Page 61 of When Ashes Fall

“We should have left sooner,” he growled. “You should have told me you were cold; we wouldn’t have been there still if you had.”

“This isn’t my fault!” I cried over the wind. “I wanted to see if there were more roses and maybe Archie’s parents.”

“Who’s Archie?”

I realized my mistake as soon as the nickname left my mouth, but this time I was better at covering it up. “Archibald is too formal for an eight-year-old boy. I like to think of him as Archie.”

“Have you thought of him often?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “It saddens me that he’s out there all alone in the woods.”

When another howling blast of wind cut across us, I shivered as I huddled deeper, and Knox pulled me closer to his chest. His warmth helped ease some of the cold, but I couldn’t avoid the wind and rain.

Thankfully, the cold had calmed some of the tension in him; he wasn’t as wound up as before. His claws remained extended, but the fur had vanished beneath the thick bands of muscle once more.

“He’s just a corpse,” Knox said when the wind died down.

“At one time, he was much more to someone.”

He was much more than that to me, but I couldn’t say that to Knox. Instead, I let my words settle between us as he steered Magnazius toward the road at a trot.

Absently, I lifted my hand to wipe the rain away as it plastered my hair to my face, but stopped. It didn’t matter as a deluge poured over us.

My teeth chattered as I hugged myself to try to defrost my bones while I nestled closer to Knox. I should be maintaining my distance from him, especially after everything I was discovering about myself, but I was cold and exhausted.

At one point, he would have been the only one I told about any of this, but now I feared he’d find out. That single paragraph about the forbidden power was in the shifter library after all and was most likely written by a shifter.

Lifting my head, I studied the sky as I searched for any more giant monsters looking to eat us, but I couldn’t see anything through the torrential rain. It sounded like rocks as it pounded against the bricks and hammered the roofs of the nearby homes—homes that were impossible to see through the storm.

It cascaded off the road in a rushing river sweeping toward us. My clothes clung to me, and the chattering of my teeth intensified.

Gizzi burrowed against my neck as he sought some shelter, but there was no hiding from this. I was certain he looked like the drowned rat Knox always accused him of being.

When Magnazius’s hooves slipped on the wet bricks, Knox jerked up the horse’s head.. The howling wind shifted, blasting rain into our faces. Needles of ice pierced my skin as the water pelted me.

All I wanted was to get to the castle and escape this maelstrom before it swallowed us within it, but I had no idea where the castle was anymore or where we were in Wildwood. Thunder boomed so loudly it quaked the ground and my bones. A streak of lightning arced across the sky.

When Knox steered Magnazius off the road, I was shivering too much to ask where we were going. One second, only rain lay ahead of us, and the next, we were only feet from a porch railing.

The conditions were too treacherous to continue, but I didn’t want to stay in anyone else’s house… especially if there were roses in there.

Knox leapt from the saddle and pulled me down.

“Get inside!” he yelled over the deluge.

“What about you?” I shouted back.

“I’m going to find somewhere for Magnazius to shelter. Get inside.”

I didn’t argue with him. He had to get the horse to safety, and I’d prefer not to die out here.

I scrambled up the porch steps as another boom of thunder rattled the windows. Beneath the shelter of the porch roof, I finally had a break from the rain, but water continued to pour off my soaked hair and clothes. Gizzi shivered on my shoulder.

It wasn’t until my hand fell on the knob that I considered the possibility of a locked door. When I turned it, the door swung silently open to reveal the shadowed interior beyond.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Briar