Page 30 of The Girl in the Forest

Hated how he dampened the energy the way Caerwen did with her massages. Allowing my body to release and realign.

Which made me furious again, over the ease he had, controlling what I couldn’t. I bucked against him. Dug useless toes into the damp ground and tried to throw off his weight. Curled my fingers to draw heat from the water, wrap it in a flaming ball and aim it at his head.

“Noa,” he growled against my ear. “Stop shouting so loud.”

I wasn’t shouting. My teeth were too gritted for sound to come out. The bastard had been in my head again. Eyes clenched, I let him see all the turmoil, the secret fears. What I could become… willingly, eagerly. Welcoming the darkness in power. Letting go of control because I wanted to let go.

His grip on my hands gentled, although he still held my arms outstretched, immersed in the rushing water.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I know what you believe. But being feral means becoming mindless, beyond control. There’s no hope of ever coming back. You can control this energy. Learn to use it, release it. The energy doesn’t have to control you. I can teach you.”

“But I can’t trust you.”

“I know how hard it is to fight fear. You aren’t alone.”

His wolf had struggled with the same fear—turning feral—and Grayson spent months in the wilderness, working through it.

“There’s a dark side to failles,” I argued. “I’ve read enough journals. We’re not all sweetness and nice. We destroy things, and the way I killed that pig—it was horrifying and I reveled in it. I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to find something else to kill.”

“I don’t believe it was the killing you loved. You were puking your guts out all over me.”

“I was not.”

“Stunk worse than the pig. Hot and—”

His deep laughter got to me, and I elbowed him with more force than I realized. He rolled to the side, shifting his weight and pulling us both upright until we sat facing each other. I swallowed, curling my wet fingers. An overwhelming sense of uneasiness dried my mouth.

Grayson was a healer and a dread lord. His power tugged in my chest. But could he heal someone as broken as I was? Would he?

“You aren’t broken,” he murmured, shamelessly answering what I merely thought about.

I forced air into my lungs, dared to skim my gaze across the hard planes of his face. Something like a soft caress brushed against my skin. My hand lifted. I wanted to cradle my palm against his cheek. Gently push the hair from his temple. In his bi-colored eyes, the colors I thought of as both man and wolf, I thought I saw the sorrow that hadn’t existed before. Shadows clouding over the loneliness.

I shifted more fully around to study his expression.

He scowled. I focused on the downward curve of his mouth. “What did I love about killing if I wasn’t turning evil?” Both hope and fear in that question.

“You’re a crusader, Noa,” he said. “Evil must be punished. Bullies. You worry over the injustice you see in the world, and what provoked you was the chance to do something about it.”

I felt the tiniest bit better after he said that, but so many unresolved questions hovered between us. My mind made the leap to something I hadn’t thought about since the moment I’d found logs blocking my path. “The obstacles—the walls, the traps—you put them there.”

“You needed to test yourself, find the confidence you’d lost.”

He stroked a grubby finger over my cheek, probably pushing a strand of my hair into the rest of the muck covering my head, thanks to him pressing me into the muddy stream bank. But a spark jumped from his skin to mine, igniting the impulse to coat goo on my fingers, smear it over his face so we’d match.

His lips quirked, boyish, the way he’d been in the watchtower the day I’d tried to play sword games and discovered the passageway. Was he waiting for me to do it? Spread mud on his face? Did he want to play?

My heart thudded. “What happened with the Carmag?”

“Anson suffered casualties.” From the grim look in Grayson’s eyes, the losses were worse than those in Azul. “He can rebuild.”

“You said creatures.”

“What we fought in the meadow—pigs and corrupted, crab-like creations. They came through splits in the air, overran a settlement in Anson’s northern section. He had no warning. More creatures swarmed our joint western boundary, and he couldn’t handle fighting on two fronts. We defeated them this time, but if a larger invasion happens, or if anything changes with those creatures, the fighting will be worse.”

“What could be worse?”

“They’re starting to think and react, not mindlessly charge into battle.”

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