For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten (freda ebook reader .txt) 📕

head, familiar shoulders, familiar green eyes in a scratched and bleeding face. He looked spent and bloody, eyes ringed in shadows, clothes torn by his flight through a hostile forest.

“Red,” Arick gasped.

Chapter Ten

A rick?” Emotion raked her voice over coals, made it raw and shaking. “How did you . . . why are . . .”

“Open the gate.” Tear tracks ran through the dirt on his face. “Let me in, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“You shouldn’t be here. Arick, I don’t know how you got past the border, but—”

His groan cut her off, low and animal sounding. Arick pressed a hand to his side, blood blooming through his shirt. “I came to save you.” He looked up, green eyes strangely cunning, voice stronger. “Let me in, Redarys Valedren.”

“I don’t know how. There’s some kind of enchantment on the gate, I don’t think it will open—”

“I know how.” Arick still crouched, but was motionless, like his body were a fragile thing he might jar apart if he moved. “Come to us, Second Daughter, and we’ll show you.” A smile, bright and sharp, as Arick held out his hand. There was something off about it, darkness running along the lines in his palm. “If you must be part of one of them, the shadows will give you a cleaner end.”

Red froze, prey in the endless moment before the trap closed. This was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

With a frustrated gnash of his teeth, Arick threw himself against the gate.

His hands turned to claws as he raked them against the metal, nails elongating, darkening. The veins in his neck were black where they should’ve been blue, and black filled the whites of his eyes, building up, spilling over. “Don’t you want it?” he snarled in a voice that wasn’t his, a voice that sounded like screams down forgotten corridors, layered and latched together. “One way or another, there will be an end. It’s just a matter of which side you want to tangle with, Second Daughter.”

Panic tugged at the magic shard in Red’s center. Her mouth filled with the taste of earth, her wrists blazing green as she tried to clamp her power down and scramble backward at the same time.

The thing wearing Arick’s face lunged forward again. A black claw reached through the gate and wrapped around her ankle. “The Wilderwood is weak and desperate, the gods it holds grow stronger. The forest won’t stop looking for a way in, Redarys Valedren, and when it finds one, it’ll drain you like a wineskin, leave all those pretty bones.”

Terror finally shattered her tenuous control. Red screamed as the green veins in her wrists climbed her forearms, reaching toward her heart. Splintered magic erupted, spinning vines from the earth to wrap the creature’s clawed hand.

It howled, lurching away from the gate, but the cry of pain became a bray of laughter. “The magic is weak,” it taunted. “Stings, but it won’t do much, Second Daughter, not unless you open your skin and let it take you, root and branch and bone and blood.”

“You’ll have your blood,” came a rasping voice from behind.

The Wolf’s hand landed on Red’s shoulder, pulling her backward from the gate even as he ran forward and opened it with a touch. There were new slashes on his palms, bloodless, like they’d lost everything they had to give already. Still, Eammon reached for his dagger as he ran, mouth a rictus of expectant pain.

The shadow-thing reared up, not playing at human shapes anymore. Now it looked exactly like the thing that had emerged from the breach last night, nothing but darkness and pieces of dead things.

“Do you have any left to give, Wolf-pup?” A cackle that felt like needles in Red’s ears. “What happens once you bleed yourself dry? When you lose yourself to the forest, and it takes you just like it did your father?”

The last word arrested the Wolf’s movement, like it was a net thrown over him. A thudding heartbeat where Eammon stood frozen, dagger held steady. Then, teeth bared, he flipped his palm over and sliced into the back of his hand.

A hiss of pain as he pushed down, pushed until finally green-threaded blood seeped around the blade. To Red, still dazed, the tendrils at the edge of the cut looked studded with tiny leaves.

Eammon tugged the dagger out of his skin, blood tracing the dips of his knuckles, painting his scars. With a growl, he backhanded the shadow-creature.

The thing broke apart, scattering bones; the shards feathered into smoke before they hit the forest floor. Still, that laugh reverberated, making the very trees shudder, and it spoke again in a hissing, fading voice as the pieces dissolved. “Only a matter of time.”

Then the shadow-creature was gone, the only sign of it a burn mark scored into the earth.

The Wolf stood there a moment, staring down at the ground. Sweaty strands of black hair had escaped their queue, sticking to the side of his neck. The cuts on his hands looked inflamed, and he held them gingerly by his side as he staggered toward the gate, an opening blooming for him as soon as he touched the metal.

“Is bleeding the only way to kill them?” The question came out shaky, to match the tremor in Red’s limbs. “Because Lyra said— What are you doing?”

He’d dropped to his knees and grabbed her ankle, twisting it this way and that as if looking for wounds. “I could ask you the same thing.” Apparently satisfied, he released her, like touching her skin was as welcome as slicing his hand had been, a necessary unpleasantness. “What about last night made you think approaching anything beyond the gate would be a good idea?”

“I thought it was different. I didn’t hear the breach—”

“You wouldn’t have, unless you were there when it opened.” Eammon jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the gate. Blood dripped sluggishly down his wrist. “Nothing in this forest is safe, especially not for you. I