Wildblood

Chapter 38

38

Kai

Kai skidded to a stop at the edge of Boston Common. He’d taken too long picking up the trace, circling the block until he found that otherworldly tinge that oiled Caelan’s skin. Her scent was unique. Most people were a motley of hormones, sweat, salt, and cosmetics. Each person had a unique undertone, but humans generally smelled alike—different brands of the same product.

The park was massive, and Caelan a wisp in the wind. Dusk darkened the already grim sky—a charcoal expanse choking out the light. As hail pelted the ground, people scattered like autumn leaves, and a frigid wind whipped around the trees with an eerie howl. Boston Common had no hills from the south, offering Kai no vantage point. Every damn gust carried Caelan’s scent farther away, leaving him to meander around the Central Burying Ground on the park’s southern periphery. As the gale pushed murky clouds across the sky like an ominous carriage, he glimpsed movement in Parkman Bandstand—a round gazebo northeast of the burying ground. Seven brick-laid paths coalesced at the monument like an invitation from every direction. A shadow shuddered from behind one of the stone pillars, and then another, when two figures emerged.

Shock snaked through Kai’s middle. It was Caelan, hand in hand with a boy. They were laughing, scantly guarding against the precipitation with a sloppily raised jacket.

It was Caelan, and yet it couldn’t be.

The wind made it impossible to catch her scent. But what unsettled Kai wasn’t that she was dressed differently—well-fitted jeans and an emerald cardigan that complimented the cinnamon-colored hair sticking to her ruddy cheeks. It was the smile—a carefree grin that brightened her whole face, made her utterly alien to Kai.

Who the hell was Caelan Carver?

Kai started toward the pair when a familiar malodor halted his steps. Putrid wood. Mildew. Mud. The throes of a dying ecosystem. A stench that didn’t belong on the cold autumn wind.

The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he pivoted toward the invader.

A towering figure skulked between the trees, his limbs and torso like a slender trunk, his oversized fishing hat a withered canopy leached of color. Brown like wet mulch. The leshy was easily mistaken for the boughs that disguised him, but nothing could hide his stink. Stiller than the rustling foliage caressing his craggy skin, he lurked mere yards from the giddy couple. Elbow bent, hand raised, his spindly fingers splayed over something at his side. One twitched like a spider’s leg, then settled back onto the shoulder he clutched. A shoulder that barely reached his ribs.

Then, they moved in unison, a single stilted step at a time.

Kai’s brow knitted, furrowed further, his attention split between the teens wandering closer to the spirit, and the spirit reciprocating their approach. The air thickened with an electric current, and as the leshy emerged with his captive, Kai’s stomach bottomed out.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Caelan. Another Caelan. His Caelan. Miya’s clothes barely clinging to the jutting angles of a starving girl.

There were two of them. Twins woven from different threads. One made of sunlight, the other stitched from shadow.

The leshy’s pupils darted toward Kai. Aural rings wound around umber irises—a peculiar light Kai hadn’t noticed before. The creature’s grip on Caelan’s shoulder tightened, her movements wooden like a puppet with too-taut strings, wielded by a graceless puppeteer.

The girl who wasn’t Caelan froze. Kai expected bewilderment, but terror that could only be spurred by recognition twisted her face. She nearly folded as a blood-curdling scream ripped from her throat, and she scrabbled at her boyfriend’s arm.

Caelan didn’t flinch. Expression neutral, eyes unblinking, neither she nor the leshy slowed their advance.

Fear rooted Kai to the ground. Fucking fear. He didn’t relate to this dread. He hated spirits. Hated dealing with them. They were Miya’s domain—her gift and her curse. But Kai was the only one here; he’d have to bear the burden alone. The two girls may have appeared as halves of a whole, but he knew their union would be a maleficent one. He didn’t understand the reasons, but he didn’t have to; he trusted his instincts.

With a graveled shout, Kai bolted forward. The moment he reached one of those seven walkways, he felt the leshy’s influence strum his bones, pluck at his essence like a sinister harp.

This time, the transition wasn’t slow.

His knee blew out like someone had taken a shotgun to it, and he collapsed to the other before it too bent wrong. Crumpling on his side with a roar that rent his throat, his body revolted against itself, denying him even a sliver of mercy. Fur pierced through flesh like a bed of needles, teeth tore through gums, and limbs contorted into impossible shapes. Pain clawed at the borders of his mind, and when his nervous system overloaded, nausea shunted him into a whole new dimension of agony. He bit down and set his jaw when the tremors started, robbing him of control. He couldn’t even roll onto his belly when the bile burned up his esophagus and forced its way out. The leshy unleashed on him with a force Kai understood as desperation equal to his own. The spirit was trying to overwhelm him—knock him out before he could recover.

A distant cry. Panicked cursing. The reek of impending death.

The world tilted, but Kai forced himself upright, his legs shaky, uncoordinated. He’d lick Sergei’s balls before he’d let a talking shrub in boots lay him out. Untangling his feet from his clothes, his tail swooshed for balance, and finally, his senses stopped swimming, the spiraling void in front of him slowing to an irritating sway.

He was salivating, queasy and disoriented, but he managed to focus on the scene ahead, the world reduced to a dichromatic blend of yellows and blues. Caelan remained in the leshy’s thrall, oblivious to the mayhem around her. The boy yanked at Caelan’s look-alike, but she seemed catatonic—jaw slack, limbs like stiff rubber. He tried dragging her away, but she oscillated to-and-fro as though anchored to the earth, her feet made of iron. She was entranced, mesmerized by her own shadow, and as Caelan lifted an arm to reach for her, she reached back, each a mirror of the other.

Kai tripped on his own legs, forgetting how to move with four of them. He burned with fever, though he couldn’t sweat it out. This body released heat through breath, and it wasn’t enough. He teetered to the side and nearly ate dirt, the sky greeting him when another cry seized his spine, and he righted himself. Hackles raised, ears erect, he forced himself forward, blunt claws scraping the earth. The leshy watched, appraising. He amplified the nature in things; forcing a violent metamorphosis was the only weapon he had. But Kai was already a wolf, and the transition hadn’t leveled him like the leshy wanted.

Kai pitched forward as Caelan and her daylight twin drew closer, their fingers a mere inch apart. They both seemed so serene—so at peace with the outcome of their collision course. Muzzle rippling into a snarl, Kai threw himself into the girl he’d stolen from death, side-checking her out of the leshy’s grasp and away from the other teen.

Caelan flew to the ground and skidded several feet, flaxen grass marring her too-big flannels. Limbs flailing, she bolted upright and rasped for breath. Wide slate gray eyes swung to the figures around her, searching madly for some inkling of sense. Her gaze snagged on the other girl—an uncanny double, an imitation.

A forgery.

The girl in the green cardigan screamed, falling into her boyfriend’s arms as her feet finally came free from the soil.

“Come on, let’s go!” the boy yelled, hauling his panicked girlfriend away. They sprinted from the park, sneaking glances over their shoulders. The girl’s eyes snapped back to Caelan’s. A morbid curiosity.

Trembling uncontrollably, Caelan’s breaths came fast and shallow. “What…what’s—” Her eyes traced a path to the leshy, her pulse hammering so hard that Kai heard it thundering in his own skull.

With his equilibrium restored, he darted between Caelan and the leshy, blocking the spirit’s path. Warm breath fogged the air as the wolf huffed through bared teeth, each canine an ivory dagger. Head lowered, fur raised like stygian blades, Kai flattened his ears and growled in warning as the leshy loomed, barred from his target. Blood red eyes tracked the woodland spirit as it slalomed, and when it dared inch closer, Kai lunged, snapping his teeth. Caelan clumsily rose to her feet, and he herded her away. The leshy wanted to bend her nature into something unwanted—whatever that was.

Her fingers curled into his black fur like she was holding on to him for dear life. His tail flicked side to side, gliding across her shoulder. The predator in him wanted to rip the leshy apart and scatter his limbs like cast-off twigs, but he couldn’t leave Caelan’s side either—couldn’t risk letting her wander. The leshy shuddered and warped like a heat mirage. He winnowed closer, the sudden movement accompanied by a hoarse keen dragged from an unhinged jaw.

Caelan’s sharp inhale and the cold hiss of fear coiling around Kai’s ribs propelled him to act. The leshy’s movements were erratic but confined, like he was trapped in a glass prism. Kai knocked into the leshy and clamped his maw around the creature’s brittle leg, gnawing until a satisfying snap cocked his head. But when he veered back toward the spirit, he found the space empty. The leshy was gone. Pincered between Kai’s teeth was all that remained of him: a broken tree branch. As Kai slackened his jaw, the stick tumbled from his mouth, shriveling with the fall. By the time it hit the ground, it’d desiccated and moldered away.

Ragged gasps pulled the wolf away from the ashes. Caelan braced against Kai as she collapsed, her arms encircling his broad neck and chest. Burying her face in his fur, she muffled her sharp inhales and muttered, “I didn’t want to…I didn’t want to…”

Kai plunked down on his haunches, unable to respond. A high-pitched whine leaked out of him, though he didn’t pull away as the girl continued to sob, her tears wetting his coat.

“I just kept hearing her call,” she hiccupped, “and I couldn’t ignore it anymore.”

Her call . The girl in the green cardigan—the one who looked identical to Caelan. Somehow, Caelan’s double was summoning her, yet she’d appeared horrified at the sight of her otherworldly twin. She may have called, but she hadn’t expected an answer.

“It hurt too much to ignore, but this also hurts. Meeting her—touching her—would hurt even more.” Caelan’s heart slammed so hard against her ribcage that Kai felt it thrumming against his own. Her body quaked, her face streaked with moisture and heat as she cried and cried like she’d denied herself the catharsis her whole damn life. “Everything hurts,” she murmured. “I want it to stop. I don’t care if it kills me. Please, make it stop.”

Kai pawed at the earth—a nervous reflex. His animal self hadn’t honed any sensory barriers. The man was beholden to the walls he’d built to protect himself from overload, but the wolf was a receptacle for everything the environment hurled at him, and Caelan was impossible to ignore. She was in pain. So much pain. As a man, Kai could observe pain at a distance, but the wolf lived it. Pain wasn’t an abstraction; it was a barbed manacle locked around his throat.

He needed to change back—needed to shed this hideous instinct that tangled him in another’s distress. How pitiful…a hunter who killed without qualm, debilitated by a few shed tears. Besides, he had questions that needed answering, and they could only be asked in a different body. What would’ve happened if Caelan and her look-alike had touched?

Just as Caelan released him, a figure appeared next to the civil war monument atop a hill to the north. Tall and broad. Legs like steel trunks. Arms like canons. When an angry gust blew in, Kai caught the scent, and his tail lashed anxiously, his soot-colored lips twitching into a grimace.

He locked eyes with Zverev. They remained fixed on one another for a long, breathless moment. Then, Zverev’s gaze drifted to Caelan.

Shit.

Kai bumped her legs until her knees buckled and she stumbled in the direction he wanted—away from Zverev, away from the park, toward populated streets where attempted kidnapping wouldn’t go unnoticed. He didn’t give a damn that he was a wolf; he had to get her to safety.

But where? He couldn’t take her home. Zverev would tail them. Even if they lost him, he’d track them the same way Kai had tracked Caelan. The fact that Pyotr’s beast managed to pluck the girl’s scent from thin air was indication enough that they were fucked.

Kai couldn’t hide her, but he could make snatching her more difficult.

He prodded her thigh, pushing her along as gently as he could. She seemed to catch on. Glimpsing the giant stalking across the field, she cursed, their predicament dawning on her like a spade to the skull.

Kai clamped his teeth on her sleeve and tugged. She broke away from the incoming threat, cool gray eyes meeting the wolf’s. Mahogany veiled in crimson, like burnt clay forged in flames.

Run , they said .