Damien glanced away from her and down to his palm. A sliver of light through a break in the wooden wall fell across the cut, healing again, though slower than he would have liked. “Of course I did,” he whispered. “Now, shut your mouth, or they’ll find us.”
She pressed her lips together, chest still heaving, then as if she couldn’t help herself, spat out, “But you’re a blood mage. Why are we even hiding?”
“Everyone has their limits,” he growled. “Killing themandlooking out for you is a much bigger chore.”
“I thought you wanted me dead.”
“I want the talisman.” He leaned over to squint out into the swamp through the slit in the wood, pushing her out of the way though there wasn’t really anywhere for her to go in the cramped larder.
She had fully caught her breath, and used the opportunity to sigh as if she were being put out, voice low and annoyed. “And if I get eaten by one of them, it’ll be harder for you to sneak into Eirengaard with a werewolf, right?”
Damien ground his jaw. Yes, she was correct about that—what else did she want from him? And where did she get off being so snarky and petulant, especially at a time like this?
He scowled back at her, vision adjusted to the darkness. She had mud splattered across her nose, but it didn’t blight the soft curve of her cheek nor did the cut over her lips mar their fullness, and the strands of hair that had come loose from where it was tied back were somehow framing her round face in a pleasing way despite being such a mess. He looked down the length of her, hidden beneath a tunic that was too big, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine what was there.
“On second thought, if they get their claws on you, I doubt you’ll be eaten.” He let her mind ponder the suggestion as he searched for their pursuers through the break in the wood once more, then clarified, “I’m not particularly interested in rooting out their den to retrieve you and the talisman, so you should really quiet down unless you think you’d enjoy being mated with the surviving pack.”
At that, she inhaled sharply. Damien waited for her next pithy response, but none came. He glanced back to see her eyes glazing over. Well, that had worked at making her shut up, but his stomach turned in a way that told him he perhaps shouldn’t have said something so crude.
When a shadow passed over the sliver of light coming in through the crack in the wall, she squealed in horror and pressed into the larder’s corner. No, he definitely should not have said that.
The werewolf stalking outside made an angry, questioning sound, and another answered it with a snarl. She gasped again, and all Damien could do was throw a hand over her mouth. She struggled against it, grabbing his wrist just like in the Sanctum when he had been ready to strangle her for being an assassin. Her breaths came even faster now that she’d been silenced. If he let go, she would probably scream, and they would be found instantly.
There were at least two outside, possibly more, and commanding her with the talisman might not be worth the expenditure of magic if he didn’t know exactly what he would be up against.
“Shh,” he hissed, leaning closer, but her struggle persisted, and she scuffed a foot against the wall. Strange, scaring her was apparently not the way to get what he wanted despite that it usually worked on others. He couldn’t shout either, that would bring the werewolves right to them. Well, that was him, out of ideas. Except, of course, something even more disgraceful.
Damien wrapped his free arm around her back and yanked her away from the wall so she could no longer kick it. Pulling her up against him, he dipped his head beside her ear. “I will not allow anything to happen to you,” he said, leveling something like comfort into his voice, “but you must be quiet now. Please.”
She took one deep breath through her nose and held it, her chest expanding against his in the tight embrace. For a tense moment, the two remained still and silent, her small body warm and fitting to his own, easy to hold now that she was no longer thrashing. As completely useless as he knew it would be, Damien still pleaded silently to every dark entity he knew that he would be able to release her as soon as possible.
She breathed out against his hand, her grip on his wrist unclenching, and she managed a nod.
Her eyes were still full of fear, but not for him. For him, there was something else, but he couldn’t quite place it. He slid his hand from her mouth, and she remained quiet. “Good girl.”
Damien loosened his grip, and she stepped back in the tiny space, her warmth and touch gone as she stared at the ground. His pleas had been answered, and he should have been relieved, yet he wondered if just another moment or two would have been for the best, solely to prolong her obedience, of course.
Damien’s throat was hoarse as he tried to keep it quiet, “Now, wait here.”
Creeping out of the larder, he could easily see there were no other creatures in the hut, but he knew they had circled around to its front. Dagger in hand, he pushed the larder’s door to behind him and stepped out onto the soft wood of the floor, but when he took another step, there was a crack, and his boot broke through a board.
There was a scuffle outside and a howl, and at the space where the hut’s door had been, the sinewy form of a werewolf blotted out the moonlight. It was drooling, its eyes flashing with excitement as they fell on him. Damien cast immediately at the thing, throwing a line of blood that solidified into blades just as a second werewolf attempted to pile in behind the first. The magicked blades slashed into the beast’s chest full force as it was trapped in the doorway, and it fell with a gurgling cry.
The second thoughtlessly clamored over the body of the first, pouncing at Damien. He jumped away, and it slammed into the corner of the larder, the girl inside crying out. Damien whistled sharply to pull the wolf’s attention back to him, and it pounced right into another conjuring of the same spell despite just witnessing his companion fall to identical arcana, hunger likely making it doubly stupid.
The first wolf raised back up, gore dripping from the wounds along its ribcage, and the second remained standing though wobbled. Damien squeezed his self-inflicted wound at the sight of all that cursed blood, and instead called out in Chthonic to what little blood was left inside the two. Their bodies lurched toward him and one another, already weak, wounds gushing as they were moved under his spell.
He’d managed to get them right beside one another and released a last spray of his own blood that turned solid and sharp in midair. The two fell simultaneously, gone with a pair of agonizing howls. “Of all fucking things,” he groused, willing his palm to heal faster as he eyed the cursed blood sprayed all over the cabin.
But then a shadow rose up from behind where the most recent defeated lay. The largest of the werewolves, the one he had already cut up and left for dead on the road, slammed a clawed, paw-like hand onto each side of the doorway, blocking off the light and baying into the hut. Damien grabbed at his collar, but hesitated a second too long before he could take the dagger’s blade to his own chest and open a new wound.
The werewolf sprung the length of the hut and was on him in an instant. The wall came up against Damien’s back with a crack, the monstrous beast crushing him into the rotting wood, and then it broke, the two falling out into the marshy ground of the swamp.
The weight of the beast was shocking, baring down on Damien and snapping saliva-covered jaws in his face. A hot droplet of blood dripped down onto his cheek. Cursed blood, blood that shouldn’t mingle with his own. Damien knew what it was like to lose himself to something he couldn’t control—he refused to be the victim of a curse that did the same. Cutting himself now would be too risky, and burying his dagger into the beast was absolutely out of the question on the off chance the curse tainted his blade.
He thrust an elbow up under the werewolf’s neck to hold its jaws at bay, frothy, putrid slobber dripping onto his nose. It bit at the air an inch from his face, and the two sank into the wet earth with a squelch. Damien tightened his cut hand into a fist to protect the wound from the curse. Muscles aching as he struggled under the beast, he sheathed his dagger on his bracer and began to focus the energy for a spell that didn’t rely on his blood, something weaker that he could only hope would work enough to get himself out from under the thing and then release the Abyss on it.
But it screamed before he even cast, a long, painful noise that pierced his ears and cut right into his gut. The animalistic man threw its head back, baying to the sky, and with a last, strangled cry, collapsed wholly atop Damien, dead.
