The wind answered.
Chapter 36
L’Échiquier
CLAIRE
All I needed was a drop of blood. One single drop of Mama’s blood and I could complete the spell. It seemed simple enough. So when I launched myself from the carriage like a raven taking flight, I headed straight for the driver.
Only… it wasn’t Mama at the reins. It was one of those half-transformed wolves with a wolfish snout and big hairy arms. He snarled at me and pulled on the reins to stop the horses. “You! How did you escape?”
Anger pulsed under my skin, and my magick begged to be let out. Mama wasn’t here. Frustrated, I focused my energy on the carriage, and I sent a spell directly at it, knocking it over and trapping the wolf beneath the wreckage. The sound it made when it fell was oddly satisfying. A crash and a bang and a yelp of pain. The werewolf was trapped under the carriage, which was a good place for him to be. I needed answers.
I landed softly beside him and took in the black pox covering his skin and the growing pool of blood behind his head. Then I saw the fear in his eyes,which were the most human thing left about him. The stench of death filled my nostrils.
I’d done that. When he died, it would be my doing.
I swallowed the empathy rising in my throat because if I hadn’t toppled this carriage, he would’ve carried out his mission.
“Where is Angelina Prideaux?” I asked, putting a purposeful edge of violence into my voice.
It was the voice of a woman who preferred warm weather and nights alone with her husband but would settle for the blood of her enemies when provoked. It wasn’t tainted with Gorrath’s anger, nor was it laced with the fear and hate I’d grown up on.
It was completely my own.
The wolf quivered. A long tongue licking his jowls. I crouched down, letting the blood caked on my face and my red eyes do the hard work of intimidating him. Then I asked my question again. “Where is Angelina Prideaux?”
“How did you escape? We bound your hands. We blindfolded you.”
I pressed my finger to his forehead and allowed the magick to flow through me. Just a taste of the anger and heat contained within. It left a red burn on his forehead. He tried to shift the carriage off him, but it was too heavy, and he was already marked for death.
“You can either die swiftly and mercifully, or I can let you bleed out slowly. Your choice.”
His big eyes shifted back and forth. “Miss Prideaux rode ahead.”
I pressed my finger harder into his forehead, heat spreading deeper. He yelped. “And where was she headed?”
“She-she was going to meet her army. The wolves Shayla promised her.”
I abruptly removed my finger and stood, not wanting the wolf to see the surprised look on my face. My mother was headed to collect an army. Her army. Of wolves? I paced back and forth, trying not to let my emotions get the best of me so I could think clearly.
After Bastien had taken me into his service, Mama had attacked the Kemps, killing their matriarch, and tried to destroy their relics. It had seemed so senseless to me at the time. In my naïveté, I even considered that she had come north to check on me. But what if it had only been a stop on her way to the Lawless Lands?
What if that’s what Alec had left Château Rose to tell me? He’d worked as a pillow whisperer at the Veraleese Inn in Nightfall. People said all kinds of things in the throes of pleasure. What if he’d heard something he wasn’t meant to hear?
He’d claimed he’d been scratched by a woman with white hair who transformed into a werewolf. Could it have been Mama?
I stopped pacing. Not wanting to believe it. Mama was a prideful and arrogant woman. But it was hard to imagine her with a pillow whisperer. I set that fact aside for now and kept thinking.
After she’d put a knife through Gorrath’s chest inside Chastity’s Stronghold, she’d told me we were going home. But the only way Mama could go back home now was with an army. She knew our coven didn’t have the numbers or the support inside the Unified Territories to make the kind of impact she really wanted, but if she had the right leverage, she would become a legitimate option. If she showed up with an army of Diana’s wolves, she might be able to draw those with a desire for freedom from the vampires to her.
I bit my lip, considering all of this while the wolf whimpered about the burn on his forehead. There was something Iwas missing. A piece that didn’t quite fit. After meeting Gorrath, I’d come to learn a thing or two about bargains, especially magickal bargains.
What could Mama have possibly promised Shayla in return for an army of wolves? Certainly not coin. No, she had to have some kind of bargaining chip.
I thought of Sera, and I wondered where she was. I could only hope she wasn’t convinced Mama’s plot was a good idea, but a sick feeling sat in my gut. What power did she have to say no to our mother when Mama had raised us with little agency over our own thoughts?
I turned back to the werewolf, considering him once again.
