on it being. Where there should have been the free, rushing pulse of my mother’s realm there was only the chill and the shade of shadows and winter.
I fell under a weight of fur and claws and breath like a blizzard. Covering my face with my broken arm was the least bad option I had available, since it freed up my other hand to stab with the iron dagger I’d retrieved from the grounds of Safernoc and somehow managed to keep with me through all the ice and the nearly drowning and the failed attempts at being sneaky. Iron did jack shit to werewolves, but a spike was a spike and I was vaguely hoping that it would neutralise some of the King-Queen’s power, like it had when I stuck Sebastian Douglas.
Bringing the weapon up as hard as I could, I rammed it into the wolf’s collarbone just as it was doing its best to turn my injured arm into a missing one. Its blood sprayed across me still warm, unlike its breath. Out of some frankly yicky instinct that I entirely blamed on my heritage, I licked it from my lips, and tasted power. The King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter had said the werewolves once belonged to my mother. On some primal level they were of the wild, as I was. I rode the taste of blood down hunter’s trails and wolf-dens into the very depths of the forest and I found a strength that came from hunger and passion and the chase.
Letting go of the dagger, I took the wolf by the back of its head and moved my arm deeper into its jaws, making it snarl and twist away. The way of the wild was pure. You were hunter or you were prey. The little lord-lady of this place did not understand, with his-her contracts and bargains, oaths and promises. But some rights could never be signed away, some compacts never broken. There was one law that mattered, and it was red and sharp and bold.
I stood in the red-spattered snow and the beast cowered before me.
“Submit.” My voice was my own in part, but not in whole. Somewhere, far away, through the screaming and the wind, through the nightmares and the chill of the dark, my mother laughed on a bed of bones.
To my very real surprise and my mother’s joy, the wolf shrank back on its haunches, and then transformed into a woman with glass in her eyes and blood on her cheeks. She sat on her knees with her head bowed. There was something strange about the scent of her—her mind was still not her own, but her blood responded to the old laws. My mother’s voice told me to kill her. As an example to the others. For having the temerity to oppose us. For her weakness. Another and thankfully louder voice said that this was a person with a name—looking at her I thought it was the other half of Tuffy and Smudge—who we were here to rescue. It wasn’t what my mother wanted, but since she was close to being objectively evil, that didn’t especially bother me.
That still left three more wolves—scratch that, two more. Tara and her granny had double-teamed one as she came in—umm, in a violence way, not in a sex way—and were now turning to the ones that remained. Watching werewolves fight in a group was always a spooky experience. I’d never been one for teamwork of any kind, being very much a do my own thing, blaze my own trail, get all my friends brutally murdered, kind of girl. Still, watching the wolves move, watching them read each other’s movements and anticipate each other’s needs like they were one mind in two bodies made me almost wish I’d learned to be better at sharing. If I hadn’t been looking at my sort-of girlfriend and her grandma, I’d have wondered what it was like when two of them fucked.
The downed wolf was stirring. The problem fighting supernatural beings was that they were often impossible to permanently disable unless you happened to know their one outlandishly specific weakness. Well that or chop them up into little bits, which worked on most things. I strode towards it with more confidence than I probably should have had and caught it by the scruff of the neck. Fortunately for operation don’t get horribly mauled, whatever echoes of the Deepwild I’d tapped into with Smudge’s blood were still with me,