Page 39 of Blood Coven

“I’m sure you know more than most that Riina understood love in a profound way.” Ana looked up and held his gaze. She grabbed his hand weakly in hers. “I want what she had.”

26

SILVANIA

THE YEAR OF THE MOON

RED

Red stood, stunned. His guilt was etched onto his face; she noticed his pain the moment she saw him but now understood what lurked behind those coal-black eyes. His remorse made Red back down for a moment. But I need Grandmother dead. Father, too, she thought.

“I am sorry,” she said.

“It is not you who made me do it; you have nothing to be sorry about.” If he meant the words to be comforting, he failed, for they came out as vicious. “And you do not want blood on your hands. I promise it will not make you feel better.”

Red didn’t believe him, and she lifted her lip in protest, no longer caring about how sad or guilty he was. He has no idea what I’ve suffered. How could he? He’s a man, she thought. He didn’t suffer at the hand of anyone before he became the Wolf. She pointed at him with her free hand, the other still clutching the shaking parchment. “My own father sacrificed me to you, knowing that you could kill me, rape me, do whatever you wanted to me—”

“I wouldn—”

“He did not care! He didn’t care what you might do to me,” Red shouted at him. “My grandmother’s favorite pastime is to see how hard she can strike me, how long she can make me work until my back aches, how long I can kneel on a stick before sobbing. Do you have any idea what that is like? Do you have no sympathy for the abused? Will you just turn your head like everyone else in this town?” She spat the words at him, fire in her eyes.

His black eyes did not waver. Then his shoulders dropped, and his head followed suit. Looking up with his head cast down, he muttered, “Very well.”

Satisfaction filled Red, her thirst for vengeance finally promised its deepest desire.

She tightened the strings of her cloak and pulled the hood over her matted hair. The man added two more logs to the fire, causing spiders to scuttle in panic as they faced the flames. Then he opened the front door wordlessly, and stepped out into the night.

Red hurried after him, closing the door behind her to seal in the heat, though she had no idea if she would see this place again. As they walked into the woods toward her grandmother’s house, Red glanced back.

With the warm orange glow coming from the two visible windows, the lone cabin in the woods looked like a fragment of a child’s imagination. A shiver ran down the length of her spine as the nipping winter cold hit her skin once again. The crunch of the man’s footsteps over leaves and sticks soothed her. It reminded her that it was out here where she harvested her power.

“The moon is full, how is it you are a man?” Red asked.

“I’m not quite a wolf or man, nor am I just a werewolf,” he said. “When I was bound to this curse, the moon no longer controlled me. Whenever the curse is enacted, I shift and do what I’m summoned for. Outside of that, I can shift when I wish. Sometimes I live as a man, other times I live as a wolf.”

“How did you come to be this…the Wolf?” Red asked.

Overhead, the clouds blotted out most of the moon, faint patches allowing brief sightings that cast an ashen tone to their skin. The man looked at her, meeting her eyes like they were equals. “A series of events that I had little control over. Putting my trust in the wrong people.”

Red scoffed. “That is hardly an answer.”

“What will you do after you’ve killed your family?” His question hung in the air, a brutal accusation.

She grimaced, looking at the ground as she carefully stepped over a gnarled root. Her thoughts moved to the other girls, Sorin, Alina, Lilianna, and Tatiana. I want to be with them, I want to live amongst them like a coven without worrying about being hit, starved, locked away…sacrificed.

But such a dream was just that, a dream. In this world, witches and women didn’t get those types of choices. They didn’t get to live those kinds of free lives. That was for men.

“Will you allow me to leave?” she asked.

He glanced up at the moon. “I have no say in what you will or will not do.”

“Tell me about the curse,” she suggested. “And I will tell you what I will do with my freedom.”

He sighed, releasing a few hundred years of remorse. The knitted anger in the creases above his brows relinquished its hold on him, making way for despair. “A daughter is sacrificed, given to me for whatever I want. A name is whispered into the wind, and I have no control after that moment. Although I can see everything, I cannot stop myself as the shift takes over, as my bones break and bend. The hunger…it comes, and I cannot control it, driven to the name that has been called. I am not proud of what I have done, but I know that there is nothing I can do to stop it. I am used to end bloodlines, but I was mercifully forgotten for two hundred years. Until now. I only know this time, something went wrong because I should have killed whomever your father wanted dead by now.”

Red shot a glance at him from the side, but he did not see it. “What happens to the daughters?”

“What do the stories tell you? What did your mother tell you?”

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