Rebellious

I came to the Black Forest seeking refuge. I will leave seeking revenge.

The more I learn about what I really I am, the less I understand who I’m meant to be. Hood? Werewolf? Something else altogether? Figuring that out will have to wait. The fate of the slayers has been forced into my hands, and for their sake and mine, I need to hand them off to someone else ASAP. Where else could I go but to the hoods?

Convincing the Council of Matrons to offer asylum makes escaping from Istanbul and Vlad Tepeş’s harem look like pup’s play. Between court politics and the revelation of my family’s darkest secrets, I fight to save the ones I love and keep a supernatural race from going extinct. If I can keep from dying in the process, that would just be peachy too. But when presented with an impossible choice, who will I rescue and who will I condemn to die?

The sky cried openly, even if I could not.

More fall leaves rusted away by the day. I sat and stared out my third-floor window, as the eroding canvas of trees laid a carpet over the span of the village to the west, to a point where the earth swelled up from the valley floor. Beyond that, a mountain, one which seemed out of place with its stark cliff towering over the land below. Schloss Wolfsretter looked like building blocks arranged by a child at this distance: a rectangle, a cone, a few squares. In my mind’s eye, however, I could see its marble entry way, the stone-floored council chambers with its antique throne and tapestries reveling of the glories of the House of Red past. I could envision myself running across the chess board of its inner bailey. Tasting hazelnut soup on my tongue and hearing the wind twist its lithe fingers up the cliff when I fell asleep at night, cloistered in the Grand Matron’s residence at the top of the tower.

A few years ago, teenaged me had despised that place, saw it as a center for indoctrination that bred hate for the man I loved. Now, my heart ached for it, knowing that I might never walk its halls again. A werewolf hadn’t set foot inside in half a century, as far as I knew. What sane wolf would? The ghosts of their ancestors may still haunt the corridors and passageways. If they were unlucky, they may join them.

The street beyond the walls of my mother’s private villa away from the compound, RotHaus, glistened under the street lamp, a spotlight that stood achingly empty. Wishing to see Tobias’s form fill in the shadow and stride toward my door was foolish on so many levels, not the least of which was that he had no idea this house existed. Even if he’d managed to escape the Ravens, how would he find me?

But he hadn’t escaped. How did I know? I didn’t. But in the quiet moments between waking and dreams, I felt his presence in a way that couldn’t be explained by logic, sensed his desperation and loneliness. He was alive, but I didn’t know why or for how much longer.

Amy walked up from behind, putting a hand on my shoulder. “They’re going to say yes. They have to.”
She’d confused my wistful street-staring for worry over the fate of the slayers. I couldn’t blame her for it; it was where my thought should be. A month ago, we’d rescued the last members of a supernatural species thought to be extinct, from imprisonment by the very creatures they were meant to balance. If not for the Istanbul wolf pack, we’d never have made it out with our lives. Here, we were hardly safer than if we stood in the middle of the street, protected only so much as the Ravens feared venturing so closely to the center of the hood world. Our only hope was to get the Council of Matrons to accept the slayers as refugees.

Which should have been as easy as asking, but anything involving a single matron never was, let alone a dozen of them. Markus was the only righteous hood among us, the only one who could appeal to the council. But to do that, he needed an official invite. One we expected to come soon after he relayed a message to my mother that he’d returned from Turkey. One that never came.

“No, they don’t.” I wasn’t being pessimistic; I was making a projection based on years of keen observation. “Hoods are very insular. Outside of dealing with wolves as much as they need to, they keep to themselves. It’s like a cult.”

Amy cocked a hip. “Then why send Markus to ask? Why don’t we just keep running? All we’re doing by sitting here is giving those vampire creeps a chance to catch up to us at as leisurely a pace as they want.”