The Ghost wolf's Bride

Chapter 3: The Ghost Awakens

Theme: Instinct and Revelation

Sleep was impossible. The word " Mosswood viper" was repeating in my mind and I simply could not stop. I needed to be out of the room and so I just slipped out into the hallway. The room was like a grave--dreary, dark and the light was only the thin light of the moon shining through the high windows.

I moved like a mouse, and my bare feet sank without making any noise on the cold rock. When I approached the spot where the road turned into the most guarded of the fortress I stood still.

Shadows. Not dull, set night shadows, but moving. Hunters rather than patrol guards, dark, human-shaped things sliding around. They were marched out before a great wide-open door I had noticed on my first day.

Sorin’s private chambers.

Assassins.

My breath caught. This was the threat that my dad had so vaguely warned me about.

The crying of all my instincts was to run away, to go round to the back, and up the stairs, and close the door, and pretend nothing was going on. Sorin had been nothing short of mean, he threw me out before everybody. Why’d I risk my life for him?

Yet the picture of him being killed when he was asleep and helpless continued to come back. He was brutal, sure. But was he evil? When our hands met I thought of that spark, of the momentary flash of something more than cold ice in his eyes. He was an individual, not a ghost tale only.

From now on, I said to myself, I quit being a healer. But I couldn’t. I am hardwired to preserve life and not avoid death.

I did not run away in making that choice. I went right in the direction of the peril. I had to warn him.

I had slipped into his room just as the door burst open with a quiet and splintering c***k on the outside.

The room was dim, but I could make out that Sorin was already seated up in his bed, in an agony of impatience. Who is that? everyone growled half-awawingly but in a sufficiently loud voice.

The shadows poured in. Four of them, in dark green--the colors of Mosswood. They didn’t speak. They just attacked.

“Alpha!” I screamed, one violent menace in the dullness of the silence.

Sorin was inhumanly fast, rolling off the bed even before a sword struck at his former point of contact. The room gave back to an intensely silent wrestle of grunts, clashing metal, and moving forms.

One of the assassins escaped in the commotion, with his eyes on me. To him I was a liability, and a witness. He jumped and a silver dagger flashed in the moonlight into my heart.

There was no time to scream.

At the sight of the blade, directed at me, something in Sorin broke.

There was a roar of his throat, so deep and furious it was not human. it was the voice of a monster, a beast, a storm.

His body erupted. No gradual change took place. One Fugitive moment he was a man, the next he was a blur of movement and blinding white light. As the light died away, a huge wolf was in its place where Sorin was. His fur was like the moon, his muscles like stone, his eyes with silver fire. The Ghost Wolf.

My eyes could not keep up with his movements. There was a pale gleam, a nauseating crunch and the dagger-drawing assassin lay sprawled with the threat which he had posted to finish the lunge countered before he could complete it. The other two were sent away by Sorin with terrible and effective brutality. In seconds, it was over.

Silence. It was only interrupted by the heavy, panting breathing of the huge wolf that was looming over the bodies.

I sat against the floor, shaky, and my arms crossed around me. The Ghost Wolf wheeled around the c*****e. His flaming silver eyes discovered me.

He walked up to me, step after step silent and forceful on the stone floor. Even closer he was still larger, a myth and a nightmare. He shut out the moonlight, and I was in his shadow. This was it. He had rescued me out of the hands of the assassins, and now he was going to do me the bother of it.

I clenched my eyes and waited as it was over.

But it didn’t come.

I felt a warm puff of air. I cracked my eyes open. His massive head had been drawn down. An inch away from my face, his speckled, blood-stainededededededededededededked muzzle was close to my face. He was sniffing me. Not with violence, but with a profound and searching intensity.

There was a raving in his breast. It wasn’t a warning growl. It was a note of bewilderment... and not that. Something deeper.

His wolf, the wild creature which he strove so vehemently to keep down, stared at me not out of anger, but with a shocking, pure sense of recognition. It was a primal look of possession like he had at last come upon what he had been seeking all his life.

He had turned me away with his words. But his wolf, his real man, took possession of me in one violent look.

With the screaming guards and stomping feet ringing down the hall I looked into the eyes of the beast, and I understood one horrifying fact: the man might have sent me away, but the monster will never release me.