"When were you last in England?" said Alice, watching the countryside unfold before them. They were on the open level of a tour bus as sedate as their surroundings. A guide pointed out spots and provided local history while the other passengers listened and took photos.
It leant a sense of privacy as strong as if they were alone in the woods, but Colton still leaned in until his mouth brushed her ear. "The Second World War."
The gentle hills looked greener than she believed grass and trees could ever be, but there was a brooding quality to the overcast sky that she couldn't quite place. They had left Texas in the middle of a thunderstorm, sweating from the suffocating humidity, but the dampness to this air somehow felt even heavier, like the chill of a gravestone.
Despite the goose down jacket she wore against the cold, she shuddered convulsively. "Did you see any fighting?"
"No. I'd long grown tired of killing." The flatness behind the words left them more sinister than the fiercest growl.
Sinister, and yet she only turned to him with a smile. If she was overdressed for the cold weather with her gloves and fur-lined boots, then he was beyond casual in comparison, wearing nothing more than a flannel over his t-shirt. His eyes looked sharp yet relaxed, revealing nothing of what he thought. "Are you familiar with this area?"
"Only with traveling through it. It's been another's territory since the Romans invaded, and I never felt like taking it away."
As with most of his answers, it left her with more questions. Just then, the bus crested a hill, revealing a patchwork of fields and trees below. Buildings clustered together in the very center, bright white and brick red and dark brown. Even from that distance, their shapes and colors marked them as centuries-old relics. It was a striking view, as if this little town had somehow hidden itself from time, protected and unchanged, while the rest of the world moved on.
Colton nodded, sensing her next question. "That's it. He won't be there but should catch our scents, anyway."
She bit her lip, unsure of how she felt about meeting another vargr. "And you really think he'll be friendlier than Giove?"
"No reason for him not to be."
The tour guide announced the name of the town as they entered it, but Alice immediately forgot it, overcome by what she saw. Every street and building looked like history captured and preserved from different periods, and the man's cheerful narration couldn't hide the sense of something ancient gutted into a shell of itself, all nastiness cleaned out and covered up with quaint charm. She had always hated the glassy eyes of taxidermied animals and now felt the same aversion as the bus took them into the main square.
They got off with a handful of other tourists at a 16th-century pub, admittedly beautiful with its thatched roof and whitewashed walls. Its interior was much more modern, offering both tables and bar seats. She didn't miss how Colton guided them to the far corner of the bar, or how he made sure his stool blocked hers from the rest of the room.
Her eerie feeling only grew as they settled in, and she still couldn't say why. The lighting was warm and cozy, and the air smelled like beer and roasting meat. The bartender was a grandmotherly woman in a cable-knit sweater who never stopped smiling, and the conversations from the other customers never rose above a murmur. All in all, it should have been a comforting atmosphere to anyone exhausted from sightseeing.
Yet if she closed her eyes, she thought she heard something else beneath the hiss of beer taps and the bartender's cheerful teasing toward another group of tourists. A whisper of a noise, a faint scream that echoed as if she were in a vast land and not a crowded little pub...
Colton's hand squeezed her thigh, bringing her back just as the bartender turned her attention to them. Even as her skin crawled, Alice smiled politely while he ordered a pair of stouts and a ploughman's lunch for them to share.
When they were alone again, she murmured, "Something feels... strange. Not dangerous, exactly, but nasty and lingering."
"The whole area is soaked through with magic." He must have caught the sudden alarm in her expression, because he squeezed her thigh again and added, "Nothing new or even active. It's as dead as the people who cast it. You're sensing what's been left behind. Think of it as bloodstains."
That was a mild way of putting it. Some part of her knew that any concentration on the traces of scent and sound would reveal their terrible origins. Whatever this magic was, it hadn't belonged to witches but could still be sensed by them. She shook her head, not wanting to sink to those depths. Since the night the hag king had shown interest in her, she hadn't wanted to think about her heritage as a witch at all, or what it might mean. "What happened here?"
Colton didn't respond immediately, at first because their beers arrived and then because he seemed to choose his words with care. "The people who lived here would offer sacrifices to their gods, usually at the nearby peat bog. At first, it was only for formal rituals, but the Roman invasions left them desperate. It became a constant begging."
Her love of mythology sometimes pulled her interest into the history surrounding favorite legends and lore. She knew enough to fill in the details. Some of the victims would have been human.
She thought about how casual Colton seemed in another vargr's territory compared to his feral aggression toward Giove's mere scent on the wind. He must have felt sure this vargr wouldn't pose any threat toward her, and it didn't take much to think through the implications behind that.
A woman at a nearby table shifted in her seat while laughing, and for one sickening moment, the glint of her earrings sharpened into the flash of a bloodied sickle. Alice blinked the phantom away and looked at Colton again. "Something horrible happened to him, didn't it?"
He didn't ask who she meant. There was no need to. Instead, he studied her intently, something there and gone again in his gaze before she could understand it. "He fell in love with a girl. Before he could take her away, she was sacrificed to the bog."
"And he's stayed here all this time?"
Colton shrugged. "It's where she is."
She quickly drank from her glass to stop her mouth from trembling. Colton shifted in his seat, leaning closer as he recognized how near she was to crying. "Alice..."
"I'm fine," she said, quickly. "It's just... sad." She couldn't bring herself to add why those words had stabbed so deep, but it hung there heavy in her mind. Is that what you would do if I ever...?
Then the ploughman's lunch arrived. She eyed the piles of meat and cheese and bread, trying to regain her composure. "I always feel so up and down, like I react more than I should. Not like you. You're always so steady."
He raised his eyebrows. "I've been thinking up ways to gut that fucker from the moment he beckoned at you. Trust me, I'm not feeling any calmer about what's happened than you are."
"You don't show it."
"My way of showing things usually involves murder." When she only smiled, he shook his head and added, "Still not scared of me?"
"Never." Her smile widened, kindling a sudden smolder in his eyes. For the first time since that night, she felt herself relax enough to ask the question that had lived in her heart like a parasite. "How much trouble are we in now that the hag king wants me?"
"We'll find out." The indifference in his voice didn't match the heat in his gaze. "Worried about anything in particular?"
She sipped at her beer again. It was thick and bitter and good, and she hoped it would numb the edges of these next words. "I'm worried they'll somehow compel me to join them. They seem so confident about getting what they want, as if they know something I don't."
"Confidence looks the same as delusion."
She laughed a little but quickly fell serious. "I'm also scared of the dreams I had about my mother before all this started. Were they just nightmares, or did they mean something? I've always obsessed over why she left me. Maybe I should've thought harder on why she left at all. And after meeting my grandmother and all the other witches, I keep asking myself whether I'm the delusional one."
Then she looked away, hearing her voice catch with fear. "What if I can't keep this life because of what I am? What if it's my fate as a witch to lose myself and end up like them? How can I resist whatever they accepted?"
"Alice." He leaned in close and cupped her chin, coaxing her to look up at him. His eyes had darkened into something feral. "You're nothing like them. And I'd find you no matter what."
Just as she nodded, they both felt it—a subtle shift in the air. A presence that overwhelmed the ancient traces of death, smoke, and fear with its own agonies and bloody deeds. The skin on the back of her neck prickled as the shadows in the room flickered and then darkened. The other vargr had arrived.
Colton said nothing, but shifted in his seat to further block her as the pub's front door opened, revealing a flash of the street traffic before someone stepped inside. Alice dropped her gaze to her beer, aware that her manner was much too stiff to come off as oblivious to the true nature of the man taking the stool nearest to Colton's.
The bartender came over immediately, all former cheer gone. She set a beer before the man without a word between them. Then she retreated to the other end of the bar and began drying glasses with a rag, giving herself a reason to keep her attention away from their corner.
The man took a long drink from his beer. Without looking up, he said, "Bringing any trouble with you?"
His accent was as thick as the other locals', but Alice couldn't glean much else about him. Even pushed back, the hood of his thick winter coat obscured his features, and she was suddenly reminded of how Colton had worn similar clothing when they'd met. A beast hiding what he was. A beast perhaps forgetting what he was.
"No." Colton sounded casual. "Stamping it out."
"Might be harder than you expect. Most who'd recognize your nature are too young to know what you've done. Or they think it's exaggerated. The black wolves aren't looked at with any caution these days. We either keep to ourselves or hide what we are."
"Some of these humans know."
Despite their terse words, Alice didn't need clarification. It was obvious many of the locals in the room understood what had joined them. She read it in their twitching shoulders and nervous glances. The fact surprised her, and she wondered what the other vargr did to be known and accepted, if just barely.
"Not enough of them," replied the other vargr, sounding tired. "I'm right in the middle of convincing the local kingpin to leave me the fuck alone. Can't say I'm happy to find you here, either."
Alice brushed Colton's arm to signal she was about to speak. "All we want is information. We're trying to learn more about the coven we're hunting. If you don't want to help, we'll move on."
The other vargr still didn't look at her, but she sensed the gesture was meant to be polite. "I don't see how local gossip is needed. You're with a butcher who's the best at doing this. Just kill whoever you find and eventually they'll be the right ones."
"I don't want that. I want the witches who tried to torture and eat my family."
At that, the other vargr finally turned to them, his gaze flickering from Colton to her. He was good-looking in his own blunt way, with rugged features magnified by a beard, but it was his eyes that truly struck her. They were the saddest she'd ever seen, pain crystallized into the color of slate. She was surprised by how utterly neutral his attention felt, without interest or calculation.
When his study of her lasted a few seconds too long, Colton growled, a brief yet clear warning.
The other vargr raised an eyebrow but returned his focus to his beer. He didn't seem nervous or suspicious so much as very, very tired. "I'm called Ambrose now. Ambris was too odd for modern tongues."
When Colton gave his name, he nodded and not-quite-looked at Alice again. "Can I speak hers, or will you throw me down a well, too?"
"So, you do hear things."
"Never said I didn't. But I don't go anywhere beyond this village. My life's very quiet. I run a rescue shelter for dogs and I like it very much. I don't want anyone fucking it up." Then he sighed and finished the rest of his beer. "But I'll talk if you want. Not here, though. At the shelter. I hate this village. I keep thinking about burning it down."
Alice remained silent, unsure of how to respond. Colton, however, looked almost amused. "Rumor has it you're their local guardian."
The other vargr grimaced while putting change on the counter. "Their presence helps protect the peatland. That's the only reason they're alive."
"I've been listening when they think I can't understand. They like you much more than you like them. They're even afraid this kingpin might kill you if you keep resisting him."
At that, Ambrose scoffed. "No one can do that. The point of our curse is to survive while anything we love rots to time. That's why I don't understand you coming here. It's not like it'll matter in the end."
Then his gaze found Alice's face, piercing through her as if he sensed her own doubts about their hunt. She forced herself calm and stared back at him, refusing to crumple. "We'd still like your help."
The other vargr nodded and rose from his seat. "I'll wait outside."
After he left, she murmured, "I wouldn't call him friendly."
She didn't miss how the bartender's shoulders sagged in relief when the door shut behind him. Then Colton's hand returned to her thigh, warm and reassuring, and he kissed her until she relaxed again. "He is compared to the rest of us. But if you're uncomfortable around him—"
"No," she whispered against his mouth. It wasn't a lie, not completely. The vargr himself didn't repulse her, not like Giove, but the bare glimpse of him, grief-riddled and worn down, sharpened the fears that had only grown from admitting their existence. She once thought nothing could terrify her more than being alone, but now she also dreaded what would happen to those she left behind.
Yet there was no time to dwell on it, not when the mere thoughts threatened to freeze her in place, and so she made herself smile. "Besides, he likes dogs, so he can't be that bad. I say we find out what we can."