The Weakest Wolf's Revenge

Chapter six

Roxie's POV

The world stopped.

Not slowed. Not quieted. Stopped. One moment the battlefield was a storm of teeth and screams and bodies crashing into bodies, and the next, everything simply froze. A wolf hung in the air mid-leap, his jaws open, a single drop of saliva caught like a bead of glass. The fire of an explosion bloomed beside me without heat, without sound, a flower of orange light that did not move. Even the dust hung still, thousands of tiny specks suspended in the evening air like a held breath. I turned my head, and I was the only thing in the entire world that could.

My mother stood in front of me.

She had come down from the sky, and now she was close enough to touch. Her hair was silver, like mine, but longer, falling past her waist like spilled moonlight. Her eyes were the same liquid silver as mine too, except hers did not glow. They were tired. So tired. I had spent my whole life imagining what my dead mother might have looked like, and not one of those imaginings had prepared me for the simple, aching truth of her face. She looked at me the way you look at something you lost a long time ago and never expected to find again.

"Roxanne," she whispered. "My girl."

I should have hated her. I had practiced hating her in my mind for years, the mother who left, the mother who died and made my life small. But standing there in the frozen world, all I could feel was a strange, broken longing, like a song I had forgotten I knew. "You're attacking us," I said. My voice cracked. "You came with the dragons. You—"

"No." She shook her head quickly, and a shadow of pain crossed her face. "I am not attacking anyone. I was pulled here, Roxanne. Dragged. The binding I placed on your power is breaking, and when it breaks, it pulls at the binding on mine too. We are tied together, you and I. We always have been. I did not choose to come tonight. I simply could not stay away once you began to wake."

I stared at her. Around us, the battle held its breath. "Wake into what?" I asked. "What am I? Everyone keeps talking about what I am, and nobody will just tell me."

She reached out, slowly, like she was afraid I might shatter, and touched my cheek. Her hand was warm. I had not expected it to be warm. "Five hundred years ago," she said, "I lost a child. Your brother. He was eight years old, and he was bright and kind and he loved to chase fireflies in the dark. And men who hated me killed him to break my heart." Her voice did not rise. It only grew quieter, and the quietness was worse than any scream. "And it worked. My heart broke. And when an Original's heart breaks, the world breaks with it. I destroyed three continents, Roxanne. Cities. Mountains. Millions of people, gone, because I could not hold my grief inside my body. So I made a choice. I sealed away nearly all of my power, and I hid it so deep that even I could not reach it. I made myself small so that I could never do that again."

The frozen explosion beside us flickered. Just slightly. A tremble ran through her, and her edges seemed to blur, like a reflection in water when someone drops a stone.

"You have to trust me," she said, and now there was urgency in her, a fear that had nothing to do with the dragons. "I know I have no right to ask. I know I left you. I know what was done to you in my absence, and I will carry that until I have no breath left to carry anything. But the people coming for you tonight, they do not want to save you. They want to use you, or end you. I am the only one who will tell you the whole truth. So please. Please, my girl. Trust me."

"How can I trust someone who's been dead my whole life?" I asked. The words came out smaller than I meant them to.

She smiled then, and it was the saddest smile I have ever seen. "Because I am not dead," she said. "I only learned how to disappear. There is a difference. One day you will understand it."

Her form rippled again, harder this time. Her hand on my cheek began to fade, becoming light, becoming nothing. "I cannot hold this," she gasped. "The shape I made to come to you, it is coming apart. Roxanne, listen to me. Listen."

"Don't go." I grabbed for her, and my fingers passed through her arm like it was smoke. Panic rose in my chest, fast and ugly. "You can't just appear and tell me you love me and leave again. That's not fair. That's not—"

"I know." Tears slid down her fading face. "Nothing about your life has been fair, and that is my doing as much as anyone's. But I will find my way back to you. I promise you that, and I have broken every promise but the ones that matter." She pressed something into my palm and closed my fingers around it. It was small and cold and round. "This was mine. Now it is yours. Do not force it open. It will open on its own, when you are ready, and not one moment before. Do you hear me? When you are ready."

"Ready for what?"

But she was almost gone now, only a shimmer in the shape of a woman, only a voice growing thin. "For the truth about your father," she breathed. "Not Aldric. The other one. The one who—"

The world snapped back into motion.

Sound crashed over me like a wave. The explosion finished blooming, throwing a wall of heat across my face. The leaping wolf finished his leap and slammed into a witch ten feet away. Screaming, snarling, the stink of smoke and blood and churned earth. My mother was gone. My hand was empty of her warmth but full of the small cold thing she had left behind, and I shoved it deep into the pocket of my torn dress before I even looked at it.

"Roxie!" Raptor's voice. He was suddenly beside me, his golden eyes wild, his shoulder bleeding. "Where did you go? You just—you stopped. Everything stopped." He grabbed my arm, and the spark of our bond steadied me. "Move. Now. We have to move."

A sound came from above. Not a howl. Not a roar. Something deeper, a sound I felt in my teeth and my chest and the soles of my feet. I looked up.

The sky was full of dragons.

They had been circling, waiting, and now they fell. They came down in a coordinated dive, wings folded, scales catching the firelight, and they struck the battlefield in a line of fury that scattered wolves and witches alike. The ground shook. Trees snapped. Raptor threw me down behind a fallen slab of concrete and covered my body with his, and the world became a blur of dust and wind and the leathery thunder of enormous wings.

Then, slowly, the wind died.

I pushed up against Raptor's arm and peered over the broken concrete.

The dragons had landed. They formed a half-circle around the wreckage of the compound, and they were enormous, each one the size of a house, their eyes glowing like coals. But it was the largest of them that made my breath stop in my throat. It was scaled in black so deep it seemed to swallow the firelight, an obsidian shadow given wings and weight. And it was not looking at Raptor. It was not looking at the wolves or the witches or my father.

It was looking at me.

It stepped forward, the ground cracking beneath its claws, and its eyes fixed on my face with something I could not name at first. Then I understood what the something was, and my blood turned to ice.

Recognition.

The black dragon knew me.

"Don't move," Raptor breathed against my ear. His arm tightened around me. "Don't move, Roxie. Don't even breathe."

But the dragon was already changing. Its massive body folded inward, scales melting into skin, wings shrinking into arms, the house-sized shadow collapsing down and down until a single figure stood where the monster had been. A woman. She straightened slowly, brushing dust from her shoulder with a calm that did not match the c*****e around her, and she lifted her head, and she looked at me.

I stopped breathing.

I knew that face.

I had seen it every morning of my life in the cracked mirror of the garage. The same jaw. The same brow. The same silver-gray eyes. But this face was older, lined by thirty years I had not yet lived, weathered by sorrows I had not yet survived.

I was looking at myself.

The woman smiled, and it was my smile, and it was terrible.

"Hello, Roxanne," she said. "I have been waiting a very, very long time to warn you about what you become."