Barbara Hancock - Legendary Wolf

“You went with her. You willingly became her pupil. After all she’s done,” Soren ground out between gritted teeth. “And now you’re using the Ether. You’re using power you can’t control.”

Once again, he looked at her as if she was a stranger. His face was tight. His eyes glared. His fists were held at his sides and pressed into his hips as if he needed to contain them.

“I can’t change my parentage any more than you can, Soren. She was wrong to curse us. She’s sorry.” At his harsh bark of laughter, she fisted her hands, too. “I know that’s not enough. She can’t take it back. What’s done is done. But I can’t deny my blood just because we’re scarred by the memories of what we endured. I always wondered... Who were my parents? Who was I ?” Anna said. “You can’t ask me to turn away from the answer.”

“You were Bell. You were our friend,” Soren said. “You were my...”

“It was a lie. Your father kidnapped me from the human foster parents my mother had used to hide me. He said I was an orphan. I was your father’s captive until he was gone and then I was a wanderer, a survivor. We were never truly friends if you can turn your back on me now,” Anna said.

Her chest expanded fully for the first time since Soren had appeared on the path. Hot anger rushed in to fill the hollow of where her heart used to be. It supplanted the sword’s Call. She gladly accepted its warmth in place of the feelings she’d had before. Anger had sustained her for weeks on her mother’s island, Krajina, after the curse was broken. It was a relief to feel it again.

“I never belonged in Bronwal. Even after I knew its cavernous rooms and twisted hallways like the back of my hand. It was our jail, but it was never my home,” Anna continued. “I’m still trying to find my way back to a place I can call my own. Part of that journey is learning about my Volkhvy abilities.” She didn’t tell him that she had her own doubts. That she was afraid. Once upon a time, the red wolf had been her confidant. That time was past.

And part of her journey would be learning to let her red wolf go. No. Not hers. Never hers. The red wolf. She had to let her silly childish dreams concerning Soren Romanov go.

“You scared Lev away right when I’d almost reached him,” Soren said.

He was lying to himself. The white wolf had been wilder than the wildest beast. He hadn’t been a creature who looked anywhere near ready to be civilized again. But she didn’t argue. Soren wouldn’t hear reason. Not from her.

Anna straightened her back and firmed her smarting knees. She took another deep breath and faced the man in front of her. She composed her face one taut nerve at a time. She wouldn’t apologize for protecting herself, although she hadn’t meant to send Lev away. She needed to accept that she was no longer someone that Soren would care for and protect. His priorities had changed. Hers needed to change, too. She would learn to control her powers and she would use her anger to survive her time with Soren Romanov until the sword was found.

Soren blinked in the face of her sudden icy calm. He raised his hands and opened his fists to push his fingers up into his hair. He held the tangled mass back from his face on either side as if to better see the witch she’d become.

Her forced calm was shaken when he seemed to harden again right before her eyes. He lowered his hands. He lifted his chin. Even beneath the beard, she could see the sharp angles of his chiseled face as his jaw tightened. He stepped toward her and she had to brace herself to keep from retreating.

She held her ground until he was only a foot away. Only then did he speak again, and this time his voice was pitched seriously low. For her ears alone. As if he didn’t even want the forest to be privy to their complicated relationship.

“You came back because you heard the emerald sword’s Call?” he asked.

She inclined her head in response, because her mouth had gone too dry for her to speak. She was braced, but she was also nervous. Her anger threatened to drain away, and in its place was an ache that said her heart was still there and the worst was yet to come.

“Good. You can lead me to where it’s being held,” Soren said. “ So I can destroy it. Then you’ll be free to go back to your queen and I’ll be free to save my brother.”

She thought she’d experienced the ultimate rejection, but now she knew better. She hid her emotions. She forced her jaw to relax and her eyes to meet his. His were trained on her face as if he wanted to memorize her reaction. Her skin was cold. Every drop of blood had drained from her cheeks, but she forced herself to lick her stiff lips and speak.

“Anything to silence the Call that won’t leave me in peace,” she said.

He blinked and looked away, as if her words had shocked him. Only her anger kept her from reaching up to bring his gaze back to hers. He wouldn’t want her gloved fingers on his face. He wouldn’t want her touch.

It was better this way.

The sooner the sword was destroyed, the sooner she could control her powers and forget the red wolf, who had savaged her without baring a single tooth or claw.

* * *

Lev had disappeared without a trace. It was too much like the old nightmare that had plagued him during the curse. Soren had always materialized to face the fear that he might have lost his brother for good. He’d never known—would this Cycle be his brother’s last? Or this one?

Bell had been his constant. His anchor. Even when he’d chosen to retreat into his wolf form to make it more possible to watch over Lev, he’d depended on Bell to always be there—human, rational, determined to survive.

And then he’d lost her.

He’d died a little that day after the curse was broken, but he’d buried himself in his vow to save his brother. He’d pushed himself mercilessly on two wobbly human legs that he had to relearn how to use again, but the push had kept him from mourning for Bell. He’d grown stronger and stronger as he’d lived in the woods tracking the white wolf. He hadn’t allowed himself to shift, because it would have been too easy to lose himself and follow his brother into the wilderness, never to return.

He couldn’t allow himself that luxury.

Instead, he’d become a wild man, driven by loss and determination, living at the edge of civilization even as he tried to urge his brother back into the fold.

He felt the wild now, closer than it had ever been. It howled in his heart. He kept it at bay the only way he knew how—by subsuming his heart and his desires in his devotion to saving his brother.

He searched the entire forest for Lev before he admitted defeat. The whole wood was devoid of life. With her witchery, Anna had frightened every creature away. Only the leaves stirred in the trees as he passed by.

Anna wasn’t Bell. The glowing veins in her hands and forearms proved it. Her face and form were all too familiar, and his human form reacted to her in startling and unacceptable ways. As a man, he was plagued with a better perspective of her eyes, and from them he thought he saw neither a witch nor the woman he’d known gazing back at him. She looked frightened. He’d seen her scared many times when they’d been trapped in the curse and fighting for their sanity and their lives. This was different. Back then she’d always been bold. She’d always seemed confident that she could handle whatever came around the next bend in the maze of the castle’s hallways.

How often had she taken a stand at his side against Ether-addled madmen or intruding Volkhvy ? So often that he could close his eyes in the shadowy forest and remember her standing as a young girl and again and again on up until she was a young woman still standing, still fighting for him, for survival and for Bronwal.