Page 36 of Howl

He straightened his legs, brushed a phantom piece of dirt from his shirt, and he smiled. “Me? Afraid? Never.”

“Macho,” I laughed. “Very macho.”

“What is this place?” He asked, looking past me.

I turned and walked into the shadows with my hands outstretched. My fingers found the table, and I lifted my hand to the lantern that hung above it. The moment I touched the metal, the wick inside the glass lit, and then another along the wall ignited, and then another until six lights burned brightly around the hexagonal room.

Where the walls weren’t lined with bookshelves and containers full of scrolls, there were old maps, and diagrams nailed to the stone.

The table at the center of the room had a stack of books on one corner and a yellowed map rolled out across the surface. Annie had pinned the corners down with a set of clear quartz crystals.

“I smell blood,” Jamie said. “It’s not…I’ve never smelled that kind of blood before.”

“I know,” I said. “I can smell it too, but it’s old blood. It’s not fresh.”

“What is it? What is this place,” he asked again.

“It’s witch blood,” I said.

Jamie laughed. “Witches don’t—”

“Exist?” I smiled. “Humans would say the same thing about werewolves.”

“I’ve never met one before.” He shrugged. “If they’re real, they’ve been gone for hundreds of years.”

“Not quite, but almost. After Annie found me trying to get down here one day, she told me that witches were dangerous. That they’d been hunted by our kind almost to extinction over the years. These books are the remnants of those hunts. The power confiscated by the Alphas to keep the few witches we allowed to live in line.”

“I didn’t know about any of this,” Jamie said, running his hands over the edges of the shelves.

“You wouldn’t. Annie was the last of the hunters,” I explained, studying the map. “Her husband, my grandfather ended it all. He believed that the witches had been hunted so far into extinction that they’d never pose a threat to us anymore.”

“But she still kept this?”

“Annie’s favorite saying wasthe wolf is strong, and cunning, but above all the wolf survives. The wolf survives.She kept this, kept hunting when she needed to make sure we all survived. She trained me to make sure I survived.”

“Trained you?” He arched an eyebrow, looking back at me over his shoulder.

I walked up beside him and pulled a book from the shelf. I felt the magic in the text buzz beneath my fingers and held it out to him. “Take the book.”

He did as I asked, but the moment his fingers touched the leather an electric current sparked around his skin, and he hissed pulling his hand back. “What the hell was that?”

“It takes some getting used to,” I said. “But this helps.”

Turning around, I pulled my shirt to the side, and revealed the tattoo on my shoulder. Jamie reached up, and I shivered as his fingers brushed over my skin.

“What is it?” he asked, his voice quite, tracing the shape of my shoulder blade.

“A rune. I don’t know what it’s called or what it does exactly, but it amplifies the magic in my blood enough that I can interact with the books,” I said. “Annie branded it there herself.”

“Nice,” he said, and I heard the sound of him swallowing.

My heart raced as my eyes fluttered closed. “Jamie.”

“Hmm?” He asked, gently running his knuckle down my back. The movement was so soft, but I could feel it over every inch of my body.

“What are we doing?”

“Wha—Oh, sorry.” He pulled his hand away and backed up a few steps. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do that.”

---