These woods were familiar, gnawing away at my fuzzy memories. Rubbing my head, I got slowly to my feet and glanced around.
Where the bloody hell was I? I frowned.
It was daylight out, there were clouds in the sky, and small blue birds wheeled through the air. A campfire crackled somewhere nearby, and the rush of a gurgling brook pricked at my ears.
I was in a meadow of gently rolling hills that burst with yellow wild flowers in full bloom.
I sniffed. There was a smell in the air.
Metallic. Sweet. Death.
My lip curled back, and the sound of the wolf vibrated through my throat. Before I knew it, I was running up the banking hill, pumping my arms and legs, as the thick scent of blood grew richer. Once I’d reached the hilltop, I saw a thatched roof hut and the quick buzz and blur of fairies zipping high above me in manic flight.
I blinked, feeling a niggle of a memory starting to worm its way through. I stared at the woodshed beside the hut, at the claw marks running down its door, and the bubbling cauldron resting over a fire.
I had been here before, hadn’t I?
But where exactly was here? It wasn’t purgatory. It was someplace altogether different.
There were screams. Terrible, horrible screams. My skin ran cold, and I was blazing a trail toward the hut, not sure what I would do, but knowing I had to get there.
Only, just as I was about to reach its door, I saw a blur of red fly past me. It was her. I knew even without seeing her that it was the witch who’d killed me every night. Somehow, she and I were trapped in this new place.
I rubbed at my ribs, fingers running over the spot where, each night, I’d been flayed open. There was nothing beneath my fingertips now but smooth, hot skin. And even as I searched my heart for the burning anger and injustice I’d felt about it, I realized with a queer start that the emotion was entirely gone from me.
I was not angry in this world. I was only… lost. Confused. So I followed her, and then stood in the doorway as I watched the scene unfold, one I was sure I’d seen once before.
A fairy, dressed all in green, with long, flowing white hair, lay on the ground. A beast the size of a large boulder was sitting on top of her, savaging her corpse, for the fairy was most assuredly dead.
I recognized that wolf, and a shiver coursed all the way through me.
The sounds of bones breaking and meat tearing were horrible things to hear. I winced, watching as that dark monster devoured her. Beside the wolf was another, a large red one, and it was growling menacingly at a small red bundle huddled against a corner of the wall. But the bundle wasn’t clothes. It was a woman. A small woman.
The red wolf advanced, padding on silent feet, its steps sure, its intent clear as day. The red bundle wept and screamed.
Something inside of me turned hot and explosive. I looked around, noting that the fairies were just standing by, staring dumb struck at the carnage, clearly in shock. But if they didn’t do something quickly, the innocent woman in red would be murdered as surely as the green fairy had been.
Moving lightning quick, I shoved at the red beast. “Get away from her!” I thundered, not sure how I knew that it was a her, but I knew. Deep in the very fiber of my bones, I knew that red cloak hid the body of a female.
But where I should have encountered fur and muscle, I felt nothing other than air. I cried out, windmilling as I tried to right myself, confused as to how I’d moved right through the monster.
My hands planted gracefully on the floor, seconds before my face hit. And I trembled with an epiphany.
The scene was not real.
I was not here.
Or maybe… I was, but no one other than me knew it? Was this, then, another form of purgatory, different from the last but just as endless?
“Who… who are you?” A voice that made me think of cool, clean summer rain and dark, tempting nights made me spin around. I jumped nimbly to my feet, crouching immediately into a fighter’s stance.
But it was the blur of red I’d seen enter the hut earlier that stared back at me now.
Her skin was porcelain, her eyes blue as the summer sky, and hair the color of spun sunlight. My body tightened, and my blood rushed through my ears. I recognized her instantly. This was the witch who’d killed me night after night.
I stared at her, lost in her beauty, transfixed by her scent, every nerve in my body suddenly aware of her. And then I thought of her curved blade slicing through me, thought of my life’s blood pouring out of me, and fear gripped me in its fist.
Power flowed through my veins, and I pounced without thought, shifting mid-jump into my truer form, my bestial body. That of the big, black wolf. The very one who’d been huddled over the Green.
And though my befuddled brain froze in shock, instinct drove me now. My lips curled back, exposing long, lethal canines that I desperately wanted to sink into her throat.
But unlike the mad woman of the other place, this woman simply stared at me with eyes that saw so much more than I could even begin to comprehend.
“Do I know you?” she asked, even as my fangs were mere inches from the throbbing, beating pulse point of her neck. She’d be dead for sure if I sunk them in, but there was no fear in her words.
It was that lack of fear that kept me from pouncing and taking her down as every instinct demanded I do.
The snapping of powerful jaws snared both our attention, and we turned back to the scene I’d been watching unfold earlier. I whined as I saw the red wolf ready itself to pounce on the small red-caped female still quivering before it. The female of this strange memory screamed. But her pain and agony felt like a fist to my soul, and I couldn’t stop from tipping my head back and howling out with her, crying out for her and for me. The sounds pouring out of me were melancholy and misery of the most acute kind.
The red wolf would kill the small female, and I could not bear it. I could not bear it! I growled, realizing I was losing myself to the memories of another time and place that weren’t part of my own present. But it felt so real here, smelled so real, that it was easy for me to imagine I was back in this strange place again.
Because I knew this had been my life once.
And just as I took a step forward to figure out how I could do battle with a phantom, my witch—who I had pinned beneath me and was straddling—had sunk her fingers into my fur. She was holding me tightly, whispering in heated tones, “We are not part of this world, beast. Not anymore. But I think… I think you and I were here before. I think that black wolf and that red-caped female is you and me. This is… us. This is our past.”
I whipped my head around to look down at the witch, feeling hate mingled with fear and desperate, desperate longing.
Terrified of these conflicting emotions, and only able to reason as a wolf, I scrabbled violently out of her reach. She had to stop touching me. I could not bear it. Not another second. Not another moment.
She wiggled to a sitting position, wrapping the end of her cape around her dirt-stained legs. But she was no longer looking at me. Instead, she was staring at the scene unfolding before us.
The big black wolf that looked remarkably like me was blocking the red-caped female from the red wolf’s view with its own body and growling, not at the bundle, but at the other wolf. Its posture was intimidating and clear—cross me and die.
I whined, lowering myself to the ground. I felt pulled to the huddling female in the vision even as I understood, in the very basic sense, that though I was here, I was outside of this place. Outside of this time.
But wolves could not reason like men, and I seemed incapable of shifting to a man. I was locked in this form, almost as if I needed to be. Like my wolf was protecting me, telling me it was safer for me this way.
The witch beside me sat as still as a stone as she watched. Her mouth was slightly ajar, and obvious pain glittered across her face. Her entire body was tense, like she knew what was coming next.
I whimpered and turned to look back at th
e scene unfolding before us. The red wolf pounced, but the black wolf was faster and stronger. It sank its fangs into the red’s neck mid-jump and gave three violent shakes of his head. A loud, jarring crack echoed through the silence.
All the hairs on my scruff rose up, and my whimpers turned to heated growls. On my tongue, I could almost taste the iron-rich flavor of blood.
Then there was a blur, a flurry of activity. The fairies jerked their wands from the air, screaming “No!” at the beast. The world was in chaos. Anarchy.
And then a shrill cry. “What has happened here!”
A fairy I was sure I knew appeared from thin air. She was blue all over, with icicles for hair and dress, and gazed cruelly down at the black wolf with hate blazing in her eyes.
“I felt the disturbance of my song. Where is she? Where is the girl?”
The witch beside me gasped, and I looked at her. But she was not staring at the bundled female or the blue fairy. Instead, there was a long shadow standing just outside of a circle of darkness, breathing, looking back at us. A white flame flickered over its face.
What was that thing? No sooner had I asked myself that question than the world spun out of control again.
We were sucked into a dark vacuum of space and time, tumbling end over end, spiraling through a tunnel of darkness that’d swooped in and taken us away.
The witch screamed, scrabbling out with her hands wildly, madly, trying in vain to cling to anything to halt her flight, but there was nothing in this void save us.
Though I remembered the stabbings, the agony and fire of death I was forced to endure each night, though I remembered it all, animal instinct drove me to reach out with my jaw and clamp my teeth gently over her wrist.
She startled and looked down at me sharply, confusion clear in her eyes, but my touch was gentle and didn’t pierce her skin. Without saying a word, she moved into my body, pressing her length against my own and hugging me tight with her free hand.
The dark tunnel soon gave way to a prism of rolling light and sounds and speech before we were finally spit out of the glowing tunnel, into another reality, another place I’d seen before.
This time, I had a better grasp on my reality versus the ghost of memories past, but even so, when I caught sight of the blond female standing strong and tall ahead of me, I felt a tremor course all the way down my spine.
It was my witch again, but she looked different, not blubbering and full of fear and weakness. Her head was high, and her posture straight.
I was in a room this time, in what looked to be a house. There was a couch beside me and a large hearth that blazed with fire. I saw a blue hand-woven rug and paintings on the walls that looked homemade and simple. One was an apple and the other an image of the hut we’d just left. The room gave off a homey, inviting vibe.
In a corner of my mind, I recognized that my present-time witch wasn’t standing beside me anymore. I cocked my head in a wolfy way, looking around for her. I didn’t see her, but I did hear her breathing. She was hidden, but she was near.
I plopped myself down at the edge of the rug and waited for her, knowing that soon she’d be forced to appear, just as she had the last time. Tongue lolling out of my mouth, I turned back to look at the witch of the past and studied her, noting the many similarities, but also the plethora of differences.
And just as she always did, she mesmerized me. The way her body moved, the surety of her gait. The power in her stance.
“Aunt, M, I’m going,” she called over her shoulder.
The anger that resonated through her words drew me like a moth to flame. She was young in this time, but I could see the same hardness shining in her eyes that I had back in my time in purgatory right before she’d jump from the trees above me and wrestle me to the ground.
A spry, middle-aged woman with salt-and-pepper hair caught up in a tight bun walked out the kitchen door as she wiped her hands on a blue rag. Her smile was cheerful and innocent.
“Where to, honey? Isn’t it kind of dark?”
A hiccupping sob rang out. But it did not come from the witch of the past. No, this sob had come from my left.
When I turned, I spotted my witch. She was huddled behind the couch, shoving a fist into her mouth, as she stared not at the younger version of herself, but rather at the elder female, misery evident in every line of her tense body.
“Mama,” she whispered.
And I frowned, whipping around to stare back at the elder.
The past version of the witch smiled indulgently back at the older woman. “It’s always dark here, you know that. But not to worry, I think the dancing lights will be out soon. I’ll have plenty of light.”
Then she winked as she polished a pear on her vest and bit into its delicate flesh. Juices ran down her pale throat. I followed the track of each line with my eyes, swallowing hard as I imagined myself not biting her, but licking her clean.
Heat surged all the way through me, and I gave a wolfy-sounding cough. I felt my witch look at me with consternation written on her brows, but I refused to meet her stare.
The elder female grumped. “Aurora borealis, Vi, and don’t laugh.” She pursed thick lips. “There’s wolves, bears, wolverines—”
The past witch laughed and patted her breast pocket. “Oh, c’mon now, I think I can handle myself just fine…”
“I lied to her. I remember this. How could I have ever forgotten?” My witch was the one who’d whispered those words, and she turned to look at me. The only way I could describe her features were… broken. “I lied to her, and this lie led directly to her death. I killed my second guardian, wolf. Not you. Me. Me.”
She hiccupped and then started sobbing in earnest. “I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten.”
I whined, feeling a terrible longing to go to her, to comfort her. But how? I was a wolf. I could not hold her, and I couldn’t afford to forget that she was the one who’d killed me night after night. And yet, the sounds of her agony felt like I’d swallowed a bag of poison. My stomach hurt, and my soul ached.
The scene was shifting around me, following the past witch’s flight from the house and deep into the woods, but I didn’t turn to look at any of it. My eyes were fixed on my witch. I shouldn’t trust her, but I wanted to move forward and draw closer to her.
“I lied, and she trusted me.”
She looked at me through red-veined eyes as she said it before burying her face in her arms. Her sobs rocked her tiny frame.
My tail thumped on the ground, indecision warring in my heart. I wanted to go her, give her my warmth and comfort, but I’d caught a glimpse of where we were, and my body had gone completely cold.
The past witch was running down a trail, a very familiar and winding trail, that led deep into the heart of a wintery wood.
My heart raced and my pulse pounded as I recognized one tree after another. A charred-out husk of a dead one, struck by lightning so many times that nothing could grow on it. Another one covered in long, vertical claw marks. And then the towering one that she finally stopped beside, scaling its face with the ease of a monkey.
My vision swirled with dark spots as I watched the young witch reach a thick, heavy branch. Her red cape swirled behind her like a sea of fresh blood.
She was laughing. The sound was cruel and vicious, and she was muttering beneath her breath.
“Come to me, dark one. Come. For now, I am ready,” she hissed, kicking out her feet, looking young and innocent, and so at odds with the sharp silver blade she held gripped in her hand.
“Oh gods, I think I’m going to be sick,” my witch moaned. She was looking up at the tree, too, shaking her head and gripping the base of another tree with tight white knuckles.
I wanted to shift so I could talk to her, so that I could rage at her and spew vitriol and hate for what she’d done to me. Who was this monster? Why was I forced to endure my eternity with her? This was purgatory, but it was also the past. Had she and I found ourselves locked in this moment in time toge
ther, forced to relive this night over and over?
The sick feeling in the pit of my gut told me that yes, that was exactly what had happened to her and I.
And then I saw a wolf trot out onto the trail, big and black and with glowing yellow eyes.
But it was only a wolf, not a shifter, though it looked just like me.
I shook my head, knowing in my soul what was about to happen and wishing I could warn the wolf away. But this place was little more than a memory we relived. It was not real, or at least, not real to us at this moment. There was nothing I could do to save the wolf. Nothing at all.
My witch’s sobs grew louder, deeper. “I didn’t know,” she whispered brokenly. “I didn’t know I was wrong. I just didn’t know…” she pleaded, but to whom, I wasn’t sure. And frankly, I didn’t care.
I watched with my heart in my throat as the past witch launched herself from the tree limb, just the same way my witch had done to me every night we had been trapped in hell. The silver blade glinted deadly in the moonlight, and just before it sank into its mark, I heard her whisper the very words she’d whispered night after night into my own ears.
“Down with the big bad wolf.”
The funnel came for us then. But I did not move. I could hardly even breathe. She was a monster.
And this time, when she scrabbled for purchase, when she reached out for me, I did not aid her. I let her flounder.
I hated her.
And I knew there would never come a time when I would not hate her.
Nine
Violet
He would not come to me, and though I didn’t know why I needed him to, I knew he was vital. His rejection hurt worse than the sting of ten thousand scorpians.
Even before we exited the funnel of speeding time and darkness, I again caught sight of the breathing shadow standing off in the corner, with the white flame for its face. I did not sense a malevolent presence. It merely stood back and watched.
Watched me.
Us.
It did not speak, but it didn’t need to.