“You are.”
“I amnot.” He motioned sharply through the air to end the debate.
“What happened to your hand?” she asked.
Cassiel glanced down at his palms. There was leftover blood that had dried down his wrist and arms.
“Are you wounded? I’ll tend to it.”
“It’s nothing.”
Cassiel tugged out a clean tunic from his pack and slipped it on. He wrapped his wings around himself, wanting to disappear from her sight. They sat like that for a moment, with his back to her and the crackling fire. Their shadows swayed together in the tall grass.
He wanted to ask how Dyna was feeling. She didn’t seem to be in any pain. Had she healed yet?
A howl rang over the treetops.
“The beast has been doing that for a while,” he said.
“Zev is not a beast. He will be himself in the morning.”
Cassiel glowered at her shadow. “I should never have given you my knife, Dyna.” He turned around. She glowered at him from the mound of blankets wrapped around her up to her neck. He lifted the rags of her bloody kirtle. “Zev almost tore you apart. If he is not a beast, why is he chained like one?”
Dyna looked away, her eyes welling. “Because I promised Zev that I would chain him. If I didn’t, he would have ended his life.”
Cassiel’s growing irritation deflated with the whoosh of breath that left him. There was nothing to say to that. He tossed the rags in the fire, and they watched the flames devour them.
“Zev’s father was a good man,” Dyna said softly. “He was my father’s brother. Both were prominent Herb Masters, but the village was too small so Uncle Belzev traveled for work in nearby towns. One day, he announced that he had wed, and he moved away to live with his bride. My father never met her and my uncle never spoke of her. Years later he returned to North Star with a baby in his arms. Only then did he tell my father he’d been living in Lykos Peak with a werewolf who’d taken him for a mate. But he had to leave because she rejected their child. She didn’t want a half-breed pup.”
Cassiel’s chest tightened. Another howl resonated in the distance with all the lament he felt in her story.
“My father took them in and Zev grew up into a sweet boy. He was three autumns old when I was born. He has always watched over me as an older brother would. As a child, I didn’t realize that Zev was special. I thought his ability to shapeshift into a wolf was normal. I hadn’t noticed he only shifted in front of our family. When a villager witnessed him change, fear spread. The council banished Zev from ever returning to North Star. He didn’t understand why the villagers called him a beast and threw stones at him. He was only a little boy. It broke his heart to be unwanted.”
The slurs Malakel spat at Cassiel during their childhood rang in his ears.“Dirty half-breed. You’re a cursed Nephilim. Abomination.”
Dyna curled over her knees, resting her chin on her arms as she gazed at the campfire. “They returned to Lykos Peak so Zev could be with his kind. We held reunions in a meadow outside of the village for years until the Shadow killed my family. Belzev no longer came, but Zev and I continued to meet. As he aged, he became more disheartened. The Pack saw him as abnormal, so they shunned him, and his mother couldn’t love him. Despite Zev’s breed, I think she resented him because Belzev had chosen him over her.”
The brunt of resentment and jealousy was all too familiar. It drove Queen Mirah mad when Cassiel’s father chose his mother. His childhood was laden with her hatred.“You are nothing.”
“Matters became more difficult when Zev reached maturity at thirteen.” Dyna’s soft voice dropped to a whisper. “The day he had his first full moon shift, the Other appeared.”
Cassiel suppressed a shudder. “What is it?”
“It’s his second form; a manifestation that comes from being half human and half wolf. Powerful and aggressive. Werewolves don’t rear pups born of mixed blood because they fear it.”
“The change looked painful,” Cassiel said, remembering how Zev floundered as another force bent and stretched him like dough.
“It is. When he shifts into a wolf, it hurts but it’s quick and his mass stays the same. But when he shifts into the Other, the bones in his body break and force him to enlarge into a new form.”
“Where did he get the chains?”
Dyna rubbed the old scars on her collarbone, staring blankly past him. “His father had them made after …”
“He attacked you.”
“He didn’t mean to. He wasn’t in his right mind.”
“Do not dismiss it. Those wounds had been enough to kill you.”
