Chapter Text
“You’re absolutely sure about this?” Elsa asked as she watched Jack limp his way to the small gray SUV that Billy Swan used for most of the estate’s errands. There was an enormous ancient van for large pickups, but according to Elsa, its gas mileage was appalling, and most of the other vehicles had been modified for hunting purposes in ways she still hadn’t quite figured out yet.
“It’s fine,” Jack assured her, hoping she didn’t see the tremor in his hand as he reached for the door handle. “I promised not to help, didn’t I?”
“You did,” she agreed slowly. Her boots crunched on the gravel of the drive as she approached the vehicle.
Jack pulled the door open and eased himself into the passenger seat, stifling a groan as he pulled a small duffel bag full of donated clothing and toiletries into his lap with his wounded arm. “I know myself well enough,” he continued, “to know that I will probably try to help if I stay here any longer.” He lifted his eyes to hers as the driver’s side door opened, and he gave her a slightly shaky smile. “So it’s best I get out of your way, isn’t it?”
“Can’t argue with that logic,” she grumbled. She slid into her seat and buckled her seatbelt.
Jack scrambled to do the same. He still wasn’t quite used to cars having them as standard equipment, but bringing that up was an entire conversation he wasn’t prepared to have.
Elsa watched him, narrow-eyed, as he carefully maneuvered the tongue of his seatbelt into the buckle and pushed it home with a click. He gave her another smile when he was finished.
She merely turned to look out the windshield.
“So, Boston,” she said briskly, starting the engine. “I assume we’re headed to Logan?”
“South Station,” he corrected.
She snapped her head sideways to stare at him. “You’re having me on.”
He smiled weakly.
“Where are you even—” She shook her head and put the vehicle in gear. “All right, South Station, but explain. Does flying put you too close to the moon or something?”
He chuckled. “No, nothing like that. I just prefer traveling by rail when I can manage it. It’s slower, but it’s much more comfortable than flying, and especially in the United States, the security is a lot less irritating, even when I have the right kind of identification.” He sighed. “I get, ah, randomly selected a lot.”
She winced in what looked like sympathy, and he felt a sudden surge of fury at whatever TSA agent had come up with a pretext to put hands on Elsa the way they did to him.
He tamped the anger back down again. She wasn’t his, after all. No one really was, except maybe Ted, but Elsa Bloodstone above all was her own woman and no one else’s.
“And Amtrak is comfortable enough?” Elsa asked, clearly trying to wrench the conversation back on course.
“Oh, yes. Business class on a train is actually more pleasant than flying, most of the time. And once I get to New York, I can book a room with a bed, lock the door, and nap all the way to Florida. It’s surprisingly restful. No jet engines, either.”
She shot him a glance. “Right. Werewolf hearing has its drawbacks.”
And its benefits, he thought, as he listened to the whisper of her hair where it brushed the shoulders of her leather jacket. It was nearly as intoxicating as her scent in the enclosed space of the car.
“And,” he couldn’t resist adding, “if I have to go out the window in an emergency, it’s a lot easier.”
She turned off the long gravel drive and onto the road toward the main highway. Trees blurred past on either side as the car picked up speed. “Have you gone out many train windows, then?”
“Only a few. People,” he was careful not to say hunters, “usually aren’t looking for people like me on public transport. They think we all have ancient fortunes and private jets. It’s a ridiculous stereotype. Personally, I blame vampires for it.”
She snorted. “About that. Your niece—”
That was when the body slammed headfirst into the windshield.
Jack yelped as he was thrown against his shoulder restraint. Elsa swore and stomped on the brake. The glass spiderwebbed and sagged inward, but didn’t shatter. The massive bulk of something brown and hairy thrashed against the windshield, its enormous skull thudding and clattering against the remains of the car frame as the SUV skidded blindly to a halt in the middle of the roadway.
“Out!” Elsa barked, and Jack obeyed, punching the button on his seatbelt three times before it popped free. He staggered out of the passenger door and fell to his knees on the asphalt as the forest spun around him.
From above, something bellowed, and Elsa let out a stream of expletives, followed by the distinctive crack of a pistol shot. Jack scrambled into the shadow of the SUV and covered his head with shaking hands as the gunshot reverberated through the trees.
“Jack?”
Elsa’s voice. Calm now.
“Jack, are you all right?”
Oh. She sounded worried.
The scuff of boots on asphalt. The creak of leather as she crouched low. A warm wave of her scent rolling into his nose.
“Jack, look at me.”
He didn’t want to. Something in the back of his brain was still screaming at him to hide, to make himself small and invisible while he was too weak to fight.
But it was Elsa who had asked, so he made himself lower his hands, lift his head, and raise his eyes to hers.
“There you are,” she said, and he thought he heard a hint of warmth in those words. Her eyes flicked over his face, and her brow knitted as she reached out one slow gloved hand to cup his cheek. “Are you hurt?” she asked.
He blinked a few times, then shook his head, not trusting himself to speak yet.
“Can you stand?”
That was a more difficult question, but again, it was Elsa who had asked. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and begged his knees to cooperate.
It was slow and wobbly and he felt terrifyingly vulnerable, but her hand left his cheek to cup his right elbow and somehow he made it to an upright position, leaning against the back door of the SUV and only shaking a bit.
She leaned beside him, warm and silent, and he sent up a quick prayer of thanks to any gods who might yet be kindly disposed toward him that the most lethal woman he’d ever met (perdóname, Nina, but it’s true) was also the most wonderful. He didn’t deserve Elsa Bloodstone, not even the little bit of her he’d been blessed with.
When he could breathe again, he said, “I’m sorry. You must think …” He trailed off, not sure how to finish the sentence.
She shook her head. “I don’t think anything. I’ve seen you when people are trying to kill you. You’re not much of a fighter, but you’re not a coward either.”
The frankness startled him, and he looked sideways at her with wide eyes.
She kept her own eyes on the woods. “Was it the gunshot?”
“I—” He looked down. Sure enough, there was a compact pistol resting innocuously in her right hand, its barrel pointed conscientiously at the ground, her finger resting outside the trigger guard.
“No,” he said, truthfully. “I’ve been around guns. I don’t like them, but that wasn’t it. It’s just.” He sighed. “Sometimes, when I’m,” he waved vaguely at himself to indicate his condition, “not at my best, the other part of me gets a little closer to the surface.” He realized what he’d said, and felt panic surging up his throat. “It’s not dangerous!” he blurted. “Not to anybody else. Mostly, when I’m sick or injured, you know, my other part would rather hide than fight anybody. You fight when you’re hurt, you’re more likely to lose, right? He only fights when he doesn’t have a choice.”
“When he’s trapped,” Elsa supplied.
“Yes.” He nodded, and kept nodding until he made himself stop. “Right now, I probably couldn’t win a fight with a housecat. My other part knows that. So when everything went crazy, he just—I had to find cover.”
She nodded, and kept nodding a little too long. It made him smile a little, to see that they were both so unsure of themselves.
“Slamming doors,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
“After I left home,” she said, “the first place I … stayed.” She swallowed. “I would flinch every time someone slammed a door. Stupid, really. I wasn’t afraid of doors. But something about the sound, it just took me right back to shouting matches with my dad. And I couldn’t stand it.” She shrugged. “It got better, eventually. But it pissed me off for bloody years, that I could spit in a demon’s eye, but the sound of a door made me jump.”
Jack studied her profile, the firm set of her jaw, the flint in her eyes. He wondered for a moment what it would feel like to touch her face as she’d touched his. Would the skin be soft, or would it be like touching marble?
“You’re not a coward either,” he said.
“I know,” she replied, and heaved herself to her feet. “Come on.”
Wobbling only slightly, he followed her around to the crumpled hood of the SUV. It was still sagging under the weight of its burden.
He stared. “Is that—?”
“A moose,” she confirmed, and reached out to grab one antler and tug the head toward him.
It was a moose, all right, a full-grown bull. Five hundred kilograms at least, with a massive rack of antlers.
And a small-caliber bullet hole between its eyes.
“I didn’t know you got moose in Massachusetts,” he said, a bit stupidly.
“We don’t, usually,” she admitted. “Not in this part. Every couple of years, one wanders through. Usually a male in mating season.”
Jack gazed down at the corpse of the moose and the probably totaled SUV. “I don’t think this was about mating season,” he said.
“Nor do I,” Elsa agreed.
“Whatever has been attacking the house,” Jack said slowly, “it doesn’t want you to leave.”
She shrugged. “Well. Whatever it wants from me, it can’t get it if I’m not there.” She looked up at Jack. “How’s your nose?”
He blinked at her. “Uh. Fine? I didn’t hit it or anything.”
She huffed. “Your sense of smell, idiot. D’you think you could track this thing back to where it came from?”
“It’s a moose,” he pointed out. “You could use your eyes for that.”
“Yeah, but you’re not leaving until this is sorted. Are you?”
There was a hint of a smile playing around her scarlet lips. He felt a matching one pulling at his own.
“No,” he said, “I suppose not.”
He left the duffel bag in the SUV and walked with Elsa into the treeline. The moose’s trail was as obvious as he’d expected; even if he hadn’t been able to pick up the musky-grassy scent of a large herbivore, the path of bent and crushed vegetation would have been more than enough to follow.
“I don’t know much about moose,” he said softly, creeping back along the trail. “Do they usually—?”
“Travel in a straight line?” Elsa finished. “No, not any more than deer or bears. Not unless they’re in one hell of a hurry.”
Together, they gazed down the almost perfectly straight path of destroyed trees and brush.
“Like when they’re running away from something,” Jack murmured. “Or toward it.”
“It hit the car head-first,” she pointed out.
“Er, yes?”
She sighed. “You don’t spend much time on rural roads, do you?”
Not in automobiles, no. “I’m not what you’d call a car guy.”
She huffed. “Most deer—and moose, really—get hit when they’re crossing the road. They hit side-on. Usually the car takes out their legs and they end up on the hood, or the windshield.” She growled under her breath. “This one came running out of the woods and charged us.”
“Like the deer at the house, and the fox.”
“Yes. I think whatever’s trying to get in has upgraded.”
Jack sniffed casually at a tree as he passed it. It still smelled of moose hair and sweat. This really wasn’t much of a job for a werewolf, but he would do sillier things for Elsa.
A thought occurred to him, suddenly.
“We weren’t in the house,” he said.
“What?”
“All the other attacks have been at the house,” he explained. “Specifically, the parts of the house that Verussa occupied. The car—did it belong to Verussa or something?” He looked back at her.
She shook her head. “Technically everything at the house was hers after my dad died, but that car wasn’t special to her or anything like that. Not her style.”
Jack offered her a small smile. “Not enough skulls?”
She flashed him one of her own. “No. And she’d have it painted blood-red. Or black.”
“She had a very consistent aesthetic. I noticed that about her.”
“You should have seen how she decorated the bathrooms.”
He couldn’t stifle the chuckle. “Right. So is this a shift in its focus? From trying to get at anything connected to Verussa to trying to stop anyone from leaving?” He frowned. “Has anyone else tried to leave since the incident with the fox?”
Elsa pursed her perfect lips in thought. “Mister Swan,” she said slowly. “He made his usual supply run the day before you got here.”
“Did he have any trouble?”
“Not that he mentioned to me. And the car was undamaged this morning.”
“So it’s not the car,” Jack murmured, half to himself. “And it’s not people leaving the estate.”
Elsa sighed heavily. “I see where this is going. It’s me, isn’t it?”
“What?” Jack blinked. “No, I didn’t say that.”
“It’s true, though,” she pointed out. “All the attacks on the house have taken place when I was there. The only attack on the car was when I was driving. There’s been a focus on anything connected to Verussa, yes, but whenever she wasn’t involved, I was.” She shrugged. “Maybe it’s after Bloodstone women.”
“Verussa was only part of your family by marriage,” Jack reminded her. “Is that enough for something like this?”
“Dunno,” she replied. “Let’s go ask it.” She stalked forward along the moose’s trail.
Jack sighed and followed.
The trail ran nearly a full mile through the woods of the Bloodstone estate, arrow-straight and littered with destruction. Snapped branches, trampled leaves, and once a dead chipmunk that clearly hadn’t gotten out of the way fast enough to escape being stepped on by an enormous hoof.
“The impressions are far apart,” Elsa observed as she paced the distance from one set of hoofprints to the next. “It must have been pretty close to a gallop.” She frowned. “A deer would have been faster, and there are plenty of them around. This thing traded speed for size. And as rare as moose are here, that bull was probably the only one it would encounter this season. And yet it wasted it on a single shot. Getting desperate, perhaps.”
“Maybe it’s running out of time somehow,” Jack suggested.
“Or it just saw an opportunity,” Elsa countered. “I don’t leave the property often, except to hunt. Driving you to Boston was a chance for this thing to try to kill me, and who knows when it’ll get another?”
Jack frowned. Something didn’t feel quite right to him about Elsa’s line of reasoning. The pattern of attacks on Verussa’s traces in the world was clear, but the connection to Elsa herself was less so. Yet Elsa seemed convinced now that whatever was attacking her home was after her personally.
Then again, he reflected, if there was one subject that could crack Elsa’s frosty veneer, it was family. Being associated with Verussa, even in the mind of an enemy, wouldn’t sit well with her.
He wondered if she had anyone to confide in about things like this. She didn’t seem to have any family left, and she had talked about the servants at the manor like, well, servants. Did Bloodstones even have friends?
Ahead of him, Elsa stopped walking so suddenly that he had to sidestep to avoid running into her.
Then the smell hit him.
The thing most people didn’t understand about werewolf noses was that all the smells were around all the time. Human beings didn’t just smell like themselves; they smelled like their soap and shampoo and deodorant and the fibers in their clothing and the food they’d eaten last and the colds they didn’t realize they had yet and the last time they’d taken a shit and—well, all things considered, he understood why werewolves didn’t mention that sort of thing to anyone outside the community.
So he wasn’t surprised that the clearing in the forest ahead of him smelled of death. The entire forest smelled slightly of death all the time, as all forests did. There was always a dead squirrel or deer decaying somewhere, or rotting leaves, or any of a thousand other once-living things tickling his nose. He’d smelled the sweet stink of decay all along the trail, but it hadn’t been notable, not for a trail left by an animal that might have been dead before Elsa had put a bullet in its brain.
What was a surprise was how much death he was smelling.
The clearing wasn’t large, maybe ten yards across, a little patch of diffuse sunlight in a dark wood. And it was littered with bodies.
Rabbits. Deer. Foxes. Voles. A badger. Something that had probably been a skunk. Several raccoons. Birds of every description. All scattered around the clearing, all twisted and broken, all in varying states of decay.
Elsa brought her pistol up. “Are they—?” she muttered.
Jack inhaled. “All dead,” he told her. “For a long time, most of them.” He sniffed again. “Some of them are older than others. There’s—there’s a whole range.” He gagged. “I’d like to stop smelling this now.”
“Breathe through your mouth,” Elsa said tightly, and he nearly shot back that tasting death wasn’t any better, but she was already stepping forward, picking her way between corpses large and small, her pistol still pointed downward but now held at the ready.
A heartbeat later, he saw what she’d seen. The bodies lay in rough concentric rings, radiating out from a single point: a tree on the other side of the clearing. Its trunk was short and broad, branching out at head height to a towering crown of branches like a hand with a thousand fingers. Golden and brown leaves still clung to most of them; autumn hadn’t finished its work here.
He tugged the collar of his shirt up toward his nose, trying to overwhelm the external scents with his own. “Is that what I think it is?” he asked, nodding toward the tree.
“It’s a wych elm,” Elsa confirmed, stepping closer. “And look.” She pointed at what looked like tiny fragments of old paper clinging to the bark. “Someone stuck something on it. Probably a spell or a ward of some kind.”
“It’s broken,” Jack said.
“It’s washed away,” she corrected. “Someone would have had to keep coming out here to slap new papers on the tree. And then they stopped.” She shot Jack a warning look. “Do not say any names. Not here.”
He nodded hurriedly. It wasn’t as if he enjoyed invoking Verussa.
“So,” he continued, “what was … she … trying to contain in the tree?”
“Merlin the bloody Magician, for all I know,” Elsa grumbled, and rose up on tiptoe to peer into the crotch of the tree, where the branches split in all directions. “Fucking hell. It’s partly hollow.” She pulled a small flashlight out of her jacket and snapped it on.
And immediately snapped it off again.
Elsa turned on her heel and stalked toward Jack.
“We’re leaving,” she told him.
“What?” he asked.
“I know what this is. We’re leaving. Now. Keep up!”
He spun in place as she stormed past him and immediately broke into a trot to keep up with her ground-eating strides.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“It’s Borrowing,” she said. “It’s something a few magic users can do, mostly witches. A Borrower can project their consciousness into the mind of a nearby animal and ride along, for lack of a better term. If they’re strong enough, they can take the wheel.”
“Even with a moose?” he asked skeptically.
“I saw someone do it with a horse once,” she said. “I don’t think Borrowing cares about size.”
“Okay,” he said, huffing as he struggled to keep up. “So what do we do?”
“Standard procedure with a malicious Borrower,” and she sounded like she was quoting now, that couldn’t be a good sign, “is to hunt the Borrower down and kill them.”
“Okay,” he repeated, “so how do we do that?”
She shot him a wild-eyed look over her shoulder. “I don’t know,” she said, and broke into a run.
He had to sprint to keep up. He followed her as she zigzagged between the trees, and he could feel his stomach turning somersaults as he stumbled over roots and rocks, but it didn’t matter. If Elsa thought it was wise to run, he was going to run.
As they ran, the forest stirred around them. Something rustled in the treetops, then began rattling the branches closer to the ground. As the two humans blurred through the woods, there were hisses and growls from the undergrowth.
Jack had approximately three thousand questions, but he saved his breath for running.
They broke from the treeline as the forest roared behind them, but there was no time to look back, only the gravel of the drive and the stone of the front steps and the door was thrown wide and slammed and he was crumpling to the parquet floor and Elsa was snapping locks shut and hissing ward spells barely under her breath, not caring if he heard or saw her magical protections, and he was going to think later about what that meant for him because right now Elsa was leaning on the door and her eyes were wild and her mouth was set in a hard line and she looked like she was about to shatter.
“Elsa,” Jack gasped, looking up at her from his knees. “What was in the tree?”
A storm of competing emotions whirled through Elsa’s eyes as she turned her mad stare on him.
“A human skull,” she said. “Verussa buried someone in that tree.”
Jack rose to his feet, unsteady but determined. He reached out toward Elsa in case she collapsed, but she might as well have been carved from hardwood like the door.
“I can’t kill the Borrower,” she told him. “Whoever it was, they’re already dead.”