Page 7 of Wolfsbane

No wolf.

No shift.

No wind in my fur, because there was no fur.

Not even claws, one of the first and simplest shifts learned by children, one I’d been able to control since I was five.

Nothing.

Only silence in my soul where the wolf belonged, because that witch had stolen half of me.

Oh, there was something there, yes.

But whatever it was, it felt like someone had torn out my internal organs and replaced them with sawdust, for all the good whatever it was did. Perhaps it was just that, filler, to keep me from falling right over, because half my soul had been torn out of me. Maybe it would let me continue indefinitely, pretending to be a whole werewolf when I wasn’t even physically complete anymore.

I turned and slumped against a tree, sliding down to sit on the forest floor. Drew took that as a cue to waddle his way over to me and lounge against my leg, like we were just out on a nice calm forest walk and had stopped to sit around.

Maybe he’d mistaken me for Leo. It seemed nearly impossible, but what other reason could there be for an innocent creature to be anything but terrified of me?

I sighed and reached into the pocket of my jeans, pulling out a bag of dried meat, handing Drew one piece and chewing on my own, resting my head back against the tree and trying not to think about what good I was now.

I’d known when I returned to my family, that I was missing something.

Perhaps that had been another necessary part of my soul, the absence of which allowed me to cut the throats of men and continue on without so much as a pause. Perhaps it had been something more vital, that I simply hadn’t been able to lay a finger on yet.

My family . . . noticed, but said little about it. They all avoided talking about my absence from their lives for years, what had happened in that time, and what it meant. Whether I was even the creature they had lost, or a lookalike monster returned in his place. Like the old stories about changelings, which had been more an excuse to abuse autistic humans than an indication of any crime committed by the fae.

At least before this, I had been useful, as a lookalike monster. I had made them feel better, and more than that, I had been able to protect them.

Monsters were good at that.

But now, with little soul remaining, and no wolf at all?

What good was I to anyone?

CHAPTER 4

Daire

Mariah Harey stared at me with her beady black eyes. She was a powdery purple bunny covered in white stars, dense with the softest fluff. Ingeborg had gotten her for me when we’d picked up my prescription when I’d been seven or eight and terribly sick, and as miserable as I felt, that trip to the drugstore still ranked high in my favorite memories.

We’d gotten lozenges that tasted like candy, and she’d taken me down the toy aisle and let me pick a treat.

Now, Mariah was judging me. She knew everything that was wrong with the world, and worse, she knew that I hadn’t done a damn thing to fix it.

Mother had come home from visiting the Wildwood pack and gone straight to her pantry. She’d been standing over a cauldron since, not stirring herself, but barking directions at the other witches.

As much as I wanted my awakening and to practice magic freely, one benefit of being a twenty-three-year-old virgin witch was that I didn’t have to help. Sometimes, I wondered if she even wanted me to have magic, which was absurd. I was her son and heir. Nobody in the coven ranked higher than me.

It was my fault that I hadn’t had an awakening yet, really. Every time the matter came up, I looked at my options—someone like Tristan or Calliope, who thought of me first and foremost as my mother’s son; a surly-faced werewolf who had perhaps never had a proper shower and was either too eager to be considered or not pleased at all to find themselves in the coven house; or a vampire in a cage.

For years, I’d told myself that the problem was that I’d read too much.

Awakenings were literally magical. It wasn’t like any old human losing their virginity constitutionally changed in the process. The very idea was absurd.

But us? Mages and witches?

For us it mattered.