The Red Wolf (The Wolf Fey #2) Read online

  The Red Wolf

  The Wolf Fey Book 2

  The Frost Series

  kailin gow

  The Red Wolf (The Wolf Fey #2)

  Published by THE EDGE

  THE EDGE is an imprint of Sparklesoup Inc.

  Copyright © 2011 Kailin Gow

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  First Edition.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Prologue

  Somewhere, far away, a battle was raging. A pixie was attacking a princess – my Breena, my love. I had fought to save her as I had sworn to do – it was no use. The Pixie King was far more powerful than I could ever hope to be. He had the ancient magic of his people; the magic of the Wolf Fey had long since grown thin in our blood. I half-remembered what had happened: I had rushed at Delano, frantic. Desperate to save her. But that all felt so far away now.

  I knew what had happened next; I remembered it vaguely in the back of my mind. He had rounded on me, grinning at me, his sharp yellow teeth glinting in the fluorescent lighting of the living room. His magic had struck me full-force in the chest. As I fell, I felt no pain. Only the agony of knowing I'd let Breena down.

  Breena, I'm sorry.

  But that was so far away. Now I was somewhere else, somewhere strange. The world around me shimmered with an eerie pale glow, a golden aura surrounding every shape, every outline. The shadows seemed to expand and then vanish; from the corner of my eye, I saw visions that weren't there. My feet were weightless; I was floating through space. Was I in Feyland? It looked like Feyland – only there could the mountains and valleys surround me have such beauty. But something was different. Something was wrong. Normally, coming from the mortal world into Feyland was like coming from a dream into reality: the colors were stronger, the contours of things more defined. The mortal world – the land Beyond the Crystal River – felt like a mere echo in comparison. But now everything around me felt hazy and blurred. As if I were still dreaming.

  Was this all a dream?

  “Hello?” I called out, confused, but I found that no sound could escape from my throat. I tried to turn around, to run, but my body refused to obey; my feet continued on the path before me, gliding softly over the cool autumn leaves.

  Breena? Where was she?

  I felt a pang in my heart, but it swiftly vanished. Breena was far away now – another world, another lifetime. Every time I tried to remember her, she seemed to slip through my fingers, to pass quietly unnoticed from my mind.

  A spell?

  I tried to resist whatever feeling had come over me, but it was in vain. A strange opiate feeling of calm came over me, a calm mingled with forgetfulness. And then I did not think of Breena at all, nor of Delano, nor of the struggle that had just occurred on Breena's living-room floor. Instead I thought of my army.

  My army? Part of me resisted, reeling with confusion. But the feeling of serenity once again flooded through me, diluting all my doubts in a sea of tranquility.

  For I had an army – the thought came to me suddenly, and then I could not remember not thinking it. I was by now in a cave – a high-vaulted, magnificent cavern decorated with sumptuous jewels, glimmering by the torchlight. Frescoes of wolves and fairies were painted on the sides of the cave; sapphires, rubies, and emeralds all sparkled from their places of honor, embedded in the smooth stone. The floor was lavishly decorated with marble and mosaics; strewn about the cave were rich fabrics and carpets.

  Somehow I knew this place. This was a palace – my palace – a place I had never seen before and yet which I recognized somewhere deep in my soul. I had rolled about on these soft pillows and embroidered textiles, shedding my fur before leaping to my feet as a man. I had dined here, on these silver platters, drinking wine and fairy fruit concoctions from golden goblets. This was all familiar to me.

  And surrounding me were wolves – thousands of them. Some were in their lupine form, their ears pricked back and their noses pressed to the cool marble of the floor, signs of submission and loyalty upon their face, their tails wagging. Others were in human form like me, clad in the leather armor customary to the ancient Wolf Fey. Their faces were obscured, painted in the colors I recognized. Red and black – the colors of wolf blood and of sacrifice. For our blood ran red like mortal's blood did; in this, we were different from the Fey our brothers.

  In this and nothing else.

  For as I looked the wolves up and down, as one by one my brothers and sisters knelt and bowed, placing their swords on the floor as a sign of their fealty to me, I felt the presence of a great magic in the room. A magic greater than any I had ever known – even my grandfather, even Balthazar (names increasingly unfamiliar to me) had never experienced. The magic here was an ancient magic, a powerful magic. Fairy magic.

  I knew the history of Wolf lore well. Once we had been a great and proud people, as powerful as the Fey of the Summer and Winter Courts. But that was a long time ago. Intermarriage with humans had thinned our bloodline, and in each successive generation our powers had waned. Few of us had any ability to command magic at all, let alone gather storms and move mountains the way the strongest Summer and Winter fairies did. But we still remembered our noble past, a past dotted with stories – with great myths and legends. Stories spoken to us at campfires. Stories my grandfather had told me before I went to sleep at night.

  But now the past was present. The old stories were here. I stood as a leader of men and wolves before an army ten thousand strong, an army waiting for my command.

  “The Dark Hordes are rising,” I heard myself say. “But you must put aside your fear. You must gird yourself with your greatest strength, your most noble courage. The battle for the life and soul of Feyland has begun. Either you will help to push back the threat of the great evil that courses through the life's blood of Feyland today, or we will all perish in the attempt. Your red blood spilled today and tomorrow will water the fertile soil of Feyland, and the life of the earth will give you strength. The life of the sun will give you strength. And you will fight against the darkness. And you shall win.”

  The Dark Hordes? The small subconscious part of my brain that still remembered that I was Logan, that I was dreaming, prickled at my consciousness. The Dark Hordes hadn't existed for thousands of years. They were only a myth – nobody even believed in them anymore. A power so filled with darkness and hatred that they could annihilate all of Feyland in a single day, sucking out the love and light and soul from our lands? It was told to frighten children, nothing more.

  But to the other-me who spoke, to the soldiers who one by one nodded and struck their chests in affirmation, this was no fairy tale. It was real. And although I saw flickers of fear across their faces, I knew that my men and women were ready to fight – ready to die, even – for a chance to save Feyland from this nightmare. I felt my chest swell with pride. A brave army, I thought. A noble army. One that would be remembered for centuries to come.

  One of the wolf lieutenants raised his shield high, and with a gasp of shock I caught a glimpse of my face in the shiny metal of the shield. I was not Logan at all – my short-cropped brown hair was long and blonde, my dark hazel-brown eyes had turned an icy blue. And behind me, growing like vines out of my back, were two gossamer medallions, flapping decisively in the cool air. Two bright scarlet wings.

  I looked up in surprise. As, one by one, the wolves began yowling and howling in assent, the human-form wolves too began to howl, releasing wings from their backs. Soon all the crimson and black wings on the backs of my brethren were revealed.

  The Dark Hordes. The Fey magic. The wings.

  This wasn't just the ancient past. This was the most ancient of all stories – the stories of a time so long ago that even wolves had wings. The time when the very first generation of Wolf Fey fought against the Dark Hordes and, with the aid of the Midnight Knight, helped to force back the banshees and the giants and the Minotaurs into utter darkness and desolation once again. A story I, as Logan, had learned was the most revered story of our kind.

  The legend of the Red Wolf. The father of Wolves. The Lupine King. The Great Howler. I had seen pictures of the Red Wolf on every cave fresco; I had read stories of the Red Wolf in every volume in my grandfather's library. None was as famous as he. As a child, I had so often dreamed of going on adventures with the Red Wolf, pretended that I was fighting alongside him.

  But as the cave started spinning and my dream began to dissolve into the reality of Breena's living room floor, I felt another sensation even stranger than the dream. I wasn't with the Red Wolf at all – not if the reflection I had seen on the shield was anything to go by.

  I recognized that face. I had seen it in paintings.

  I was the Red Wolf.

  Chapter 1

  My eyes flew open. The slow churning of the ceiling fan buzzed through my brain, an agonizing rhythm. My head was throbbing; my feet were throbbing. My chest felt as if it had been sliced open. Instinctively I put my hand to my heart, but with a sigh of relief
I noticed that I felt no blood. The magic the Pixie King Delano had used on me had been destructive, but the only injuries I had sustained had been from my violent, crashing fall. Odd, I thought, sitting up and shaking my head. Delano was not known for his mercy; if he shot that lighting-green power from his fingertips, he was probably aiming to kill. But his magic had only sent me reeling. What was happening, I wondered? Had Delano decided to spare my life? That certainly seemed unlikely. Or were Delano's powers reduced across the Crystal River?

  Yet if Delano had taken that risk – chosen to come here and risked his own strength and well-being – he had to be in search of something. Something worth risking his life for.

  Or someone!

  My heart started beating faster. “Breena?” I called out tentatively, fear flooding my brain. The silence around me seemed to echo louder than thunderbolts through the house. “Breena, are you there?” But I had no answer. “Delano?” I called. “You pixie scum, show yourself...”

  But I could sense no pixie presence in the house – nor any other presence, for that matter. I sniffed the air, but it was too late. Any scent of them – of her – was hours old at best. I looked down at my watch. I'd been knocked out for at least two hours.

  I could have kicked myself. Two hours was enough time to get Breena miles away – particularly if Delano was traveling at pixie speed. He could have her out of the state by now.

  Unless he'd brought her back.

  Across the Crystal River? Back to Feyland? If Delano wasn't even capable of shooting to kill out here in the Land Beyond the Crystal River, how was he going to summon the magic to bring Breena back to Feyland? Yet as I sniffed wildly, frantic to find a trace of Breena's scent, I realized that the trail ended upstairs, in her bedroom. Delano – if it was Delano that had gotten her – hadn't even managed to take Breena outside the house.

  Then where are you, Breena? My heart was pounding so violently within me that I felt as if my chest were about to burst. Where are you, my love? He can't have taken her outside; even after two hours, I would have smelled her sweet, jasmine-like scent upon the crunchy autumn leaves. I would have sensed her lingering presence on the path. And that meant he can't have gone to find the Crystal River. The magic portal in this part of Oregon was an hour's drive away; I'd learned this well during my childhood. Plus, if Delano was going to try to use the river-crossing, he'd have to have known where it was, and we wolves and Fey kept the location of the Crystal River a closely-guarded secret.

  A thought struck me, and I sprang to my feet. I followed Breena's scent to her bedroom. The door swung wildly on its hinges; the room was painfully bare as I looked around wildly, my last vain hope dying as I surveyed the empty bed, the empty room. I sighed with pain. There was no sign of Breena – this was the last place, the last human place, she'd been.

  Yet my eyes fell upon the canvas sitting on the easel in the corner. Breena had shown me her paintings often – shown me the gorgeous designs and rare, unearthly beauty that she painted from her dreams, from childhood memories. She had shown me faces that she remembered from visions, landscapes that seemed more familiar to her even than her beloved woods of Gregory. Snow-capped mountains, towers cloaked by clouds, flowers bursting with color and nectar and intoxicating scent. Vistas I recognized as the scenery Feyland.

  Vistas she did not know she recognized. And yet, when painting, Breena had always turned to me and said: “Logan, when I'm painting, I feel like I'm going home. I feel like these places are so real to me; it's like nothing else is real. It's like Gregory is just a memory, and my real life is there.”

  There in Feyland. There in my home. And yet I could not tell her, could not bring myself to tell her, that I knew the places she painted. That I knew Feyland. That it was my home, too.

  The last painting she had done was of a young man – a slender, too-beautiful creature with flashing blue eyes. A face that I remembered vaguely from childhood, and yet could not make out. Someone I had known when I was young? I remembered only that Breena had grown wistful upon finishing that painting; that she had not spoken to me about it as she had done for so many of the others. As if she was ashamed of something. I remembered how she had looked at the painting – with a look of love so strong it broke my heart. I remembered how irrational my jealousy had been – how could she love a man in a painting? A man who did or did not exist, whom she certainly had never met, when there was a flesh-and-blood man desperately head over heels for her beside her?

  But my memory of the picture was vivid nonetheless, perhaps all the more vivid as a result of the pain it had caused me. And that was so strange. Earlier this afternoon, the painting of the young man had been on Breena's easel.

  But now there was no man in the picture. Now the painting was of a snowy landscape – dotted with rich, virgin snow banks and trees wrapped in snowflakes like so many bundles of lace. A landscape that seemed to be moving. As I moved closer to the painting, I felt a strange sense of beckoning, as if the painting itself were calling me closer to it. The trees seemed to be swaying in the wind; I could almost hear the rush of the air past my ears. I shivered, suddenly feeling cold.

  I had heard tell of this – of great fairy painters capable of creating a hole between the two worlds, using fairy paintings as a go-between to enter the Land Beyond the Crystal River from Feyland. But I had never put stock in such tales. Yet as I stared at the painting, feeling the snow lightly brush against my skin, I felt a sense of longing so strong it almost floored me.

  Breena had been here. I knew. She had gone through this painting into Feyland.

  But who was the young man who had been in the painting? Had he come for her – or was it Delano?

  Well, here goes nothing. I felt vaguely stupid as I stepped back, poised to take a running leap into the painting. What if I was wrong – if I ended up just tripping over the canvas? What if Delano had managed to take Breena somewhere else and just disguised her scent?

  But the painting called to me. I could feel its magic.

  Go on, Logan.

  I started running, throwing myself at the painting in a single, heavy movement, fully expecting to feel a crash as I collided with the canvas. But I felt no such obstruction. Instead, I was flying through the air, landing softly in a mound of snow. Immediately I felt the chill. I was in the midst of the icy landscape I knew well – the Winter territories. The sky was smooth and white; the mountains were white around me. I could see the footsteps of deer and satyrs neatly imprinted onto the snow bank.

  I was back in Feyland.

  Breena’s painting was the doorway to this beautiful magical place I knew so well.

  I sniffed the air once again. Yes, I thought, Breena had been here. But it was not pixie blood I smelled alongside her sweet perfume. No, it was fairy blood – silver and cold. Delano's scent was gone – but this fairy smell hung in the air, overpowering in its strength.

  I looked around in confusion. Feyland was as beautiful as ever, I noted. The trees were strong and noble-looking – deep mahogany and birch wood. The snow was white and pure. The air smelled like fir and pine, filling my nostrils with their sweet aroma. In the distance I could see the mountains, each peak a jagged silhouette against the backdrop of white clouds and pale sun. Its beauty overwhelmed me.

  And yet I sensed the sadness. This was not the happy Feyland I remembered from childhood – before the war, before the bloodshed. This was a terrifying place now – a place where slaughter was regular, where men, women, and children hid in their houses to avoid the marauding bands of soldiers and unscrupulous profiteers who made sport of looting and pillaging. I could not remember ever seeing Feyland so quiet, so deserted.

  I could sense the mourning in Feyland's magic. I listened to the silence, and in the silence I could hear the ancient magic of Feyland calling out to me, beckoning me, summoning me.

  You must restore us. I felt the declaration throbbing in my brain. You must restore Feyland.

  This was not the happy childhood I remembered. Feyland lay in ruins all around me. The woman I loved had vanished into the night. I was alone – I felt more alone than I had ever been. With Breena by my side, I felt, I could have withstood it. I could have borne the pain of sensing Feyland's magic so desecrated by war and bloodshed. But without her, I couldn't stand it. The grief was too great. I couldn't stop myself from dropping to my feet, burying my knees in the snow bank. I thrust back my chest, shook back my hair, and let a great and wild howl loose from the depths of my chest.