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My heart started racing for some reason at that, and I found myself glancing out the window. How strange to have this very physical reaction from that alone.
“The Lycans are a species that have been around millennia, before man, and will still be here after humans are gone.” Andrei started speaking to Mini, and I focused on them again. He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I’m not sure why she’s insistent on me telling you this. It’s not to frighten you. She says you must know what lurks in the woods, because you being here is no accident.”
I swallowed and knitted my brows. “I don’t understand. No accident?”
He shrugged as if he didn’t understand either. “She says nothing is coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. We are born to fulfill something.”
Mini started speaking again, and I watched her, so engrossed for some reason that I actually found myself leaning forward, hanging on to the words she spoke that I couldn’t understand.
“She says as soon as she looked into your eyes, she knew you were here for a reason, that you are meant to fulfill your truth. She says it’s in your eyes.”
For some reason, I lifted my hand, stopping when I got to the corner of one of my eyes. I didn’t understand what she meant but it was clear she was very passionate about it.
I could push this all off to an older woman from a faraway land telling me a story she heard as a child and had hung on to it her whole life. But then Mini lifted her hand and gestured to her own eyes then pointed to mine. She started speaking again, her tone now becoming a lighter, gentler cadence. When she gestured for Andrei to translate, I snapped my head in his direction, anxious to hear more.
“My grandmother said something about blue eyes being fate, ones so bright they were not a human shade, but like the Lycans.”
It was true, my eyes were a strange shade of blue, almost teal in appearance. As far as I knew, no other person in my family had this shade or anything remotely close to it. I’d gotten compliments as a child, looks from men and women in wonder, and appreciated it as I’d gotten older. I’d have to say my eyes were probably my best attribute, seeing as I was plain in every single manner aside from that.
But to think something so outlandish as this, whatever this was—not even including the whole wolf, Lycan, whatever folklore—that I had some kind of preordained destiny here simply because of the color of my eyes? Outrageous.
I kept that to myself, though. It was very clear Mini believed what she said wholeheartedly, and I was in no position to correct anyone and tell them I was nobody special. I didn’t have a great destiny in front of me. I was simply here because I needed to get away, because I felt some kind of lacking in my life… some kind of pull to explore and move on.
I realized I needed to get away, how I felt so at home when I decided I was going to Dobravina, how I felt it was exactly where I was supposed to be. And that feeling intensified when I landed in the country, and even more so once I got to the village.
I stayed for another half hour, the conversation being steered in a more neutral, “safer” direction by Andrei. But all I could think about was what Mini said.
After thanking her once again, I headed next door but stood outside and stared at the thick line of trees I could see just up in the distance. The moon was high, not quite full, but casting a silvery, glowing light across everything. Shadows snaked between the trees, and it was pitch-black deep within those woods, so dense I saw nothing but that inkiness.
My skin felt tight, hot. My heart beat a steady rhythm, and I actually found myself moving closer to the woods, some unforeseen event almost drawing me closer. But I shook my head to clear it and forced—yes, I had to force—myself to go inside the cottage.
I found myself in my room and leaned against the wall, my mind even more confused than ever.
I went through the motions of getting ready for the night, my mind thick with the tale Mini delivered.
And then I lay in my bed, the lights off, the sound of the night right outside my window doing nothing to lull me.
I knew there wouldn’t be a restful sleep for me. Not when it felt like I’d touched a livewire.
6
Ren
It was the same. Every night. A routine that came as natural as breathing.
As I walked the forest, my big body glided almost soundlessly over the terrain—a supernatural gift for all species of the supernatural world. We were—and always would be—stealthy predators.
