LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 7

      Madeline slept fitfully, always waking in time to refuel the fire when it died down. It was nearly morning when she woke to discover that Lev had stoked the fire. He was wrapped in another sleeping roll that had come from a pack on the dun horse’s back. He faced away from her toward the trees on the other side of the fire. The dancing flames painted his broad back with shadows and light.

      He wasn’t asleep.

      She watched his breathing rise and fall, and somehow she knew he had sensed her waking. Neither of them spoke. The silence stretched, straining the strings she imagined between them, but just as she thought she would ask him about the wolves, another howl sounded. It was as far away as the last one she’d heard.

      “I couldn’t find the Volkhvy that are influencing them, but they aren’t acting alone,” Lev said. He didn’t roll toward her. His back looked stiff.

      “Will they try to prevent us from reaching Straluci?” Madeline asked. Her hand had gone for the hilt of her sword. The move was instinctive, driven by memories she couldn’t recall.

      “They won’t succeed,” Lev replied.

      It was the answer she expected because it was the one she felt deep in her bones. She would save her son, come witches or wolves. The only other option was death.

      He didn’t sleep. He waited. Finally, when the night mist began to rise toward a hint of pink sky, he rose from his bedding. Madeline had been restless throughout the night, but she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber less than an hour ago. He’d sensed when she no longer watched his back. He knew when her eyes closed.

      Before he left their campsite to check on the wolves again, he made sure the fire still had enough fuel to burn until the sun fully came up. Then he stepped lightly to his companion’s side. She murmured indistinctly in her sleep. He couldn’t be certain if her sounds were ones of protest or appeal. The firelight danced on her pale cheeks. The ruby sword was forgotten beside her.

      But it was the position of her hands that stabbed him with invisible blades, cleaving his heart in two.

      Her arms were crooked over her chest, and her hands were cupped as if her palms supported a baby’s head and bottom. Trevor was in danger somewhere out in the world. Only Vasilisa and the marked witches knew where, but Madeline still tried to hold him safely to her breast.

      Madeline murmured again and her fingers twitched as if her body knew something was wrong, even if her sleeping mind did not. It would be doubly cruel to wake to empty arms if her dreams were filled with lullabies and the powder scent of Trevor’s sweet curls.

      Lev’s chest constricted. He knew that cruelty from personal experience. He fisted his hands at his sides and kept his spine straight and tall. She wouldn’t welcome him leaning over and smoothing the waves of her fiery hair back from her forehead. She wouldn’t want him bending down and holding her empty hands.

      He had failed to protect his wife and child for centuries. He couldn’t undo the harm that had been done to them. He could only try to protect them now. The pack of wolves he’d seen would be tired this morning. With the sunrise, they would probably collapse from their frenzy of the night before.

      He still couldn’t shift, but he was far from an ordinary man. He would go to the alpha wolf and try to overcome the unnatural influence he suspected the wolf was under. He would try to disband the pack and send them on their way before the Volkhvy could use them to try to stop Madeline from reaching their child.

      It was a risky move. The alpha had the power of the pack behind him, and somewhere, the Dark power drawn from the Ether by the marked Volkhvy was also at work. Lev could almost scent the smell of Darkness caught and held in the ozone of the morning mist.

      He turned away from Madeline’s prone form and headed into the forest. He couldn’t shift, but he had decided he would still try to challenge the alpha wolf with the ferocity of the white Romanov wolf that lived in his heart.

      Aleksandr worried the raised skin of the brand on his forehead. His fingers had long since grown used to the roughened shape of the bellflower that Anna, the Light Volkhvy princess, had emblazoned on him, on all her enemies, when they tried to send her red wolf into the Ether for the last time.

      The amount of power it had taken for her to instantly sear the mark on all of them had been prodigious. Habit sent his fingers to the brand, but no matter how often he traced its design, he was surprised all over again. Anna’s abilities had been magnified by the emerald in the hilt of the Romanov blade she had taken from him. It had come to life for her because her mother had forged it for the red wolf’s mate. At that time, she hadn’t consciously accepted the connection, but her heart had known.

      She had literally glowed in defense of the red wolf she loved, and the energy she expelled had left a lasting testament to Anna’s love for Soren Romanov on the skin of both Aleksandr and his followers.