Chapter Three: The Stranger in the Woods
1247 Words
I bit him.
Not a wolf bite. Just teeth. Human teeth into the hand covering my mouth as hard as I could manage.
He hissed and loosened his grip for half a second, and that was enough. I drove my elbow back into his ribs, spun around, and put three feet of distance between us.
“Don’t touch me.”
He was big. That was the first thing I registered. Not Ryder big, not pack-warrior big, but the kind of big that comes with age and actual use. Wide through the shoulders, dark jacket, short hair going grey at the sides. He was holding the hand I’d bitten against his chest and looking at me with an expression that wasn’t angry.
It was assessing.
“You have good instincts,” he said.
“Who are you?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“I will not keep my voice down. You grabbed me from behind in the dark. Who are you?”
He reached into his jacket and pulled out something flat and held it toward me. I didn’t move closer. He stepped forward and held it up where the moonlight could catch it.
A crest. Silver and black, a wolf mid-leap with a crown above it.
Royal guard.
My mouth closed.
“My name is Damon,” he said, putting the crest away. “I’ve been stationed near this pack for six weeks.”
“Why?”
“That’s not your concern right now.”
“You grabbed me in the dark; everything is my concern right now.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. “Fair enough.” He looked past me toward the packhouse. “You were listening to the Alpha.”
It wasn’t a question.
“I was walking home.”
“You were pressed against the wall eight feet from him with your shoes off the gravel.”
I looked down. I had no memory of taking my shoes off. Apparently, my body had done that on its own somewhere between hearing Ryder’s voice and losing my mind.
“What did you hear?” Damon said.
“Nothing.”
“Aria.”
I looked up fast. “How do you know my name?”
He didn’t answer that. He just watched me with those flat, careful eyes that gave nothing away and waited like he had all night and wasn’t concerned either way.
Something about that made me more nervous than the grabbing had.
“He said there was a reason,” I said slowly. “For the rejection. Something he’s hiding.”
Damon nodded once like I’d confirmed something rather than told him anything new.
"You already knew."
“I had a suspicion.”
“About what. What reason. What is worth hiding a real mate bond?”
He looked at me for a long moment. The assessing thing again, like he was calculating how much to say. It made me feel like a file he was reading. Like information rather than a person.
“I have some questions for you first,” he said.
“You don’t get to have questions. You grabbed me.”
“Your mother’s name is Elara Winters.”
I went still.
“She moved to Blackwood Pack twenty-three years ago. From where, exactly?”
“I don’t see how that’s”
“From where, Aria?”
The way he said it wasn’t threatening. It was urgent. There was a difference. Like the answer mattered for a reason that had nothing to do with me being in trouble.
“I don’t know,” I said, and it was the truth. My mother had never talked about it before. Before Blackwood, before my father, before me. It was one of those things I had learned not to ask about because asking got me nothing except silence and a closed door.
Damon’s expression shifted. Just slightly.
“She never told you,” he said. More to himself than to me.
“Told me what?”
He opened his mouth.
The growl came from the left.
Low and wet and wrong in a way that had nothing to do with pack wolves. I knew the difference. We all learned it young. Pack wolves growled with direction, with language in it. This was just sound. The animal is unfocused and bad.
Damon moved before I did. He stepped in front of me and dropped into a fighting stance, and his hand went to something at his belt.
The rogue came out of the tree line fast.
Bigger than a normal wolf. The size was wrong, swollen somehow, as the body had grown past what it was supposed to be. The fur was patchy. The eyes caught the moonlight and reflected nothing, just flat and empty and fixed on me specifically. Not on Damon. On me.
Damon lunged to intercept it.
It went around him.
Straight at me.
I had time to register that it was airborne. Four hundred pounds of rogue wolf in the air with those empty eyes locked onto my face, and I had no weapon and no shifted form because I had never been a fast shifter, and there was simply no time.
I threw my hands up.
It was instinct. Pure and stupid and useless. You don’t stop a wolf that size with your hands up.
Except something happened.
The air around me cracked open.
That is the only way I know how to describe it. A sound like a c***k, like something splitting, and then light came out of my palms. Not warm light. Silver and cold and violent, and it hit the rogue mid-air like a wall.
The rogue dropped.
It was dead before it hit the ground.
I stood there with my hands still up and my palms still faintly lit and my brain empty of any usable thought.
The light faded. The woods went dark again. Somewhere behind me, a nightbird started calling as if nothing had happened.
I lowered my hands slowly.
Damon had not moved. He was standing six feet away, staring at me, and his face had done something I would not have expected from a royal guard who probably saw difficult things regularly.
He looked terrified.
Not of me exactly. More like a man who has just watched something happen that has broken a rule he thought was permanent.
“What was that?” I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended.
He didn’t answer.
“Damon. What just came out of my hands?”
He walked toward me slowly. Stopped close. Looked at my palms, then at my face, then at the dead rogue on the ground, then back at my face again. Like he was checking his math and getting the same impossible answer every time.
“Has that ever happened before?” he said quietly.
“Does it look like that has ever happened before?”
His jaw worked. He looked at my hands one more time. When he looked up, his face had gone through something and come out the other side as something careful and controlled.
He took a step back.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered. Not to me. To himself, or to the night, or to whatever part of his understanding had just collapsed. “The royal bloodline was supposed to be extinct.”
The woods were very quiet.
I looked at my hands.
They looked the same as they always had.
- Writer
