other side of the path where a rocky mountain juts upward, blocking any possible new routes for us to take.
Studying my hands, the spark of magic dances about furiously. Something is wrong here.
“Is everything okay?” Stone asks, staring at me with narrowing eyes.
Lowering my voice, I say, “I’m not sure. I can’t see any spells, but my magic is bouncing about inside me like it detects something. Can you sense anything?” I ask, my gaze shifting to his collarbone where the top of his tattoo no longer glows.
He shakes his head.
“What’s going on?” Crius asks, his impatience grating on my nerves.
“Just hold your horses,” I say, glancing over my shoulder. Nikos and Ragnar wait patiently, while Crius is acting all jumpy, his arms folded over his chest, then he drops them by his sides. His feet never stop moving, even if it’s to pace in a tight circle. What the hell is going on with him?
“Trust your instinct,” Stone tells me. “Where does it tell us to go?”
I look back at him. “It tells me to get the hell off this path, except this is the only way forward.”
10
Stone
Narah stares down at her hands, looking so lost and confused, and my insides constrict to see her this way. Despite her bravery and strong words, I can’t help but wonder if she’s new to magic. She’s extremely timid when it comes to using her ability… or maybe I’m used to everyone boasting about themselves at every opportunity.
But she’s also all we’ve got. Ragnar has been searching for a witch to help us for months, but they aren’t exactly just wandering around freely. Most wolves despise and fear them, so they are killed on sight. But a Cursed is very different… half-wolf, half-witch, and from what I’ve seen, they have limitations on both their powers and the strength of their wolves, but they still wield it at every chance they get. They straddle both worlds, never really fitting into one completely. And I see that struggle on Narah’s face. She knows very well the world would spit her out, so she lives on the fringes.
Hell, I shouldn’t feel pity for her, but I do. The way she looks around for an answer, the way her hands shake… yet the power that comes off them has so much potential.
A tingle flares over the runes on my body. They were inked on my flesh when I turned five, a ritual on my mother’s side. Her family carries the ability to tap into the power of runes, and the best way to hold onto the skill is to have them marked on my skin. A talent that took me years to learn, and even then, it’s minuscule in comparison to the power of a Cursed, let alone a witch.
It’s the part of me Father detests. He calls it a woman’s power and scoffs in my presence. At the age of eight, I found my mother’s rune stones, and the moment I touched them, I called for a tree to sprout up in the middle of our home, tearing it apart at the foundations. Yeah, it was fucked up, and then my father fucked me up. He broke two ribs, fractured my skull, and physically threw me out of his house. That’s when I went to live with Ragnar’s family.
My father is a piece of trash, and it’s one of the many reasons I jumped at the chance to claim new territory with Ragnar and leave Denmark.
The gods gave you the power for a reason, Mother would tell me, but that didn’t change a damn thing, now did it?
I exhale loudly, letting go of the past, and instead, I refocus on Narah.
Her shoulders curl forward in concentration, then she jerks her head up toward me with a newfound confidence. “We have no choice but to take the path.” Without waiting, she steps onto the dirt road and starts ahead of us.
If nothing else, I will say the girl has balls of steel… and she does have a curvy, gorgeous ass too, from this view.
“That river better be over this hill or I’ll fucking dig into the ground and make my own river,” Crius goes on while Nikos laughs at him.
“I’d like to see you do that.”
Ragnar is especially quiet, like he’s worried too that perhaps we jumped the gun too quickly to rush in here with Narah. I fall back a step so he catches up to me.
“Is this going to work?” I ask him quietly.
He