Legendary Shifter

The snow was deeper and softer where drifts had accumulated in the protected lee of the pass between mountainous ridges. Her legs weren’t very long. At twenty, she was thin and graceful, petite and powerful. In spite of her knee, her body responded to the desperate pounding of her heart. Go. Go. Go.

She was all muscle, tendon and sinew. It didn’t matter that the ligament in one knee had required surgery to repair. All the rest made up the difference, fueled by adrenaline and fear. But if the howl had spurred her on, the sight of the creature who had opened its maw to create the sound caused her to freeze in place. A white wolf had climbed to the top of the ridge on her left. He was immense, larger than any wolf nature could have made. He stood on the peak, a ghostly silhouette against the darkening sky, and he howled again.

Elena’s legs—her stock and trade, the one thing between her and oblivion—gave out beneath her. She collapsed to her knees in the snow. She cried out when her right knee made contact. An unnoticeable deformity in the shape of her femur had caused her to land from jumps with incorrect form. Over the course of a decade, after millions of repetitions, her knee had been stressed by the imperfection. She’d recovered well from surgery and spent over a year in physical therapy, but the snowy hike had aggravated her injury.

Another howl answered the first. On the left peak directly across the pass from the white wolf, another wolf appeared, as russet as the sunset had been moments before. Even if she could get to her feet, she would never outrun them in the deep drifts of snow. There was no castle. There were no Romanovs. As hard as she squinted against the icy wind, she could see nothing to refuel her hopes. There were only two giant wolves whose echoes sounded hollow and hungry as they bounced off the icy walls of the pass. This is better than Grigori, the blood seemed to whisper as it rushed in her ears. The ice on her eyelashes had melted as fresh hot tears filled her eyes. They shimmered there, making the gloaming world mercifully indistinct, but even now she refused to let them fall. She closed her eyes to will them away, but then it was an effort to lift her lids against her weighted lashes. She did it anyway. If she had to meet a grim fate, she would do it with her eyes open.

Only her nightmares made her cry. On waking, when she was alone with no one to see, she often found her cheeks damp. She’d grown to be terrified of enclosed spaces and the sound of frantic, fluttering feathers—the two elements of her nightmares that never changed. She’d never cried over bloody toes or aching muscles or the harsh practices meant to perfect the curve of her arms and spine. The nightmares were far worse than any real-life trials. It had been horrible to discover that Grigori was real even more so because it meant that he had witnessed the tears she’d thought were shed in private. He’d seen her weak and terrified. That knowledge and his pleasure in it caused bile to rise and burn her throat. She wouldn’t cry now that she’d found only a part of what she’d been looking for, even if the wolves turned out to be her salvation in a darker way than she’d intended. She wouldn’t season their meal with tears.

The illustrations in her book hadn’t done the wolves justice. They were more monstrous. Far above her, she could see the power in their limbs and the glint of their eyes. She could also see the flash of white that indicated deadly teeth against their damp fur.

It was only the movement of the wolves’ attention from her to elsewhere that caused her to lower her attention from the ridges back to the pass. She blinked against icy lashes as an approaching form swam into focus. A tall, muscular man clothed all in black walked purposefully through the deep snow. He came out of the swirling white clouds of flakes as if he materialized before her eyes. He wore a cloak with a fur mantle that covered his broad shoulders. Its voluminous folds whipped around his powerful strides. But it was another sight behind him that caused her to gasp in stunned surprise.

Before she’d fallen, there had been nothing but ice and snow on the cliffs of the pass. Now, in the last hazy hint of twilight, ramparts and towers seemed to solidify from the shadows high above. Behind the man, the castle had appeared as if the mountain itself had decided to morph its rocks into the shape of a king’s home. Around the highest tower, ravens circled in and out of storm clouds that clung to its pointed peak. The structure was surrounded by a stone wall that enclosed the entire keep and a small village around the foot of the castle. She could see thatched rooftops peeking over the wall. Wind swept over her in a new way. The sudden appearance of the castle and the enclave its walls created had diverted the air. This new breeze rushed over the man, and his long, tousled hair was blown into a riotous black mane around his face.

He held a lantern in his hand. Its light suddenly flared to life and its glow illuminated the man’s face. The world fell away—castle, mountain, wolves and snow—until only his face shone before her. The call had brought her to the right place and the right time. The compulsion to come here hadn’t been a lie.

“Romanov,” Elena said. Her lips were stiff with cold. Her voice was muted by the wind. The white of her breath dissipated in wisps blown away from her face, taking most of the sound with it. The snow had claimed all feeling from her legs, and the numbness climbed steadily up her hips to her waist.

He heard her. He stopped and lowered the lantern so its light shone in her eyes and on her face, leaving his in shadow.

“Whoever you are, I’m not the man you seek,” he said.

The wolves had leaped down from the peaks on either side of the pass while the castle and the man had distracted her. Their large, powerful forms had eaten up the distance much sooner than ordinary canines might have done. They came to the man—one on each side—and he chided their eager prancing without taking his attention from her face. She’d been right about the wolves’ size. Both came to their master’s chest, and he was no small man.

The wolf she’d come to find would be even larger.

She needed larger-than-life legends to help her escape Grigori’s clutches.

“I’m not here for a man. I’m here for the wolves,” Elena said. The wolf she needed was the alpha of the Romanov pack and he would be as black as midnight. The old legends said that only the alpha wolf could defeat the strongest of the Dark Volkhvy.

The creatures paced toward her, but the man called them back to his side by name.

“Lev. Soren. Heel.” Though his face was shadowed, she could see the stern set to his lips and jaw. “Then you have come for nothing,” he said to her bluntly.

He gestured and the two wolves churned snow as they spun around to rip back toward the castle in the distance. Oddly, she felt abandoned rather than spared. Her stomach hollowed within her as if she’d fallen from a great height. The cold reached relentless icy fingers into her heart. Its thumping had slowed as if the muscle that pumped her blood was beginning to freeze.

“You risked your life,” the man said. “For nothing.” He didn’t follow the wolves. He stepped closer. His clothes were fashioned with tooled leather and thick stitches. The wool of his cloak was thickly woven and the fur of his mantle blew this way and that in glossy chunks. There was a richness of texture to his entire appearance that made her frozen fingers twitch. Though she’d come for the alpha wolf, a being more fantasy than reality, this man looked solid and strong. Against the backdrop of ice and snow and plain gray rock, he was sudden, vigorous and very alive.

Far from nothing.

Only his eyes kept her from reaching out to him. They were green. A frigid pale green. Ferocious and intense. Bright against his black hair and the deepening darkness, but also intimidating.

“I risked my life to escape from a nightmare. I’ve accomplished that. At least for now,” Elena said. His words had caused the pulse beneath her skin to fade. She was left on top of a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to anchor her there. No certainty. No song.

“You won’t find escape here,” the man said. But he knelt down beside her. Elena was so cold, the heat from his lantern seemed to warm her, or maybe it was the heat of his large body so close to hers.

This was the right place. She wasn’t mistaken. Even with the physical pulse of the compulsive call to climb diminished, her instincts to trust the old legend wouldn’t fade. She was here for a reason. The book in her bag had shown her the way. Her grandmother had told the old tales as if they were true. They might have fueled her nightmares, but they might also prove to be her only hope against Grigori once the protective binding her mother had bought with her blood ran out.

“I won’t go back,” Elena said.

Her body was done. Frozen. If he refused to help her, she would die. But it was force of will, not bodily exhaustion, that caused her to take a stand even as she knelt in the snow.

“Not tonight anyway,” the man said. “The storm is only getting started. I won’t leave you here to die.” She cried out when he reached to pick her up, but she quieted when his hold turned out to be surprisingly gentle for such a large man. He stood easily, trading his lantern for her body in one smooth, easy move. “But this isn’t an invitation to stay,” he continued.

“You are a Romanov,” Elena murmured against his windswept hair. He turned to walk back through the deep snow. The ache in her knee throbbed in time with the thudding of her heart. Her weight in his arms didn’t slow him down and neither did the drifts of snow. He left the glowing lantern behind them, so every stride carried her closer and closer to the dark where his wolves had disappeared. She’d seen his face earlier. She’d recognized his features—the square jaw, the sculpted nose. She’d seen their like in the book that had brought her here, but her book’s illustrations had been fanciful compared to the actual man.

“I am Ivan, the last Romanov,” the man replied. “You came for a refuge, but you found nothing but cursed ground.”

* * *

When she’d fallen to her knees, Ivan Romanov wanted to rush forward to her aid. That very human reaction had slowed his response. It wasn’t the fall that caused his heart to swell and his chest to tighten with concern. It hadn’t been the pale blue of her lips or the porcelain of her skin or her thick dark lashes crusted with a dusting of white. Her sapphire eyes, vivid against the blowing snow, and the stubborn light that intensified in them even as darkness fell, had compelled him forward. Whatever had driven her up the mountain in winter hadn’t faded with the fall or the intimidating appearance of the wolves.

She would rise.

She would press on.

And if he didn’t do something to prevent it, she would die at Bronwal’s great gate. Her eyes revealed a different person than her slight form suggested. When he picked her up, she weighed nothing in his arms. He had trained for centuries, but it wasn’t until he felt her delicate, mortal burden that he had the insane idea he had trained for just this moment.

For centuries.

She reached to hold around his neck. In spite of the stubborn light in her eyes, her arms surprised him with their strength. Only the wisps of respiration that came too quickly from her lips betrayed her fear. She was bundled in insulated clothing of a make and design he’d never seen. It had been many years since anyone other than the Volkhvy had ventured close during the Romanov materialization. The glimpses he’d seen of the modern world as it progressed had created an incomplete picture in his mind, always changing.

Her clothes told him little about the woman who wore them, but her determined journey through the pass should have alerted him. Her size was deceptive. Her eyes and tight hold as well as the tension in her body against him—those things revealed the woman to him.

Her limp did not define her.

She wouldn’t be frightened away. Not easily.

“You can shelter here for the night out of the storm, but when it passes, you leave,” Ivan said. He’d left the gate open. Lev and Soren stood on either side to guard the entrance. He’d seen them do so thousands of times before. The momentary electricity that had claimed his limbs when he’d lifted the woman in his arms drained away. He recognized the numbness as it returned. He was beyond weary. More worn by the years of coming and going from the Ether than he’d ever been worn by battle.

His father, Vladimir Romanov, had betrayed the Light Volkhvy queen centuries ago. He hadn’t been satisfied to be a champion. He’d wanted to rule. The queen’s punishment had been unrelenting. She’d cursed Bronwal and all the people in it to be bound to the Ether for eternity. Every ten years, the castle materialized for one month. It was taken into the Ether after the month was over, again and again. Each materialization, fewer survivors materialized. His father had been the first to succumb.

The quickening Ivan had felt in himself when he’d rushed to the fallen woman wasn’t respite. It was torture. The years had piled on until his soul was crushed by too many losses to bear. And yet there was always one more.

Not always.

His enchanted blood had prolonged his life as had Vasilisa’s curse.

But he wasn’t immortal.

He said a prayer of thanks for that small mercy before he carried the woman inside.

Chapter 2 (#ue243427a-3fef-5d70-9f6e-5b1affd3a2df)

Even though she had the snowstorm and the frigid mountain pass for comparison, she didn’t find the great hall of the castle welcoming. It was nothing like the illustrations in her book. Dark, gray, unlit by torches or firelight, it seemed more a massive cave than a place where people would gather. A fireplace several times larger than any she’d seen before yawned cold and dark. Wind whistled down its chimney like a banshee. A frozen banshee.

In the shadows, the elaborate tapestries hanging on the walls were lifeless and dull. In her book, they were painted with vivid detail that never seemed to fade. Romanov had carried her through the outer keep without greeting or comment from a dozen or so dreary-looking denizens going about half-hearted work. The gamboling of the giant wolves had seemed cruelly vigorous in comparison. The wolves were playful when all else was doom and gloom. They must have been protected from the gloom of the villagers by their simpler, animal comprehension.