Lord of the Wolfyn

chapter 10

Reda’s scream was buried beneath the tumult that arose from the wolfyn as Dayn’s form blurred, widened, shifted, shortened…and then crystallized into a huge wolfyn.

Dayn was a wolfyn. Oh, God. No. This isn’t possible. It’s not happening. But shaking her head didn’t clear the sight, and she was beyond thinking any of this was a dream. Or, in this case, a nightmare.

Its—his—fur was dark, nearly black, which made the reddish shoulder patch and golden dorsal stripe stand out like a visual shout. And when he drew back his lips to snarl at Kenar, his canines were longer than those of any of the others, and wickedly pointed. A vampire trapped, temporarily at least, in a wolf’s body.

“Noooo.” The word escaped from Reda on a low, anguished moan as the structure of her unreal reality crashed to pieces around her and she saw the past few days for what they had been.

Dayn’s brilliant eyes—emerald green, not the amber of the others’—flicked to her at the noise, but she couldn’t find any human emotion in them. His words rang inside her: I’m sorry for everything.

He wasn’t just talking about her being caught up in his family’s magic, or even about him having kept yet another huge secret from her. He was apologizing for what he had done to her over the past two days.

The bastard had enthralled her.

Shame. Rage. Heartbreak. She didn’t know what to feel, what to focus on within the huge wave of emotion that slammed through her as the pack struggled to deal with this new shift in the balance of power.

Kenar recovered quickly from the surprise. He might have paled, but his sneer didn’t lose any of its oily, predatory nature. It made her think of the wolfyn in the book, the villain… And that made her see how Dayn wasn’t the woodsman, after all.

He was the wolf.

He was the seducer, the tempter. And she had fallen hard for the temptation.

“A challenge?” Kenar waved the others back, and the pack members cleared out. Within seconds, he and Dayn were facing each other in the middle of a cleared circle. “You think the pack will accept you as their leader now? I don’t think so. And don’t look to Keely for any help this time. She was outcast for helping you. Last I saw, she was hauling ass away from a big silver loner.” Kenar’s sneer turned even nastier. “He’s probably caught up to her by now. Wonder if she’s having fun? Those loners don’t get a chance at many bitches.”

Dayn growled low in his throat and began circling toward Kenar, trying to flank him.

The alpha, still in human form, moved to stay opposite him, openly taunting now. “Were you planning on handing things over to my weak slut of a sister? You think that’s going to be any—” He morphed abruptly, dropped to a crouch and leaped with a feral roar as Dayn did the same.

The two huge creatures thudded together midair and went down snarling in a flurry of fur, raking claws and snapping jaws. Blood sprayed and one of the combatants yowled, and then they were surging to their feet, up onto their hind legs to come together again, smashing into each other like fighting rams going for a head butt, only with gaping jaws and wickedly sharp teeth.

Growls and excited yips came from the crowd, and more than one of the human forms went wolf, as if the experience was better in fur.

Reda’s stomach roiled; she had to breathe through her mouth to stem the surging nausea that came from the potent mix of fear, disgust and upset rocketing through her.

Enthralled. God.

That explained why she had fallen so hard so fast, didn’t it? And even now that she knew the truth, she wasn’t free of his spell. She couldn’t be, because her eyes were fixed on the fight and her heart was lodged in her throat.

She hated the sight of blood wetting his thick, dark coat when he and Kenar next parted. She hated the thought of his lean, beautiful body taking on new scars. And she hated how the other wolfyn were watching him with cold, hard eyes that suggested that even if he won his fight, he wouldn’t live to claim his prize. She wanted to put herself between Dayn and the others, warding them off with her body while snarling, Mine.

Even more, some part of her drank in the sight of him in his wolf form: how his thick black coat shimmered over his muscles and caught the light as he reared up and lunged for his enemy; and how his eyes flashed like emerald-green flame when the combatants came together chest to chest, snapping and snarling. The sight of curving, elongated and wickedly pointed canines stirred her deep inside, and the way he moved so elegantly, like a fighter, like the largest of predators, brought the same whisper of, Mine.

And she had to get out of here. Because if she stayed any longer, she might never escape his spell.

But how could she leave? She was surrounded, disarmed, her bow and arrows tossed aside. Mind racing, she scanned the scene. She caught a blur of motion from the trees near the waterfall, another from a stand of middle growth nearby, but then nothing, making her think it had been a bird.

Her captors were all in their wolfish forms now, glued to the fight as Dayn rose over Kenar and slammed down atop him, driving the alpha to the ground. Teeth flashed, blood sprayed and Kenar screeched in pain. When he next stood, he was panting and dragging a foreleg. Dayn, too, was injured; he was bleeding from a deep gash on his shoulder, and the blood spattering the ground beneath him said that there were other wounds hidden by his dark fur. But he lunged first, drove Kenar back and followed him down with a flash of bloodstained teeth.

The brutal, meaty crunch that followed was the most sickening thing Reda had ever heard, and she gagged as Kenar spasmed and went gruesomely limp.

And then that slurp-crunch instantly dropped to the second most sickening thing she had ever heard as Dayn topped it by planting his front paws on Kenar’s body, lifting his blood-streaked black muzzle to the sky and loosing a terrifying and self-satisfied howl of victory.

Awwwoooooo. The noise reached inside her, making her want to scream and claw at her own skin. Or maybe that was the knowledge that she had lain with a creature, a killer. Her heart tore as she stared at him, his wolf form gorgeous, terrifying…and entirely enthralling.

He howled again and nausea flared suddenly, and she clapped a hand over her mouth and turned away. Two of her huge wolfyn guards flanked her as she ran blindly from the circle with no real destination in mind except away. She needed to get away from the sight of his gorgeous emerald eyes, away from the wild, feral glory in his howl, away from the burning desire to turn back.

The guards herded her toward the trailhead, near where her bow and arrows had been tossed. One nudged her toward the weapons. The other turned back to the pack, silver-white fur bristling as if he were protecting her rather than holding her captive.

Wait. Silver?

Reda looked down at the wolfyn nearest her, thought she saw something familiar in its eyes. “Keely?”

The creature nodded, then nudged her forcibly toward the weapons, the pathway. She whuffed an almost-word that sounded like, “Go.”

And then there was a sudden howl of alarm, a scramble of feet, and Reda looked up to see the pack reorienting on her, Keely and the silver-backed male.

Reda exploded into motion. She grabbed her bow and arrows and bolted for the trail. Behind her, a feral snarl sounded the attack as the Scratch-Eye pack came after her, and Keely and her loner friend tried to fend them off, and only partially succeeded. They stalled some of the wolfyn, but others came on.

Reda ran for her life. Her legs and lungs hurt; the wolfsbene helped, but would it be enough? Please, God. Gods. Whoever you are, she thought brokenly as she hit the trail and started up with a half dozen beasts behind her and gaining.

“Hold!” The word cracked commandingly, halting the wolfyn in their tracks.

She couldn’t help herself. Recognizing Dayn’s voice, she stopped halfway up and looked back. Her heart shuddered at the sight of him standing over Kenar’s body, both of them now morphed back to their human forms, one alive, one dead.

Dayn was wearing the same clothing he had been in when he morphed—how did that work?—and for a nanosecond he looked like the panel in her book that showed the woodsman standing over the slain wolf, triumphant at having saved the girl.

It was the truth, yet not.

Their eyes met, and even across the distance the contact struck sparks inside her. “Oh, Dayn,” she whispered, heart hurting.

“For gods’ sake go, Reda. Get out of here.” He didn’t shout the words, but she heard them clearly in her head, in her heart. And she just as clearly saw the pack orienting on him, bristling as the excitement of the fight cleared and they remembered that he was both their sworn enemy and now their leader.

This was about to get ugly, Reda thought. But even as her body—traitor as it was—sent her two steps back down the trail, a full-throated roar of sound and energy geared up above her, drowning out even her own sobbing breaths.

She didn’t need to look to know what that meant: the vortex was fully formed. If she was going to leave, she had to do it now.

And, oh, dear God, she needed to leave.

Tears blurring her eyes, she spun and bolted up the remainder of the path.

She heard Dayn shout her name, but she didn’t look back. Couldn’t. She could only look ahead of herself.

The narrow stone bridge that formed the archway was higher than it had looked from the ground, the drop scarier, the pathway itself narrower—little more than a two-foot-wide span in places and crumbling at its sides. But where only a few days earlier she had balked at the rope bridge, now she strode across the crumbling stone archway without fear.

She wasn’t sure if she was too scared to be scared anymore, having been vaccinated by repeated terror, but as she looked down into the dark center of the vortex, her only real thought was, Well, here goes nothing. There was no anticipation as she called the spell to mind and visualized her apartment kitchen, which seemed suddenly small and stale rather than safe. But she couldn’t stay in the wolfyn realm and she didn’t want to go with Dayn anymore. Not now.

She glanced over, saw the pack gathered around Dayn as if awaiting orders and felt her heart break.

And she jumped into the whirlwind that would take her away.



Reda! Dayn watched her fall, felt the vortex surge deep in his bones and knew she was gone. He felt it in the emptiness inside him, the hollow spaces he hadn’t even recognized until the past few days.

Agony hammered through him—not the pain that had come with the change, but from the way she had looked at him when he transformed, and again when he killed Kenar. The world was better with the bastard dead, but he wished there had been another way. There hadn’t been, though, which left him with a pissed-off, leaderless pack and no time to waste.

Tearing his eyes from the archway, he refocused on the pack, not liking the way Kenar’s main lieutenants were closing on him, though there seemed to be some sort of commotion going on at the back, over where Reda had broken through. Maybe he had an ally or two, after all. Too bad one or two allies weren’t going to do a damn thing when the other forty-something went for his throat.

Pulse thudding sickly in his skull, he spread his hands in a “no harm, no foul” gesture. “Look, I just want to go home. If you’ll just let me—”

The wolfyn closest to him shimmered and stretched to his human form to reveal Janus, a thick-necked soldier who followed his alpha’s orders unquestioning and knew tradition better than he knew his siblings’ names. “You won the challenge,” he growled. “But we don’t intend to be led by a filthy bloodsucker.”

“I don’t want to lead you. I just want—”

“I claim the Right of Challenge.”

“Damn it, Janus, just listen for a minute. I don’t want to fight you.”

“Too bad.” The other male blurred and retook his wolfyn form, baring his teeth in a feral snarl.

Dayn cursed under his breath, all too aware that he only had so much time before the vortex started to die back down. Hell, the thing could collapse at any moment. Taking a deep breath, he called on his other magic, and—

“Hold, damn you!” a woman’s voice called.

Every eye swung to the source, and a murmur of yips and growls rose up at the sight of Keely in human form, pushing through the crowd with a man at her side. Easily twice her mass, he had silver hair despite appearing to be only a few years older than her. He wore the heavy furs and sigil of the Bite-Tail pack, and sent Dayn a steely look as they joined him in the fight circle that had cleared at Janus’s challenge.

“Who the hell are you?” Dayn blurted, but even as he said it, the Bite-Tail connection clicked and he put it together. “Roloff?”

“Aye.” The big man’s low growl carried enough force to quell the pack instantly. He swept the wolfyn with a look. “Keely’s father promised her to me, but Kenar broke that bond and outcast me. I claim her by right of the original promise.”

And to Dayn’s utter shock, Keely blushed.

Not a loner, then, Dayn realized. It had been Roloff, coming around during each moon time, making himself visible and seeing if Keely was ready to go against her brother. And finally, this year, getting what he wanted.

Gods, he would never understand wolfyn politics. But at least someone had gotten what he wanted.

Dayn glanced at the vortex. Ah, Reda.

“Do any deny me this mate?” Roloff demanded.

Dayn met his eyes. He didn’t embarrass Keely by shaking his head. But he didn’t say anything, either.

Keely and Roloff didn’t embrace or kiss, but the look they exchanged said that making her an outcast had been the best thing Kenar had ever done for her.

Now, looking entirely in her element, Keely faced the pack. “By right and descent, the leadership of this pack should have come to me, not Kenar. He took control outside of tradition, which means that the challenge was not a true challenge, and this male—” she indicated Dayn “—is not your leader. I am.” She swept the pack with a piercing look. “Do any challenge me on this?”

There was dead silence. Janus even looked a little relieved.

After a minute, she nodded. “Good. Then hear me. This man goes with safe passage. None shall touch him.” She turned to Dayn, taking his hands and squeezing them in probably the only spontaneously friendly touch between them in two decades. “Go home, Prince Dayn of Elden. Go with my friendship, and the hope that this could be the beginning of a new era of peaceful sharing between our realms.”

“You… Wow. Okay.” Dayn faltered as he found himself nailed with an ambassadorship before he’d even regained his kingdom. “Yeah. That’s ambitious.”

“It was what Candida wanted, why she befriended you. So if you don’t do it for me, do it for her.”

He swallowed hard. “For both of you, then. And for the betterment of our realms, I hope.”

“Good. Then go. Get the hell out of here.” She kissed him on the cheek, shoved his rucksack, crossbow and sword into his hands and waved for the pack to let him through.

Roloff gave him a cuff on the shoulder that held a good measure of “and don’t come back,” and the rest of the pack watched him with unblinking amber eyes that said “good riddance.” It would take more than Keely’s goodwill to convince them—and the other packs—to give the blood drinkers a chance, but the benefits could be huge. Which was just another reason why he needed to get his ass through that vortex and get this brand-new era started.

Still, an empty hollow opened up inside Dayn as he jogged up the trail to the archway. Not because he was sad to leave the wolfyn realm, or because of the changes—and deaths—that had come because of him, or not entirely. No, the ache had curly red hair and blue eyes, and the hollowness came from knowing that the best three days of his life were over.

And the rest of it was about to begin.

His feet weighed him down as he headed out along the narrow causeway, following the line of Reda’s footprints in the thin layer of grit. He stopped where she had stopped, stood where she had stood and closed his eyes for a second, trying to mindspeak her and failing yet again. Still, though, he sent his message toward the swirling realm magic, hoping against hope that it might reach her, just as a book of fairy tales once had: Be well, sweet Reda. Be brave. Live your life.

Then, without looking down, he stepped off the edge. And plummeted home.