Even, I added to myself as I touched the invitingly unsecured door, if they expect you to try it. Even if they have set it up so they could kill you without accepting blame.
Another thing that Charles would say was that standing around staring at the door wasn’t accomplishing anything useful except giving me time to scare myself.
Unencumbered by clothes, I opened the heavy freezer door and emerged into a moonlit garden. A light breeze, just this side of chilly, caressed my bare skin and brought a host of unfamiliar scents. I stepped over the doorway—and truthfully, despite the play Bonarata had made that there was something important about that space—I didn’t expect to feel anything.
But my ears popped as if I’d just dropped a thousand feet, and magic shivered across my skin, scratching like spider legs. I froze for a heartbeat, but when that was all that happened, I took a cautious step forward.
There was packed gravel under my feet and a roof over my head, held up by huge old timbers. At first I thought it was some sort of porch around the building I’d just left, but the covered part was bigger than the building. It was more carport-sized, with two adjacent sides open. The building was the long, closed side, and the end of the building met a yellow, stuccoed wall.
The freezer end of the building tucked into the corner next to the wall and took up about a third of the building. The other two-thirds looked like long-abandoned horse stalls.
The building, roofed area, and wall were all set in a large walled garden that held rows of grapes and fruit trees. Ivy climbed the ten-foot walls.
On the opposite corner of the garden was a huge house in the shape of an “L” that appeared as hoary as the building at my back. The whole place looked as though someone had tried very hard, with better-than-average luck, to re-create the set of a movie that had taken place in Italy. I assumed it was to make Bonarata feel at home in a strange land.
I couldn’t get any sense of what lay outside the walls—there were no towering mountains, but it didn’t feel like the Tri-Cities, either. The air smelled different; it was cooler, and the air was damp.
Maybe I was in Yakima or Walla Walla. I hadn’t spent a lot of time in Yakima, but Walla Walla’s air wasn’t as dry as the Tri-Cities’, and it was cooler.
I took another step away from the doorway, and I quit worrying about where I was when I felt . . . something. Someone.
Heart pounding with hope, I looked back at the open doorway. I let my eyes become unfocused, then I could see it—a ring of magic that stretched along the edge of the building and disappeared around the open edge and, on the side with the wall, slipped under the stones like an electric cable made of magic, or a circle of magic.
Bonarata hadn’t lied. I was a better prisoner inside that circle than I was outside it. Because outside it, the bonds that tied me to Adam—and to the pack—were functioning again. Sort of, anyway.
I reached out with my soul, down the familiar path that had so recently been blocked by silence. I reached for Adam.
It didn’t quite work. Not the way it should have.
I could feel him at the edge of my awareness, but that was it. Maybe the wreck had done something—or the drugs or magic that had kept me quiet until they got me here. Maybe it was some kind of witchcraft or magic I wasn’t resistant to right now, or that the circle was still affecting me. Maybe there was another circle around the whole property.
But I could tell that Adam was alive. Hopefully he could do the same. I’d examine the bonds more carefully later. Right now, I had to work on survival, because I could smell the distinctively musky mint of the werewolf’s scent.
“You might as well come out,” I said to Lenka the werewolf. That way I’d know where she was, and I could head for the garden wall in a direction that gave me a head start. “I know you’re there.”
She’d meant for me to scent her. She wanted me afraid. A low growl filled the air—soft enough not to be heard in the house. I think it was supposed to be scary, too—which it was, but not because I was afraid of the sound of her voice.
I remembered her crazy eyes and was scared. Fear was good. Fear would make my feet faster.
“I live with werewolves,” I reminded her. “Hiding doesn’t make you more frightening.”
The wolf who rounded the corner of the walled side of the roofed area was too thin, and her fur coat was patchy. But her movement was easy, and the fangs she showed me as she snarled were plenty long.
I’d grown up hearing the old wolves talk about how much more satisfying it was to eat something while its heart pumped frantically from terror. Some of the old wolves who came to live out their last years in the Marrok’s pack were not kind.
“Hi, there,” I told her casually—and then I bolted for the wall surrounding the yard.
I smell mostly human to a werewolf’s nose, especially if I haven’t recently been running around on coyote feet. Human is a smell with enough variability that unless they know what I am, werewolves mostly chalk up the bit of odd in my smell to that. Vampires, I don’t know as well.
I was betting that the vampires here didn’t know what I was. That they thought I was human. I’d very carefully left it out of the mini biography I’d given Bonarata, and it wasn’t widely known. My best-case scenario was that she would think I was a human woman trying to run for her life, penned inside the yard because, outside of a few martial artists and acrobats, the walls were enough to keep most people in.
I don’t get super strength or scary points. But speed is my friend, and I caught her flat-footed because she thought one thing was happening when it was really something else. She thought I was running from her—and I was just trying to get up some speed.