Shifting Shadows

Samuel smiled sharply, his hands keeping a restless rhythm on the drum. “A stir we’d make, that’s for sure,” he said, his voice oddly cadenced as he talked with the beat of his drumming. “They aren’t used to fairy princesses and hobgoblins in human villages, my lady. Some warlord would try to claim you, and I’d have to take him down.”

She pulled a glamour over her face and form and spread it over Haida just to watch his jaw drop. “Do you think that fae keep to themselves always, Samuel?” she said behind her guise of a pox-scarred, plain-faced woman. “Just because we are not seen doesn’t mean that we do not go where we please.”

“I thought your magic was gone,” Samuel said, his face softening. “Is it back?”

“This isn’t that kind of magic,” she told him. She had expected her magic to start seeping back to her by now, but it had not. Sometimes she worried about that, but Samuel made her feel safe—and magic had brought her enough heartache that she would not be sad if she were never any more than what she was now. Samuel waited for her to explain herself, so she told him, “It’s glamour—a part of me, like music is a part of you.” Then she nodded at Haida. “I could only do that because she does not guard herself against me.”

Haida put her hands on her cheeks. “Oh dear,” she said, and squeaked when she sounded like an old woman. She laughed and ran off to find the polished-bronze mirror in the hallway to see what Ariana had done to her.

Samuel set the drum down, got up, and walked all the way around her. He stopped in front of Ariana and reached out to touch her nose. He slid his hands to her cheekbones, then to the corners of her eyes.

“It feels real,” he said, drawing a deep breath. After a moment he relaxed. “But you smell like yourself.”

“Samuel,” Ariana said. “How would you like to earn our room and board as we travel from village to village? I can be your meek wife, and Haida can sing with you.”

He rubbed his face and paced a bit.

“I have a hard time thinking with the moon singing in the sky,” he said, as if it were a confession.

She tilted her head—it was still daylight, though the sun hung low in the sky. There were human things, phrases and aphorisms, that seemed odd to her; perhaps Samuel’s odd comment was just such a thing as those.

“Samuel?” Ariana couldn’t keep the concern out of her voice.

His eyes half closed. “I am restless tonight, I think. But travel appeals to me. Yes.”

“We’ll do it,” she said. The floor moved just a little under Ariana’s feet. So it was to her home she spoke the last bit. “Travel the summer and return for autumn and winter.”

THIRTEEN

Samuel

I woke up suddenly, not too long after I had gone to sleep. Beside me, Ariana still slept deeply. I had tired her with my lovemaking this night, trying to drown the strange energy that filled me in her body. I had succeeded insofar that afterward I’d been able to sleep—only to be awakened by the moon’s call.

I got up out of the bed carefully so as not to awaken Ariana and stepped to the open window, where the moon hung high in the sky. I had learned time passed differently in Ariana’s home than it did in the outside world, but the moon’s song had not changed between the world I knew best and Underhill. I lifted my hand toward the moon as if I might reach it.

And she reached back.

A sizzling, burning energy coursed through me, calling the wolf to hunt—and the wolf answered. It was a better change, now that the witch’s power didn’t fight the wolf. Over the years, I had learned to ease my way between wolf and human, but even so, it hurt.

I dropped to the floor and writhed under the moonlight as the wolf tore through my human flesh with as much care as he would have given the carcass of a deer. In all the years I had been a werewolf, I had never met the full moon in my human flesh. I had not realized that the moon would call the wolf, will I or no. Helpless, I held my silence as long as I could, but wolf and moon between them reft me of my humanity, and I cried out.

“Samuel?” Ariana’s voice, full of worry and love and all those things that meant I wasn’t alone, should not have filled me with dread.

The wolf, who eclipsed me in my own mind as he had not since the very early days of my running on four feet, rose to his feet and met Ariana’s eyes. Ariana’s beautiful green fae eyes. The wolf could see in darkness better than my human self. So he watched as her pupils expanded to eat her iris until her entire eye was black.

Ariana’s scent changed until the smell of terror made the wolf drop his head and growl in pleasure. He bared his teeth, enjoying the spike of fear that followed. He was playing; he knew as well as I that she was not to be hurt. I, caught by surprise and thus overcome by moon-called wolf, was unable to do anything to reassure her.

Haida knocked on the door, “My lady? My lady?”

Ariana moved to get off the bed, and the wolf blocked her in, his countermove bringing him closer to the bed. Ariana made a sound then that I hope never to hear again. A keening, sorrowful sound like a rabbit who knows it will be dead before it draws another breath.

The door to the room opened, and the wolf snarled ferociously, angry at the intrusion into his game. The little hobgoblin stayed in the doorway, dropping her gaze.

“Samuel?” she said.

I felt the pull of my name, felt the wolf begin to give way to my control. I took a step toward Haida.

No!

The voice that uttered that word was not my Ariana, though it came from her throat. It was a roar more felt than heard, and it made my wolf think that we were under threat, and he turned again to face the bed and Ariana.

Her face was oddly distorted; I do not know if it was just the extremity of her fear or if there was some magic at work. Her dark skin was lit by scars that by a trick of magic, because that was thick in the room, or just some oddness of light looked the same color as her silver-lavender hair. The map of her pain was tattooed forever upon her skin, bared to the world.

My attention was caught by her for a moment too long. I didn’t realize she was gathering more magic until the bed dissolved beneath her and she dropped to the floor. Walls crumbled around us as she pulled magic from Underhill to protect Haida from the wolf she thought was attacking her friend. When she thought Haida was threatened, she protected the little fae with all the power she could draw.

She thrust it at me in a deadly blast I could see, wine-dark power bearing the scent of death.