Chapter 50

Fifty

FINN

A dark forest opened around me with a heavy memory of Odion finding a mate and leaving the pack to pursue a family of his own. The weight of the loss sent me away from the pack. My wolf snarled at the separation, but my heart ached in a way I could only recall from losing my mother. The decades of friendship had given me an anchor and his strength at my side kept me focused on the pack, now one of the largest on the entire continent.

Without him, I hated how much they demanded from me. My wolf pointed out potential mates for us, citing benefits that he thought worked well for my witchborn heart too, and yet, none of them appealed to me. I handed the wolves over to the mothers of the pack, to guide them, and help steer them in the right direction. Wolves didn’t kill people, or anything unnecessarily. We’d built a community entirely of wolves, their mates, and their young. And I never felt so alone.

I wandered south and east, months passing with four paws to the ground rather than human flesh. Occasionally we’d join a pack, not to lead, rather to fulfill the need of my wolf for pack. My wolf chose a mate for us among the humans, I think because he knew we were lonely and thought it would help me find stability again. And for a time, they gave me focus, until age began to eat away at them. The short lifespans of mortals leaving me to watch them fade before my eyes. Twice it happened, a passing of years in seconds as the memories flipped from page to page on high speed, stopping when I woke curled around the third mate, chosen by me this time at the insistence of the wolf, from among the humans born within the wolf pack.

A hundred memories of our time together knit itself into my memory as though I’d relived it all in a handful of seconds to bring me back to this place. I stared at their sleeping beauty, mortal and delicate, and yet I’d found a home there with them, but my heart ached at what I knew was coming.

“Why are you awake?” They asked as they reached out to run gentle fingertips along my jaw.

“Thinking,” I said. Always thinking. The wolf hated that I refused to submit to my instinct. It wanted to change them, feed the wolf curse into their blood and keep them with us.

“Eriony survived the transition,” they said. “She’ll be okay.”

Sometimes those humans living among the pack chose to attempt a change. I hated it. There wasn’t a blessing to the wolf splitting our souls. It was filled with pain, and often death. The wolf ached with sadness at my rage toward it. Unfair, I knew, as it hadn’t asked to rest within me either. Only when we ran with four paws to the ground, free of the obligation of mortals did we finally feel united, and I worked to keep us from bonding further.

Self-hatred, Odion often reminded me, would lead to self-destruction. We’d seen it a dozen times among the wolves. Those wolves would go mad and have to be put down, often in a bloody and vicious battle that resulted in more than one dead wolf. I had never cursed another, even those injured in battle. Perhaps because I had been other before the wolf settled inside my soul?

“I’d like to change,” my mate said.

“I would rather you didn’t.”

“But I will grow old and die.”

“We all die. Some live longer than others. Wouldn’t you rather have children and watch them grow, than die beneath teeth and claw?”

“I want to stay with you.”

The words tugged at my heart, but I shook my head. “I want you to stay with me, too. Safe. Not cursed to try to survive in this violent world.” The mortals who lived among us were protected from the violence that sometimes erupted. A few wolves would live decades and suddenly become flesh hungry, as though fueled by blood lust instead of the instinct of the wolf. Neither Odion nor I understood it, and the handful of pack alphas I encountered over the years had stories of those lost to the eventual corruption. Like the longer a wolf lived, the more likely chaos overtook their sanity.

My mate sighed and snuggled down with me, and I closed my eyes to rest, hoping the discussion was over, but when I awoke, I was alone.

Not the first time a lover had left me. But as I sat up in bed and stared at the last dregs of moonlight fading to the rising sun, a sense of dread pooled in my gut. Since I wasn’t pack alpha, the draining noise of having them all linked to me and tugging at my awareness was peacefully absent.

The sense of doom intensified. I made my way to the door of our tiny house, one of a couple dozen among our pack, and stepped out to study the village, listening with a beyond human capability. Silence stretched deep. Not sleep, though I could hear a handful of human hearts resting peacefully in their dens. The absence of the faster beat of the wolves made my heart flip over.

I raced into the woods, straining for a sense of them, their scent carried on the wind with an undertone of blood, and my mate. No, no, no!

The clearing where we held pack meetings was overrun with wolves and the stink of death as I realized that Eriony, my mate’s friend, lay still in the center, half wolf, half human in a horror of mid-shift turmoil. Blood and intestines stained the ground, leaving the smell of open bowels and death heavy in the air.

I took a step forward and the alpha broke my path, hand on my shoulder, though I didn’t like the humans to touch me. I flinched away, but he stood firm. “They sought a change.”

“No!” I said, understanding it wasn’t Eriony he spoke of, but my mate.

“I had to put Eriony down…” the alpha said. “Your mate was already gone.” He took a step to the side and waved his hand. A row of pack members moved to show me the remains of my mate, torn up and half blistered with bubbling masses of the change bursting beneath their skin. Even in death the curse tried to rip them from one form to the next, but they hadn’t survived the first fever.

I found myself at their side, heartbroken, wolf howling inside my head, as I dropped to my knees and held their remains and wept. A tide of something dark burst from inside me, and a gasp of fear rose from the nearest packmates. I turned to snarl at anyone close to me, finding only the alpha as the rest of the wolves vanished into the woods.

The alpha stood his ground, though I could smell his fear.

“You are not a wolf,” he said.

I was, and I wasn’t. Just as I was human and I wasn’t.

“You can’t stay with us.”

I growled at him, feeling the darkness slide across my body and enlarging it as though my beast would burst free at any second. The alpha trembled, but didn’t back down. He was a good man, trained to care for his pack as an alpha should, never seeking power, but gifted it by gentle and protective leadership.

“Will your grief ease if you kill me?” he asked.

I knew it wouldn’t. I’d killed hundreds over the years after the murder of my mother. Most I couldn’t remember at all. Other wolves sought fights, and I always won, which often sent me away from the packs to wander alone. I wasn’t a wolf. I wasn’t a man. I was something else.

Witchborn. The memory ached as if those zealots had woven magic to span my existence.

“Let us give them a proper burial,” the alpha said. “I would not have wished this on either of them. I know you wouldn’t have either.” I met his gaze, heard the truth in his words, though my heart bled as though sliced through the middle. “The pack has seen what you can be,” he said, quietly. “It terrifies them.” And him. “It’s best you go.”

I let out a long breath and sucked the darkness back inside, locking it deep within my soul. The wolf wept within as if my human half bled into his, making his emotions a thousand times stronger. It made sense to blend one to the other, as we shared a soul, and for some reason the wolf’s heart was more delicate than mine.

I stood. The alpha took a single step back, but squared his shoulders as if ready for battle. He would die to protect his pack. I understood. He didn’t have a mate. His pack was his anchor. I nodded to him and headed into the woods in the opposite direction. “Don’t follow,” I said in warning. Nothing would survive when I released the darkness again.

“I am sorry,” the alpha said.

I left it all behind, my wolf silently weeping. We wandered for days, perhaps weeks, with unseeing eyes until we found our way into the mountains and I set free the accrued darkness. The world vanished around us, turning from summer to winter in a rush of raging winds and snow, and then back to sweltering heat. Fire latched on to the trees casting plumes of smoke into the air, raining down ash, and finally a soft blanket of snow. The forest died, trees snuffed and wildlife running from the madness.

Mortals avoided the mountains, their whispers carrying over the wind of a nightmare in the north. Once again, I was that nightmare, teetering between hot and cold, rage and silence. Decades passed before I resurfaced to try again.