. Come eat. I’m sorry about the basement. It won’t happen again.”

She took a few deep breaths. Now was not the time to panic. She would eat and try to figure out what was going on.

The place where they were staying was a ramshackle structure, neither home nor barn. It looked like it might have been a tavern, years before. There were long wooden tables, plenty of chairs, and a well-equipped kitchen. There were gaps in between the wooden planks, stuffed with hay.

Outside, the area was surrounded with smaller huts, and beyond that, a high fence wrapped in razor wire.

There were wolf shifters everywhere, doing normal things like carrying boxes, chopping wood, and cooking on open fires. It looked like an ordinary camp, except for the razor wire fence. “Why is there a fence?”

The female fidgeted. “To keep predators out.”

“Who is a predator to a wolf shifter?” If they were like bear shifters, and she was pretty sure they were, then they were very hard to injure or kill.

“Anyone who wants us dead,” the woman said.

Anyone who wants us dead? What did that mean? “Who wants you dead?” Sofia asked.

“Shhh. Stop asking questions. You don’t want to be like that. You don’t want Koryak to watch you too closely.”

Her brain still felt a little sluggish. It was hard to parse through what the female was saying and what she really meant. “What’s your name?” Maybe that was a safe enough question.

“Taisiya.” She gave Sofia a hint of a smile. “I chose it myself. It means Egyptian goddess.”

“Why did you need to choose a name for yourself?”

Taisiya frowned. Her eyes swept around the room. “That’s enough. No more questions.”

She took Sofia by the elbow and led her to a chair. “Sit.” She placed a bowl of dumplings in front of her. “Eat that. Then we’ll get started on spell work again.”

After Sofia was done eating, Taisiya had Sofia copy Latin spells onto a piece of parchment.

She started to pay attention to the words: mortem , occidere, caedes, sanguis.

She’d never gotten to go to school. But she’d snuck into plenty of bookstores and libraries, and when they were in Rome, she’d made a point to learn some Latin after hearing it in a Catholic ceremony. Horror dawned in her mind. Those words… They meant, death, kill, murder, blood.

What was she doing when she said those words, or wrote them down? Their plans had sounded sinister. And so did these spells.

“What do these spells do?” she asked Taisiya.

“Don’t ask any more questions,” Taisiya snapped.

At that moment, Sofia knew her own skill. She got a flash of Taisiya, reciting the spell to a group of humans, who then handed over all their possessions and went straight to a cliff and jumped to their death.

Sofia gasped.

She got another flash, of Koryak using a spell on a group of Fae, who walked away from their ancestral lands and straight into the sea and drowned. Koryak took their land. There were more, many more, slamming into her head. She couldn’t take it.

Had she been that easy to manipulate? Yes, she had. She’d been homeless, alone in the world, desperate for someone to cling to. She’d walked right into whatever trap this was. But she knew one thing; she wasn’t going to stay. She wasn’t going to be the reason anyone was harmed.

She didn’t ask any more questions, but she plotted her escape.

She would not stay with these wolves. She would not help them hurt anyone else.

That night, she climbed the fence.

I want to make it to the other side.

She expected the razor wire to slice her skin open, but nothing happened.

Was this her magic? Was it her blood that allowed her to scale the fence and move over it completely unscathed?

She hit the frozen ground with a thud. She landed on her shoulder. It cracked, but she didn’t have time to linger. Her stomach lurched as she popped it back in place.

Then she ran.