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

A tremble in their locked-together hands. She couldn’t tell which one of them it came from. “If that’s what it takes.”

The sound was quiet. If they weren’t caught in fraught silence of their own, they wouldn’t have heard it— a thin screech, like tearing metal. Red’s teeth snapped together, a low, strange discomfort creeping up from her feet, through her bones.

Eammon’s face blanched. His hand curled around the hilt of his dagger, the other still on her wrist. His eyes went to the pitted, rotten ground as he stepped slightly away from her, moving like prey in a predator’s sight line.

The sound came again, louder. The surface of the pit undulated, something stirring beneath.

“Red.” Nearly a whisper, and Eammon’s eyes were wide. “Run.”

The pit ruptured before she had the chance.

It was darkness solidifying, shooting upward. Different from that first night— not some formless thing cobbling a counterfeit body from bone and shadow. This had a body, a wrong and terrible one, a tube of black scales and clinging rot. The tearing-metal noise came from an open mouth, wide as Eammon was tall, ringed with layers upon layers of carrion-caked teeth. The thing wove from side to side, towering in the air, circular jaws gnashing at the twilight sky.

The eruption tossed her backward, the edges of her vision dark and hazy. Red didn’t come fully back to herself until she felt Eammon beside her, ripping her dagger from her hand. Whether to use it himself or to keep her from it, she didn’t know.

“Go!” He jumped to his feet, whipping around in front of her with his teeth bared, facing the thing that had wrenched itself from the breach. Not a shadow-creature, nothing so insubstantial— one of the other monsters the Shadowlands held?

It seemed taller now, like it’d pulled more of itself free of the hole. Eammon held both daggers in one hand and swiped at the palm of the other, twin slices across a dirt-crusted lifeline. “Red, go!”

She scuttled backward across the ground, boot heels churning up roots and rock. A scream hung in the back of her throat, one she wouldn’t let loose, and her eyes couldn’t leave Eammon. Power curled up from her center, blooming like a vine, nearly solid. Nearly a weapon.

Eammon slammed his sliced hand to the shadow-churned dirt. The monster’s sharp teeth came down, and he backhanded it away, the desperate movement sending blood drops flying. Where they fell, the darkness on the ground healed for a moment, but it was like rain on a house fire, too little and too weak. The thing roared.

Red stopped, hair tangled in branches, teeth set and chest burning. It wasn’t fear that drummed her heartbeat, not anymore— it was anger, anger to see Eammon bleeding himself dry, anger that he had to.

Shatter-edged magic climbed through her veins like ivy.

Every movement was unthinking instinct. Red stood, arched her fingers, and the Wilderwood arched with her, synced to her movements. With a snarl, she thrust her hands forward, the taste of earth in her mouth and green in her veins, gathering every bit of magic she could from the thin thread of it winding through her frame.

The forest followed her lead.

That tearing-metal scream reached a crescendo as vines wrapped the beast’s awful length, squeezing until the gore-caked sides split, opened. The creature whipped from side to side, tangling in reaching branches, ripping itself on thorns grown long and sword-sharp until it fell with a sound like a thunderclap, pieces of it breaking away as it hit the ground, stinking of decay. The parts that landed in the shadow-pit sank slowly down; the parts that landed outside the ring of darkness sat like lumps of meat. Unattached to the whole, rot set in quickly, eating through the flesh like acid.

One more screech, one more thrash, and the monster was gone.

Slowly, Red straightened her fingers, and as she did, the Wilderwood sheathed its weapons. Thorns shrank, branches bent back, vines slithered into the underbrush. The forest settled and was silent.

The shadow-pit still marred the ground, but nothing rippled beneath it. Next to the edge, Eammon slumped on his knees, eyes wide. But then he looked to her, and pushed himself up, and walked across the forest floor like he was a compass needle with her as north star.

Her whole body felt numb. Red nearly swayed toward Eammon’s waiting warmth, caught herself. “What was that?”

“I told you to run.” His bloody hand raised, like he might touch her, then fell away empty. “You don’t know what could’ve happened, you could—”

Red grabbed his sliced hand, jerked it toward her so he would follow. “And leave you alone? You keep asking me to do that, and I won’t, Eammon.”

His eyes on her mouth, his non-bloodied hand curling to touch her cheek, like his body couldn’t keep up with his words. “It’s for your own good.”

“I won’t,” she murmured again, and there was so little space between them that she barely had to move to press her lips to his.

One beat of surprise, both of them frozen. Then they melted together, easy as water running downhill, as breath pulled into waiting lungs.

One of Eammon’s hands gripped her hip, the other coming up to cup the back of her neck. She pulled his bottom lip between her teeth like it was something she could claim; he made a low noise in his throat, arm cinching around her waist, pulling her so close there was no room for light between. Red’s fingers sank into his hair, pulling it loose from its knot to sweep softly against her wrists. When her nails brushed his scalp, his breath hitched.

Red pressed as close as she could, something deep and desperate pulling at her. She’d kissed and more than kissed, but never with this need— like they were two pieces fitting back together, like her edges were meant for his hollows. His fingers dug into her hips, the ground fell away, then her