He materialized on the edge of a cliff with tears on his face, but the wind coming off the sea dried them. It was a stiff wind, stinging and harsh. His hair whipped around his face, each strand like a russet lash. He was able to see through the wild mane to the woman who had materialized with him. He hadn’t let her go, by God. Even when he could no longer feel his hands and arms. In the Ether, you were nothing, but if you were strong you could hold on.
He’d always held before.
His nightmares rose from the fear of not being sure he always would.
He was on his knees. He got to his feet as the wind fell. The weather around him was suddenly still and calm. He’d materialized to a cold, windswept ocean, but he rose to the warm embrace of a magically created Mediterranean climate. He’d heard of Vasilisa’s island, Krajina. She maintained its secrecy and artificial atmosphere with her Volkhvy abilities. The mirror must have disrupted the spell long enough to deposit him and Anna, and then the spell had reformed. He’d had only a glimpse of a stormy sea. Now he looked out over a calm, sunlit bay.
Anna’s skin appeared worse than pale. Her cheeks were translucent in the bright light. With all his strength, he was powerless to save her from the damage his brother’s bite had done.
And still he held on.
He turned away from the cliff to search for the beings he couldn’t trust. He had no other options. Nowhere else to go. He stumbled to a halt after several strides, because the Light Volkhvy queen rode to meet them.
He didn’t recognize the creature that bore her on its back. No doubt there were other species beyond man and wolf that she’d tampered with in order to enslave them.
Like a horse, her cream-colored mount had four legs. Unlike a horse, a golden mane encircled its head, and its tail was a short starburst of similar gold bristles. Its shiny brown hooves were as big as dinner plates, and it stood taller than the black wolf would be if he were here. Soren recalled tales he’d heard as a child of a mythological beast called an Indrik, but this beast had no horn on its head and it made no sound. It also moved slowly, as if it was very old. He noted gray hair mingled in its gold mane and tail.
“You did this?” Vasilisa asked as the beast she rode halted and she slid off its back.
She was dressed in a long white gown that blended with the white hair flowing over her back and shoulders. The absence of color startled against the green vegetation behind her and the blue sky overhead.
“No,” Anna said. The sound was so soft he sensed it more than he heard it out loud. He looked from Vasilisa to Anna’s face. The queen continued to approach. She might strike him dead when she reached his side. But he could only care about how weak Anna sounded and what it must have cost her to speak.
“Shh, you’re home. Your mother is here,” Soren said.
Vasilisa stopped a foot away at his words. He could feel her intense attention on his face. But he didn’t look at the queen. He watched Anna instead. For signs of life, to memorize her last breaths—he wasn’t sure which. As he stared at Anna, four more Volkhvy arrived. They pulled a cart with large wooden wheels by two handles on either side. They were big and burly witches, but the cart moved inch by inch up the rise to the cliff.
“Lev attacked her. We bound her wounds, but they continued to bleed. There were no witches left at Bronwal. So I brought her to you,” Soren said.
“Ivan hasn’t destroyed the mirror,” Vasilisa said. She was a breathtakingly beautiful woman. Her white hair was shot through with silver strands that caused it to shimmer and gleam in the sun. Her eyes flashed, dark yet bright. The sunlight glittered on her pupils, causing a silvery outline around the obsidian edges. Her face was unlined, but there was harshness to her high cheekbones and the set of her jaw.
She was unaged, but she didn’t look young. Vasilisa somehow carried all the years of the curse on her shoulders. He noted the weight as she moved closer to touch Anna’s pale face. She was no longer graceful. Every step she took seemed an effort to push against something trying to hold her back—guilt, time or the Ether’s hunger? Had she used too much of its energy for too long?
“He let me use it one last time,” Soren said. “By now it’s crushed beneath his paws.”
The queen’s dark eyes quickly cut upward to look at his face. He could feel the weight she carried pressing against him. He didn’t back down, although his first instinct was one of retreat. He stood. He cradled Anna against his chest and he met the Light witch’s eyes. The cart came to a stop several yards away.
“You risk your life for hers,” Vasilisa said. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of fact. His life was in danger on Krajina. His brother had attacked the queen’s daughter. Once again, the Romanovs had tried to take the life of her child. If Anna died—and maybe even if she survived—he would be the first Romanov to feel the Light Volkhvy queen’s wrath...again.
“Help her,” he said. “You can deal with me later.”
“Bring her. Quickly. As only the red wolf can,” Vasilisa commanded.
In the artificial light of an impossibly warm sun, Soren froze. He’d vowed never to risk the shift again. He hadn’t risked it even when he hunted for Lev over the hills and forests of the Carpathian Mountains. Two legs had been a hardship, but he’d needed the pain and difficulty to distract him from the constant nightmares...and his memories of Bell.
“You weren’t wrong. She is dying. And I can’t help her here on this cliff,” Vasilisa said. She turned and pointed toward the interior of the island, where he could see a distant garden surrounding a sprawling Mediterranean-style palace of stucco and tile. How much of the Ether’s energy did Vasilisa channel to maintain her hidden island home?
He had no choice. He’d faced the Ether and he’d returned to himself again. He would return to his human form again once he used his wolf to help Anna. He moved to place his burden in the cart Vasilisa’s men had dragged slowly up the hill. It was no relief to let her go and step away. The back of the cart was lined with pillows and soft blankets, but he missed her against his chest. He couldn’t feel her heartbeat or see her slight respiration. As he backed away, Anna looked like she was in the deepest of sleeps.
She looked like she’d never wake up again.
Vasilisa mounted her horselike creature. It was too old and slow to pull the cart. The big witches who had pulled it up the hill were already headed back down. Soren had already made the decision to shift. He blinked. The earth trembled. Down below, the sea churned as the island quaked.
The shift was brutally physical. It wasn’t pretty. Bones shifted and reknit themselves into a giant canine form. Skin stretched and changed and, in his case, russet fur spread across his cheeks and chest, arms and legs until he was covered. The pain was intense, but so was the relief. The wolf was always there, deep within his heart. Every beat risked its escape. Every space in between beats was a moment’s longing for the wild that could be.
The howl was inevitable. It was always only a matter of where and when, not if. It wasn’t until he leaped for the front of the cart to position his giant wolf self between the handles that he understood the real danger: as the red wolf, the loyalty he felt toward Anna was as ferocious as it had ever been. It was less diminished by human reason. It was cemented in this physical form as muscle memory he would have to fight.
But not now.
For now, he unleashed it.
The cart was nothing to him. The tiny woman in it not much more weight than she’d been as a child. The only thing that slowed him down was the care he had to take over rocks and bumps in the terrain. Other than those, they flew.
Soren slowed when they reached the garden that surrounded the palace. The sprawling structure was located on a rise above this tangle. He carefully made his way around the lush rosebushes that grew in a wilderness of thorns. Once they arrived at the base of a winding stairway that led up to the palace doors, he stopped. The stairway was lined with black banners on silver poles. Each banner held white markings he couldn’t decipher. Some language he didn’t understand. It was Vasilisa who picked Anna up from the back of the cart and carried her upstairs. The creature she’d ridden had almost kept up with Soren in spite of its age.
If she hadn’t really needed his speed and strength to pull Anna to the palace, why had she manipulated him into the shift?
Vasilisa carried Anna up the stairway. Her white skirts trailed behind her gracefully as if she floated upward, step by step. Soren followed. As he walked up the stairway, he reclaimed his human form. His physical wolf attributes—hair, fangs, claws—disintegrated and rose from his newly reformed human shape as a fine smoky mist. He ignored the pain.
The soul of the red wolf, unlike its accoutrements, settled deep in his chest to inhabit the dark reaches of his heart.
Between one step and the next, he reached for one of the banners that flanked the stairs to wrap himself in a makeshift robe. He was comfortable with his nakedness. As a shape-shifter, he would have to be. But he was entering Anna’s mother’s home. Until he could find something better, the banner would have to do.
He didn’t feel vulnerable in his human skin, but he did feel exposed as he followed Vasilisa into a great hall with a high, arched ceiling and black iron accents on pillars and posts. He couldn’t hide his concern for Anna as well as he’d hidden his nudity.
Vasilisa paid him no notice. She walked through the hall and into an antechamber that led to another flight of curving stairs. When they finally reached the top, they came to a large round room lit by streaming beams of sunlight that poured through a faceted glass dome that formed its ceiling. Only then did he stop. His gaze tracked over a myriad of keepsakes he recognized from years of familiarity. The shelves and tables in the room as well as the windowsills and corners were stacked with Anna’s magpie collection from the Bronwal aviary.
This was Anna’s new bedchamber in her mother’s palace.
Like the aviary, it was bright and ringed with windows that were open to the air and sun. Through those arched openings, he could see the ocean far below. It kissed the sandy shores of Krajina with soft curls of foamy white. But Anna’s bedroom also had heavy doors and shutters that when closed would provide a solid defense against intruders.
She’d always been brave but cautious. Bold but careful.
Vasilisa placed Anna on a large canopied bed draped with diaphanous clouds of ivory fabric and jewel-toned silken coverlets and pillows. It was a bed fit for a princess, and more than anything else he’d seen on the island, more than the luxurious palace or the magical beast or the enchanted weather, the bed made him acknowledge that the waif he’d known was gone.
Bell had made do with dusty, deteriorating bedclothes and the empty aviary with its rough stone floor. She’d looked out on cold sunset mountains. She’d shivered and starved and barely survived.
And she’d loved still.
“I am your maker and Anna carries my blood in her veins. The white wolf’s attack was an abomination against the Light power I used to create him. That’s why she won’t heal without my help. The enchantment I worked to create the Romanov wolves was tainted by the darkness of Lev’s violent actions against my daughter. His bite carried with it the Ether itself poisoned by his hatred as if it was a venom,” Vasilisa said. “I can cleanse her, but I’ll need your help.”
“I’m no longer your champion,” Soren said. He looked at the pale woman on the bed instead of the queen he addressed. The drape of the borrowed banner was forgotten to sag low around his waist and one shoulder, but it was the focus of his attention that exposed him more than his bare skin.
He couldn’t look away. Or turn away. He could only tell Vasilisa with his words and actions that he was here for Anna, not for her, and even that was temporary. He would never be tied to the Volkhvy again.
“Be that as it may, you shifted to bring her to the palace, because you will always be her champion whether you realize it or not,” Vasilisa said. She held one hand toward him with her palm facing up and fingers spread. She gestured for him to take her outstretched hand and waited.
His attention had left Anna at Vasilisa’s shocking claim. The shift had been a test of his loyalty to her daughter. He was too surprised to protest. Besides, Anna was dying. Now wasn’t the time to argue that he and her daughter had decided to destroy the sword that tried to bind them together.
“What would you have me do?” Soren asked.
If he could fight the poison with tooth and claw, he would. Whether or not it gave Vasilisa misconceptions about his and Anna’s relationship.
“She’s lost too much blood. We need to cleanse her wounds so they can knit,” Vasilisa said. A slight sea breeze came through the windows, gently shifting the gauzy bed hangings and the queen’s hair. The silvery strands sparkled with the movement in the sun. “There’s no hate in you for her. We can use your blood to undo what your brother has done.”
“No,” Soren said. He didn’t hate Anna, but he did hate the Volkhvy. He had to. Vasilisa had tortured the Romanovs for centuries. “My blood will only hurt her more.”
“You know your own heart better as the red wolf than you do as a man, Soren Romanov,” Vasilisa scolded, obviously impatient with his hesitation. “You came here so that I could save my daughter’s life. Let’s get on with it before it’s too late.”
Soren forced his legs to carry him to Anna’s side.
“Anger at injustice isn’t hate. You’re angry and you have every right to be. But you do not hate as your brother hates. He is the one Romanov that I wronged the most. I can never make right what was done to him. I took his wife and child. I drove him into the wilderness of his despair. For that, I never expect forgiveness. But you...you don’t hate as your brother does. One day you’ll come out on the other side of your anger, and you’ll find yourself much as you ever were.”
Vasilisa took one of his arms in her hands. It looked impossibly large and savagely scarred and muscled compared to her pale, soft limbs and graceful fingers. But he misjudged her savagery based on her feminine appearance. When she sliced his wrist with a sharp, pointed ring of sterling silver thorns she wore around the third finger of her left hand, he sucked air in between his clenched teeth in surprise.
Crimson blood welled up from the shallow cut, and the queen urged him to move. She positioned his bleeding wrist over Anna’s bandaged wounds, where her Volkhvy blood had soaked through. His blood formed a scarlet teardrop before it fell to splash on Anna’s shoulder. It hissed and bubbled as it soaked into the bandages. Several more teardrops of blood fell until steam rose from Anna’s shoulder. As the steam rose, Vasilisa released his arm and began to speak in a low voice, muttering words in a language he didn’t understand. Soren backed away as Vasilisa reached to place her hands on Anna’s steaming shoulder. The glow she’d summoned wasn’t green like Anna’s. It was purple, like the color of the mourning dresses she’d worn for centuries.
Anna cried out, and Soren clenched his fists. He was helpless to prevent her pain just as he’d been helpless to save her from the curse her mother had worked or the impossible choices the emerald sword forced them to make.
Whether he hated Anna’s pain or not, he had to save his brother. The white wolf’s poisonous bite was only more evidence that Lev was nearly too far gone. Soren and Anna had no future together, regardless of what the queen might think or how she manipulated them with her magic.
His only future was in saving his brother and protecting his family from further Volkhvy manipulations.
Anna wasn’t welcome at Bronwal.
And Ivan had every right to protect his wife and child.
Soren watched as the color returned to the Light Volkhvy princess’s cheeks, and then he held the banner around his hips and slipped away.