ran the risk of attracting the attention of true witches. Ones from the dark as well as the light.
Too much dabbling could lure an ordinary person into a Volkhvy world they weren’t prepared to face. Perhaps her family remembered the Old ways too well.
Elena was living proof. She was stalked by a witchblood prince and her fascination with the legend had turned into a call she couldn’t ignore. She’d been pulled across thousands of miles from Saint Petersburg to Cerna, and the call only became stronger the closer she came to the mountains.
It was almost physical now. In spite of the cold, she was aware of a strange pulse beneath her skin that compelled her onward. Her choice had seemed so clear—heed the call or stay within Grigori’s grasp.
By the time she came to the pass, her lungs hurt with every frigid breath and her weak knee was on fire. She wouldn’t have made it this far over the ice and rugged terrain if she hadn’t spent years pushing past physical pain to achieve the optimum performance from her muscle, sinew, heart and will. Prima ballerinas weren’t born. Or made. They were forged in the fire that was the Saint Petersburg Ballet Academy.
Elena paused. She wiped her eyes with gloved fingers, but they weren’t so hindered by icicles that they missed the castle she’d come to find. She couldn’t see it because it wasn’t there.
She’d chased help that only existed in a book of legends. No more. No less. She’d followed landmarks in the illustrations and carefully tried to sleuth her way to the right place. But her beautiful book crafted of intricate, hand-painted and cut designs that leaped from the page in three-dimensional depictions of a castle, the Romanovs and their enchanted wolves was nothing more than a storybook.
Her grandmother had blamed Elena’s nightmares on the book, but ten years of bad dreams hadn’t prepared her for the true horror of the witchblood prince who stalked her. She’d been haunted by the loss of her mother, only to learn her death had been a heroic sacrifice and not a suicide. Her mother had spilled her own blood to protect her daughter from a Dark Volkhvy prince. Her blood had fueled earthy folk magic. Nothing compared to the power it faced down and held back, but her mother’s fierce love had strengthened it.
He had stood out from the other patrons even before he spoke—tall, lean and beautiful to the point of being unnaturally perfect as if he was a mannequin, not a man. Not a hair of his glistening gelled hair had been out of place. There hadn’t been so much as a speck of lint on his tailored tuxedo. He’d moved like oil into her path with a flow to his gestures that was less grace and more fakery. His appearance was a charade. One meant to obfuscate his true nature. Yet one that revealed all, if you looked closely enough.
The sun was almost gone. Suddenly the white glare of ice and snow turned russet as it reflected the orange glow of the sky. Elena had nowhere else to go. The guide in his all-terrain vehicle was gone. He had taken his money and followed her orders: Don’t wait for me. I won’t be coming back. The dire economics of the region precluded any squeamishness over what she might do once he drove away.
It was true. She would freeze to death rather than go back and give in to Grigori’s demands even though she hadn’t found the help she’d hoped to find.
You’ll be utterly mine. Your mother only ensured I would require even greater satisfaction from our time together because of the delay.
A sudden sound dispelled the ice in her veins. A long, echoing howl—both mournful and triumphant—filled the air and conquered the wind as the king of sound on the mountain. Adrenaline rushed lifesaving vigor to her limbs. Her heart pounded. Her breath poured from her lips in vaporous puffs of fear and hope. The call that had brought her all the way from Saint Petersburg seemed to respond to the howl. It rose in her throat as if she should cry out a reply.
But her head was more rational than her heart.
Freeze or fangs?
Probably both, yet the possibility that the legend was true sent her scrambling farther along the pass in spite of her terror and the pain in her leg. The Romanovs controlled powerful wolves that were trained to fight the Dark Volkhvy witches. The alpha wolf was her last, best chance to defeat the witchblood prince. Another howl swelled up and out from the unseen chest that gave it birth. Paired with the decreasing light, the howl seemed to raise hungry shadows to consume the world. She hadn’t brought a flashlight. Or a tent. She didn’t own a weapon of any kind. Weapons were useless against the witchblood prince, and mortal shelter would only protect her from the elements long enough for him to find and claim her.
Perhaps she’d been seeking death after all. If the call that had drawn her here was a lie, death would be preferable to a life spent as Grigori’s captive.
Even sleep hadn’t given her peace in years. Every night she suffered horrible nightmares in which she was caught by Grigori and unable to escape. She’d thought they were only nightmares. Now that she’d seen her tormenter in real life, certainty had settled into her bones. Death wasn’t the worst fate she could suffer. As his stalking had escalated, so had her resolve to escape.
The snow was deeper and softer where drifts had accumulated in the protected lee of the pass between mountainous ridges. Her legs weren’t very long. At twenty, she was thin and graceful, petite and powerful. In spite of her knee, her body responded to the desperate pounding of her heart. Go. Go. Go.
She was all muscle, tendon and sinew. It didn’t matter that the ligament in one knee had required surgery to repair. All the rest made up the difference, fueled by adrenaline and fear. But if the howl had spurred her on, the sight of the creature who had opened its maw to create the sound caused her to freeze in place. A white wolf had climbed to the top of the ridge on her left. He was immense, larger than any wolf nature could have made. He stood on the peak, a ghostly silhouette against the darkening sky, and he howled again.
Elena’s legs—her stock and trade, the one thing between her and oblivion—gave out beneath her. She collapsed to her knees in the snow. She cried out when her right knee made contact. An unnoticeable deformity in the shape of her femur had caused her to land from jumps with incorrect form. Over the course of a decade, after millions of repetitions, her knee had been stressed by the imperfection. She’d recovered well from surgery and spent over a year in physical therapy, but the snowy hike had aggravated her injury.
Another howl answered the first. On the left peak directly across the pass from the white wolf, another wolf appeared, as russet as the sunset had been moments before. Even if she could get to her feet, she would never outrun them in the deep drifts of snow. There was no castle. There were no Romanovs. As hard as she squinted against the icy wind, she could see nothing to refuel her hopes. There were only two giant wolves whose echoes sounded hollow and hungry as they bounced off the icy walls of the pass. This is better than Grigori, the blood seemed to whisper as it rushed in her ears. The ice on her eyelashes had melted as fresh hot tears filled her eyes. They shimmered there, making the gloaming world mercifully indistinct, but even now she refused to let them fall. She closed her eyes to will them away, but then it was an effort to lift her lids against her weighted lashes. She did it anyway. If she had to meet a grim fate, she would do it with her eyes open.
Only her nightmares made her cry. On waking, when she was alone with no one to see, she often found her cheeks damp. She’d grown to be terrified of enclosed spaces and the sound of frantic, fluttering feathers—the two elements of her nightmares that never changed. She’d never cried over bloody toes or aching muscles or the harsh practices meant to perfect the curve of her arms and spine. The nightmares were far worse than any real-life trials. It had been horrible to discover that Grigori was real even more so because it meant that he had witnessed the tears she’d thought were shed in private. He’d seen her weak and terrified. That
