He was gone.
There one minute, and the next, just… gone.
Tisper stood at the edge of the road, watching the foliage of the dark forest, rattle and quiver in the wind. Quentin had disappeared into shadows, shoved his way between fir branches, and any sight of him was eaten up by the lush growth.
Bailey and Elizaveta followed after. Then it was Izzy, looking back with her blue, almond-shaped eyes. “Um…” was all she said. Then she was gone into the darkness behind them.
“Matt, come on!” Tisper pulled at his arm. “We have to follow them.”
“Are you kidding? Tisper, they’re wolves. They know what they’re doing. We don’t.”
“Matt, it could be Jaylin,” she strained.
Matt looked torn, stuck to the distance between the tree-line and the pavement.
“Relax, kid.” Leo leaned through the back seat window, thick arm folded over the frame. “I’ll watch the car. Not much help treckin’ through the land with a bum leg anyhow.”
Before he could even agree, Tisper was dragging him behind, bulldozing through the rough wings of the firs. It was dark here—darker even than the night road where they’d left Leo. Tisper could see nothing but the silhouettes of trees—their bark ripped and ribboned by something big. Something surely terrifying. She held Matt’s sleeve in a death grip, slipping over mossy stone, searching through the dark for a sign of the others. A sound, even. The longer she heard nothing, the more her heart wrenched in her chest.
“Which way did we come?” She spun, twirled one way and then the other. The trees all looked the same, each a monument to the next.
Matt turned around too, searching for a sign of the rode, twisting around in a cold sweat. “Shit, Tisper.”
“It’s not my fault!”
“You’re the one who dragged us in here! I think the road’s back that way.”
“This way,” Tisper pointed in a different direction. “I remember that broken branch.”
“There’s broken branches all over!”
“Stop yelling,” Tisper squalled back. “You were a boy scout, right? Make us a compass or something.”
“How in the shit is a compass going to help if we don’t even know what direction we came from?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know, okay Matt? I—”
A hand shot out from the dark, slender fingers sealing her words in. Tisper bristled at the palm muzzling her mouth, chills creeping up her bare arms like goose skin.
“Shh.” When she recognized the voice behind her, and the scent of her sweet perfume, Tisper sobered of her anxieties. “We don’t know that we’re alone here,” Izzy whispered. “Come on, quietly.”
Her fingers fell from Tisper’s mouth and Izzy took her hand instead, leading her through rough brush and all of the spidery little tree limbs that snagged her by the clothes and hair, and scraped crudely against her bare skin. Tisper hated the wilderness. Hated it. For every step, she swore she was crawling with spiders and beetles and earwigs galore.
But all of the things going on were so much bigger than bugs, so Tisper didn’t bother to wipe the crawly feeling away. She reached behind for Matt instead, just to make sure he wouldn’t get lost; a three-person chain as she felt his fingers slip between her own. She did miss that about Matt. He had the warmest hands.
Somehow, in the jet black thicket, Izzy knew the darkness like she spoke its language. She’d say things like “watch your step” and “mind the moss” and Tisper and Matthew would skirt around the invisible hazards, clinging on tight to one another.
She led them to a small clearing—a spot where trees wouldn’t grow beyond the flat, rocky sediment. Standing in a circle were Bailey and Elizaveta, Quentin bent at the knees in front of something. It wasn’t until the clouds parted and the light of the moon cast its mellow glow on the situation, that Tisper saw the long, coarse tail and the pale yellow eyes she’d come to recognize too well.
She let go of Izzy’s hand for fear of the animal’s respective space. Especially when it growled the way it did—low and resounding, but clipped at the end with something sharp and painful.
Quentin was tending to him with something—something he pulled from the black backpack at his feet. Tisper hadn’t even seen him take it when he left the car. Maybe Bailey had been smart enough to bring it at the last second.
Whatever it was, Quentin scooped it from a jar with gloved fingers, and the muddy substance glittered in the moonlight as he applied it to the beast, who suffered every deep, gusty breath.
“What is it?” Tisper asked.
Matt lifted his hat from his head and fanned himself with the bill, his sweaty brown locks stuck to his forehead. It was easily fifty degrees out, but Matthew was the kinda guy who sweat like a butcher under stress. “Or who is it?” he asked.
“Dylan,” Izzy said. “One of the younger Salem Sentinels.”
Tisper could hear Quentin speaking, crouched low over the animal as he worked the paste into its coat. The animal shuddered beneath him, vented out a hoarse sigh. Then Bailey was knelt too, holding the wolf up at the neck, inches from the ground so that Quentin could reach beneath with his bandages. He tied it around the wolf’s belly, ripped the gauze with his teeth and pinned it to place.
The wolf lifted its head, simpered as he tried to his feet. And Quentin brushed a hand down muzzle, into the bristly tufts of his forechest. “Down,” he said. “Stay down. We’ll carry you.”
Tisper watched the moon, glinting from the wolf’s eyes. He looked up to Quentin—just stared. But in that silence, he was saying something and Quentin was replying with words:
“What?”
“How many?”
“It’s not too deep. You won’t need a cleric; I’ll take you home to Kamilla.”
“Is he… talking to him?” Tisper asked. “Can you hear each other when you’re not…you know, people?”
Izzy seemed so stuck to the conversation, it took her a moment to pull away from her eavesdropping and a little too long to answer. “Yes. He’s saying that all the sentinels and patrols were accosted. Well, arrested more like. By the East.”
Matt finally let go of Tisper’s hand—probably because he’d forgotten he was holding it all this time. Or maybe it slipped out all on it’s own, as clammy with sweat as it was. “Everyone but him?” he asked.
“Everyone but him. Taken in silver barb cuffs.”
“Silver?” Matt awed. “So it is like the folk stories.”
“No,” Izzy said. “Silver doesn’t kill us any easier than other metals. But it burns like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It’s like…like rubbing salt in an open wound. Before the new age of our civilization, it was used as a torture method. Y’know, to keep the werewolf society underground. The queen at the time—she used fear tactics to bury our people beneath myths and legends. And it worked. Everyone feared the silver so much, for decades we were never exposed to a single human.
“But, the thing about silver…If you aren’t wounded, you won’t feel a thing. The metal has to come in contact with open nerves. That’s why the military here—the Sentinels. We’re meant to carry silver barb cuffs. They’re cuffs with tiny little thorns that cut into the wrist. Even the tiniest little scrape and it’s like you’re on fire.”
“So you’ve used them?” Tisper was horrified at the thought. Like mace for the flesh.
“No. We’re meant to carry them. But Quentin hates them. He hates the thought of hurting our own kind.” Her beautiful round eyes sought Tisper and Izzy’s little smile bloomed bright again. “I mean, it’s Quentin. He hates the thought of hurting anyone.”
Tisper watched him in the blue embrace of the moon—the tall, broad outline of him as he rose from his knees, the wolf draped over the back of his shoulders, long sugar-brown tail curling around his neck like a scarf. The wolf could lift his head now, but he opted to lay it against Quentin’s shoulder. It was an act of trust. They all trusted Quentin.
Something howled in the distance and Tisper felt the sudden urge to clutch for Matt’s hand again. The wolf’s ears perked to the noise, and relaxed back flat against his head.
Tisper edged in closer to Izzy. “Was that—”
“No, not one of us. But that sound means we need to go.”
“What was it?” Matt asked, stepping in on the other side.
“A gray. A real one, not one of our kind. She knows we’re here, she’s telling us to leave. This must be tender territory for them.”
“A real wolf?” Tisper asked. “You can hear them too?”
“Not really, but we’ve come to understand their intentions. Wolves—real wolves—they’re kind of like deities to us,” Izzy said. “We don’t speak their language but they understand us. There are stories of them taking in our wounded. Fighting alongside our men. Any one of us could walk up to a gray and pet their coat, play with their children. They trust us and we trust them. But Quentin—they don’t take kindly to him.”
“Izzy,” Bailey snapped from the distance, “come on.”
They’d nearly been left behind, Quentin and Elizaveta and the wolf gone to the darkness. Izzy took both of their hands this time, led them in the path of Bailey, to the gap in the trees he’d disappeared through.
“I don’t understand,” Tisper whispered, quietly, because she wasn’t quite sure how far he could hear. “What is it about Quentin they don’t like?”
“From what I know, his father was a hunter who sold the pelts for a pretty penny. Quentin was born in the blood of Eurasian wolves. I think it kind of put a curse on him in a way.” She ducked beneath a low hanging branch, yanking Tisper down just a bit so she’d miss a wack in the face. “It’s natural, you know. To fear your alpha. But being around Quentin kind of feels like death. He’s been surrounded by so much bad all his life. It’s like the smell of it sticks to him. It’s abnormal.”
Tisper shuddered. Partly from the cold, partly from the thought of becoming the very thing your father killed and skinned for a living. “Jaylin always said that being near him freaked him out. But you don’t act like it bothers you much.”
“Used to, a lot,” Izzy said. “I’ve gotten used to that feeling but it’s still there. Every time I’m around him, like this dark anxiety. That feeling like something bad’s about to happen. That feeling is Quentin. It doesn’t feel that way to you?”
Tisper shook her head and resisted the urge to wipe the cold from her arms. “No. Not at all. He feels…safe.”
Matt, reached above to shove a branch out of Tisper’s way, wood splintering under the strength of his grip. “Yeah, doesn’t really seem like a bad guy.”
“Maybe it’s only his influence on us.”
“Do you think that’ll change for him? For Jaylin? Once he turns, will he feel that way?” Tisper ducked under his arm, cringing when she felt that skittering-spider sensation on her neck.
“Why wouldn’t he?” Izzy asked, meeting her eyes for the smallest second in the dark. Tisper wanted to speak out, say something like because that’s not how love stories are supposed to end, but she sucked her words back in. It was Jaylin’s business who he cared about. What he did with his own heart. She just hoped he wasn’t out to ruin himself again.
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