Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,29
that look like rubies in the shape of pears and a handful of bell-like magenta flowers that bob in his hand even when he comes to a stop, as if they’re drifting in their own innate breeze. “It’ll just take a moment,” he promises me.
He dumps his entire haul into a bowl and mashes it together with the energetic pounding of a pestle. He adds a little water from the kitchen faucet, mashes some more, and brings the gloopy mess over to me. “Ready?”
My heart has started thumping as if this was a perilous mission rather than a makeover, and it seems abruptly absurd that this linebacker of a man is going to deliver a dye job, but I’ve come this far. “Ready,” I agree, willing my voice not to shake.
He has to sit even closer to me to work the gloop into my hair, his fingers massaging my scalp and spreading the concoction down through the strands, which still fall to about an inch past my shoulders. When he speaks one of those hushed, melodic words to enhance the dye’s effects, his breath washes over my neck again. The fluttering heat returns to my chest, traveling lower in my belly in a way I’m not sure I like.
There’s no chance he’s feeling anything like that about me. I’m a pitiful prisoner he’s trying to make himself feel better about keeping locked away.
I don’t want to enjoy the tender press of his fingers. I don’t want to like him at all.
Whatever his reasons, he is being nice to me—extraordinarily nice. Maybe there’s a way I can take advantage of that so I can get away from here and all these unwanted feelings ASAP.
I didn’t want Whitt looking at me like I was pathetic, but I suspect August is more likely to cooperate if I play up the pitifulness with him. I’m nervous enough about broaching this subject that my voice comes out wavery without any need to feign it.
“August… can I ask you something?”
He kneads more of the dye into a patch of hair at the back of my skull and then eases it out through the rest of the strands there. “Of course. What is it?”
My hands ball in my lap. “I know the reason this Aerik guy kept me and the reason you all wanted me too has something to do with my blood. What’s so—what’s so special about it? I just want to understand why all this has happened to me.”
My words break toward the end. Suddenly I’m choked up, through no act, just honest emotion.
What could possibly have been worth all the other blood spilled, the screams that echo in my memory, the years crouched in that filthy cage? Or maybe to faeries it doesn’t need to be all that big a deal to justify that kind of violence.
August’s hands have gone still. He pauses for a moment, and then he says, in a more subdued tone than usual, “We don’t really understand it either. We only know what it does.”
“And what’s that?”
He inhales slowly. “I think I heard Sylas tell you that we can transform into wolves?”
I nod, suppressing the cringe accompanying the images that rise up in my head. “He did.”
“Well, it used to be, a long time ago when I wasn’t even of age yet, that the shift was always under our control. It felt right to let our wolves out under the full moon, but we didn’t have to, and we were just as much ourselves if we did. Then that started to change. We would shift even if we didn’t want to. And when we did, on those full-moon nights, our wolves would go wild.”
“Wild?”
“Savage.” August grimaces. “Nothing in us but the urge to fight and destroy. Like some kind of curse, but we have no idea what might be responsible or how. And the wildness has taken over us for longer and more violently as the years passed. These days, the full moon makes us more like monsters than wolves.”
Another memory flits through my mind: hulking, furred shapes lunging out of the shadows. Monsters, indeed.
“That’s awful,” I say, restraining a shudder.
“It is. But for most of the Seelie, the ones with a decent amount of favor among our peers, it hasn’t been so bad for the last several years. Aerik started selling a tonic that if drunk would either prevent the wildness or halt it if it’d already taken over, clear the folk’s heads. And as far as we can