Shifting Shadows

Outtake from SILVER BORNE

This is an outtake, a scene that I knew happened between the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters of Silver Borne, while all the people who care about Mercy are out looking for her. I had no good way to fit this into the book—given that Silver Borne is told strictly from Mercy’s viewpoint.

I didn’t intend to ever write it down—it is not a story, really, just a scene. But my husband, after reading “Silver,” told me that I needed to remind readers that there was a happy ending to Samuel and Ariana’s story, even if it was a long time later.

So for those of you who have not read Silver Borne, there are some spoilers in here.

Ariana

Somewhere between Walla Walla and the Tri-Cities in Washington State

The snow had fallen overnight. Ariana pulled into a meadow that had turned into a parking lot. Two of the cars, like hers, were bare, but a big black SUV and a cherry red Mercedes were dusted with snow: Adam and Samuel had been here all night.

Samuel was beside himself—and Adam . . . She couldn’t think about Adam for very long without pulling her beast from its rest. Adam was very, very scary. Zee said he wasn’t usually like this, that Adam was usually cool and controlled. But he’d been wounded and asleep when his mate went into a fairy queen’s Elphame to rescue a human boy. The boy and the rest of the rescue party had gotten out, but Mercy had stayed behind.

Shortly thereafter, someone had broken the mate bond that held Adam to his mate—and though she had tried, Ariana hadn’t been able to use Adam or anything else of Mercy’s to find the Elphame. Mercy’s ties to the pack, to her real life, had been sundered.

Ariana locked her car, pulled on her gloves, and began to walk a different direction than she had yesterday and the day before. She let her earth magic seep into the soil, reaching out to look for something that didn’t belong. Zee had been here before her; she could feel the touch of the iron-kissed fae on the land. If he hadn’t found the fairy queen’s lair, then the chances of her doing so were slim. But still she had to look.

It was Ariana’s fault, after all. If she’d been stronger, braver, more something, then Mercy would have been freed with the rest of them. They had been looking for her now, to no avail, for two weeks.

If she had thought about it very long, Ariana would have given the Silver Borne to the fairy queen right from the start. It was an artifact of power—but owning it was more curse than blessing because it drained the powers of any fae who happened to get too close. They always thought there was some secret magic, some spell she’d put on it to allow her to siphon off the magic.

There wasn’t. But fae don’t give up advantage easily—so it made them unwilling to believe any other fae would do so, either.

She was paying too much attention to her dowsing and not enough attention to where she was going. She stepped around a half-downed fence and found herself face-to-face with a pair of werewolves. She’d known they were out here somewhere—hadn’t she just noticed their cars? But she knew that they had been told about her, told to avoid her, and she hadn’t seen any sign of them except for their cars since she’d started searching.

She froze, unable to move, unable to do anything about the black entity that crawled up her spine and took over her body. Magic coiled in her hands, and the beast who rode her waited for them to attack.

A gloved hand covered her eyes, another wrapped itself around her, pinning her arms to her sides. But before panic took her entirely, a voice said, Samuel’s voice said, “Run away. Get out of here, now.”

His body was so warm along her back. Familiar warmth, though it had been a very long time since she had last felt it. She could smell the scent of his skin. But she could also feel the beast’s magic waiting eagerly for the beast to direct it.

Frantically, she reminded the beast who Samuel was and that he wouldn’t hurt them. The beast relaxed against Samuel, mesmerized by the sound of his breath . . . and it slept. Ariana sucked in a deep breath of air.

“Stupid,” she told him harshly. “That was so stupid. What were you thinking? It could have killed you, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop it.”

He left his hand over her eyes and put his lips against her ear. His breath was hot as he spoke. “That’s my job, Ariana. The beast that lives inside of you is not so different from the one who lives inside of me. It knows when it meets a more dominant predator. It knows that I would never hurt you—or allow you to be hurt.”

“It’s a beast,” she hissed. “It knows nothing.”

“It knows me,” he told her soothingly.

His lips brushed her ear as his arms eased from around her. Maybe it had been an accident, that touch of lips.

He stepped back from her, touched his finger to his forehead, and walked off.

Several times in the days to follow, she caught glimpses of him. She was sure it was deliberate. Sometimes he was in human skin, but twice he was the great white wolf she’d only seen three times before. Once when he’d attacked her, once on the day he’d left, and once when he’d come back and killed her father’s hounds—centuries ago, but she knew him. Huge and white and dangerous, he stalked a parallel path to hers, pretending he wasn’t watching her.

It made her smile.

Snow fell and temperatures plummeted and still they searched. The only wolf she saw was Samuel, but she heard their mournful cries on the wind as she patiently walked a new route.

She smelled the coffee before she saw him, waiting for her next to a three-sided animal shelter. He gave her a foam cup of strong dark coffee, still uncomfortably hot.

“Samuel,” she said. He looked tired and gaunt. She wondered where he was staying—he’d lived, she thought, in the house that had burned down.

“Adam doesn’t think this is working,” he said with a nod to the open field. “My da is flying up tomorrow.”

“Your da?” she said. “I thought he died.”

Samuel shook his head. “No. Not exactly, though it took me a long time to find him and bring him home.”

She was curious but didn’t want to bring up bad memories. She took a sip to stop her mouth, then thought of something. She frowned. “Bran, right? Your da’s name was Bran. Samuel Cornick, Bran’s son. Bran Cornick the Marrok?”

He smiled. “That’s the one. He’s an old dog and has some canny tricks. We’re hoping he can contact her when the rest of the pack has failed.” He must have seen her doubt. “My da is a werewolf—but his ma was a witch. And witchblood generally breeds true.”

They stood there for a while, sipping coffee in the lee of the old animal shelter.

“How did you know when my father’s hounds came for me?” she asked. “I would have called you, but I had no magic to do it with. The beast inside of me could have called you by burning your hair, but it didn’t because I still have it.”

“Do you?” he asked, his cup arrested only half-lifted to his mouth.

She felt the corner of her lips turn up despite herself. “Yes. I saw them come and the beast rose up—leaving me with only scattered memories.” Her momentary happiness retreated in the face of the past. “I remember his hounds beating at the door of my home as we cowered, my terrorized beast and I. Then the howls of a wolf. I saw you, a brief glimpse of you that the beast tried to hide from me. You were standing, bloodied and triumphant, my father’s hounds dead at your feet. And then I have nothing until days later. The beast destroyed anything you’d left behind and tried to take my memories of you. I only found them later.”

“She was only trying to protect you, your beast,” Samuel said. “You shouldn’t be so harsh to her.”

“How did you know?”

Samuel looked away. “My wolf thought you were our mate,” he said. “I didn’t know it then, but he forged ties of wolf magic between us. You would have had to accept them before the ties became permanent, but until you rejected us, they bound me to you. I felt your terror and it took me three days to find you. When I had killed the hounds, she opened the door, a woman with your face and black eyes, terrified of the hounds—and of me. She asked me to go and never come back—and her words broke our bond.” His voice was bleak. He took a deep breath and turned back to her with a ready smile that didn’t touch his eyes. “But that was a long time ago. And she had reason to fear me, didn’t she? I’d made her kill someone she loved.”

They drifted back into silence. She didn’t know what he thought about, but she considered the compassion he had for the beast who had nearly destroyed them both when it had killed Haida. The events had been, as Samuel had said, a long time ago. But she had let her fears, born back in the past, endanger a woman who did not deserve it.

“The wind has picked up,” Samuel told her reluctantly. “We’d better go.”

She shivered, looked at his tired face, and said, “Come home with me tonight. Let me feed you.”

He frowned at her. “I don’t need to be taken care of, Ariana.”

“Don’t you?” She smiled into her coffee. “Don’t we all? Come home with me. We can pretend we are wise old things while we eat. In the night, we can hold each other and believe that your da can fix my mistake.”

He dropped his cup on the ground and rounded on her so quickly she dropped hers, too. He was faster than she remembered—and fiercer as he growled, “This is not your fault.”

“Is it not?” she asked. “I made the Silver Borne. I failed the contest that would have let us all free.”

“Your strength saved all of us except for Mercy,” he said. “I salute your bravery.”

“My failure,” she spit, suddenly angry. “You cannot put me on a pedestal of memory. I am not perfect. Not strong. Not beautiful.” She dropped the glamour that made her look human, let the clothes fall away so he could see her as she really was.

He took off his coat and wrapped her in its warmth. He squeezed her shoulders, then took a few steps away and gave her his back. “I tried to kill myself a few weeks ago, Ariana. Time . . . so much time, centuries and centuries of time, and nothing that mattered to me, no one to whom I mattered. So many people I have loved, and most of them are dead. I have been struggling for decades to rid myself of this malaise of time, and I gave up. If it had not been for the wolf who lives inside of me, I would not have known that had I only held out for a few days more . . .” He turned to look at her. “I would have missed you. And I have waited for so long, Ariana. I looked and looked. Then I went on with my life, all the while knowing that you were missing from it.”

“You don’t know me,” she said roughly, her throat closed at the thought that he might have been gone.

“No,” he said with simple honesty. “And yet I have loved you forever.”

Tears welled in her eyes when she would have sworn that nothing could bring her to cry.

“And you are brave and stalwart,” he said. “I will challenge any who say differently. For you still care, still love, and fear has no hold on your heart.” He kissed her hand. “I see you now with the experience of centuries, not the clouded eye of a chained prisoner. And my eyes tell me exactly what they told me before. You bring hope into my life when I thought there was none to find.”

She reached out her hand and he took it.

“So”—she cleared her throat—“that’s a yes to dinner, then?”