Ten miles further down the road, Phelan heard the wolf howl, too, and the sound shot shivers down his spine as he huddled in his cloak and blanket next to his own meager fire.
“Hell,” he muttered to himself. “You’ve never been scared of critters before. Why would anything be different now?”
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the last time a wolf got close to you, it shapeshifted into a man and shoved a spear into your gut. He rubbed gingerly at the wound. Still aching. Still healing.
“Calm,” he muttered to himself in the darkness, staring at the fire like a fool. “Calm. Nothing out here is going to get you tonight. You warded your camp. They can’t cross the boundary.”
Because the boundary was so much help when the bitches’ minions came to skewer you.
He bit down on the inside of his cheek hard, almost snarling. When the hell he started to be this way?
“You’re a foolish boy,” a woman’s voice rasped from beyond his wardings. Phelan jerked toward the sound, swallowing a curse.
“What do you want?” he spat, his eyes narrowing as he stared at Leinth. “Come to out me to whoever the hell’s hunting me?”
“That wouldn’t benefit my bloodline at all, now would it?” She crossed thin arms beneath her dark cloak, staring at him with something close to consternation. “You’re a tremendously foolish man, Phelan O’Credne, Wandering One, and now you’ve endangered them all—everyone that you or I have ever dared to hold dear.”
“You’ve turned your coat once,” Phelan said. “I don’t have any doubt you could easily do it again and come out of this smelling as sweet as clover buds.”
“Not this time,” Leinth said softy. “Now it’s about who we really are, what we have it in us to be. What’s dark is darker than night. What’s light is light, brighter than the sun. And then there’s us—the shades of gray that inhabit the world that wakes and sleeps and lives and dies by the whims of chance and fate—and the gods that walk her face again.”
She took one step closer to the edge of his wardings. “They need your help, Wanderer. You can’t abandon them now. Turn back or die. Those are your only choices.”
“Why? If I don’t go back, you’ll kill me?”
“No,” she said simply, her thin, pale face turning sad for a moment. “But something else will.
“Something else will.”
