Soul Taken (Mercy Thompson #13)(92)

“Do you remember Frost—” he said.

Frost? What did our situation have to do with Frost? Forgetting his injunction, I looked at Wulfe incredulously. But my perceptions were altered by my ties to the Soul Taker, which had tasted my blood and which operated in the world of souls.

I saw Wulfe.



* * *



—

The sickle hooked my katana and ripped it out of my hand at the same time that Wulfe . . . that the Harvester’s elbow cracked against my jaw, knocking me to the ground.

I rolled with the blow and came to my feet, meeting the backhand swing of the sickle with a blow of my own with the walking stick almost before I realized that the walking stick was in my hand. I didn’t try to hit the sickle with the walking stick; I took aim at Wulfe.

“Steel loves flesh,” Adam liked to say, though he said it as if he were quoting someone else. “Wood loves bone.”

I hit the back of Wulfe’s wrist with the wooden stick and heard the bone crack. The Harvester dropped the sickle—and there was a moment when I could have grabbed it before he did, but I would sooner have stuck my hand into a nuclear reactor than touch that blade.

I knew what Wulfe was. I had seen him, seen the power he still held, and twisted and broken as it was, his capacity to wield magic to protect his mind was infinitely larger than my own small measure of ability. The Soul Taker had control of Wulfe. If I touched that thing, I wouldn’t have a chance.

The Harvester picked up the sickle in his right hand, almost before it had touched the floor. He continued the fight as if I had not hurt him.

If the katana had thrown me off balance, the walking stick was . . . odd. Better, I decided, in some ways, even than my own cutlass, because it felt as if I’d always fought with the walking stick in my hand. But if I’d been careful to turn aside blows rather than risk a full-strength sickle-to-blade strike with the katana, I was even more careful with the walking stick.

I had the feeling that if that sickle dug its corrupted blade into the walking stick, something very, very bad was going to happen. But something bad was going to happen really soon anyway. We had been fighting for a relative age for this kind of aerobic full-on, full-contact fight. We were both bleeding.

If I didn’t change the nature of this fight pretty soon, my death was going to be the bad that was going to happen, even if Wulfe was managing to play a reluctant attacker. If I died, according to the Soul Taker’s own calculations, it would have repercussions I was not willing to be a part of.

But I had seen Wulfe.

I used the movement of my body to center myself and gathered my magic, the magic that allowed me to speak to the dead, a magic that I understood better after the Soul Taker had shown me its world of souls and ties between life and death. I tried to form it the way I had when I’d laid to rest an army of zombies. When I’d done that and accidentally included Wulfe in my workings, I’d knocked Wulfe for a loop. I was hoping it would work again.

All this time I’d wondered if I had simply knocked him out that night. Given him the vampiric equivalent of a concussion. There was no question it had affected him more than just physically. He’d behaved more like someone who’d had too much to drink. So it was possible he’d gotten the edge of what I’d thrown at the zombies and been sort of hotboxed.

But, however it had happened, I had just seen Wulfe. If I weren’t fighting for my life, I might have struggled to explain how I’d seen into him. But I’d just had the Soul Taker in my head, and I didn’t have time to lie to myself.

I’d seen his soul. I knew why he stalked me and what he wanted from me.

Having seen him in his dream time in the garden of the seethe, I understood exactly what I’d done in Elizaveta’s backyard. For a very brief time, I’d given Wulfe back himself, the person he’d been before Bonarata had tortured him all those centuries ago. Once again, he’d been the traveling scholar, Marsilia’s poetic friend, the man who had played a vielle while sitting in a tree in the moonlight.

Wulfe hoped that I could make him whole once more, permanently this time. That I could save him. I was pretty sure—having seen the scars of his past and the person he was—that I could not. Though I might give him brief respite, fixing what had been done to him was beyond any magic I could lay claim to.

I could not undo the damage done to him, but I thought I might, just might, be able to shake the Soul Taker’s hold on him. After all, the Soul Taker itself had told me that it did not think it could have held Wulfe had Bonarata not blinded him first.

I pulled on whatever magic lingered in the room, no matter that it was the Soul Taker’s magic. Although my mating bond and my pack bonds were intact, the Soul Taker—or possibly some magical protections that Marsilia had on her seethe—was blocking me from pulling on that power. Instead, I called upon the ghosts tied to the seethe with unbreakable bonds of trauma, and they came, despite their fear of the vampire in the room with me. And, when the walking stick fed it to me, I took power from the dance of blade and staff that the Harvester and I engaged in.

When I could hold no more magic, I dropped the walking stick, slipped my head under Wulfe’s arm, shoved my neck into his armpit, and reached up with my hand so I could touch his face, the only place his skin was exposed.

His flesh was chill under my battle-and-magic-heated fingers as I whispered, with all the Coyote-born magic within me, “Be at peace.”