Claimed (Book Four of the Castle Coven Series): A Witch and Warlock Romance Novel (9 page)

Then, suddenly and without warning, he was not.
 

She looked up from a strange twist in the trail only to realize that she was alone. At first, Hailey thought that she must be wrong. Surely Kieran was right behind her. Perhaps he was hanging back to let her work out the trail. At worst, he had walked to one side or the other to see if there were any other traces worth following.

She stood stock still for a few long moments. Then she had to come to the dark conclusion that he was not behind her. Hailey took a deep breath. The wolf brain was not one that was inclined to panic, so she used it to her advantage. She followed her own track back patiently. She couldn’t have lost him all that long ago, she knew that.

Less than twenty minutes after she started following her own back trail, she found Kieran’s scent again. The fur of her back started to rise, and without even thinking of it, she uttered a deep and ferocious growl. That
wrong
scent was back again, fresher than ever. It mingled with Kieran’s scent, tumbled with it. She could see no blood on the ground, but neither could she see any tracks leading away. To her shock and fear, she realized that whatever had taken him had carried him straight up.

She didn’t bother thinking about what she did next. Instead, her body started shrinking. Instead of a human form twisting out of the wolf’s, an eagle’s feathered body emerged instead. The expenditure of power was large, but she didn’t care. As soon as she had wings that were great enough to bear her upwards, she sprang into the air. She lofted herself well above the trees, circling the area where she and Kieran had been. She sought desperately for Piers, but even the power of her sharp eyes did not reveal his presence.

Hailey circled the area for what felt like hours, but what she knew was only minutes. They were simply not there to be found. If she was a human, there would have been some doubt. However, there was no fooling her eagle eyes or her wolf nose. Something had taken both men, plucked them away as if they had never existed.

With a final cry, she circled back down to the forest floor. After a moment of thought, she came out of her eagle form. Though the eagle’s body was useful, there was too much distraction for her in it. There was simply too much animal instinct within it for her to think clearly.

Hailey’s mind was in a panic. She knew what she should do. Kieran had not predicted that both he and Piers would disappear. If he had, though, he would have told her to stay in her eagle form and to make her way back to civilization. From there, she could contact the Magus Corps and the Castle, letting them know what had happened.

Hailey understood this, but she couldn’t make herself do it. She couldn’t leave the last place she had seen Piers and Kieran. She couldn’t leave them to whatever fates were waiting for them. She took a deep breath. She had to find them. She still had power to spare, she realized, something that should have been impossible. She should have at least been flagging a little. Instead, buoyed by panic and worry, she was as strong now as when she had begun. She started concentrating on her wolf form, thinking about the power and the speed it could give her.
 

A deep, thunderous growl halted her in her tracks.

In front of her was the wolf that she had smelled. It was no shy animal, hiding away from men and guns. Instead, it was a giant. If it stood on its hind legs, it would have been as tall as Piers. Its fur was long and shaggy, speaking of its ability to survive the mountain winters. Its eyes were yellow, possessed of a deep fire that spoke of an uncanny intelligence.

It lowered its head and growled at her again.

• • • • •

Hailey froze. She couldn’t transform into a wolf or an eagle. Her transformations were fast, but they weren’t fast enough to catch a huge wolf in mid-lunge. She could neither fight nor fly away from the beast.

Instead, she stood frozen as it approached her, head down and tail up.

When she started to edge away, it uttered another ferocious growl, making her freeze. She had power to spare, but something kept her from summoning fire. She knew that she could set the beast alight, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not to something that had not yet offered her any harm.

Still she kept the idea of a bright white-hot flame in her mind as it stalked closer and closer.

It seemed confused by her the closer it got. Several times, it drew its head back, once or twice uttering a plaintive whine that sounded positively bewildered. It circled her several times. Though it made the hair at the back of her neck prickle to have it behind her, she allowed it to look.

It was examining her, she realized. It wanted to know what she was and why she was in its territory. She took a deep breath. She submitted to its curiosity, reminding herself over and over again that she was not helpless. She could fight, but she didn’t wish to, not when her opponent was only an animal that had done her no wrong.

Finally, the wolf made a deep whuffing sound, sitting down a few feet in front of her. Instead of regarding her as a threat, now it only looked curious, as if it wanted to see what she was going to do next.

“Well, are you done?” she asked softly.

To her surprise, the wolf barked. Wolves in the wild didn’t vocalize the same way that dogs did, she knew that. Wolves were mostly silent, though of course they howled and they vocalized to communicate with their cubs. It was dogs that barked, or so she had been told. Dogs barked because they wanted to talk with their human companions. This was obviously a wolf and not a dog, but the bark that it had uttered made her think of a golden retriever at one of her foster homes. It was a bright and cheerful sound, something that was utterly out of place in the dark forest.

“Are you used to living with people?” she wondered out loud. “Did you once live in a zoo or a circus or something?”

The wolf offered no further answers. Instead, it only looked at her expectantly. Never taking her eyes off the animal, she edged away from it. Though it followed her, she could not detect any harm or ill intent coming from it.

Hailey realized that she was starting to lose the light. If she was going to have any chance of finding Kieran and Piers she had to get back on the trail she had been following. Still keeping an eye on the wolf, she reached for the power inside her again. To her surprise, the wolf did not growl or snap when she started to change. Instead, when she emerged in her wolf form, it trotted up and licked her face companionably.

When she sought after the trail, the wolf followed her.
 

Soon, Hailey had no time to keep an eye on the wolf at all. The trail twisted and turned a few more times, but soon enough, it led on a straight track through the woods. As she had guessed, it was leading her towards the smoke that Piers had seen earlier. She stuck with the twisting scent trail until dark had truly fallen. Even in her wolf form, she shivered a little bit from the cold.

As if sensing her discomfort, the wolf shouldered up against her, guiding her towards a well-concealed den underneath a fallen tree. The scraped earth burrow there was tight for two, but it was a cozy berth nonetheless. The wolf, far bigger than her own form, lay closer to the opening, shielding her from the cold.
 

Hailey thought that she wouldn’t sleep at all, that there was far too much to occupy her mind. Before she knew it, however, she was drifting off, her cold nose buried in the wolf’s ruff.

WHEN HAILEY WOKE up, she was slightly startled to realize that she had reverted to her human form in the night. The burrow had been tight when she was a wolf. Now she realized that she was cramped and sore from curling her human limbs into it.
 

With a staggering step, she rose out of the hollow, shaking out her legs and arms as best she could in the predawn light. Her mouth tasted foul, and she spat a few times. Her rations had disappeared along with Kieran.
 

She still had power enough to transform. She was just getting ready to do so when there was a rustling in the bushes close to her. She looked up, expecting it be her mysterious wolf friend again, but instead, it was a man.

She barely stifled a cry of surprise, causing the man to look at her curiously.

He was dressed in a strange mix of modern clothing and things that could have come out of a Renaissance Faire trash heap. His dark hair was tied back with a leather thong, giving him a rather Viking appearance. He wore ragged black tactical gear, but over it was a coat of roughly tanned leather. It took her a moment to realize that he was holding a skewer of meat in his hand.

“I brought breakfast,” he said mildly. “Eat up. It’s good.”

Hailey stared at him in confusion, making him push the meat towards her again.
 

“I…I don’t know who you are,” she said. “I try not to take food from people I don’t know.”

He grinned, his teeth sharp and white.

“We spent the night together. Usually that means that we’re doing all right.”

“The wolf was you? You’re a shapechanger?’

He thought about it.
 

“I guess that’s a word for me. Do you want the hare or no? It’s getting cold.”

She took the skewer of meat that he offered her, nibbling at the charred bits and never taking her eyes off of him as they stood there.

“It’s good, thank you. Who are you? What are you doing far out here?”

“I’ve been here as long as I can remember,” he shrugged. “Might as well ask you and your men what you’re doing out here.”
 

Hailey was glad her mouth was filled with food. It gave her a brief moment to review her options and to figure out how much she wanted to tell this stranger.

“We’re looking for another man who came here. He was taken by something with a strange smell, not killed, though.”
 

The man made a disgusted face.

“The dead-walkers,” he growled, more than a touch of the wolf in his voice. “They’ve been showing up off and on for the last year, but now there are more of them than ever.”

“Dead-walkers… You’ve run into them before?”

The grin that he gave her this time was honestly a little terrifying. There was death in that smile.

“I’ve killed them before, miss. They fight hard, but they die like anyone.”
 

Hailey took a gamble.

“Are you a member of the Magus Corps?”

A faint shadow passed over his face. He frowned at her as if uncertain what she asked.

“That…they’re hunters, yes? Men of power who hunt killers?”

Hailey nodded, encouraged. “Yes. They protect people who live in covens, like me.”

He shook his head.
 

“They come through from time to time. I see them. I stay out of their way unless they need help.”

“The man who was on the ground with me, he’s part of that group. The man in the sky is a coven master. They were both taken, and I need to find them.”

“And then what?”
 

“Find them, free them, hurt the ones who took them,” Hailey said promptly.
 

The man stared at her uncertainly.
 

“Are you a killer?” he asked. “You don’t look like one.”

Hailey took a deep breath. In the mountains of northern Italy, a Templar had caught Kieran and her own friend Beatrice unawares. There was nothing standing between them and an enraged Templar but her. She had reached for the power that Kieran had given her, freezing the man’s blood in his veins and killing him.

“I am,” she said. “I would do it again if my loved ones were in danger.”

The man nodded to himself.
 

“I can guide you to where they have been taken. I can even get you in. But I will warn you, the closer we come to that place, the more likely it is that I will lose myself.”

Hailey shook her head.

“I don’t understand what that means.”

“I don’t either,” the man said helplessly.

• • • • •

In the end, she had no choice. She could have kept following the twisted trail that she had been on, but those scents were already fading. This man offered her a direct path that she needed to find the most important people in the world to her.
 

In her wolf form, she could keep up with him. As she ran, she observed her strange new companion. He was far more skilled in his wolf form than she was in hers. After a certain point, she began to suspect that it was due to long use. She was a human wearing a wolf’s skin, but he was someone who seemed to inhabit both bodies equally. Something about it tickled the back of her brain, but then it was gone.

They ran for most of the day, pausing only briefly to hunt and kill food. Hailey found herself eating half of a rabbit that he had killed for her before she even thought of it. The idea of eating raw steaming meat in her human form sickened her, but in her wolf form, nothing could be more natural.

As they ran, she did her best to keep her thoughts focused. She couldn’t afford to think too deeply on what was happening to Piers and to Kieran. She could only pray that they had not been harmed, and that she could rescue them.

The shadows grew longer, the light dimming steadily. The first sign that something was wrong with her companion was when he sat down, pointing his nose at the sky with a whine. She came up to him, offering wordless comfort by pressing her flank against his. That time, he got up and started running as he had before, but it grew worse. He seemed confused and distressed, whining and panting with his great red mouth open. Once she prevented him from running off their path. Another time, he nearly bit her in the face. Finally, she changed back into her human form, speaking quiet words of comfort as he leaned against the tree and panted. He whined several times, high and sad in a way that hurt her heart.

“It’s all right,” she murmured. “It’s fine, I swear it’s fine. You’re taking me right where I need to go.”

His form flowed until it was a man who knelt in the pine needles, his face pressed against her belly and his large hands clasped around her hips. She would have been startled and even frightened to suddenly be so close to a strange man, but he shook just like the wolf did.