The Will and the Wilds(39)

His lips quirk into a smile. The expression lights something in me, near the ache of my missing soul.

I look away. It is not attraction. Any such feelings I harbor for Maekallus merely spring from my desire to learn more about his kind, from my yearning for the lost bits of my soul. Yet are they bits? I have no idea how much he’s taken, or how much remains inside me.

“Thank you,” he says.

I start.

He eyes me.

“You’ve never once thanked me for anything.”

He frowns. Considers.

I turn back to the binding spell. “I’m not sure what to do next. I tried willing the gobler here, but nothing has happened.”

Maekallus rubs his jaw. “If I can leave this place,” he gestures to the glade, “I have a friend of sorts who frequents the wildwood. Rooters enjoy mortal forests.”

Rooters. One of the few generally docile mystings of which I am aware. My grandmother was especially familiar with their kind, which is why I had the courage to track one before. I think of the one I recently sent away. “You’re sure he’s here?”

“I think I could find him. His name is Attaby. He’s more familiar with magic than I am. It might be a ways.”

“I . . .”

He glances my way.

“How far? My father isn’t well. Not terribly so, but . . .”

“I don’t know. Not too far. He frequents the wildwood. I may be able to call to him if we draw another one of those circles. There was . . . some . . . power in it.”

I mull over this for a moment. “I could try to will him to us.”

Maekallus doesn’t hide his frown as his gaze flicks to the stone hanging from my wrist. He’s sensitive to it, but I would be, too, had it acted like my prison in the past. “If we can’t find him, yes. But believe me, the fewer creatures who know about that thing, the better. Attaby is intelligent. He might be able to figure it out.”

I nod. “Then we might need provisions. And to see that my father is well.”

“Can it be done today? I don’t need to eat. You . . .”

He glances downward. I think he meant to indicate my stomach, but his eyes linger on my breasts. Feeling warm, I cross my arms, and he looks away. “I can leave now.” He thumbs a black spot on the back of his hand.

The cut on my hand has opened again. I massage the Will Stone. “Let’s go. The worst we’ll get is some exercise, right?” Tennith, stop by the house and check on my father. If this Will Stone can reach you . . . ensure he’s provided for.

The stone tingles against my fingers.

Maekallus stands and offers me his hand, another surprising gesture. I take it, and he lifts me to my feet.

“First, the circle,” he says, and draws a star in the soil.





CHAPTER 17

A vuldor is an unintelligent mysting of canine make that lives exclusively in the monster realm. That is to say, neither I nor my source have ever seen its kind on the mortal plane.





Maekallus stands in the center of a descent circle. Although mystings don’t need a circle to return to the Deep, and the binding spell won’t allow such a circle to work in its intended manner, he’s discovered this rune opens the space between realms just enough to let him suck up a little power. Before his fight with the grinlers, he hadn’t realized how powerless he’s become, how . . . mortalesque. He isn’t as fast or as strong. He can’t remove his horn. And gods below, he’s lost his tail. It’s as though the growing soul inside him clashes with his immortal body, and as compromise, his form becomes more and more . . . human.

Maekallus closes his eyes as the circle lights, drawing upon the energy it emits. He will need the boost to find Attaby.

“But you don’t mind if we use the basement. Of course you don’t mind.”

He rears back. The man doesn’t even bother to offer him a bribe. The glint in his eye and the knife beneath his coat is enough.

Maekallus grits his teeth against the strange . . . what, memory? . . . surfacing in his head.

Enna’s voice follows it. “Maybe, you are the bastard?”

So what if he is? He was made from a human. From the murder of one. Thus his humanoid form. He’s always known that. He’d been born a fully formed adult—there are no infant mystings. They don’t generate the way humans do. He isn’t the bastard who died to create him.

So why is it that, somewhere in a dark pit inside him where the pieces of Enna’s soul nest, he wants her speculation to be true?

The bit of power snuffs out. Maekallus opens his eyes. Feels the tendrils of energy dancing through his black-mottled fingertips. No. Humans—mortals—are weak. Pathetic. He wants nothing to do with them. He certainly doesn’t wish to be one.

“Maekallus?”

He looks up at Enna’s voice. The fragmented soul stirs within him.

Would it be so terrible, to be like her?

He knows now why he hadn’t consumed her inner being with that first kiss; the Will Stone explains as much. He’d realized it after the grinlers’ attack, when they stood there in the forest, surrounded by the bodies of the fallen grinlers, Enna covered in his blood. It’s simple.

She doesn’t want to lose her soul, so she wills it to stay.

The magic of his kind pulls, and the stone resists. The conflicting forces reached this strange compromise, just like the way his physical form changes to accommodate the newfound soul within.