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Vasilisa had been the cool presence that had helped her. Madeline’s body had woken from a long illness, but her mind hadn’t. Every sight that met her eyes had dazzled and confused her.
The queen encouraged her drawings. She said the sketches came from the recesses of her mind that were still sleeping. Besides the wolf, there were sketches of a life she’d forgotten—a life very unlike the world she had woken to on Vasilisa’s island, Krajina.
Vasilisa was the Light Volkhvy queen, and Madeline had trusted her from the moment she realized it had been the queen who protected Trevor from the white wolf. Her queen. Her beloved liege. Vasilisa had rushed to break the crystal and take the baby from Madeline’s arms when the white wolf appeared on the island. His appearance had woken Madeline too harshly from her long sleep. She had risen to face his attack, but she hadn’t been strong enough. Vasilisa had explained everything as she helped Madeline recover. Healthy food and exercise seemed to clear her head a little more each day. As her health improved, Vasilisa gently tried to help Madeline recover the memories she’d lost.
But, most of all, the queen had continued to take care of Madeline’s infant son, who was still sleeping. She’d explained that Trevor needed to wake up slowly, and that soon he would be smiling, gurgling and grasping Madeline’s finger once more.
Madeline had forgotten a great many things, but she hadn’t forgotten her baby.
Trevor, the white wolf and her ruby sword—everything else in this strange new world she had to relearn, but not those things. Knowledge of them flashed behind her eyes with every blink and pounded in her chest with every beat of her heart.
Madeline finished the sketch and pulled her blackened fingers away from the page. The white wolf’s snarl was threatening, even though she’d created it herself with charcoal and paper. She calmly looked into the beast’s eyes for a few moments. Remembering his savagery made her stronger.
She had quickly come to love Vasilisa, who treated her as a daughter and Trevor as a beloved grandchild. But she wouldn’t depend on the queen to keep Trevor safe. Madeline was his mother. Facing the threat of the white wolf was her responsibility, and she was determined to be ready.
She closed the sketchbook and placed it on the window ledge that overlooked the ocean below.
Vasilisa was walking on the beach. She held a tiny bundle in her arms—Trevor. Even far away from her breast, Madeline could feel the tug of the invisible heartstrings that held her and her baby together. Yet she trusted the queen with him; Vasilisa visited with him every day, often taking him on walks beneath the Mediterranean sun.
The queen’s footsteps took her and the baby closer and closer to the cliff where the white wolf had appeared. Though Madeline trusted Vasilisa entirely, her breath still came quicker and her pulse leaped in her throat.
Vasilisa said the white wolf had once been her champion, but he had become a wild and savage monster that couldn’t be trusted any longer.
Madeline looked from the empty cliff down to the kind queen, who crooned to the sleeping baby she held against her chest. Queen Vasilisa’s enemies were Madeline’s enemies. It was a truth she felt to her bones.
She stepped back from the window and stretched before dropping down to the floor. She caught her weight with her hands and then pressed up and down until her shoulders protested from the effort. Then she pressed up and down a dozen times more.
When she’d woken up, her vision had been blurry and weak, but her instincts had driven her to rise and climb to the top of a cliff, where she’d found the white wolf. His presence had drawn her like a magnet—a terrifying magnet with vicious teeth and glowing red eyes.
She’d confronted the wolf with the ruby sword in her hands, but she hadn’t killed him. When he’d shifted into his human form, she’d been taken by surprise. Then Vasilisa had appeared to bring her back to the palace, along with Trevor. The white wolf’s brother had taken the beast back to his home.
Letting them go had been a mistake.
But her weakness that morning had only guaranteed she would work hard to heal so she could fight the white wolf another day.
Madeline brought her legs up beneath her and used them to lift her body back to a standing position with her arms outstretched. She exercised in secret because she didn’t want Vasilisa to worry she was overexerting herself. She grew stronger every day. Her arms, back and legs were responding to her efforts. Madeline straightened her shirt and stepped back to the window. She smoothed her hair back from her face.
The queen was heading back to the palace. As she came nearer, Madeline turned to go outside and meet them. In midmorning, she always sang to Trevor and watched his little face for signs of waking.
A sudden quaking of the earth beneath Madeline’s feet shook the entire palace and sent her to her knees. It was a testament to her persistence in recovering that she was able to leap back up again within seconds. As soon as she was back on her feet, she raced to the window, but the beach was empty, as was the stone stairway that led from the sand up to the palace portico.
Vasilisa and Trevor were gone.
Her gaze flew up from the sand to the cliff, but it was also deserted.
If the white wolf had returned, he hadn’t appeared in the same place as last time.
Madeline abandoned the window, but before she could make it to the door of her room, the screams had already begun. She wrenched open the door anyway and headed toward the noise of battle. She didn’t have the ruby sword by her side, and she was far from as strong as she could be, but she’d fight for Trevor with her bare hands if she had to.
He was all she had left of a life she couldn’t remember.
The palace was under attack, but it wasn’t the white wolf. Madeline searched for Trevor as witches all around her battled each other with bolts of energy from their hands. The transformation of the beautiful Mediterranean palace into a battlefield jarred her already tender senses, but she didn’t allow the shock to slow her down. She wasn’t Volkhvy, and her sword was gone, but she was quicker on her feet than she would have been because of her secret exercise regimen. She used that quickness to dodge and weave and make her way around the fighting witches.
As she ran, she noted that the witches who had attacked Vasilisa’s palace had black marks on their foreheads. Were all Dark Volkhvy marked? She couldn’t remember.
She only knew Vasilisa’s enemies were her enemies. She memorized the mark for later reference, but for now, she had to find Trevor and keep her baby from harm.
“This way,” a voice whispered from one of Vasilisa’s sitting rooms. Madeline reacted just in time, sliding inside the narrowly opened door before a contingent of marked Volkhvy could see her. She blinked when the door clicked shut, enveloping her in darkness. The marked Volkhvy ran by, their booted feet ringing down the hall.
“I’m looking for Trevor,” Madeline said into the darkness.
“They’ve taken him. And the queen. Her last order was that I should keep you safe,” the voice explained.
Madeline could finally make out one of Vasilisa’s older servants. The woman allowed the energy in her fingers to glow only slightly, lighting up the room enough to illuminate her face.
“No,” Madeline said. “I can help them.”
The servant reached out and touched Madeline’s cheek with her cold fingers. The violet glow of energy felt tingly on Madeline’s skin.
“You can’t help them alone,” the servant said. “Sleep now. Then you can seek the white wolf’s help.”
Madeline had slept over a thousand years during her illness. She resisted the sudden cool fog that claimed her mind with the servant’s touch to no avail. She slipped into an unconsciousness that was as dark and deep as before, but it wasn’t as silent. As her body crumpled, the last thing she felt was the servant lowering her to the floor and the last thing she heard was the white wolf’s howl. His cry echoed through her soul in an endless protest against losing loved ones to the evil Volkhvy.
Her journey from the Light Volkhvy island of Krajina had been long. Without the use of Vasilisa’s more powerful abilities, Madeline had been dependent on Vasilia’s followers and their help in procuring human modes of transportation. There had been a boat and a stormy, rough passage by sea. Following that, she had flown in a plane that seemed to her as magical as Vasilisa herself. But the length of her travels had caused her body to ache nearly as much as her heart. The soreness reached all the way to her bones and deeper still. The jarring movement of the final leg on a train that carried her closer and closer to her destination didn’t help. Not nearly as quiet as the plane’s flight, the constant metallic screeches of the train strained her ears.
Only her sketches soothed her.
She finished a particularly menacing charcoal drawing of the white wolf, and then she closed her sketchbook and pushed it into the backpack that sat beside her in an empty seat. She put the pencil in a side pocket of her pack, even though it was probably spent. It rattled against a handful of others that had been used up. She had a few good ones left—soon she would sharpen another and sketch some more.
Soon.
Trevor and Vasilisa had been ruthlessly ripped from her life by an attack that had taken even the queen of all Light witches by surprise because it had been perpetuated by a traitorous Light Volkhvy who had turned to the Dark. Vasilisa had told her that long ago she’d been a warrior for the Light. Madeline felt that truth in her heart, but it wasn’t echoed by any sort of ability in her muscles and mind. She hadn’t been prepared for the old servant who had knocked her out and hidden her from the fight.
She’d failed to protect her son. She’d failed to help the witch queen who had done so much for her.
“Care for some tea, miss?” an older woman sitting across from her asked. She poured herself a cup from a steaming metal container as Madeline shook her head. Her stomach was too knotted to keep the liquid down.
She’d put her sketchbook away and zipped her backpack closed, but the white wolf’s snarl was still vivid in her memory as the train took her closer and closer to the monster himself.
Lev Romanov.
She didn’t know him. She couldn’t remember him at all. But Vasilisa had told her the legend of the Romanov wolves. The Light Volkhvy queen had created champion shape-shifters to help her stand against the Dark. She had forged three enchanted swords to be wielded by their warrior mates.
Madeline’s heart beat too quickly in her chest, and her breathing was shallow. As usual, when she wasn’t sketching, she wasn’t sure what to do with the adrenaline that urged her to some vague action. She had forgotten too much for too long. Vasilisa had encouraged her to take her time. She’d told her to remember how to live first. The simple mundane tasks of daily life that so many took for granted had challenged Madeline for months.
But now she must do so much more.
She had to save Trevor.
Her secret exercises seemed silly now, poor preparation for what lay ahead. She was physically stronger, but her memory loss left her vulnerable.
Her arms were empty. She needed to sketch or she would go mad. She clenched her smudged fingers into fists and placed them on her lap. She only had a few pencils left, and she needed to ration out the precious charcoal as a starving man would his last crumbs of bread.
Vasilisa had urged her to take her time to recover all she had lost, but her time had run out.
“Here. You look like you could use a hot drink more than I could,” the old woman insisted.
Now that her sketchbook was tucked away, Madeline really looked at the woman across from her for the first time. She raised her hand to accept the proffered cup as the older passenger nodded in approval.
But something was wrong. The woman wasn’t as old as she had seemed. Her hair wasn’t gray. It was white like Vasilisa’s, and her eyes were sharp, not elderly and vague as they focused keenly on the cup in Madeline’s hands.
Steam rose from the hot tea, but as she brought the cup closer to her face, its wafting fragrance wasn’t the aromatic scent of strong tea she expected. Instead, an unpleasant bitter scent assailed her. Madeline’s nose crinkled, and she lowered the cup without sipping.
“There’s something bad in your tea,” she gasped as her eyes watered.
The woman grabbed the cup from Madeline’s fingers before she could drop it. She raised it to her own face and sniffed.
“I only smell tea. Nothing else. You can’t possibly smell the poison. Not unless...” The woman’s eyes widened, and she rose so quickly that the bad tea slopped on the floor. “They told me it was safe to approach you alone. They said you’d lost your connection to the wolf.”
Madeline sat frozen as the woman’s movements caused a black mark on her forehead to be revealed. She’d seen the same mark on the foreheads of the corrupt Volkhvy who had attacked Vasilisa’s island. She’d sketched the ashy flower all around the wolf drawings in her pad.
“My son. Where is my son?” Madeline asked. Her sharp demand caused the other passengers to shuffle and murmur. She and the witch who had apparently tried to poison her were now the objects of everyone’s attention.
But the Volkhvy was already backing away. Her eyes were round with fear.
“It doesn’t matter. Your connection to the wolf won’t stop us. I’ll be back, and next time I won’t be alone,” the marked witch threatened. She continued to back away toward the door, her gaze spinning wildly around the passenger car as if she expected the savage white wolf to suddenly spring from thin air.
Madeline knew there was no wolf connection coming to her rescue, but before she could rise and go after the witch, armed with nothing but a sketchbook, the train entered a tunnel. The darkness wasn’t complete, but it was enough cover for the Volkhvy assassin to disappear.
When the train exited the tunnel and daylight streamed through its windows once more, the sun found Madeline clutching her backpack to her chest as if it was the baby she’d lost.
Her uncertainty in her abilities didn’t matter. The assassin’s fear meant she was on the right path. The white wolf was her only hope.
The savage wolf was a shape-shifter, and at one time he had been her husband. In this whole wide world she navigated alone, there was only one other who might be able to help her save Trevor from the marked Volkhvy who had stolen him away.
His father.
Vasilisa said he was wild and he couldn’t be trusted, but Madeline had no one else to turn to for help.
Chapter 2 (#u6c7e6480-fd97-5698-89ec-a039af1b7cf8)
Lev had thrown most of the furniture out of the tower room. Niceties enraged him. He was currently dissatisfied with the shredded bed he’d kept in the middle of the room. The gemlike stained-glass windows he’d shattered with his fists lay all around the floor in glittering shards, while the biting wind howled through the ramparts and into the room he’d opened to the elements outside. The cold air didn’t bother him. He welcomed it. He craved discomfort. In fact, he wanted to run away from the care and concern of everyone around him, but reduced to two legs and two feet cut by the glass he’d walked over as he paced back and forth for days, how far could he possibly go?
Not far enough. Never far enough.
On four legs, he’d finally found her. She had greeted him as an enemy. She had raised the ruby sword against him...and he’d wanted its blade to fall. He’d stood on the edge of the cliff as the white wolf, and then he’d kneeled there as a broken man. He deserved her hatred. He should have thrown himself into the raging sea far below the cliff’s edge.
But Soren had brought him home.
Bronwal. The Carpathian castle Vasilisa had built for her enchanted warriors so long ago. It still stood. Only now it remained ever-manifest in an isolated mountain pass where once it had come from the Ether because of Vasilisa’s curse.
His twin brother wouldn’t give up on him. He never had. As the red wolf, Soren had been relentless in his pursuit. If Lev could have shifted back into his wolf form in those moments, he would have fought Soren tooth and nail to remain at Madeline’s mercy.
But the shift wouldn’t come to him no matter how hard he tried to summon it.
He was still a man. He’d been trapped in his human form since the day he’d found Madeline on Vasilisa’s island. His human body was unrecognizable to him. He’d been a battle-hardened warrior in long-ago days he could barely remember. He’d lived a demanding life in the saddle and on the battlefield, even when he wasn’t a wolf. But none of that had compared to the relentless life he’d lived for hundreds of years as the white wolf. That life was written on his scarred skin and ruthlessly toned physique. Only now could he look back and realize he’d been as relentless as Soren. The red wolf had hunted him. The white wolf had hunted for his lost wife and child even after he’d forgotten their faces and names.
Witches had done this to him. They had tortured him for centuries by taking his family and leaving him with a mad hunger for his wife and son that couldn’t be satiated no matter how much blood he spilled. He’d thought them dead. He’d searched anyway.
Never resting. Never stopping. Never giving up.
Only to discover his long-lost love hated him when he finally found her. It was a suitable end to his legendary tale. The only one he deserved. He hadn’t protected Madeline or Trevor from Vasilisa. He had howled and howled against the Volkhvy queen, but he had never been able to find the family she’d stolen from him. And still he howled. He couldn’t shift and he couldn’t leave Bronwal, not while Madeline, Trevor, Soren and his entire family were at the mercy of witches.
Lev jumped up from the bed and wrenched one of its solid posters free from its frame. His long years as the white wolf had given him incredible strength. His muscles were lean and firm and roped with veins. They bulged as he tore apart the bed and flung its pieces down the winding stairs.
He had felt her fear. It had been a part of him. It had driven him back into the human form he’d shunned for hundreds of years.
Servants would come. They would clear the busted wood away. They would bring him food and drink. They would bring him clothes to replace the shirts and trousers he tore from his skin. They would try to bathe him and bandage the wounds on his feet.
But his rage always won in the end. They always ran away and left him alone. Even his devoted brother, Soren, when he came to check on Lev like clockwork every night, would eventually leave him to howl alone at the too-distant moon.
He’d lived with torment for many years, but it was far worse now that he had felt Madeline’s fear.
Without the help of some of Vasilisa’s loyal servants, who had also survived the attack, Madeline never would have found Bronwal. The servants had given her the money she would need and explained how to use it. In spite of her illness, she was quick-witted and only needed to see or hear something once to understand how to do it herself. They explained that at one time, there had been a mirror portal between Krajina and the Romanovs’ castle, but it had been destroyed.
Madeline was desperate to save Trevor, but she was also terrified to see the white wolf again. The long journey helped to prepare her for what she might have to face. Still, once she hiked to the protected pass where the castle the world had forgotten stood, she stared up at its towered heights with trepidation.
The sword seemed like a dream. Her ability to wield it seemed like a joke. Her hands seemed much more suited to charcoal pencils than deadlier things. But she no longer had the luxury of taking the time to rediscover herself. It was time to decide who she would be. Right here. Right now.
Madeline decided she would be the person who saved her son.
She had dreaded seeing the white wolf again. She hadn’t stopped to imagine what it would be like for all the other citizens of Bronwal to welcome her “home.” She recognized no one. For her, it was exactly as if she’d approached the castle for the first time. She wondered at its breadth and depth. She marveled at its immensity. Only Volkhvy enchantments could have kept it hidden from the outside world for so long.
But by far, it was the whispers and exclamations and expressions on people’s faces that seemed like the greatest barrier between her and the shape-shifter she sought.
“Please, ma’am. Wait here,” an elderly servant advised.
The great hall she entered was cavernous, but its details were swallowed up in shadows.
When someone came to meet her, Madeline finally saw her first familiar face. It was one of the people the white wolf had threatened on the cliff during the storm when she’d woken up to confront him—the warm presence that had taken the sword from her numb fingers.
This was Anna, the Light Volkhvy princess, and Vasilisa’s daughter.
“We didn’t expect you so soon,” the curvy, dark-haired woman said. Her hair tumbled around her face in a chestnut cap of curls. And her lush figure was enhanced by the obvious swell of pregnancy that rounded out the loose tunic she wore. In her arms, she carried a long bundle wrapped in scarlet cloth. The cloth was embroidered with thorny vines. For some reason, the design made Madeline’s heartbeat quicken.
“I’m surprised you expected me at all, but I have no choice. Marked Volkhvy attacked Krajina. They’ve taken Trevor and Vasilisa,” Madeline said. The other woman’s eyes widened and her face blanched. Madeline’s urgency for her son had caused her to be inconsiderate. She should have been gentler when she told Anna about her mother’s kidnapping.
“I marked them. They’re worse than Dark Volkhvy. They were once Light, but they’ve been corrupted by their thirst for power,” Anna said. “You’ve come for Lev’s help,” she continued in a softer tone. She had frozen several steps away. She held the scarlet bundle with one hand while the other had fallen on her stomach as if she was protecting her own baby from harm. “He hasn’t recovered. He might never recover. He is still...lost,” Anna warned.
