Page 64 of Wolfsbane

“You could . . . you could try to make it rain. Stop the fire.” He sounded uncertain. Like he was worried I didn’t want to try the magic.

So I nodded to him. “Tell me how.”

He took a deep breath and nodded. With the enviable stamina of a wolf, he explained while we continued running toward the old square. Another little rhyme, this one set to a meter that sounded like a children’s song, just repeating.

Rain, Rain, come our way,

wind so strong and skies so gray.

I suspected it was, in fact, a children’s rhyme, and would work better if it had been a part of my childhood, ingrained in me the way it clearly was in Daire. But I could do this. His magic was incredible. It had stitched Aleks’s hand back on. It could do anything.

He drew me through the usual visualization exercise, and those were getting easier as we went. The magic was inside me, and it felt . . . trained? As though I had some muscle memory from long years of practice. I imagined it was the same way my wolf kept him landing on his feet whenever he fell. Even if he didn’t know how to use it, it knew what to do.

Maybe I didn’t know shit about magic, but the magic knew. Daire had spent his whole life training it, even if he hadn’t been able to touch it yet. His years of hard work were now paying off for me. For my pack.

So I followed along with him, visualizing the gray misty energy of a rainstorm as he talked me through it. He was so good with words, taking my mind right to a thunderhead rolling across the land, dousing everything beneath it. Flashes of lightning in the distance, but not near us, since we were trying to put out fires, not start them. Chanting the silly little children’s rhyme as we went.

I was panting when we reached the edge of the tree line next to the old square where . . . half of the buildings were on fire.

Thank fuck they hadn’t known about the new buildings.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and just as we broke through the trees, rain started falling.

Next to me, Daire froze, and I stopped running, turning to look back at him. He was staring up into the sky, which was very suddenly pouring rain down on us.

When his head dropped and he met my eye, his own were shining with emotion. “You did it. Fuck me, you did it.”

Well of course I had. I had his magic and he’d told me how. Hadn’t he expected it to work?

CHAPTER 36

Daire

Viktor made it rain.

Witches didn’t control the weather. At least, none that I knew had managed it. We’d learned the rhyme, but it was more a wish for rain than an actual summoning. Usually we’d get rain within a week, not minutes.

Ingeborg had told me stories of witches of old calling the rains down in dry seasons, but I’d thought they were children’s stories and nothing more.

Like the witchwolf.

And there Viktor was, with my magic, and somehow, he’d summoned a whole freaking storm in the time it took us to get to the old square.

I didn’t think I could have done it, but thank the goddess he didn’t have my doubts.

Thank the goddess that right then, he had my magic.

Rain fell in heavy sheets over the burning shacks. Wolves stumbled outside, getting pelted so hard their hair stuck to their faces. They looked up at the sky.

And there, in the middle of the square, fire sprang to my mother’s hands. That was the weapon she’d settled on, and she was so damned stubborn that even getting drenched, she hadn’t paused to adjust tactics.

She wasn’t looking at the wolves around, but staring at Viktor. She’d seen him using my magic, her eyes flashing like coal in the middle of her smeared mascara. Not only did he have my power, but he knew how to wield it.

It didn’t matter that I had his wolf. A werewolf with magic was the bigger threat—an abomination when it wasn’t of her own creation.

She was going to kill him.

I shouted at the same time as she threw a ball of fire. Viktor raised his hand. Magic sprang to his fingertips and the fire shot out on either side while I ducked behind him. But that? That was instinct and luck.