XV
After a time, praying to God to return her body, Maria began to itch. She rubbed her arms and realized that her fingers touched naked skin. She sat upright, hugging herself, realizing that her prayers had been answered. The skin she inhabited was suddenly her own again. Like the change before, she had been too absorbed in emotion to remember exactly when it had happened.
A dream, she thought. It had all been some nightmarish fantasy.
But when she looked behind her, the wounded tree still bled sap from its splintered trunk. And bark and splinters were caught under her fingernails.
She was also sitting naked on the forest floor.
“This was no dream,” she whispered, flexing her now-human fingers.
She stood, brushing leaves and branches from her skin. A few paces away, the cross lay where Darien had dropped it. If you still want it, he had said.
She picked it up.
Was this all that had been keeping that nightmare from happening?
The wolf thing she had become, was that the Devil her father had been warning her of? Was she the Devil?
That thing protects them, not you. Darien’s words echoed, unwanted, in her skull.
Her hands shook as she placed the cross around her neck. She stood in the forest, naked and alone, staring up at the small sliver of glowing cloud visible through the shadowed trees.
“What do I do?” The words were barely a whisper, but her whole body shook with the anguish of the question. “God, please help me. What do I do?”
Somewhere, far away in the forest, she imagined she heard Darien laughing.
For a long time she resisted going home, afraid that the beast within her might hurt her family. But where else could she go?
After a while, she decided to trust in the cross. Removing it had been what had called forth the demon. If she obeyed her father and kept it on, her family should be safe …
“Forgive me, Papa.”
She followed her trail back to the path, finding her damaged, mud-stained clothes. She barely remembered shedding them in her fury.
I have never been so angry. Not even at Lukasz …
But what would she have done to stop Lukasz if it weren’t for the cross she wore? Even without it, she had landed a blow that had broken his cheekbone. What if that hand had been massive, furred, and clawed? What if she had done to Lukasz what she had done to that tree?
I could have been that angry at him. If Darien hadn’t stopped him.
She walked home, her mind tumbling over itself, asking questions she didn’t have answers to. Who was Darien? How did he know what lived inside her? Why did he find such glee in drawing it out, tormenting her with it? Why was she cursed with this thing?
What do I do?
She stumbled though the gate and pushed open the door to the cabin.
“Maria, my child, what happened?”
Her stepmother ran to her out of the darkness and grabbed her shoulders. “Where have you been? What happened to your clothes?” She looked into Maria’s eyes with a familiar intensity. Even in the dim, overcast night, Maria could see the same fear and terror in her stepmother’s eyes that she had seen in her father’s before he died.
“Did you take it off?” her stepmother asked.
Something sank in her heart as she suddenly realized why her father had screamed the same question at her. The Germans had been torn apart by some vicious animal, and that news had reached him before she had returned from the fortress. He had heard the descriptions of what had happened to the Germans and he had thought she had done it.
“Maria.” Her stepmother shook her shoulders, trying to get her attention. “Your cross. You still wear it?”
Maria blinked up at her stepmother and nodded. It wasn’t quite a lie, but she could barely bring herself to speak. She pulled aside her immodestly torn chemise to show the cross resting over her heart.
“Thank God,” her stepmother whispered. She pulled Maria into a hug and rocked her back and forth. “Thank God, you’re safe.”
Do you know what you embrace?
“Please, child, tell me what happened.”
“A man, in the woods. He …” She sucked in a breath and buried her face in her stepmother’s shoulder. “He frightened me,” she whispered. “I saw him, and he frightened me. I ran. I ran for a long time.”
“Oh, my baby. You’re safe home now.” Her stepmother paused a moment and asked, “Did he harm you?”
“No.” Not in the way you mean. “I was lost, and I didn’t see him again.”
“You’re safe at home now,” her stepmother whispered. “Nothing will happen to you here.”
As Maria cried into her stepmother’s shoulder, she began to realize that her stepmother didn’t blame her for her husband’s death, or care that she was her husband’s bastard.
But maybe she should.
A calm heart.
Darien thought of the words he had spoken, and what he had asked of her. He knew more than ever that she was his, that their meeting was fate. More than fate—it was something as self-evident as the coming dawn.
It didn’t mean that things would be effortless, however.
In the years he had hunted the creature man and sought revenge on the Order itself, he had never come across another of his kind. Not living, in any event. When she’d chased him through the woods, he had not even seen her embrace the wolf in her rage. When she had jumped upon him, he’d been ill-prepared to feel her claws dig through his back. Though it had been glancing, he’d felt a rib give way under the blow.
That had ended the game. He couldn’t hang on to her trinket as splinters of bone pierced his lung. He gave up the cross and scrambled away from a creature that was awe-inspiring in its raw fury.
Even in his pain, he circled around, just so he could look upon her. Long-limbed, lithe, and muscular, wrapped in a pelt of pure midnight, her face long and narrow; and in her muzzle, her teeth glistened like stars as she snarled at him.
She was magnificent. And it was all he could do to keep from running to her, even if the result would be more clawed flesh and broken bones.
But it wasn’t the time. It was clear that these human wretches had raised her as one of them. Bound her. Crippled her. There was no telling what lies she had been fed about herself, or her kind. He needed to take care with her, no matter his own excitement or his own desires.
In the end, he wanted her to come to him.
But still, he followed her.
And in the morning, when she left her cottage, Darien was in the woods, watching. He watched as a man accompanied her, bearing an axe. He tensed his haunches, preparing to tear the throat from this man, but then he heard them speak, and heard her call him her brother.
So he didn’t attack. And when they walked along the path toward the fortress, he followed—a giant wolf padding silently through the woods next to them.
There was no question now that her eldest brother, Władysław, would escort Maria to the fortress and fetch her back. Even though she wanted to object, there was no way she could. A man had approached her in the woods, after all. It was clear that she needed the protection, and she could not explain her fear for her brother without explaining what had happened.
And even if she could have convinced her stepmother that Władysław was best off working on the farm, he knew that his half sister had come home weeping and with her clothes torn. She had seen the look in his hazel eyes and knew that even if he did not leave the cottage with her, he would follow.
So she accepted his unwanted company as they walked from her father’s farm, she in her hastily mended surcote and borrowed chemise, he in his leather breeches and linen shirt, with an axe slung over his shoulder.
Władysław was two years her senior, the inheritor of her father’s household. He had not spoken very much since their father had died, and it had been longer since she had seen him smile. While Maria and her stepmother had tended to her father during his illness, Władysław had been the one to care for the farm.
Walking silently next to him, Maria saw for the first time how that responsibility weighed on him. She saw the wear in his face and felt a wave of guilt for not thinking of the responsibility he must feel: for his mother, for his brothers, and for her.
Władysław caught her looking at him, and she turned away.
After a time, he asked, “Did he abuse you?”
“No,” Maria said, shuddering a bit inside. Did he know what she was? Her father must have, and her stepmother; they had put this cross around her neck. But had they told Maria’s brothers? She looked at Władysław for any sign of the horrifying fear she had seen in her father’s eyes and, to a lesser extent, her stepmother’s. “No. No one has raped me.”
Władysław visibly winced at her language, and she wondered at it briefly; that was what he had asked about, after all. Then he shook his head and said, “Promise me, if anyone ever—” His voice caught and he looked away from her. “Promise you will tell me.”
“Nothing happened to me.” The lie was out before she even knew she was lying. How could she say nothing had happened? What had happened was worse than any rape. She hadn’t lost her virginity, she had lost … everything. Everything that made her herself.
“Promise.”
How could she not? “I promise.”
After a few moments of silence, he added, “I have been thinking, since Father died, of what our family should do, and how I should handle what we have.”
“Oh?”
“You aren’t to be serving at the fortress anymore.” He hefted his axe. “You will stay with the farm and help.”
Maria sucked in a breath. She didn’t know what to do. “Władysław, I work there because the taxes—”
“The burden is not that great, and it will be easily borne with another set of hands to bear it. You belong with your family, until you make one of your own.”
Maria shook her head, wondering how she could be touched, terrified, and angry all at once. The prospect was terrifying. How could she risk her family, knowing what she was? With something inhuman inside her?
And, on a very basic level, Władysław infuriated her. Here was her big brother, with barely a wisp of hair on his face, acting like the head of the household and presuming to solve problems he had no knowledge about.
She would end her service at Gród Narew, and that was that. As if she had no say in the matter, or as if she were nothing more than a horse, some dumb beast led to plow wherever Master wanted. All to save her from … what? For all the terror she had endured, the attention of someone like Lukasz was beneath notice as a possible worry.
Lukasz should be frightened of her.
And there was Josef. The last thing she wanted was to abandon him. Even if her caring for him, and how she felt, would be doubly impossible with this thing living within her. She owed him more than to simply vanish without a word. She had commitments, she had duties, and she would not renounce them to save her brother from some phantom worry.
She found the strength within herself to speak, slowly and deliberately: “Władysław, I will continue to work at Gród Narew.”
“No, Maria. It is too dangerous.”
She whipped around, her fury barely contained. She felt something within her body and thought that, if not for the cross on her neck, they would both be in true danger. “You are not my father!”
Władysław took a step back at her outburst. “Maria!” he snapped, putting a force into his words that didn’t reach his eyes. “This is my family now. Don’t defy my wishes!”
“Your wishes? Your wishes? Did you even consider my wishes?”
“As a member of this family—”
“Stop it!” She shook her head violently, the anger intense and horrifying. The anger fed off the fear, and the fear fed off the anger, spiraling away from her so that she wasn’t even clear what had sparked it.
“Maria?” Now she saw the fear in his eyes—eyes that looked so much like her father’s. He reached out for her.
Did he know?
Did it matter?
“No.” She backed away from him. “You should stay away from me.”
“Maria, what’s the matter?”
“Stay away from me!” she screamed, and in her panic she imagined a hint of a growl in her voice. She turned and ran, as fast as she could, away from him.
“Wait! Maria!” She heard him call after her, then heard him begin to run himself. He couldn’t catch her, though; she had always been faster.
Darien saw them argue and, again, almost attacked the axe-wielding man. But he had already heard enough to know that the death of this Władysław would not make it easier for Maria to come to him.
Although it would be satisfying to taste the blood spilling from that arrogant neck, Maria saw the man as family, however impossible that actually was. Darien knew too well what the loss of family could do to the spirit, and the hatred it could nurture. He would never touch Maria’s “family,” if only to avoid igniting such hatred directed at him.
But she had turned on the man, so perhaps she was already shedding this human family.
If so, so much the better.
Darien wove through the woods and followed her, leaving the axe-wielding Władysław alone on the path behind them.
She reached the end of the forest before the morning bells rang. She looked up the hillside, to the walls of Gród Narew, as if staring at an apparition out of a nightmare.
What was she doing here? What was she doing anywhere? A monster lived inside her, a raging beast, and now that it had been loosed once, she felt it pushing against her skin every time she breathed.
“Stop it!”
She surprised herself by speaking.
“Stop it,” she told herself again. Directing her anger at herself, at the spiraling loss of control, seemed to shock her renegade emotions into a moment of clarity. She took deep breaths and reined in the fear.
She didn’t know what had happened to her; she didn’t know what Darien had done. But she knew that right now, at this moment, she was herself. She knew that, for all the rage she had felt, she hadn’t lost control. She didn’t even know if what she had experienced was real. She might have suffered from some waking nightmare. Perhaps Darien had bewitched her.
There was no reason not to live her life as she always had, if she wore her cross and took care for her anger.
But there was another reason to go up to Gród Narew. Josef had seen something. He and the men with him had been attacked by something. And her father had thought that something might have been her.
She needed to know exactly what that was.