Page 69 of The Wolf Queen

“Couldn’t stay away from me?” he asked.

“Couldn’t wait another second to kill you,” I retorted, approaching slowly.

Watch for the line of attack, that’s what Nordred had told me, read their body, their facial expressions. Look for signs of which way they’ll attack and side step it, then strike.

“And yet you stand here, bantering with me,” Callum replied, moving in turn. “It’s almost as if you can’t bring yourself to strike me down.”

Looking for hints, more likely, but I didn’t reply. I wouldn’t let myself be distracted by this monster. I had to analyse him, dissect his moves before slicing him in two. And there it was. A slight dip of his shoulder. He was going to strike right, so I shifted to the left.

I’d seen many of my men and women take the half-wolf form, so the transformation of Callum’s body shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was what he shifted into that gave me pause. Rather than fur and claws, I saw black smoke trickle from his fingers.

“Darcy!” Dane shouted in warning, but his warning wasn’t needed. I knew instinctively that I shouldn’t let it touch me.

But where he was striking out with his hands, I had a sword, so I parried his swipe and then quickly sliced back and into his arm. The bright blue flames burned brighter, fluttering with the movement. I’d slice off his hand, just like I had the Reavers and then I’d go about cutting the rest of him to pieces.

So it came as an awful shock when my blade hit bone, and instead of slicing straight through, it was as if I’d slammed my sword into a brick wall. Worse, the blue flames along the steel began to falter, then darken. They turned to black, small deadly looking things that threatened to creep up the blade and… I pulled it away from him, and he laughed.

“Tell you what.” He threw his arms wide, providing the perfect target, so of course I hesitated, suspecting him of some trap. “I’ll let you strike first, my queen. Then when I’ve subdued you, you can spend some time patching me up—after we’ve made love, of course. I think you’ll look quite fetching, covered in my blood.”

“I’d rather see you covered in your own,” I shot back, right before I struck.

Callum was favouring his right side, where I’d plunged the sword the last time we’d met, so I feinted towards it, watching for the split second it took for him to move. As soon as he did, I was moving to the left before he could even swipe at me, stabbing into his unprotected side.

The sword didn’t slice him in two like it did the other Reavers. Instead the blade scraped against his ribs, exposing the white bone, but not much more. The tip didn’t find the gaps between them, didn’t stab through and so I was forced to jump sideways and out of his reach. And Callum just laughed.

“The Sword of Destiny…” He spat out the title like it personally offended him. “It doesn’t work on me like it does my Reavers, does it, my queen?”

“Don’t call me that,” I growled, watching in confusion and horror as the cut across his ribs knitted back together.

I lunged forward again, forcing him to raise his arms to block my strike, and the blade hit the hard bones of his forearms. For a moment I watched his flesh burn, bleed, then—just as before—a blackness seeped from the wounds to prevent them from bleeding before oozing onto the blade.

“What do you want me to call you?” he asked, grinning as he began to circle, forcing me to do the same. “Lover? Sister? Eleanor?”

“You think I’m her?” I asked, my shock causing me to foolishly stop in my tracks at the idea of it. My reaction only made his smile widen as he shook his head at me.

“More than her. A version of Eleanor tempered by trauma: made hard by circumstances, rather than weakened by them,” he said. “A woman worthy of me, unlike my pathetic sister.” My sword twitched in my hand, the blue flames flickering wildly. “We are joined–”

“The hell we are,” I said. I knew I was being pulled into responding to his strategy the very way I’d told myself not to. But I couldn’t seem to stop it.Focus, I told myself,focus!Clenching my jaw, I struck out again, no longer trying to aim for those black smoky hands and whatever magic they wielded. I sliced my sword through the air, aiming for his head, in the hopes of wiping the annoying smirk off his face, glad when he was forced to jump backwards once, then again But he didn’t bother trying to strike back, not when he could employ a more effective weapon.

“No? Then how do you explain this?” There was something sinuous about his voice, like it was a snake trying to hypnotise me. Determined not to be his prey, I struck again and again, trying to catch him off guard, to lop his head from his shoulders, but Callum evaded each blow with a smirk. “Your aim is very good. Nordred taught you well…” His hands went up, catching my blade between them and his grip was unbreakable. My muscles strained with everything I had to try and break his hold. “But he had no way of knowing what I would become. If you’d had the chance to oppose me on the battlefield in my former life, I’d be dead now, but…” His mouth quirked up on one side, as though he was privy to a joke that only he knew. I had a sickening feeling that he was about to share it, and that none of us would find it amusing. “Where do you think I have been for three hundred years, Darcy?”

A tense silence filled the room. I frowned as I stared at him, considering his words and trying to fathom what his meaning might be. Suddenly, muffled howls from beyond the heavy oak door alerted us to the fact that our time was running short.

On the edge of my field of vision, I saw Weyland whip his head around to assess the extent of the threat. As I flicked a glance in his direction, I saw his eyes widen, and he called out, “To the door!” Even as I directed my attention back to Callum, I was aware of my mates running to the door to push the solid iron drawbar home into its slot on the far side of the door frame.

“Darcy!” Dane shouted my name in an attempt to stop me from stepping into the snare that Callum was setting. As my men threw their backs against the door, the thuds coming from the other side made it clear that they’d barred it just in time, for Reavers were now attempting to break it down e. When I threw another glance their way, Gael was watching me. His tone turned desperate. “Darcy!”

But whatever my mates had to say, it was drowned out by the sound of my heart beating loudly in my chest as I tried to fathom Callum’s intent.

I answered his question, of course I did. I had to know what he was talking about.

“You’ve been raising Reavers—”

“Not for three hundred years, beautiful girl,” he interrupted, before raising a hand as if to stroke my face. When I shied back from it, he continued. “Nowhere near that long. It's only the last nineteen years that I’ve been walking that particular path.”

And that was when the vision struck: a series of events playing out before me.

The first moment made me blanch, for I saw Linnea. But this younger version of her was smiling softly, kindly, murmuring words of encouragement and support. I saw that she was bent over, tenderly wiping the brow of a panting, red-faced woman drenched in sweat. The next moment she was reaching between the woman’s bloodied thighs to draw out a quivering, screaming baby. Although I wanted to stay there to see my mother’s face as she reached for me, the vision whirled me away. With a dawning sense of horror, I began to understand that it wasn’t only me that was born that day. The next moment, I was looking at the interior of a crystal cave, at a figure I barely recognised as Callum. Eyes closed, motionless, he was covered in enough grime to look like the abandoned idol of some long since forgotten dark god. Then, somehow, the sounds of my first cries emanated from within the crystals. As the reverberations washed over him, his eyes flicked open, hellish red and glowing in the darkness.

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