Wolf's Kin (Monstrous Hearts #3)

Chapter Two

Branches reached for Alice as she followed the stream. It was a trickle of water, hardly enough to cover the smooth pebbles of its bed, and yet it was the only sure path through the looming pines and drifting fog. A silver arrow pointing a way out of the suffocatingly thick forest.

She dreamed. She knew she dreamed because the sky looked black as pitch even as the whippy branches on either side gleamed like knives. Her feet took step after step, steady and numb even as her gaze remained fixed on a spark of light hidden deep within the trees.

Something cried in the distance, a high-pitched shriek that could have been human or animal. The voice cut off just as Alice reached where the stream dwindled into a muddy path, and a chill ran down her spine while she listened for any other noise. All was silent. Still. Only the hints of wood smoke warned how she would meet someone if she took this new trail.

There was no way to go back; she knew that bone-deep. And whatever waited beside that pinprick of a fire felt heavy with malice, poisoning the forest with its very presence, thickening the air into a raw, throbbing heartbeat. Yet Alice stepped onto the path without shivering, and when thorns caught at her hair, she didn't flinch. Instead, her lips curled back to reveal her fangs, and her hands snapped the branches trying to scratch and sting. She was nothing to be toyed with.

The trees opened into a clearing as quickly as a gasp, and Alice stumbled to a stop, bloody and hot-eyed and shaking. A bonfire burned in the very center, the logs at its heart long and curved like bones. As it crackled, a sound that seemed very much like laughter, the cages around it grew clear.

They were built from branches and mud, squat and filthy and marked with fingernail scratches. The lingering smells of blood and terror choked Alice with each breath even as the flames brightened, revealing the cages weren't empty. Hunched things convulsed with breath, ruined as roadkill but somehow still alive. Firelight flickered on exposed bone and missing muscle, on mouths opened in silent screams because their voices were gone, taken along with everything else.

Alice flinched back, her own voice catching in her throat as a gasp. Then a figure rose behind the bonfire, the uncertain flames hiding its face even as they picked out long, ragged hair and skin streaked with blood. The things in the cages grew frenzied, filling the clearing with wet, ripping sounds as their ravaged flesh tore under the strain of their struggles, but it was the weight of the figure's gaze that finally broke through Alice's shock. When several shadows slipped over to flank it, hardening into silhouettes that all beckoned at her, she snarled and dropped into a crouch, limbs shaking with the first spasms of her shift.

Agony wracked every inch of her, bone and sinew twisting in protest of their raw rebirth, but within a heartbeat she lurched upright again, already steady on the long, lean limbs of a predator, already snapping at the air with jaws that could shatter bone. The dim figures watched with cocked heads, their bodies flickering with the fire even as hers found its fearsome form.

Wolf-Alice shook away the last of the tremors, fur bristling as she growled at them. Come closer if you dare, she said with a snap of her teeth. Just try turning me into your prey.

A rush of laughter in response. Then the fire roared, flames swelling out to catch her. She ducked away unharmed, but when the smoke and sparks cleared from her sight, everything had vanished. The cages, the figures... Even the fire itself. Only a smoldering pit of ash and a few bloodstains remained.

Wary, cautious, she circled around the clearing, sniffing over the ground for any clue as to where they'd fled. Magic always smelled horrible to her, sharp as fear and acrid as smoke. Thick enough to overwhelm everything else. Even so, she caught traces of sweat, hair, and skin. The forest had hidden the figures but couldn't strip away their scents—all female, all entwined with magic. All of them ravenous.