Page 36 of The Howling
She needs me, not an absence of me. I have to protect. I have to be there to attack anyone or anything which wants to harm her.
I was nearly too late with Lord Guyzance. I will never be too late again.
More flaming arrows hit my hide, but I pay them no attention. Instead, I retrace my steps, following my nose, taking myself back to my castle, back to my home.
Back to my Wynter.
I might have been feral once, but I cannot be that Barghest anymore. I have to be her mate if I want her to be mine.
I pad through the great hall, the fire now a deep red glow and the table cleared of the limited food Fenrother left behind. I growl my thanks to the Duegar, even though I know they will not show themselves. However the glow of the dying fire picks the outline of something familiar within these walls.
“Mother?”
“No, Reavely.”
The spirit of my sweet youngest sister, Ellie, steps into the firelight. It glows behind her and instantly my heart is gripped with guilt.
She was too young to end up like this, trapped here, with me, with the rest of the spirits who haunt this place.
Who cannot leave and who cannot leave me alone.
“You deserve to be happy, brother.” Ellie says. “If she makes you happy, then you need to be with her.”
“But if it doesn’t break the curse…”
“Yes, we stay here but I don’t care. Life is for the living, Reavely. Not for what might have been.”
I can’t look at her, I have to avert my eyes because the anger which rises like hot rocks from the underworld would have me destroy the entire Yeavering for what has been done.
When I look again, Ellie has gone.
“Ellie? Mother?” I call out, feeling hopelessly alone.
“Oh, you’re back.” The damned Hedley Kow wanders into the hall from the kitchens. “And I am not your mother, or I’d be telling you to get a grip and go look after your mate.”
I refrain from saying she sounds exactly like my mother as the small sprite stomps past me.
“You need to decide what you want, Barghest. Your old life or the new,” she grumbles. “Because the human you brought here needs your presence and your protection more than you could ever know.”
With that pointed remark, she does what mischief makers in the Yeavering do and disappears as if she was never there.
Two tiny embers dance up from the glowing bed of the fire and spin around as if they live, while almost everything else in this place is dead.
It doesn’t mean anything, even in a place filled with magic like the Yeavering, even if I want it to be more.
WYNTER
Istare at the dress. It should be slumped over the ornately carved chair in the bedroom, but somehow it’s contriving to look fresh and pressed as if ready to wear by a blushing bride on her wedding day.
It’s not that I don’t want to get married. I’d just rather I had a choice. I’d rather things stopped happening to me and were created by me.
Certainly I allowed my stepfather to push me into the whole setting up a business thing.
‘You’re so talented, Wynter,” he’d croon at me in front of my mother. “You can do anything you want.”
I knew he was a slimy git, but my mum loved him, and she was the happiest I’d ever seen her after my dad died in the plague.
I didn’t want her happiness to end, even if I would never forget the kind, gentle man who brought me up, my real father and her first husband, as easily as she seemed to do.
