Page 26 of Hunted By Wolves and Shadow
Iwas in trouble. Big…bad…trouble.
The problem was Emi. She was on my mind from the moment I woke until my paws hit dirt at nightfall. For the last few runs, she’d been with me even then.
The days passed in a dance of awareness and avoidance. More and more, I found myself drawn to wherever she was, no matter how much I told myself to give her space.
My favorite time together wasn’t the training, when I got to tease and touch her and began to appreciate her quick wit as she bantered and parried. It wasn’t how intently she listened to my instruction or how fast she picked it up, or the times her frustration boiled over and she let her anger and grief out on me with sharp fists and sharper words.
It wasn’t the time we spent searching the cottage, when she continually told me all the ways I was wrong about her grandmother, or the increasingly creative insults she found for my intelligence as she insisted there was no curse bound to anything we could find. It wasn’t the way I suppressed laughter every time she held up ordinary objects and said things like,“How about this? A jar of pickled radishes is supremely suspicious. No one likes radishes, let alone pickled, so thismustbe black magic.”
My favorite time wasn’t even our silent feud over the bedroom, and the ways I found to thwart her trying to claim it before I could each night. It wasn’t the way I won every one of those battles, because it was more important to me that I could put a lock between us, and because she was easily distracted by staged kitchen disasters.
No, my favorite time of the day was when we sat down together to eat the delicious meals Emi prepared. She’d stopped deliberately sabotaging my portions after the first two days, seemingly too proud to have anyone taste any food but her best. Then we talked. It became a time of truce within our truce, when Emi dropped her hard edges and couldn’t seem to help herself from enjoying a good meal, and maybe even the company. Okay, that last part was probably wishful thinking.
We talked about anything and everything, and I fell hard and fast. Every brush of our arms, the heat of her skin, every time I made her laugh, the one time she let me hold her when she dissolved into tears after telling me about her father’s neglect and how much she’d relied on her grandma’s carefully doled out affection. Every soft moment got catalogued in my head and branded on my soul until I was etched in lines ofEmi, Emi, Emi.
So yes, I was in trouble.
I rose from my search of the lower cabinets to stretch and immediately found the object of my obsession through the window, furiously pulling weeds from the garden. Her glorious locks were pinned half up, her plain blue skirt covered by an apron that showed her hard work in wide swipes of dirt. Emi had been on a mission to set every scrap of this place in order as if a tidy house would make sense of her emotions or free her from being trapped with me.
She paused to wipe an errant strand of hair from her forehead and succeeded in smearing dirt across her cheekbone, then went right back to her task with no idea that a trace of brown across her rosy cheek had become my complete and utter fixation in one heartbeat. I wanted to go out there and stand her up, hold her in my arms, and gently wipe the smear from her flawless skin. She would smile at me and I would return it before ducking my head to capture her lips with mine. I could almost feel their soft pressure.
Losing myself in the vivid image, it took me a heartbeat to realize she’d sensed my gaze and was glaring back at me, frozen with uprooted plants hanging from her hands. I ignored the impulse to duck away and didn’t bother hiding my smile.
Abandoning my task, I sauntered out the back door. It was about time for another training session, and the Mist was currently held to the trees, meaning we could use the soft, mossy clearing. I’d get to have Emi in my arms…for at least as long as it took her to fight free from me.
I sighed dramatically as I joined her. “What, exactly, are you doing, witchling? Looking for something to poison me with?”
Her eyes flashed surprise, like that thought hadn’t occurred to her.
“Maybe I am.” After a glance at the bed behind her, the animosity fell from her face. “I admit, I don’t know what a lot of these are.”
“I can help,” I suggested. “I am something of an expert in plants, what with living in the forest.”
I enjoyed the rattled look on her face. It wasn’t easy fighting sympathy for someone you weren’t supposed to like. I knew the feeling.
Striding past her, I examined the greenery sprouting in messy rows, my stomach sinking with each one I recognized. The tallest looked almost like saplings, with long ovate leaves. Butit was the bell-shaped flowers and beginnings of green berries that gave it away. Pointing, I said, “These berries will turn black when they ripen. Belladonna makes a fine poison, though some varieties can be fermented to help with sleeplessness. Not this one though. There’s only death waiting to ripen in those berries.”
“What? Grandma wouldn’t be growing belladonna.”
I waved a hand at the plant. “And yet.”
“Maybe she mistook it for something else, or a harmless variety.”
My eyebrows formed skeptical arches, but Emi was too busy frowning at the plant to notice.
Shattering her innocence and ruining her memories wasn’t something I relished, but she deserved to know the truth. I pointed to a low plant with long, white buds that I knew would open to trumpet flowers. “Jimson weed, great for inducing vomiting and hallucinations.”
“Well, that’s a weed. You said so yourself. I’m sure it sprouted there by accident.”
“Okay, here then. White flowers with pink stamens that look ready to grab you if you get too close. Recognize it?”
“No. Should I?”
“Only if you share your sweet grandmother’s penchant for evil. Kalmia is deadly if consumed. It burns your mouth and throat and stomach from the inside, melting tissue and turning your insides to liquid.”
Emi’s mouth dropped open. “No.”
“Do you need more evidence? Because there’s nettle, mandrake, hogsweed,” I said, pointing to each in turn. “In fact, aside from that vegetable patch over there, everything else here is toxic to humans and many animals as well. Most are potent poisons. Any more denials?”
