Page 26 of Bound to the Wolf
“I don’t think we should stick around to find out if they come back.” She grinned at him. “Want to get out of here?”
This time he did manage to grin back, but it was wolfish. He chose a direction and started walking, and this time Delainey let him lead.
Chapter
Eleven
Delainey was eager to put distance between themselves and the creepy murder shack, but she struggled a little to keep up with Reece.
Not that she would ever admit that.
He might have been wearing his human skin, but he moved through the woods like a wolf—loose and natural, like he was born to do this. His strides were long and even, his boots finding solid ground on roots and rocks without looking down, his weight shifting from foot to foot with a fluid economy that her own clumsy, flat-footed steps couldn’t match.
He wasn’t focused, though. His head turned toward every sound, including ones she couldn’t make out, and after two false starts she realized he was also following scent trails she couldn’t detect.
If her magic wasn’t going haywire, she might have tried some sort of spell to figure out which way they were going, or point them toward home. The canopy was thick overhead—mostly oak and hickory, their trunks wide enough that she couldn’t have wrapped her arms around them.
She didn’t recognize these woods, but she’d bet they were somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Not that that narrowed it down any.
It didn’t feel like she had been sleeping for a long time, but for all she knew, she and Reece had been in a magical coma for days or months—or they would get home and find out it had been years, secreted away and held in stasis like characters in a fairy tale of old.
Okay, that was probably not what had happened. But Reece wasn’t being very talkative, and her mind was spiraling just abit.
Delainey tripped over a branch she hadn’t noticed and went sprawling. Her palms hit the leaf litter and slid, and a sharp rock bit into the heel of her left hand hard enough to sting. Her denim jacket rode up to her ribs, and damp earth pressed cold against the exposed strip of skin above her waistband.
Reece kept moving until her manacles tingled and he froze before the pain could start. This was going to get annoying.
Six feet was really close, and she didn’t want to think about how that was going to affect them when one of them had to use the bathroom. Not that there was a bathroom out here. Given the state Reece was in right now, he might just lift up his leg and do his business that way. Delainey shuddered to think.
She wondered what he would look like in his wolf form. She had seen it before; they had fought together. He had saved her life. But she hadn’t been paying that much attention to him then. She’d been more focused on getting Elise free and fighting off Austin LaSalle’s pack of bigoted rogues than admiring Reece’s fur.
Austin LaSalle might have something to do with this.
Delainey didn’t exactly have a long list of enemies, and the coven usually kept their heads down. There was no reason to attack them or hold anyone hostage or put strange manacles around her wrists and bind her to a werewolf.
Her power surged, and her hands glowed a bluish gold for a moment before she clamped it down and shoved her power deep inside her. It took a lot more effort than she cared to admit, and Reece looked back at her like he was impatient for her to start moving again.
“My magic’s acting up.” She hated to admit it to him, but he was her only ally out here, and they needed to be on the same page. If he thought she was going to use her powers to get them out of this mess, he needed to be disabused of that notion. “Whatever these manacles are doing, they’re affecting it.”
Now that she had gotten used to wearing them, they weren’t that heavy, but every time she moved her wrist she felt the resistance, and it reminded her she wasn’t free.
Reece was sniffing everything. He put his nose to a tree and breathed deep, then pulled back and sucked in a breath of open air. He pressed one palm flat against the bark of an oak, fingers spread wide, and tilted his head at an angle that was more canine than human. He was like a dog at a dog park, except not cute and fluffy.
“Are you learning anything useful?” She planted her hands on her hips. “Care to share with the class?”
Around them the trees were dense, and she heard the distant song of birds, but it was getting darker. The light had shifted from the warm gold of afternoon to a flat, gray-blue that leached the color from the leaves and turned the spaces between the trees into deep pockets of shadow. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees since they’d started walking, and goosebumps rose on Delainey’s forearms despite her jacket.
It had been lunchtime when she and Reece were attacked. Was it still that same day? Maybe late afternoon? If so, that narrowed down the options for where these woods could be. Was this Iron Runner territory?
Reece wasn’t sharing, and they kept moving, him remaining silent. They had walked for another half hour or so, and Delainey’s feet were burning. The soles of her gym shoes were thin—meant for sidewalks and gym floors, not mountain terrain. She could feel every rock and root through the rubber. A blister was forming on her right heel where the shoe rubbed, and her left knee twinged on every downhill step.
She was thankful she had worn gym shoes rather than heels to her lunch with Elise, but it was starting to get chilly as night crawled in around them.
Pretty soon they were going to have to figure out what they were going to do.
“Maybe we can’t,” she said out loud. “I’m not exactly a hiker, but I know you’re not supposed to wander around at night.” She didn’t like the idea of stopping.
If someone had taken them captive, that someone was eventually going to come looking. Even without an exact trail to follow, they’d be able to track their scent—a wolf doing it physically, or a witch doing it magically.
