Legendary Beast

Chapter 5

Take this blade to save our child. Remember it, and it will remember you.

He’d wanted to say “Remember me.” The words had risen from his heart to his lips, but he’d stopped them just in time. He’d hardened his mouth against them. He was here to help Madeline save Trevor. He was here to find and kill Queen Vasilisa. That was all. As she’d said, the past couldn’t be reclaimed. But not for the reason she thought. She was still a warrior. She would always be a warrior. She’d been a warrior while she was sleeping, protecting their baby against her breast. Her eyes were troubled and wounded, but they still gleamed with determination and fury, even if they didn’t gleam with ruby fire.

He was the one who couldn’t reclaim what had been lost. Even as he’d reclaimed his human form, he’d known it. It wasn’t only his skin that had been scarred by the years of ceaseless wandering and torment. The white wolf’s rage continued to live beneath his skin like a never-ending howl only he could hear, and its claws had dug away his humanity too deeply for him to ever fully find it again.

His body was a sham, his desire for Madeline only an echo of what had been when he was a civilized man. When he’d released the sword into her hands, he ignored the spark caused by the phantom ghost of their previous connection.

And then he’d stepped back, prepared to be the cool and impersonal instructor she needed to help her remember the sword. Only the sword.

Him, she could and should forget.

The training session lasted only an hour, but when they were finished, Madeline’s arm was trembling and rubbery, and she was panting with exertion. Sweat had dampened her hair, even though the mountain forest was cold.

Lev didn’t pant or sweat. He had shown her every thrust and twist and parry, often with his hands over hers to demonstrate technique, but other than a wind-kissed flush on his cheeks above his golden beard, he seemed wholly unaffected.

“Our lives consisted of battle and training for battle. Your muscles will remember even if your mind doesn’t,” Lev said.

“There must have been other things. Like singing...” Madeline thought of the lullaby. Then she tried not to think of how Trevor had been conceived. “Um, dancing?”

They had walked back to the horses. This time the dun didn’t prance at all, and the white merely snorted at Lev’s approach. It was Madeline who tried to prance away when Lev reached to help her tired body onto the back of the gelding. He caught her easily, but in deference to her avoidance, he deposited her quickly into the saddle and stepped away.

Her waist still burned from the memory of his short-lived grasp—so strong and sure—even after they headed back onto the trail. Her exhaustion was as much from resisting the effects of his touch during her training session as from the exercise itself. He had taken no liberties. Each time he’d positioned her hands on the hilt or her shoulders and hips, he’d released her the moment the demonstration was finished. Yet her body still became flushed and sensitive. By the time the session was over, she ached for his touch to become more personal.

She had counted the seconds each brush of his hands had lasted.

“We sang and danced. Of course. In between our battles with the Dark Volkhvy. And all the while we didn’t realize we were kept in Vasilisa’s gilded cage. We were her most treasured champions. Until we were not,” Lev said.

“Did the Dark Volkhvy cause my long illness?” Madeline asked.

Lev pulled the large dun to a sudden stop. He turned in his saddle to face her. Madeline’s horse stopped at the dun’s hip because the trail was too narrow for him to pass.

“Is that what the witch told you?” he asked. She was suddenly on alert again after being lulled by the gelding’s steady hoof beats beneath her. Lev was deceptively quiet. She could feel a new tension in the air. She could see his stiff shoulders and his white-knuckled grip on the reins.

“She only said I’d been ill. Not how or why,” Madeline said.

“Queen Vasilisa spelled you into an enchanted sleep. One so deep and so long that it clouded your memories. Your past wasn’t stolen by an illness or the Dark Volkhvy. There is no Dark and Light. All Volkhvy are evil. Vasilisa most of all. She wasn’t your savior, Madeline. She was your tormentor. She stole you and Trevor away from Bronwal before she cursed us all,” Lev said. The howl was present in his voice again. More than ever. His words were husky rasps in the shadowed forest. The sun had entirely disappeared. The canopy was dense, but clouds must have rolled in high above them in a sky they couldn’t quite see.

Madeline’s body no longer ached from physical exertion or burgeoning sensual need. She’d gone numb from her forehead to her toes. Her fingers had gone slack on the reins, and the gelding shuffled aimlessly in its tracks with no guidance except for the dun’s broad hips ahead.

“She was helping me recover. She was making sure Trevor woke slowly so he wouldn’t be affected the way I’d been. She tried to protect him from the marked Volkhvy when they attacked,” Madeline said.

“Whatever she does, she does for herself. For her own ends. She isn’t human—never forget it. Long ago she took my father from his family and manipulated his genes to create a supernatural champion. He helped her. He provided an entire family of supernatural beasts to fight her enemies. We married and brought our warrior mates into her service. And she repaid us with a horrible curse. The Ether ate us, again and again. Once every hundred years we materialized. She wanted to watch our slow demise,” Lev said.

He kicked the dun and it leaped forward into a trot in spite of the rough path. The white gelding followed, and Madeline’s hands were too numb to pull it back. Was everything she’d learned since she woke up a lie? The Volkhvy on Krajina had been kind to her. Very unlike the marked Volkhvy who had attacked the island. And she’d felt Anna’s warmth. She’d instinctively trusted one of the other women who wielded a Romanov blade.

Lev had to be wrong about the Light Volkhvy. And if he was wrong about the Light, then he was wrong about Vasilisa, too. She was Anna’s mother. Madeline’s sanity was currently being saved by the idea that wherever Trevor had been taken, he at least hadn’t been taken there alone. Vasilisa would take care of him until Madeline could get there. She had to believe that, in spite of what Lev believed.

Queen Vasilisa had created the Romanov wolves, and she’d forged the enchanted blades for their mates. That much was true. The rest? Madeline’s mind seemed shrouded in fog. She had woken too quickly, Vasilisa had said. She’d risen from her long sleep too fast and left her memories behind.

It had been the white wolf’s howl that had woken her up. She’d echoed it. His howl had ripped from her throat and passed her lips as it sprang from her own chest. The crystal bed she’d slept in had been shattered, Trevor gone.

But as her horse followed after the dun that had already disappeared down the curving trail, Madeline wondered who had shattered the crystal and taken the sleeping baby from her breast. She’d blamed the white wolf for waking her too soon, but perhaps the blame didn’t lie entirely with him alone.

Her skin was as soft as the petals of a flower. The faint scent of roses was tangled in the auburn strands of her hair. As he’d tried to focus on reminding her of her prowess with a blade, he was distracted again and again by observations he couldn’t ignore.

The forest canopy above them was dense. The majestic spruce surrounding the mossy bank were lined up in seemingly never-ending rows of bitter bark and evergreen bows. But sunlight still peeked through and found its way in beams down to the top of Madeline’s head. The rays of light turned the waves of her hair to fire. The strands were a myriad of colors, from light gold to the deep red of tarnished copper. He’d grown up with a ginger twin, but Soren had ordinary red hair. Madeline had flames.

He forced himself to only touch her when necessary. He corrected her hold on the hilt of her weapon, and his fingers burned where they touched hers. He nudged her feet farther apart with the toe of his boot against her foot, and he hated himself for remembering his bare leg welcomed between her naked thighs. He pressed a hand against the small of her back to urge her to straighten her spine, and he quickly pulled it away rather than allowing himself to press her body against his.

It was an hour of the worst torture he’d ever experienced, but he endured it because in spite of all the observations that hurt him, he also noticed her shoulders begin to line up with her blade the way they should, directing the sword. He noticed that the sweat on her brow didn’t stop her from going through the forms he suggested over and over again.

She would be prepared to wield the blade against the Volkhvy even if it killed her. She possessed the same determination as ever. She didn’t need memories to drive who she was at heart.

Of course, he also noticed her breath catch and her body go still when he leaned in close behind her to position her elbows. For only a moment their bodies had been touching, from her back to his chest all the way down to hips and legs. The swell of her bottom encased in tight fawn leggings had been pressed against the tops of his thighs. He had paused for only a second, allowed himself to savor the touch but only for the blink of an eye, and then he had stepped back before his response to their mutual stillness could betray itself against the small of her back.

He had ended the session soon after, no longer trusting himself or his focus. She had seemed as glad to back away and return to the horses as he had been.

And then Madeline had brought up her enchanted sleep. She’d reminded him of why they were undertaking this journey in the first place.

Vasilisa must be stopped.

She had endangered his family for the last time.

He would lose them for good when it was all said and done, but they would be safe. That was all that mattered.

The problem with travel on horseback down a narrow trail where she was required to do nothing but let her horse follow the one leading was that she had hours to think. Since she couldn’t ponder memories, she was left reliving every second of her time with Lev on the mossy bank by the stream.

His body was inhuman in its hardness, but instead of being repelled by his steely arms and legs or the solid rock of his chest, she was drawn to him as if her soft body could soothe away the centuries of hardship that had caused his to turn to stone. She could tell he tried to keep his touch impersonal. She could also feel him fail each time he brushed his hand against hers. He leaned into her as if he was freezing and she was the flame.

She tried to keep the image of the white wolf in her mind, but even though she’d sketched the monster a thousand times, she failed. Lev Romanov was intimidating. He was tall and broad and as lean as any hungry hunter could be. But he didn’t act like a predator. Oh, he noticed her every move. He sensed every time she reacted to his touch. But he didn’t exploit her weakness.

Not even when, God forgive her, she’d hoped that he would.

He had held her from behind, and she’d felt every inch of his hard body against hers, including his obvious reaction to holding the small of her back to him.

Then he had stepped away.

She had quaked like a leaf afterward. Perhaps he had thought she had overexerted herself. He had ended their practice. He’d headed back to the horses. She’d been left to mull over the impossible: the white wolf she’d been told to distrust had refused to devour willing prey.

Chapter 6

They were being followed. As the forest darkened around them, Lev could detect the scent of wolves on the breeze. He was well used to wild wolves. He’d run with them for over a hundred years. They naturally bowed down to his giant white-wolf form. In his supernatural body, he was easily the apex predator of the mountain. Volkhvy power might be evil, but it had given him the power he’d needed to survive when Vasilisa cursed Bronwal.

Now his ability to shift was gone.

For whatever reason, he couldn’t set the white wolf free. It was as if his human body was unwilling to risk disappearing for another hundred years or more. He was drenched with sweat by the time the sun set, but he was still a man. He’d asked Madeline to ride in front when he first scented the wolves. She hadn’t looked back at him since then. If she had, she might have drawn the ruby sword from the scabbard at her knee. She would have seen his tension. She would have anticipated the arrival of the white wolf she feared.