I sighed, too. All that was left were the corpses.
And Maddox.
He was already stalking away, his tail lashing in the air. I wondered where he was going until I realized my command had an effect on him.
Like releasing a breath, I let go of my control. Maddox stopped in his tracks. The corpses, however, started crawling towards me again. I had enough power left in me to turn them away.
I didn’t like how easy this was becoming. A few days ago, I’d had no idea how to harness my own arcana. Now, I was using it like I’d been doing it forever. I couldn’t help but feel like I was treading dangerous territory.
Released from the power of my command, Maddox shook himself. The hatred gleaming in his eyes was at odds with the way he sauntered over to me. He nudged me with his muzzle, but he didn’t seem happy about it. When I ran my hand along his nose, he pushed into my touch and growled in warning at the same time.
I jerked back.
“Shouldn’t you follow the killer? You could hunt him down…” I glanced in the direction the masked killer had fled.
Maddox sat at my feet. He looked down at his body with clear confusion and growled again. When he tossed his head, I realized he was trying to pry himself up off the ground. Maddox and his body were at war. While one part of him wanted to stay, the rest of him refused to sit still.
He lifted his head and glared at me. The look was so vicious that I couldn’t help but back up a step. I knew, in that moment, that what I’d done had violated him. That hadn’t been my intention. When I spoke, I’d meant to grab at the undead attacking us. I never meant to give him a command.
“Be…be free?” I said with the hopes that I could release Maddox from this.
His expression flattened. He was not amused.
I threw my hands in the air. “I don’t know what you want from me! I didn’t mean for this to happen. It would take us hours for me to explain why I had no idea how to use my arcana, and Maddox didn’t need to know the ins and outs of my complicated childhood.
That left us at an impasse. I didn’t know how to release him. It seemed…maybe I was mistaken, but it seemed like this wasn’t my doing. I got the sense that Maddox’s new beast was the one fighting him.
When his body relaxed and his expression became more animal, his tail wagged, and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. He looked more like a giant dog than a wild ghost-wolf taller than me.
Man, Maddox made a huge wolf.
“Thank you,” I said softly as I patted his head.
He pushed into my palm again. His back foot thumped against the muddy ground and splattered his white fur with speckles. I brushed them off as if he wasn’t going to shed the fur in a little while when he shifted back.
Speaking of which, I needed to know if he planned on shifting back. He wasn’t the kind of wolf that I could put a collar and leash on. No one would believe he was a normal dog. One look at him, and people could tell that he was something born out of nightmares. His tail was still made of sharpened bone. Blue-white light blazed in his eyes.
“You can’t go back to civilization like this,” I said.
The beast ignored me. He shoved me to the ground and climbed into my lap. When he closed his eyes, I realized he wanted tocuddle. I knew that shifters liked to gather in dog piles, that they needed touch, but I never thought that Maddox would want to cuddle me.
This wasn’t Maddox, though. He was a new shifter. Ryder had warned me that the divide between man and beast would be drastic. It would cause problems more often than not because the human part of Maddox wasn’t used to the new animal urges yet.
I’d assumed that the animal urges would include hunting for sport, notcuddling. My life had taken an odd turn as of late. I’d hated it before, but now I was stuck at an odd impasse. I didn’t hate everything, but it certainly wasn’t great either.
The man hunting me down had a rosary much like my own. I peered at it in the sun and tried to figure out why some beads flickered with little sparks of light when others were dark. I wouldn’t figure that out just by staring at it, though. To get to the bottom of this, I would have to delve into my arcana again.
I shuddered.
Looking to the beast, I asked, “You’re not going to give Maddox control, are you?”
The beast pretended not to hear me, but I could see the slight wag of his tail. The beast was perfectly happy in this form. That meant we couldn’t go back to the parking lot any time soon.
Instead, I pushed the beast off my lap and stood. “Let’s go for a hike.”
* * *
My hands shook.The rosary jingled in my grasp. Behind me, the soft trickle of water from a melting waterfall filled the air with a sound that should have been soothing. The sound had no such effect on me, unfortunately.
It was Maddox’s presence that comforted me. He walked through the shallow water to come sit with me on the dry rock I’d found. This would have looked like something out of a training montage in a movie were it not for the terrifying shifter sleeping beside me like a housecat.
I shook myself free of the present moment and tried to sink into myself. Gripping the rosary tight, I explored it with my arcana. Skeletal fingers clicked along the beads, one by one. My power hit the rosary and rebounded outwards, much like it had before. It reflected my arcana and amplified it so that my senses could reach for miles.
That wasn’t an exaggeration. I could feel every dead thing, every small creature that’d given itself up to the circle of life, every person laid to rest, every last sigh, formiles. For a moment, I wondered if I could reach from these mountains all the way back to Syracuse and Lakesedge, but I was too afraid to try.
I was afraid of what that might mean for me.