he listened to his own heart pounding, her lips on his ear. Her voice, soft and beautiful and animal, rasping straight into his soul.
“No.”
She let go. He staggered. She took a step back. He reeled.
Her eyes were like pools of glittering darkness, marooned in a bone-white face. The kind of beautiful specter that lured a person into shadows, into nightmares.
She didn’t say anything else.
Instead she kept retreating, while Lukasz stood, stunned. And suddenly, like mist off a river at night, she became indistinct, almost nebulous. And suddenly his fantasy that she was a specter, a monster, a vila, a witch . . . it all became much more reasonable than the alternative. Because she was not human. She had melted, she had shifted, and she had simply faded away. You have an appetite for monsters. She never actually moved, was just accompanied by all the secret sounds of the river. And then Lukasz was looking at black trees and he could barely believe there had ever been anyone there at all.
And they for you.
Eryk
THREE YEARS EARLIER
LUKASZ AND JAREK MET THE other three brothers just under the eaves of the mayor’s house. They looked imposing, army caps pulled low on their foreheads, fur-collared greatcoats slick with rain.
Now that he was the oldest brother, Eryk was in charge. Certainly the most lupine of them all, he had always been fond of the bottle and the beautiful things that winked at handsome men from smoky shadows.
Now he checked a silver pocket watch before stowing it in his coat.
“Two minutes to spare,” he said. “Cutting it close.”
“They wanted photographs,” said Lukasz, out of breath.
Eryk raised an eyebrow.
“Well, if they’d wanted good ones, they should have asked Anzelm,” he said before striding up the front steps to knock on the door.
Anzelm rolled his eyes, but they all knew Eryk was right. Anzelm was the handsomest of the Wolf-Lords.
The five of them had just slain a pair of Tannimi scuttling shipping boats in Granica Harbor. The mayor’s house loomed overhead, in white stone with arched, blue-tinted windows. The Granica flag flew from the topmost floor, and the second story was flanked by statues of mermaids.
The door swung open, and a maid curtsied.
“You still smell like fish,” murmured Franciszek as they filed inside.
“We smell like courage,” replied Lukasz.
The mayor of Granica was a powerful man. His city controlled the import of goods; his city welcomed the drab ships of the west and gorgeous ships of the east; his city weighed and measured the cargoes with cranes; his city produced the most capable of engineers and the wickedest of privateers; his city shipped out the great salt blocks that kept the Miasto nobility draped in jewels and lace.
And the mayor was jealous of the Wolf-Lords. They were near the ages of his own disappointing sons. According to the Granica gossips, the mayor had looked into five dark faces and five pairs of sharp blue eyes, and he had envied them. Resented them.
And so, under his direction, the celebratory dinner, held in the opulence of amber-paneled rooms in the gatehouse’s upper floors, took an unexpected turn. Between the soup and the entrées, the mayor clapped his hands. Double doors opened at the end of the amber room, and his attendants entered. Lukasz froze, midway through a generous glass of vodka.
Noises of awe and fear echoed in the sparkling room.
The mayor’s attendants carried a cage of amber. Candlelight glanced off the carvings at its crown, caught the herbs trailing down the delicate bars. Linden tree leaves lined the bottom of the cage. Lukasz assumed they were merely decoration. And inside, of all things—
“Is that a vila?” he murmured to Franciszek.
At the head of the table, the mayor smiled. His two sons watched, eyes narrowed.
Lukasz was riveted on her, whatever she was. Her blue-white hair swept the bottom of the cage. Her arms were wrapped around shaking knees. Her face was bent away from them. Her shoulders trembled. In the stifling heat of the room, she emitted a chilly kind of glow. She was light, she was monochrome, she was beauty.
She was fear.
Thick enough to taste. Bitter enough to choke on.
“A challenge.” The mayor steepled his fingers, blew smoke rings at the ceiling. “It would seem that a common dragon is no match for a Wolf-Lord. Why not something a little more . . . sophisticated?”
Nervous laughter around the table. None from the brothers. Eryk spoke.
“We’re supposed to kill her?”
The laughter died. One of his sons, thin and blond, pushed back