Pain swamped her, pain and weariness so deep that it felt bottomless, and it hurt to breathe. She was lost in Wellesley’s emotions for a long, horrible, endless time.
“Anna? Chiquita? Talk to me.” Asil’s quiet voice grounded her, reminded her that there was a reality besides Wellesley’s pain and brought her back out to where she could have dropped the connection between herself and the other wolf, again.
He had let her go.
She took a breath, but she didn’t take her hand off Wellesley.
“I’m all right,” she told Asil. “But this is a little strange. Bear with me—and do not let him up.”
She put her other hand on Wellesley’s face, drew in another deep breath, and let him suck her back into his prison. She didn’t pull away from his pain, and in accepting it, she discovered that she could separate herself a bit—and she understood what had happened.
Wellesley had invited her in. And his invitation had power. His power wasn’t like Bran’s; nor was it witchcraft … not quite. But it wasn’t not witchcraft either. Asil said that Wellesley had magic more akin to Charles’s—and the magic Charles usually used belonged to his mother, a healer and a shaman’s daughter. The power felt more like Charles than like Bran’s. But it was not the same as her mate’s.
The space—it wasn’t quite a place—that she found herself in was dark and felt hollow to her ears, as if it were somehow enclosed. But she didn’t know how far to trust her perceptions.
When all else fails, the memory of Charles’s voice rang in her ears, follow your instincts. Werewolves have pretty good instincts.
This felt like the kind of place where instincts would be more useful than intellect.
She moved through the darkness and came upon Wellesley. It wasn’t as if she found him where he had always been. One moment he was not anywhere, and the next he came into being, quite near. Near enough that she took a step backward, becoming aware in that moment that she could step, that she had something that felt like a physical body.
She could perceive Wellesley, the man, quite clearly. But she could also feel the struggle he was carrying on, feel his great weariness and his pain, as if those things were part of what she was seeing, just as easily as she could perceive his outer form.
He fought so hard, and he had been fighting a very, very long time. Nearly a century of battle had worn him down to his essentials. She could see places where he was worn thin, his body fading to gray in patches.
That’s where you can see me, something whispered in her ear. There, in those bare spots.
And that wasn’t scary. Not at all.
But she followed her instincts and didn’t look behind her, though the hairs on the back of her neck were raised as if they were her wolf’s hackles. Whatever was back there smelled evil, rank, and rotting. In a place like this, sometimes noticing things too hard gave them more reality. And that wasn’t instincts talking, it was something Charles had taught her.
She concentrated on Wellesley. What was he fighting? Because she couldn’t perceive his wolf at all. That thing that had whispered in her ear, that wasn’t a wolf. She knew that as instinctively as she saw his fight—though he wasn’t moving at all.
If he wasn’t fighting his wolf spirit, despite Asil’s story, maybe he was fighting for his wolf. That felt right. As soon as she accepted that idea, her connection to Wellesley increased appreciatively until she could feel the echoes of his emotions. It was a terribly intimate connection to have with someone who was basically a stranger—someone not her mate.
She didn’t find the kind of heartbreaking sadness that Asil had led her to expect. There were oodles of despair. But despair was not a synonym for sorrow or regret. Despair was the loss of hope.
Please, he asked her, his voice coming, as that evil thing’s voice had, from just behind her left ear. Please help us, Namwign Bea. We are dying, healer.
What can I do? she asked him, but he just repeated the same request, over and over again, as if he could not hear her.
She reached out and touched his cheek, as she had in the real world. He did not react to her touch, nor did touching him change her perception of him or this place. He had, she thought, told her as much as he could; it was up to her to find out more.
She set out to do that very thing, leaving the human seeming of Wellesley behind her. She couldn’t hear or smell his wolf, but the scent of the evil that had whispered behind her back—that was sharp in her nose. At first she tried to avoid it, but when nothing else drew her attention, she followed her senses.
Eventually or immediately (it was frustratingly difficult to tell), she found a forest of thick green vines that were so tangled she could not go through them. When she turned, to see if she might go around them, they had encircled her.
Trapping her.
She swallowed down fear. Asil was in the real world, watching over her. And her ties to her mate were strong, stronger here than in the real world, as if they had more substance here. She was not alone, no matter what her fears tried to tell her.
She reached out and touched the fibrous growth. As Wellesley, himself, had, the plants felt real under her touch. She couldn’t see any structure that was holding the vines up; they seemed to be holding themselves in place. Out of the corner of her eye she could see them move, but the ones directly in front of her were motionless.
She closed her fingers around one of the vines. It was nearly as big around as her wrist. Experimentally, she gave it a tug. It gave a little and was answered by motion farther in the tangle, the sound of rustling plant matter filling the emptiness.
She gave it a sharp jerk, calling upon her wolf to help and putting her shoulders and hips into the effort. Reluctantly, the vines shifted until she caught a glimpse of golden fur.
She tried to reach through, to touch the fur—and impaled her hand, the one still hurting from the silver bullet that had kill Hester, upon a thorn as long as her pinkie. The vines, she saw, were covered with long, sharp thorns, though they hadn’t been a moment before.
She growled and redoubled her efforts to pull the vines away. Her hands bled until they were slick, and she left bright trails of blood on the skin of the plants. Wherever her blood stained the vines, they loosened until she could, at last, see the sickened and enraged creature trapped within.
The wolf, presumably Wellesley’s other half, looked plague-ridden. His coat damaged as if by mange, revealed oozing sores where the thorns had dug in. There were places in which the wolf’s flesh had grown over the vines that trapped him so that he was part of the structure that held him prisoner.
Rationally, she was pretty sure that she was using constructs to try to organize what she felt through the magic: her magic and Wellesley’s magic. That what she saw was more symbolic than actual. But maybe not.
Anna was her father’s daughter, and her father believed in science and rational thinking. She’d been a werewolf for years now, and she still tended to think about it from a scientific viewpoint, as though lycanthropy were a virus.
Faced with a wall of briar-thorned vines straight out of a Grimms’ fairy tale, she’d never had it brought so clearly that what she was and what she did was magic. Not Arthur C. Clark magic, where sufficient understanding could turn it into a new science that could be labeled and understood. But a “there’s another form of power in the universe” magic. Something alien, almost sentient, that ran by its own rules—or none. Real magic, something that could be studied, maybe, but would never rest in neatly explainable categories.
With that in mind, she tried visualizing a knife, or something she could cut through the vines with. But apparently that wasn’t something her magic could do. In frustration, she called upon her wolf. But found that she couldn’t change to her wolf, not here in Wellesley’s … what? Imagination? Soul? Prison.
But she managed to give her hand claws. She dug into the vines, sinking her claws into the surface of the vine.
Querida, said Asil, are you sure you want to bleed him?
For a bare instant she got a flash of the real world, where her real claws had sunk into Wellesley’s skin.
Horrified, she pulled her claws out of the vines. Almost inadvertently, her gaze met the determined eyes of the trapped golden wolf. A gray, viscous substance leaked down the green exterior of the plant from the holes she had dug in it. And the substance smelled noxiously awful.