This arrow arched up, piercing the beast in the neck. It was hard to tell how deep it had penetrated, but the liquid left the vial and the beast threw its head back with a piercing wail. It ripped away from Quentin, leaving him bleeding and clutching at the fresh hole in his shoulder.
Tisper slid from the back of the beast and the jump left her stumbling to her knees, but it freed her monstrous steed to move faster. It charged across wet grass, flinging mud from its hands and rain from its coat. And it hit the first beast with such impact they both tumbled into the garden fence—collapsing the wood, breaking the planks in half.
Tisper pushed herself up, ran barefoot in the grass to Matthew and he caught her just as she flung her arms around him. “Matt.”
“Tisper, holy shit.” He hugged her close, ran a hand through her drowned hair. “Is that him? Is that Jaylin?”
She dropped her arms from around him, but not entirely. She still hung to his shoulder, nodding, nodding wildly. Her eyes found Jaylin across the yard, long, deadly fangs gleaming in the red of the moon. He had his claws in the face of the first beast, tearing the skin down its eye to the angry curl of its mouth.
The beast swung back, ripping him down the shoulder. The screams that came from them both—the voices that somehow still lingered beneath the cords of the creatures, it made Tisper’s legs go out again. She couldn’t even cry Jaylin’s name, she shook so badly. She dropped to the ground and watched in the distance as Jaylin slammed the monster into the earth.
They fought the way brutish animals would. Slow but powerful swings of their claws, teeth long and sharp and effulgent, snapping at one another—striking for flesh in any place their fangs could reach. Each hit held an impact—a shock wave that carried through the air like the sound of a baseball, struck by a bat. Each hit so hard, she could hear it echo from every direction of the cloud-clustered sky.
Then the beast struck Jaylin on the jaw—three long claws tearing down his neck.
He thundered a guttural roar and reached for the creature’s face, claws crushing its skull as he brought it to the ground. It fought beneath him, but the poison from the arrows had slowed it down. Jaylin was much too fast now, and bowing in, he opened his jaws—sunk his teeth into the flesh of its neck. And Tisper heard a snap so loud, she could feel it vibrate in her bones, in her fingers and her toes.
And the beast stopped moving beneath him.
Felix was helping Quentin to his feet, shoving the gun into his hands. “Get out of here,” he urged, but Quentin didn’t budge. He was blanched, rooted to the ground beneath him.
Jaylin had raised his head, blood dripping from his jagged teeth. His moonlight eyes found the faces a distance away and he trotted up the grassy incline. The wolves stood at bay, fur risen on their spines, but Jaylin paid them no mind. His frightening eyes searched the faces of each person until they found Quentin. And it was like something in him clicked. They set, eerily focused on him. So still and unblinking, those wide, empty orbs. And then Jaylin charged.
Quentin gave Felix a shove away, one hand gripping his wound, the other raising the pistol, shaking uncontrollably as his finger found the trigger.
“Don’t!” Tisper was screaming, but her voice was washed by the sound of thunder.
The earth jarred under Jaylin’s heavy footsteps, each one stamping deep down into the mud. He shot across the lawn, the ground moving quickly under his feet. Every leap hurdled himself forward faster, and the way he ran was almost primate—hands and feet beating against the drenched earth in steady succession.
He slid on the wet ground as he came to a stall just in front of the pistol. So closely that Quentin stumbled back and fell into the grass, his gun still raised to the snout of the beast. His finger still shaking over the trigger. And Jaylin snarled—a small sound, but enough to make Quentin jump—enough to make him nearly drop the gun.
Jaylin didn’t move any closer. His ears perked, his snarl relaxed, and the cursed thing blinked slowly, sealing those yellow eyes shut, lowering his head until it nestled against the gun. And the giant creature bunted the weapon like an affectionate house cat, rubbing against the barrel with the broad front of his forehead. Then against the hand that held it.
Tisper wasn’t sure what it was Quentin heard. If Jaylin was speaking to him some way, or if there was more to it. If there was another way he recognized him. But slowly, much too slowly, Quentin lowered the gun to the ground. Then he raised his hand, caked in mud and blood, and ran his trembling fingers up the bridge of the lichund’s nose.
“Jaylin.” His words were nearly a gasp—like all at once, he couldn’t breathe or speak. Only stare.
And then one of his sharp, canine ears flicked back, and Jaylin raised his head in alert.
Someone approached from the fog—the cut of a woman slicing the bleary distance. From the shapes of the creatures at her sides, Matt feared it was Ziya. That she’d come back to see the mess her creature had made. But as she neared, a long mane of dark hair fell down over her shoulders, silken black like spider webs. He’d never seen hair so long—but it reached nearly beyond her knees, and it swayed with every elegant step she took.
She was dark, like Ziya—a rich, roasted skin that glistened in the ambiance of the moon. She wore red on her lips, black around her eyes, and nothing more than a t-shirt, so large on her that it draped on past her thighs.
She treaded grass with a black wolf at either heel and as she neared, there was a sound—a soft steady rumble. The lichund, his flesh and fur dark as night, had taken a stance over Quentin, head low and the coarse hair on his back rising on end. And the closer she neared, the louder he snarled, crouching protectively over his wounded alpha.
The wolves had all lowered to the ground, chins in the damp earth, ears flat on their skulls. Imani and Felix and the sentinels in human form—the ones who could at least—bent on one knee, knelt to the dark woman in the fog.
It was so silent, Tisper couldn’t hear the frogs croak—the ones that thrived in this place at night. It was like this woman took the air from everything she passed.
Matt helped Tisper to her feet and she swept her bow from the ground, held it to her chest for the same reason he clutched so tightly to his shotgun. There was something about this woman. She filled the air with electricity, made the hair on their arms stand on end.
Rain flushed her shirt and the cotton stuck to her skin, but it was as if she didn’t notice it at all. Like she deflected the rain—walked the storm like a ghost, floated like a beckoned spirit.
Not a word was said, not a sound was made. The woman leisured to the center of them all, looked around to the faces, to the wolves, to the large, beastly body that bloodied the grass. And then to Jaylin. She approached him, just as slowly as she’d come.
Tisper could feel her heart in her throat. “Don’t hurt him!”
The woman turned her head, looked over her shoulder to her. Her silken hair spilled down her back and hung at her spine. Jaylin still snarled, but he was relaxing slowly to her presence. Unmoving from his stance above Quentin, who laid back with his bleeding wound, each short breath seeming to cut him deeper.
The woman turned and walked past Jaylin, and as she did, her fingers dipped into the sides of his fur, raked along his dark pelt. And it was as if every seam in his flesh had been undone at once, and like the wolves, Jaylin burst to blood—to a shower of it. So dense, it looked as if the sky opened up, rained carnage down on the earth. On Quentin, who turned his head and spat the blood from his mouth. And Jaylin landed hard against his chest—a fragment of what he was a moment ago. Only flesh now, only human.
The woman had strolled a circle around the corpse of the first beast, her wolves following step for step. And she made her way slowly back to Quentin—so slowly, like she couldn’t feel the icy rain or the wind billowing back her endlessly black hair. She stood in front of him, observing the situation with unmoving eyes.
Quentin sat up with Jaylin limp against his chest, and there was something about the look on his face that was almost childlike. An uncertainty—a fear. Something that froze him when the woman reached for Jaylin and Quentin’s arms tightened around his pale, slender body.
She paused, and for the first time, Matthew heard her voice, rich and regal—much deeper than he expected from the sight of her and the size of her small frame.
“Enough of that,” she said, “I won’t take him from you.”
Quentin looked to the boy in his arms and loosened his hold enough that he allowed her to touch Jaylin. To turn him somewhat perpendicular, so his head fell to Quentin’s wounded shoulder and he gritted from the pain of it. She observed his face—now free of the curse that blackened his skin, but ravaged instead by the gashes on his jaw. The ones on his shoulder.
“Qamar,” Imani rose now, from her knelt position. But before she could say another word, the woman held out a hand.
“I know of my sister’s misdeeds.”
One of the sentinels—one of the women who’d turned, she too rose. “What will this mean for us?”
They all began to rise after that. The stranger hovered over each face, slowly from one to the next. “I need to speak with the council,” she said. Then she turned away from them all and walked on. “For now, rest easy. And don’t use witches to call on me again,” she added. “They’re much too loud.”
And as if she could even silence the clouds, the rain slowed to a stop as the woman made her leave—treading the grass to the vehicle parked at the edge of the road. A man leaned against the passenger door, dressed as casually as the woman herself. His chest exposed beneath the undone buttons of his shirt.
He opened the passenger door for the woman and the back for her wolves, then rounded the car himself—but there was something about the look on his face that didn’t sit well with Tisper. Something about the smirk he gave.
Once she was gone, it was like the world had taken a single harmonized breath, the birds and the trees and the wolves and the men, relaxing their bones in one deep integrated exhale. The red moon still bled its blight on the world, but what bad could it do that it hadn’t already done?
Jaylin laid there, blond hair rusted red, blood pooling in the shallow of his collarbone, in the shell of his ears. Even sticking to his lashes. Matt followed Tisper to him, shedding his jacket from his shoulders, blanketing it over the body that laid so limp in Quentin’s arms.
Tisper knelt, combed her fingers through his cold, wet hair. “He’s pale. Paler than usual.”
“He lost a lot of blood,” Quentin said. “We all do, but they…they lose too much.”
Matt found the wound in his shoulder—large and deep, a hole bludgeoned to the very bone. “How are you not dead right now?”
“It’s harder than you’d imagine, to kill a wolf.” Imani stepped forth and stretched her arms over her head in satisfaction as if this all had only been an exercise to test her grit.
It was a sight, her disciplined body, wet and sheening in the moonlight. And as she stretched, Tisper caught the way Matt stared. She took him by the jaw and wrenched his head back in the direction ofJaylin.
“Not the time.”
“Should get ’em to a medic,” Felix joined them, arm limp at his side. He winced and watched it dangle. “I could use one too.”
But without so much as a warning, Imani took it roughly in her hands, pushed into his shoulder with one palm, pulled harshly with the other. And Felix shouted as his shoulder was shoved back into the socket, cursing with the emphatic ire of that Scottish tongue. “Bitch,” he hissed as she ambled off. He blew through his nose with a deep exhale and watched her go, giving his shoulder a stretch. “Gods, she’s sexy.”
In the distraction of it all, the wolves had turned human, and the maids were rushing out towels by the armful—ones already red in color. Izzy wrapped one around her chest, her hair hanging damp over her shoulders. The red of the moon ate up every bit of blue in her eyes.
“Quentin, that lichund…” she nearly whispered. “Something was different.”
“I know.”
“What?” Tisper asked, gnawing at the nail of her thumb. “What was different?”
“She was stronger,” Quentin said.
Izzy nearly burst to say it, “So much stronger than the others we’ve faced.”
“One bullet was all it took for—” Felix had gone too far by the time he caught Quentin’s eyes. He stopped and recomposed his words. “Usually it only takes one. I shot it three—four times, even.”
“I thought I broke a tooth just popping into its flesh,” Izzy said. “Something’s not right here.”
Tisper didn’t mind the light rain, soaking down the front of her shirt. It wasn’t the coldest thing she felt. “Maybe Ziya wasn’t only trying to eradicate them. Maybe she was…using them.”
“For what?” Izzy asked.
Quentin sat up fully, Jaylin rocking limp against the hollow of his throat. He searched down Jaylin’s arm until he found his hand—for the first time human, truly human. He lifted it, held the pallid flesh of his wrist to the moonlight, watched the pale forest of blue veins that ran down. Traced the faint pulse of them under his thumb.
Tisper saw the words sitting in his throat, but Quentin would never say them. Maybe for fear that they would ignite something new, that they would set blaze to a new evil looming in the distance.
For once, she was thankful for his silence.
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