XXIV
Darien woke and stretched, feeling a sense of contentment he hadn’t felt since he was a child. The universe had reorganized itself again, and he had a proper place within it. After years of being a single creature on the outside of man’s castle, tearing at the monuments of their hubris—after so long defining himself solely in opposition to his enemy—he had something of his own: a life, a family, a mate, all outside the world defined by the desires of men or their God.
The earth where he had slept was still strong with her scent, and he breathed it in, growling in pleasure. He felt honestly happy for the first time since the Order had slaughtered his family.
He let out a small yip to let Maria know he was awake, to come back to him. There were still so many things to show her, so many stories to tell. The evening was crisp and cool, and the night promised to be excellent.
Where was she?
As he came fully awake, he remembered her stroking him. He remembered her naked human form cradling his head. She had told him to go back to sleep.
He padded over to where they had cast off their human clothes. She had taken hers …
Where had she gone that she needed to dress like them?
Darien felt his mood go cold, still, and dark. Like the sky before a great storm, his mind was suddenly very quiet. She wouldn’t go back to them, not after what he had shown her.
He had mated with her. No one else. Her. He had waited for twenty years to find his own kind. She couldn’t give that to him and then leave. She couldn’t.
He nosed the leaves where her clothes had rested, trying to think of some other explanation, some excuse. A flash of silver glinted from the leaves, and he saw her cross.
Yes, he thought. She’s not returning to bondage.
Then he licked his muzzle as a host of new possibilities filled his mind. She had gone back to punish them. They had been the ones to trap her, chain her in silver without any knowledge of the strength within her. What they had done to her, in some sense, was worse than what the Order had done to him. The Order had destroyed his family, but these wretched humans had spent years destroying her. Forcing her to deny what she was until she didn’t even know what she was denying.
He ran, drinking in her scent. He would catch up with her, and he would help her wreak vengeance on these fools who would have her chained. They would both taste of their traitorous flesh, and he would take her again on a bed made of their bones.
Darien knew that something was very wrong when he heard her crying. He stopped in the woods, just out of sight of the house where they had imprisoned her. He heard the sobs and tried to convince himself that they were the sounds of remorse or pain from the ones who had wronged her.
But he knew her voice.
He crept forward, keeping to the shadows between the trees, stopping only when the cottage came into sight. When she came into sight.
This is not possible …
A murderous growl formed in his chest, and his lips curled back in a demonic snarl that threatened to split his muzzle in two. His mate, his bitch—after she had given herself to him—stood in front of the cabin of her captors, sobbing in the arms of some man. And not any man, but a monk of the Order.
One he recognized.
His forepaws creaked as his body began twisting itself for combat, and he dug his growing fingers into the soil. He would tear the monk apart, rip the flesh from his bones while he still lived. The man would watch as Darien fed on his liver. The Order had taken one family from him. They would not take this.
Maria broke from the embrace and looked toward the forest, as if she heard him.
Darien froze, staring at them. At him.
Do you feel it, man? Do you feel the eye you nearly stole looking back at you?
As he watched, he saw Maria’s nostrils dilate, and her face turned right to him. She knew he was here. As he watched, frozen, she placed a hand on the man’s chest, gently pushing him behind her.
You foolish bitch! His anger screamed at him to attack, but he had not lived two decades alone against the Order by allowing his rage to lead him. He could take this man now—he could slaughter him whatever Maria might do to protect him—but that wasn’t what he wanted. Not this man’s suffering, not his death. That was coming soon enough, regardless of what Darien did now. He wanted her. He needed her to see what these creatures called men truly were.
She had run back to this house, to this man, only because Darien had told her, but he hadn’t shown her. Darien slowly backed deeper into the shadows. However much he wanted to taste this man’s flesh now, there were more productive outlets for his rage.
Maria cried against Josef’s shoulder, letting loose all the pain, frustration, and confusion. He didn’t ask her any more questions, and for a time she was able to forget that she was not the same Maria he knew. She sucked in sobbing breaths, smelling Josef’s scent, so unlike Darien’s. She wanted to lose herself in him, to be the woman he thought she was—to have a life, a family, a husband: all the doomed dreams of the mother who had birthed her.
Such thoughts only made her weep more. She cried until her breath burned against the rawness of her throat.
Then she smelled Darien. Her muscles seized as she thought she heard a low growl.
No, not here.
She broke from Josef’s arms and spun around to face the woods. She smelled him strongly now, and she thought she saw movement beyond the trees: a flash of yellow fur, a glint of a pale blue eye.
“Maria?”
She pushed Josef behind herself and stared out at the woods, heart pounding, waiting for her wolf lover to charge out of the woods to challenge her.
Just as Lucina had challenged her father.
Please God, not that.
“Maria? What is it? Is there something out there?”
There were no more sounds, and after a few moments, his scent was carried away by the evening breeze. “Nothing,” she said finally. “I must have imagined it.” But she knew she hadn’t.
“You know what is out there, don’t you?”
She turned around and faced him, prepared to lie. But seeing his eyes, she couldn’t. “Y-yes.”
“You knew it before I told you anything, before I gave you that dagger. That’s why your brother carries it now. He needs it more than you do.”
He knows. He knows what I am. She felt her stomach sink. Josef knew what she was, and she wouldn’t even have the cold comfort of being the one to tell him.
“I came here to save you.”
“S-save me?”
“Yes. You have a chance to repent of your sins. There is even a bishop present to grant you absolution. Please, you must abandon your pagan practices. Tell us where the shrines are, where you leave your sacrifices.”
She stared back at him in total confusion. Her pagan practices? She was a Christian. Whatever else she might be, she knew that much. She had been baptized. She attended Mass, confessed her sins.
“Maria, my heart has been weighed by suspicions since you showed me your father’s cross. It was not until after you confronted me that I understood what this must be, how a good woman like you could be involved in such evil.” He took her shoulders and looked into her eyes, an expression of heartbreaking concern across his face. “This creature, it is not your God. It is a satanic deception meant to lead you from salvation.”
Her eyes widened as she realized how fully Josef had misunderstood. “Please, I’m not …” She trailed off, not knowing how to correct him without making things worse.
“I see it, Maria. You know this thing. That is why you spent this morning trying to convince me of its humanity, isn’t it? It is why you know of wolves when I mentioned no such thing to you. You sensed it here just a moment ago, didn’t you?”
She hesitated for a long time before finally saying, “Yes.”
“You’re trying to protect it.”
Maria felt tears burning her cheeks. Even in error, he came too close to her heart. All he was mistaken about was why. “You don’t understand. I want this to stop.”
“I know,” Josef said. “When you disappeared, you sought it out, didn’t you?”
“Please—”
“Did it explain why it slaughtered your lord Bolesław and seven other men?”
“They were hunting him.”
“Did it explain the villages it has laid to waste? Forty men, women, and children left to rot on the steps of their own church?”
She wanted to deny it, but she had seen Darien’s eyes. She had heard him. Yes, he had reason, but the reason was so deep and grave that she could see Darien using it to justify anything.
In her confusion, she had to force her heart from turning completely away from Darien’s brutality, because, after this, he would be all she had—all she ever would have. She hugged herself and shook her head, telling herself that she really wasn’t a wicked person.
She must have said it out loud, because Josef answered, “I know you aren’t.”
She looked up at him.
“I was watching your face when you saw the evidence of its slaughter; I saw the betrayal in your eyes. Even if this thing is the god of your ancestors, even if you sacrifice to it, this wrath was not what you were asking of it, was it?”
“No.” She wasn’t even certain what it was she wanted from Darien anymore. Or Josef. Or herself. She did know that she didn’t want more people hurt or killed, and that included Darien. In her confusion, she finally said to him, “If you lead them away from here, away from him, the killing will stop. I know it will.”
“Maria,” he said, lowering his voice, “does your family know what you’re doing?”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
“They don’t, do they?”
“I—”
“You gave your brother the dagger because you realize that they’re in danger.”
“No.” But he was right: for all she’d been drawn to Darien, she didn’t trust him. Couldn’t trust him. Especially with her family.
“You know that this beast is nothing that will be turned aside by an offering.” Josef released her shoulders. “Come back with me, make things right with God. Make them right with yourself. I see in your face—you know you’re on the wrong path.”
“I can’t go back.”
“Please. If Brother Heinrich discovers what you’ve done, he won’t be merciful. If you don’t come forward and seek sanctuary with the bishop of your countrymen, I don’t know if I can keep protecting you.”
“If he discovers—You haven’t told them?”
“If I had, I wouldn’t be here.”
Guilt compounded on guilt. She looked up at the darkened sky and felt as if the world were caving in on her. “No, you cannot sacrifice yourself for me, lie for me, when you have no idea what I’ve done.”
“What have you done?”
“I—” She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t tell him of the animal hunger, the lust that burned within her. Worse, even though she wanted more than anything to turn him away, she had sensed Darien watching, and she knew that if Josef walked the nighttime path back to Gród Narew, Darien would—
“I’ll go back with you,” she said. It would give her time to think. Perhaps the bishop could give her absolution. If not, once Josef was safe in the fortress, she could slip away during the night. She knew the place intimately enough. Then she would find Darien, and if the Order would stay here, she would lead Darien away. They could go east, away from the frontiers of the monastic state, past the point the Germans would ever dare explore. “Just let me say good-bye to my family.”
Darien returned to the clearing in the dark of night, his rage now cold and hard as a stone. He would mete out a grand vengeance—both to the Order and to the wretches who had imprisoned his mate, turning her against him and her kind. In the process he would show her the true face of the humans she lived with. She would have no choice but to reject them.
As distasteful as it was, he retreated into human skin and dressed in the clothing that allowed him to walk within the humans’ world. When he took her away from this place, they would shed these rags. Then they would both forget everything of the human world.
But only after he exacted his last payment of flesh and bone from the Order here, and only after he had proved the worthlessness of humanity to her.
Once his human mask was in place, he reached down into the leaves and dug up the cross Maria had left behind. “These chains were so important to you,” he said. “Fitting that they will finally free you.”