Page 4 of Wolf's Bane
Each time, he swore he could smell perfume, a clean mix of fresh-picked herbs and ink. Years had passed, but he could still hear her laughter, bright and clear as a bell. He held the letter up and breathed deeply.
She had been his friend then, but it’s easy to have friends when you have a handsome face. If she could see him now, scarred and disfigured, she’d recoil in horror.
Growling in frustration, he crumpled the paper and tossed it into the dying fire.
Godwin and his family needed him.
Alek did not like to dwell on his past. His family had been slaughtered in the night. Godwin Marechal arrived like a savior to rid the small village of its monster infection. It seemed the fucking sunlight even gleamed on his golden hair when Godwin pulled Alek from the steamer trunk he had been hiding in for days.
Alek had been entranced. Godwin appeared so noble, so admirable, that the new orphan followed the hunter in a desperate case of hero worship.
Fortunately, Godwin Marechal was as good of a man as he appeared to a starry-eyed child. He took in the scared child, gave him a home, taught him a profession, and treated him like family. Until—
Alek could not say no; he owed too much to the Marechal family.
Unfortunately, much had transpired in the decade since he left the Marechal home. He hunted monsters, like the one that slaughtered his family, but paid a price. At the time, he had been happy to pay.
Now? He could not find it within himself to regret his choices. A cursed half-life for the lives of innocent people? A bargain.
If the Marechals knew of his curse, he doubted they would welcome his help. He could barely keep himself contained. Leaving would endanger the very family that sought his help.
And yet he yearned to see the only family he had, the people who needed him. Wind rattled the windowpanes and the house groaned.
Aleksandar retrieved the letter from the fire, batting at the charred edges and blowing away soot. There had to be a way to help. He would find it.
Chapter 2
Solenne
Boxon Hill
Marechal House - The Undercroft
The iron keyrattled as Solenne shimmied it into place. The locking mechanism groaned in protest as she turned the old key and pushed the door open. At one time, the Marechal family had many functioning treasures of the old world. Now they had a room full of broken junk. Some still considered the useless machines to be treasures, which was why Solenne picked through the shelves.
The armor Godwin and Luis wore was a genuine treasure. Made of a lightweight and super-strong carbon, the ability to fabricate the material had been lost to time. The pieces were battered and failing. Fortunately, the blacksmith in the village had developed a technique to repair the carbon material. The mended fabric was not as strong, but still better than anything else. Leather was not durable enough, and metal, even chainmail, was too loud and too bulky for the family’s work. By this point, the Marechal armor was mostly composed of repairs. Solenne would eat her hat if more than 50% of the original material remained.
She moved aside defunct slabs made of a material as clear as glass but stronger and shatterproof. Sometimes, if she left them in the sun long enough, they glowed with an internal light.
Godwin would never part with a weapon, inoperable or not, but a long-range communication device that had not worked in decades? That could be bargained away.
Solenne found it difficult to believe that the machines of the ancestors ever worked, that technology could be reliable and dependent. It seemed like a fairy story.
The artifacts disturbed her. She knew it was not magic, but a lost technology. Electricity and circuits. It worked on a principle of gears and levers, heat and steam, or pressure and valves: the same as any machine. Still, images and symbols that she couldn’t decipher ghosted across the surface. She would rather leave well enough alone.
However, Miles, the blacksmith, couldn’t get enough.
She passed over non-functional pistols—or that’s what they looked like to her—and mysterious black boxes. At the back of a dusty shelf, she found a spheroid object, flat on the bottom with a handle. Once white, the casing had yellowed with age. The material was plastic, which, while no longer produced, was common enough. The oldest houses had entire dinner services made of the stuff. The ancestors had used it for practically everything, even trivial, single-use products. Discarded plastics were shredded into chips and melted to be reused. The end product was a crude but durable material, perfect for roof shingles and the like.
Carefully, she wrapped the item in cloth like a sacred relic and added it to a basket along with the damaged armor. She did not need to convince Miles to accept the item as payment for repairing the armor, but she could prevent it from being damaged during the journey.
A week had passed since the events of the full moon. Godwin refused to stay in bed and rest. Luis pored over old texts and fiddled with broken weaponry. The household was almost normal, if one could ignore the underlying current of worry. Every night brought them closer to the summer solstice when creatures prowled the night.
Alek had not replied to her letter, but it had not been returned as a person unknown, either. It had been delivered, presumably read. She had to be patient.
Time was not on their side.
Luis perched on a stool in the library, holding a small crystal to the window. Solenne knocked on the open door’s frame.
