Page 22 of Devoured

This will not be our undoing.

Marching farther into the labyrinth, following a twisted sign that reads ON WEREWOLVES, I storm up to the nearest stack, suck in a breath, and throw both hands into the blackened flames. Pain explodes through my palms. Sizzles all the way down to my bones. But I collect sheet after sheet, scanning the pages as the fire burns them. I trace the words with my mind until I’m sick with them. Page after page after page. Cora can’t win.

I might not be the fastest or the strongest, but I have been in school long enough to memorize facts, to discern the most important bits of text from an entire page of jargon. Any mortal could do this. I can do this.

Though the agony flares hotter every time I grab a new parchment, I ignore it. Werewolves heal. I will heal.

“Have you lost your mind?” Evie murmurs from the floor. I turn, clutching parchment. Clutching ash. She blinks at me. “What are you—”

“One way or another, these records are going to burn. We have to read them first. Cora won’t know these have burned because we’ve touched them. She’ll just think the protective enchantments are fading.” I rummage through another stack, tearing papers from the middle at random. They slide out easily, as if they’re begging me to free them from Cora’s torment. “She’ll never know we were here from a few piles of ash.”

Evie still looks skeptical. “Vanessa…”

“Listen to this: A werewolf may bite a human, but the turn shall never take hold unless enough of the werewolf is implanted in the human. The payment for life is life.”

Evie sits up, and the ghosts surrounding her flicker in and out of sight. “But we know that already.”

“So? It’s something. We can use this.” My words come in short, shallow bursts as I swallow my pain. By the time I give her the next quote, the parchment has already disintegrated. “Caution should be used when turning a human. Historians have recorded centuries of evidence of werewolves giving too much of themselves to their turned humans, thus losing critical bits of their humanity. When humanity is lost entirely—” I stop short, exhaling sharply. My fingers heal bit by bit, but I hardly notice the way my flesh knits itself back together. Hardly feel the sting of regeneration.

Evie climbs slowly to her feet. “What?”

I glance at her. “When humanity is lost entirely, a werewolf may become boundless.”

“Boundless,” she echoes, approaching me with cautious steps. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I say feverishly, unable to help repeating, “but it’s something.”

It’s something, it’s something, it’s something. The words replay like a lifeline, and I cling to them with both hands. Maybe it makes me delusional; maybe boundless means nothing at all, but I still rack my brain for a definition.

Boundless.

Unlimited. Or forever.

“Fine.” Shaking her head as if still incredulous, Evie turns to the stack behind me, reaches in, and retrieves a page on werewolf diets. Then another on werewolf mating rites. I free a page about wolfsbane, and she begins to read from a scorched parchment on family curses.

For over an hour, we take turns burning ourselves and consuming information. Too much to fully comprehend or remember, but enough that we feel as if we’re doing something. Anything. Evie meets my gaze every once in a while, and the surrounding smoke writhes in her darkened pupils. She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t frown either. That’s enough too. For now, all of this is enough.

“Here,” she hisses abruptly. “I found one on lone wolves. A werewolf cannot be cast out of its pack and survive. Without the strength of numbers, their minds immediately begin to fray, and they go mad. Every single one,” Evie reads.

I frown at her, dusting the ash from my blackened fingers. “But Cora didn’t.”

“Maybe she turned her pack with enough time to save herself.”

I contemplate this for a moment, my frown deepening. “What else does it say?”

“Not much.” Evie lifts a shoulder as the parchment disintegrates between her own blistering hands. “Just that mad wolves often become rabid—”

A low, threatening growl cuts through the room before Evie can finish. I feel it before I hear it—the prickle at the base of my skull, the instinctive tightening of my spine. The door closes behind us, and someone is there. Here.

Someone is going to catch us.

Evie and I whirl as one.

Amethyst stands beneath one of the moon-white arches, her massive wolf form half shrouded in smoke. Phosphorescent moss casts sickly green light across her gray fur. Her lips peel back from chipped teeth the length of daggers, saliva dripping and sizzling on the ground. Her eyes burn a loathsome yellow, fixed on us with terrible clarity.

“Well,” Evie says unhelpfully, “fuck.”

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