would do the trick.”
Panic blares through me with a shriller edge. I struggle twice as hard, as hopeless as it feels. The grizzly hefts me up in his arms like I’m weightless, one arm dropping to catch my legs, and then I’m bundled tight against him, barely able to move. I swing back my head, one of the few parts of me not clamped in place, and my skull slams into my kidnapper’s jaw.
He lets out the faintest of grunts, his grip not loosening in the slightest. “Kill her, and there goes the supply. We’ll take her—now. But we need her pliant to get her out of here unnoticed. August, the blanking grip.”
“But—”
The next word is a snarl. “Now.”
I wriggle in his hold like a fish wrapped in a net, my head whipping back and forth, but it’s not enough. The man with the warm, boyish face steps up beside the grizzly and presses his hand to the crook of my neck. As he says a quiet but emphatic word, his thumb and forefinger pinch and squeeze—and my awareness snuffs out into blackness.
3
Sylas
The moon is on the rise. Even with it hidden beyond the oaks and pines around us, I’m aware of every fraction of its journey to scale the horizon. The prickling energy of its full-faced state carries on the warm evening breeze alongside the green and musky scents of the forest and the beasts that live in it. Once, the ghostly impressions beyond regular sight that sometimes seep through my deadened eye show a glimpse of it like a translucent afterimage superimposed against the shadows.
Far too soon, that round white circle will be completely exposed in the darkening sky. With every passing minute, its energy niggles deeper into my bones.
I don’t like it. I don’t like the turn our mission took or how much time we had to spend departing Aerik’s fortress with our unexpected cargo. I thought we’d be hurrying off with a sheaf of papers or a notebook or two, ideally after downing a vial of the tonic. We’d have moved faster and had more advantage of stealth in our wolfish forms. We wouldn’t have needed to worry about that moon.
But there were no vials remaining in the fortress. Aerik and his pack must have taken this month’s entire batch to distribute. And while our cargo isn’t much more than a slip of a creature, she’s still significantly more unwieldly than a book.
Aerik and his cadre will know someone broke in. The pottery Kellan smashed—accidentally, he said, but the bastard can be fastidiously careful when it suits him—would have told the story well enough even if we weren’t absconding with an entire human girl they were keeping locked away. The last thing I want is to add our names to that story. No one can know it was Sylas and his cadre who stole the secret of the tonic, not until we’ve decided exactly how we’re going to leverage that secret in our favor.
So, we had to make awkward use of one of the faded pack member’s wheelbarrows and some hasty concealment spells, and now we’re tramping through the forest an hour later than we were meant to be returning to our carriage. Which means we’re an hour closer to the moment when the full moon’s energy overwhelms us completely.
There’s no telling what we might do then. Whether we’d spare the girl or savage her or misplace her in the woods. Whether we’d rage deeper into the woods or back out into the open fields where Aerik’s pack might spot us on their return. If we don’t make it away from this foray in time, we’ll manage to fall even farther in standing than we already have, and that catastrophe will be on my shoulders too.
August is carrying the girl now, slung over his shoulder, still limp from his magic-enhanced touch. With her ratty blanket wrapped around most of her scrawny form, she bears an uncomfortable resemblance to a sack of bones—and a half-empty one at that. The pink ridges of scarring that mottle one of her knobby shoulders bear testament to a more brutal savaging than the cut on her wrist some time in her past—a savaging that appears to have come with a gouging of wolfish fangs.
This is the key to Aerik’s surge in prestige, to all the favor he’s curried in the past several years, and he’s treated her with less dignity than I’d subject my worst enemy to. Starved, hunched, and filthy,