Red and Her Wolf (Kingdom, #3)

Lungs heaving with fire, legs burning, Vi pushed on. She was almost there.

The worry had probably started the moment her aunt noticed her drawings. Sketches really. When they’d first come to Alaska, Violet could barely remember her past. Her aunt had called it brain trauma. From what, she hadn’t known, and Miriam hadn’t explained. But large snatches of time had been lost to her.

A hundred yards ahead she spied the tree. Heart galloping with glee, she put on an extra burst of speed--uncaring that she sank into thick snow; nothing would stop her this night.

It’d frustrated Vi for years that she simply couldn’t remember a childhood, a point where she wasn’t grown. She’d asked Miriam countless times to tell her of her youth, but her aunt was always tight lipped and easily aggravated when the subject came up. So Vi had stopped asking. Her life was good now, and though it was strange to move so often, she didn’t think much of it. She loved her aunt and trusted that her best interest was in Miriam’s heart. But like a fuzzy television screen getting signal back, things had begun to take shape recently.

An image of an old woman. Then more.

Apples.

Rolling like heads on a packed dirt floor.

Lots of them.

Her lip curled. She hated apples.

Innocence.

She’d been that once. Pure joy. The old woman--her grandmother--had once told her she lit up her life with her smile.

Violet’s heart gave a painful squeeze and she blinked back hot tears.

And then the nightmares came and the wolves with them.

A thin pine branch slapped her cheek, but Violet barely felt it. She was panting hard now, huffing from the exertion. She wondered if the tracks were still there.

Her body tingled, a slow hum at first, but the closer she got to the tree the harder it pulsed. The tracks were here, she still felt its magic. She smiled.

In her dreams, the wolf was black. Big. Frightening. And she hated to admit, even to herself, how absurdly drawn to the beast she was. She was fixated. Obsessed. Sketching his image over and over. Most of them were of him kneeling over her, over her grandmother, with a shocking spill of scarlet bathing the ground all around them.

Violet grabbed her chest, panting when she finally reached the tree. She took a moment to calm herself and then looked down.

Large paw prints circled the tree. Her entire body flared to life when she brushed her finger over the impression. It was close.

Biting her lip, she glanced both ways. Was it watching her? She cocked her head, listening for the faint disturbance of movement. All she heard was silence. But not the dead silence of fearful animals, the silence of nature at rest.

He wasn’t here. Yet.

Grabbing hold of the lowest branch, she hoisted herself up. Climbing from one branch to another, delicately, gently… trying to disturb nothing. Knowing her scent would be all over the place and hoping it would attract him.

When she got as high as she could, she sat and waited, scanning the horizon for any movement.

Minutes ticked past, and then an hour. Two. She didn’t move. Barely breathed. He would come. She knew it.

They would always come for her.

Long ago Violet had suspected she was special when she didn’t age, when Aunt Mir didn’t age. Time stood still for the two of them, whatever damage had been done to her brain was now gone. Because, last night, Violet remembered everything. In her sleep she’d heard the growls, the screams of her grandmother being ripped apart, fear closing her throat and making her numb, stupid, and weak. Huddled under her red robe like a child thinking if she closed her eyes they wouldn’t see her, couldn’t hurt her. Violet knew who she was now.

She was the Heartsong, the manifestation of wild fae magic. She wouldn’t age because she wasn’t mortal.

Vi tore a sturdy twig off her branch and toyed with its sharp edge, dragging it along her palm. Time had been good to her. She wasn’t only strong of mind and body, but she’d learned to do something even grandmother had said was impossible.

She rammed the twig through the palm of her hand, entranced as the pool of blood--black because of the night--welled up and began to spill. The pain had been absurdly delicious. Strange to think of pain that way, but for her it was more euphoria, a drug-like high of adrenaline and cutting pleasure.

But that wasn’t what she’d learned.

Violet focused on the twig, watching as it slowly worked its way completely through her hand before dropping to the ground below.

Grandmother had told her she was magic, but she could never do magic. But grandmother was wrong.

Violet raised her hand up to her face. The hole went completely through. Then she kissed herself, right where she’d shoved the twig through. A small sphere of light escaped her lips, like a golden drop of dew, it entered her wound. Flesh and tendon knit themselves back together again.

Something snapped.