Wolf’s Blood, Part One
Pond Fair was a good village.
It had a baker who started before sunrise, so the whole main street smelled like bread by the time anyone was awake. It had a big pond, which was how it got its name, and the pond had delicious fish all year round. It had a library, a little potion shop, and a café. It was, by most measures, a very good village to grow up in.
There was, however, one problem: the forest. Well, the forest that ringed the eastern edge of Pond Fair was not itself a problem. The forest was old and tall and full of interesting things, and Walker had spent most of his life exploring it, just like all the kids in Pond Fair. He knew where the best mushrooms grew. He knew which trails looped back on themselves and which ones actually went somewhere. He knew about the hollow oak near the creek that had a family of owls in it, and he knew which caves were infested with snakes. Walker knew the forest better than anyone in Pond Fair.
The problem was not the forest. The problem was who was in the forest.
The Blackroot Bandits had been operating in the woods east of Pond Fair for almost three years. They generally stayed out in the woods and did not come into town. The town guard made sure of that, patrolling the streets day and night. But the roads through the forest were a different matter. The roads were long and dark, and the bandits knew them better than the merchants did, and the bandits would rob all the merchants who tried to come to Pond Fair.
So, one by one, the merchants had stopped coming. The spice trader hadn’t come through in a year and a half. The woman who sold good rope and canvas had not come since last spring. The traveling bookman, whom Walker had liked very much, was simply gone, and nobody talked about whether he was all right or not, because that was a question nobody wanted to answer out loud.
Pond Fair was not starving. It had its own farms, its own tradespeople, its own gardens. But it was getting quieter, more careful, more sealed off from the rest of the world than a village ought to be. The Blackroot Bandits were driving everyone away from Pond Fair. The town had slowed down quite a bit, and they rarely had new food or new books or new tools or new anything.
Then one morning, everything changed.
“Mom, I’m going out for mushrooms. I’ll be back later,” Walker yelled to his mom from the front yard.
His mom rushed to the front door. “And who’s going with you?” Parents never let their kids go into the forest alone.
“I’ll be fine, Mom. I’m just getting some bighead mushrooms from, like, the edge of the forest. It’s not—”
Walker’s mom cut him off. “Take Rumor. You can’t go alone, even to the edge of the forest. You know that.”
“But Mom—”
“Take Rumor or you can’t go. Period.”
Walker sighed. Rumor was his neighbor. He was a nice kid, younger than Walker—kind of annoying, though, really. He talked too much. But Rumor was right next door, and it would take Walker who knows how long to find one of his own friends to go with him.
Rumor must have heard his name. He was peeking out of his front door now. Walker looked at him, and he flung the door open wide.
“Oh, hey, Walker. What are you doing?”
“Hey, Rumor. Do you want to go into the forest with me to get—”
Walker didn’t even finish before Rumor rushed out the door. “Yeah, great. Sounds good. I see you got your mushroom bag. I got mine, too. It was hanging on a nail by my front door. It’s always there because I go shrooming so much. Rumor the Shroomer—that’s what my grandma calls me sometimes. Well, she did once, anyway. I asked her to call me that, like, for a nickname, but she just said, ‘Go out and play, Rumor.’ Anyway, I’m totally ready to go get some bigheads. I know where all the good ones grow. We’ll have full bags in, like, an hour, probably. Then maybe we could bring them back home and head to the fountain in town, hang out there, and get a cookie from the bakery. We’ll make a day of it. Mr. Akers said he owes me a cookie since I swept up his shop the other day. I’d sweep up his shop every day if—”
“Rumor,” Walker interrupted him. “Just chill for a bit, okay? We’re going to need to be quiet in the forest, you know?”
Rumor was quiet for a few minutes before he started up again.
An hour later, their mushroom bags were only about half full. They stood scanning the forest floor.
“We’re going to have to go deeper in if we want to fill up these bags,” Walker said, kind of thinking out loud.
Rumor’s eyes got wide. “Oh, um, maybe we just go back with half a bag. I mean, it’s a whole bag if we put them together.” Rumor was leery of the bandits.
“If we just stay away from the road and stay quiet, then we’ll be fine,” Walker said. “You think you can stay quiet?”
Rumor nodded a bit.
Walker realized he was getting grumpy, likely because he was hungry. He’d forgotten to bring lunch. “All right, how about we search for some berries, and then we’ll have a snack and collect whatever mushrooms we can find on the way out of the woods, yeah?”
Rumor nodded. “Oh, yeah, great idea. I bet there are some berries over there. Look, there are always berries by a briar bush.” Rumor pointed to a thick, dark bush a bit deeper in the forest.
Minutes later, they were stuffing their faces with raspberries as fast as they could pluck them off the vine. They were both realizing they were hungrier than they’d thought. For a while, the only sound coming from them was chomping, their hands stained red with berries.
“Okay, then, maybe we head back this way and see what we find on the way out?” Rumor said.
Walker nodded, his eyes half-closed now that his stomach was full.
“Oh, here, I’m not going to finish these.” Rumor held both his hands together, cupped and full of berries.
Walker took them in his own hands, opened his mouth, and popped them all in at the same time. He chewed, and they tasted strange, almost awful. Walker thought maybe there was bird poop on one of the berries or something, which was gross, but that’s what you get for eating unwashed berries by the handful.
Walker quickly realized it was something different. His stomach turned, and he dropped to his knees. His arms wrapped around his stomach as pain tore through his middle. Walker groaned.
“Walker? Walker, what’s wrong? Are you going to throw up? My mom says if you’re going to throw up, just go ahead and throw up. Just let it happen. We’re out in the woods. You can barf wherever you want.”
Walker was in too much pain to tell Rumor to be quiet. He wished he could throw up to stop the pain that was now tearing through his body.
Rumor put his hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Walker. Just go ahead and throw up.”
Walker looked up at Rumor, and the little kid jumped back so fast he fell onto his back. He scrambled away. “Oh, Walker, your face,” the little boy said.
Walker reached one hand up to his face and felt hair all over it—his cheeks, his forehead, his neck. “What’s happening to me?” Walker muttered.
Rumor turned and looked at the briar bush they’d been eating from a moment earlier. Walker did the same. Rumor scrambled over to the thick tangle of vines and thorny sticks. He reached into the mess and pulled out an entire bright green plant, which snagged on other branches as it came free of the bramble.
“Oh, no,” Walker muttered.
Rumor held the viny green plant in front of them both, and they could tell it was not a raspberry plant at all. It was wolf’s blood.
Walker flopped to the ground, and in just a few seconds, his body grew so much that he ripped out of his shirt. His light brown skin was covered completely in thick, coarse fur, dark brown and black. The ends of his fingers grew into long, sharp claws, and he felt the sharp points of his now tooth-filled mouth with his new, huge tongue.
“Ah, no. Oh, no, no. Walker, you—you—you’ve got to—” Rumor looked like he was going to cry.
They both knew wolf’s blood berries had no effect on normal people. They didn’t taste very good, but they were just berries. However, it was rumored that if you had any werewolf blood in you at all, the berries would activate those genes and turn you into a werewolf for a few hours. Even if your great-great-great-grandma was a werewolf, or half werewolf, or half-of-half werewolf, the berries would still activate that werewolf part of you. Of course, nobody knew this for sure, since werewolves were so rare they were only ever seen in picture books.
Walker was heaving now, breathing heavy and deep, every exhale nearly a growl, and he was looking at Rumor with a snarl he couldn’t quite control.
“Uh, Walker, I—I—I think I should go.” Rumor turned and ran.
Walker instinctively took a few big steps after him but stopped himself. The pain and exhaustion of his transformation were gone now, and in their place was a feeling of power coursing through his veins. His muscles tensed as he flexed his entire body. Drool dripped from his mouth, and he felt the instinct to howl.
Werewolf Walker looked around, realizing he might need to hide before leaving the woods. The last thing he wanted was for the town guard to try to kill him if he went back home looking like this.
Before he could turn around to find a cave to lie down in, he heard a loud thwack and felt a sharp pain in his left arm. He looked down, expecting a wasp sting, and instead saw an arrow sticking out of his arm. His eyes lifted in the direction the arrow had come from, and he saw a bandit peeking over a huge rock not far away. The bandit’s eyes were huge as he slowly realized that his arrow had barely hurt its target.
Walker stared the bandit dead in the eyes and yanked the arrow out of his arm. The bandit gasped, stumbled backward, and ran away yelling.
Walker, now completely transformed into a werewolf, leaped into the air and tackled the bandit in one motion. Instinctively, the bandit swung his bow at Walker. Normally, the hard wooden bow would have smacked Walker right in the face, but now he caught it in his tooth-filled wolf mouth and bit down hard, breaking it to pieces.
“Please, please, no! Help!” the bandit cried out, thinking he was about to get eaten.
Another arrow whizzed past Walker’s face, and he looked up to see more bandits. They were keeping their distance, backing away as they readied more arrows in their bows. Walker grabbed the bandit beneath him and threw him so hard he soared through the air and landed on one of the other bandits.
Walker threw his head back and let out a terrifying, deep howl he couldn’t control.
The bandits scattered, falling all over themselves to get away from the beast. Walker rushed off, moving faster than he ever had, faster than he ever thought he could run, toward a series of caves he and his friends used to play in. He slid into the dark, quiet cave and caught his breath, panting heavily.
He was scared of what had just happened, and scared of himself, and he wondered if he would ever be a regular kid again.
Soon, Walker fell into a deep sleep right there in the cave.
Wolf’s Blood, Part Two: Rumor Knows
Walker woke up on the floor of a cave. At first, he was very confused, thinking he had gone to sleep in his own bed. He sat up slowly. He was in the old caves near the creek. He and his friends had played in these caves for years. He knew exactly where he was. That part was fine.
What was not fine was everything else. His shirt was in pieces on the ground next to him. His arms were caked with dirt up to the elbows. His feet were bare and scratched up, and he had absolutely no memory of coming there. He did, however, have a memory of growing an enormous amount of hair very quickly, and claws, and throwing a bandit through the air like a sack of grain.
Walker sat in the cave for a while and thought about all of that. The memories slowly returned, as if he were gradually remembering the details of a dream. He rubbed his arm where the arrow had stuck into him in his werewolf form. It was just a little scar now. Then he stood up, picked up what was left of his shirt, and walked home.
Rumor was sitting on Walker’s front step. He had his knees pulled up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them, and he had clearly been there for a while. When he saw Walker coming down the path, he jumped up so fast he nearly fell off the step.
“Walker, Walker, Walker,” Rumor said, three times before Walker even reached him.
“I know,” Walker said.
“Walker, y-your face had—”
“I know.”
“A-and your hands were like—”
“Rumor.” Walker looked at him. “I know. Come here.”
He took Rumor around the back of the house into the garden, far enough from the windows that nobody inside could hear them. They sat down in the dirt between the bean rows. Rumor stared at him. His eyes were enormous.
“You’re not going to tell anyone,” Walker said. It wasn’t a question.
“I’m not going to tell anyone,” Rumor agreed immediately. “Who would I even tell? Wh-what would I say? ‘Hey, guess what? Walker turned into a huge monster in the forest.’ Nobody would even believe me. My mom would probably make me go to bed early.”
“Good.”
“But, but Walker, what did happen to you?”
Walker told him. He told him how the transformation felt, and about the fight with the bandits after Rumor had run away. Rumor listened to all of it without interrupting, which was very unusual for Rumor.
When Walker finished, Rumor was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “I grabbed that plant. When you were on the ground, I saw where those berries you ate came from.”
“I know. I saw you.”
“It wasn’t a raspberry plant at all. It looked almost like one, but the berries were darker, more purple, and the leaves were different.” Rumor picked at the dirt with one finger. “I’ve seen that plant in a book.”
Walker looked at him. “What book?”
“Mr. Ossie has this big reference book in the library about plants and fungi and things. I used it last summer to look up mushrooms or something. It had a whole section on rare and dangerous plants.” Rumor paused. “Walker, I think it was wolf’s blood.”
Walker had heard of it. Everyone had heard of it. But if Walker had ever seen it, he hadn’t noticed. Wolf’s blood was a rare plant, nearly impossible to find, and mostly harmless to regular people. It tasted terrible and made you feel sick, but that was all it did.
Unless.
Unless you had werewolf blood somewhere in your family line. Old blood, faint blood—even if it was so far back nobody remembered it, the berries would find it anyway. And if they found it, they would wake it up, and you would become a werewolf. Most people who heard that rumor, though, didn’t even believe it.
“Someone in my family was a werewolf?” Walker said.
“A long time ago, probably,” Rumor said. “Like a great-great-great-great-grandparent or something. That’s how the book described it. It could be really old.”
Walker thought about his parents. His dad was a carpenter who got up before dawn every day and always smelled like sawdust. His mom grew the best beans in Pond Fair and sang to herself when she thought nobody was listening. He tried to imagine either of them as a werewolf and just couldn’t. But somewhere, a long time ago, somebody in his family had been one, and he had inherited just enough of that to be affected by wolf’s blood berries.
He stood up and brushed the dirt off his pants. “I need to go to the library,” he said.
So Walker got cleaned up and went to the library. Mr. Ossie found the reference book for him without asking too many questions. Walker sat at the table in the back corner and read the wolf’s blood entry three times.
Rumor had remembered it correctly, mostly. The part Rumor had left out was the duration. The book said the transformation lasted a few hours—not all night, not all day. A few hours, and then it was done, and you were yourself again, and the only way to do it again was to eat more berries.
He thought about the bandit with the arrow and the way the other bandits had scattered, the way he had run through the trees without effort, faster than he had ever moved in his life. He thought about the traveling bookman who hadn’t come through in over a year, and about the spice trader and the rope-and-canvas woman—all the merchants who had stopped coming because the road through the forest wasn’t safe anymore.
He sat in the library for a long time, reading the same passage about the berries, before returning to Rumor.
“I need to go back into the forest,” Walker said.
Rumor looked at him. “Uh, to look at that plant?”
“To get more berries.”
Rumor was quiet for a second. “Walker.”
“I know.”
“But that’s—”
“I know.”
“I’ll come with you.”
They went back into the forest together, quiet and careful, sticking to the trails Walker knew. They found the wolf’s blood plant right where they had left it, still tangled in the base of the briar bush.
Walker crouched down next to it and looked at it carefully. There were more berries than he’d noticed before, a whole cluster of them, small and dark and perfectly round. He pulled out his mushroom bag and picked the berries one by one.
Rumor watched him do this and said nothing for a surprisingly long time, and then he said, “You’re going to eat those on purpose?”
“Yes.”
“A-and go into the forest at night?”
“Yes.”
“A-and fight bandits?”
“That’s the idea.”
Rumor looked at the bag. “H-h-how many are you taking?”
“Enough for a few trips,” Walker said. “I want to see what I can actually do before I try anything too serious.”
Rumor nodded slowly, like he was trying to convince himself that this was a reasonable plan. He did not look convinced, but he helped Walker pick berries anyway.
On the trip back, Walker told Rumor what he needed from him: someone who knew where he was going and when to expect him back. Someone who could cover for him if his parents asked questions. Someone who would come looking in the morning if he didn’t come home. Someone who could maybe find more wolf’s blood berries. Someone to scout bandit positions from far away.
The whole thing sounded scary to Rumor. His life was suddenly shifting from super chill and safe to considerably dangerous. But Walker was being honest with him, and the more he thought about it, the more he felt important, like Walker was taking him seriously. Rumor liked that.
“I don’t love this plan, Walker.”
“I know.”
“I-I just want to say that. I don’t love it.”
“Understood.”
“But I’ll do it anyway,” Rumor said.
That night, Walker waited until the house was quiet. He could hear his dad’s slow, steady snoring from down the hall. He picked up his mushroom bag from under his bed—a good excuse in case he got caught sneaking out. He pulled on his oldest shirt. He went out the back door without a sound.
He stood at the edge of the forest. The trees were dark and tall, and the wind moved through the top branches in a long, slow sound like breathing. Somewhere in there, the Blackroot Bandits had their camps, their fires, and their stolen goods from merchants who just wanted to pass through.
Walker reached into the bag. He took out one berry and held it up between two fingers.
He popped it into his mouth and walked into the trees.
Wolf’s Blood, Part Three: The Werewolf of Pond Fair Forest
Walker ate the berry at the edge of the forest and waited. He didn’t have to wait long.
The pain came first, the way it had before, tearing through his stomach and dropping him to one knee. He kept his eyes open this time. He wanted to see it. His hands spread out in front of him in the dirt, and he watched his fingers stretch and darken and grow until they were huge, with sharp, serious claws sticking out of them.
Then the pain was gone, and everything else arrived all at once. The forest exploded with information—every smell, every sound, every small movement in the dark. He could hear an owl adjusting its feet on a branch sixty yards away. He could smell the creek and the frogs near the creek, and he could smell that a deer had walked by recently. He could smell smoke. Campfire smoke. Far away, but not that far.
Walker stood up to his full height, which was taller than any grown person he had ever met. He walked into the trees.
The camp was small: four men around a fire, a pile of canvas bags stacked against a fallen log, and a rope strung between two trees with a lantern hanging from it. The men were talking and eating and not paying very much attention to the forest around them, because in their experience, the forest around them did not require attention. They owned this forest, and they had for a while now.
But that was about to change.
Walker stepped out of the tree line and into the ring of firelight in their little clearing. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t do anything. He just stood there and waited to be noticed.
One of the bandits looked up.
What happened next happened fast. The man yelled and stood up so quickly his bowl of food went flying. The other three looked up, saw what he was looking at, and then all four of them ran in four completely different directions. One of them ran directly into a tree, bounced off it, and kept running.
Walker enjoyed the feeling of power. He had run them off without doing a thing. He thought maybe this was going to be easy.
He found another camp twenty minutes later, deeper in. This one was bigger: seven or eight men and a more permanent-looking setup, with a rough wooden shelter built between some trees, a bigger fire, and more bandits eating stew.
These bandits heard him coming. He didn’t know how. He thought he was being quiet, but he wasn’t quiet enough. Two of them had their bows up and pointed in his direction before he even saw them.
One of them fired.
Walker moved instinctively, without deciding to move. His body just went sideways, fast, and the arrow passed through the space where he had been standing and disappeared into the dark.
He heard one of the bandits say, very quietly, “Oh, no.”
Then the camp erupted.
This fight was real, unlike the first one. A few of the men were brave enough, or stubborn enough, to stand their ground, at least for a bit. One of them swung a club that would have been a serious problem for anyone else. Walker caught it in one hand, stopped it completely, and growled at the man holding the other end.
The man let go of the club and ran. The rest followed.
Walker stood in the middle of the second ruined camp and noticed that his powers were already beginning to fade. The smells were a little less sharp. He was a little less strong. The edges of things were softening back toward normal. He was running out of time.
He grabbed a couple of bags of stolen goods, went back to the first camp and grabbed the rest of the stolen goods there, and then rushed to his little sleeping cave from before. He pushed his werewolf body up against the stone wall and fell asleep.
Rumor had been awake all night. Walker found him out behind their houses, and he looked exhausted. His eyes were barely open, but his voice still came out fast.
“Oh, you’re okay. Good, good. You’re okay,” Rumor said.
“I’m okay.”
“Man, I thought about a lot of different ways things could’ve gone wrong last night.”
Walker sat down and told him everything: the two camps, the bandits scattering, the one who ran into a tree, the second group with the bows. Rumor listened with his mouth open the whole time. When Walker got to the part about catching the club, Rumor let out a long breath, like he’d been holding it for most of the story.
“Oh, that’s so cool. No arrow wounds this time?” Rumor said.
“No, I’m good.”
Rumor nodded slowly. Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was a map of Pond Fair Forest, with all the trails and main roads on it. Rumor had already marked the briar bush where the wolf’s blood was growing, and he’d also marked the cave where Walker said he slept. He had Walker point out where the camps were, and he marked those spots too. Then they marked where the other bandit camps probably were, based on the way the road wound through the trees.
“I’m going to sneak in there later and figure out where all the other camps are for sure,” Rumor said. “If I just creep in a little, I can use a telescope to see where they are.”
“Yeah, good. This is good,” Walker said, looking down at the map. “Once we figure out where they all are, I can go in and rip them up good and take their stolen stuff. But I think from now on, they’re going to be expecting me.”
The story got into town two days later.
A fabric merchant had been sneaking through the forest along the creek at dawn. He arrived in Pond Fair pale and shaky and full of a story about screaming in the forest and a shape he had seen moving between the trees that was not a man and not a bear and not anything he had a name for.
The town guard captain, a solid woman named Briggs, listened to the merchant’s story with her arms crossed.
“A wolf,” she said when he finished.
“No,” the merchant said. “Not a wolf.”
“A big wolf?”
“Captain Briggs.” The merchant set his hands flat on her desk. “It was standing upright.”
Briggs wrote something down and thanked the merchant for his time.
That evening at dinner, Walker’s mom mentioned it to his dad, who had already heard some things about it. Word had spread all over town quickly.
“Did you hear what the fabric man said?”
Walker’s dad poured more water into his cup. “I heard.”
“A werewolf,” his mom said, trying out the word like she wasn’t sure she believed it.
“People see strange things in the dark,” his dad said.
Walker ate his soup, looked at his bowl, and said nothing at all.
Rumor almost told Petra.
Petra was a girl from the edge of town whom Rumor had known since they were very small, and Rumor told her more or less everything. Walker caught him at the fountain in town, where all the kids hung out, in the middle of a sentence that started with the words, “But what if it is a werewolf? What if I’ve even got proof? What if—”
Walker appeared at Rumor’s elbow. Rumor stopped talking immediately.
Petra looked back and forth between them. “What?” she said.
“Oh, nothing,” Walker said pleasantly. “Hey, Rumor, can I talk to you for a second?”
He walked Rumor to a quiet spot behind the baker’s shop and looked at him. “You can’t go around telling people I’m a werewolf.”
Rumor winced, feeling a little guilty. “I-I know.”
“Seriously. If word gets out that I’m the werewolf, all the bandits need to do is come find me when I’m not a werewolf, and then I’m finished.”
Rumor had not really considered this. “Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Yeah, you’re right. It-it-it’s just that I’ve never had to keep a secret like this. This is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to anyone in Pond Fair, and I know about it, and I can’t tell anyone, and it’s a lot to carry around, you know?”
“Okay.” Walker was thinking. “Okay. How about when the bandits are all gone, I let you be the one to tell everybody? You can be the first to tell, okay?”
Rumor’s eyes lit up. “Ha! Really?”
“When it’s done. Not before.”
Rumor nodded and straightened up. He looked considerably more settled. “Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah. When it’s done.”
A few nights later, Walker went out again, this time with Rumor’s map folded in his pocket.
He was better at it now, more deliberate. He knew how long he had and how to use it. He knew how his wolf body moved, what it was capable of, and where its limits were. He was figuring out how to listen hard and smell hard. He cleared two more camps from Rumor’s map that night without much trouble.
Walking home in the gray early morning—ordinary-sized and ordinary-shaped, and carrying his frayed shirt, because he’d learned to take it off before eating the berry—he counted the X marks on the map in his head. A few camps cleared. A few more to go. One of them Rumor had marked with a note that said, in Rumor’s careful handwriting: Biggest one. Lots of bandits. Be careful.
Walker folded the map back up and put it in his pocket. He went home and ate breakfast, then went to the library, sat in his regular chair, and looked at the door for a while without reading anything.
If he was going to target the big camp next, he was going to need a better plan.
Wolf’s Blood, Part Four: The Big Camp
Rumor had spent three days at the edge of the forest with his telescope. He’d told his mom he was bird-watching, which was not something he had ever shown the slightest interest in before, but she seemed so pleased about it that he felt a little bad about the lie. He made a note to actually look at a bird at some point, so it wouldn’t be a complete one.
What he had really been watching was bandits.
He spread the map out on the kitchen table the evening Walker was getting ready to go out. It had gotten a lot more crowded in the last few days: new trails, new notes crammed into the margins in Rumor’s careful handwriting.
“Okay,” Rumor said. “Here’s the first thing. The little camps—they’re pretty empty.”
Walker looked up. “Empty?”
“Cleared out. You scared them, Walker. The ones you didn’t wreck packed up and ran, and they didn’t go home.” Rumor’s finger traced inward across the map toward a single spot circled deep in the middle of the forest. “It looks like they all went here. Every one of them.” He tapped the circle. “This is the only camp left, and it’s not like the others. It’s where they all went to hide from you.”
He had written notes all around it. Walker leaned in to read them: Two tree houses. Rope bridge. Multiple fires. Two sheds. Lots of them. More than twenty?
“I couldn’t get close enough to count exactly,” Rumor said, “but there are a lot of them down there now, way more than before. And there’s somebody up in the big tree house I couldn’t really see. Somebody in charge. Bandits kept going up and coming back down, like they were reporting to him.” He paused. “And he had a staff. A-a big one.”
“A staff?”
“Yeah, like a wizard staff.”
Walker looked at the circle for a moment. “Okay,” he said.
“Okay? Just okay? I just told you there might be a wizard.”
“It could also just be some guy with a staff. You didn’t see him do any magic, right?”
“Walker.” Rumor glared at him.
“Rumor.” Walker folded the map back along its creases. “I’ll be careful.”
“You’re going to turn into a werewolf and run into the biggest bandit camp in the whole forest looking for a fight,” Rumor said. “There’s nothing careful about that.”
And Rumor had a point.
Later that night, Walker didn’t waste any time on the empty camps. There was no reason to. Everything that mattered was in one place now, and so was everyone.
He crept through the dark woods, careful and quiet, the way he had learned to over the last few weeks. He didn’t want to eat the berry too early and waste his werewolf time just creeping along, but he didn’t want to wait too long either and get caught out there as a kid. So he worked his way as deep as he dared, found a patch of shadow, and ate the berry.
The pain came and went the way it always did now. The forest opened up around him, every smell and every sound coming at once. It was harder to move quietly like this. He was huge, and even his breathing came out rough through a snout full of teeth. But he reached the outer edge of the main camp without being heard, crouched in the tree line, and looked.
It was everything Rumor had said, and then some.
Two big tree houses sat high up in a pair of old oaks, joined by a rope bridge. Fires burned everywhere, throwing orange light across a wide clearing. There were two solid sheds with locked doors, and bandits leaning on trees, sitting on logs, moving between the fires—more than he could count at a glance. Thirty, maybe more. Every bandit left in the forest, gathered in one place.
Walker watched for a while. He tried to find a quiet way in. He moved slowly around the edge of the clearing, staying in the dark, looking for a gap, a blind spot, an angle nobody was watching. But there wasn’t one. The bandits were rotating constantly, covering lots of ground.
He thought about turning back, about coming up with some clever plan, telling Rumor it was too much for one night. But then he thought about how few wolf’s blood berries he had left in the pouch, and how every night he waited was another night the bandits had to prepare.
It was now or never.
He stepped out of the tree line and ran.
He never saw what he hit. Somewhere at the edge of the camp, his foot caught on something—a cord, a wire, strung low between the trees—and the place went off like a kicked hornet’s nest. A clatter of bells and pans rang out across the clearing before he’d taken five steps into it. The bandits were up and fighting before he reached the first campfire, all of them at once.
For about ten seconds, it still went the way he wanted it to. He kicked a fire, and sparks and burning logs sprayed across the clearing, and the bandits near it scrambled back. He grabbed two panicking bandits and launched them into the forest. He ripped a shed door clean off its hinges and flung it spinning.
Then the rest of them hit him.
Arrows came first, from two directions at once. He twisted away from most of them, but not all. Two stuck in his leg. Then the bandits who hadn’t run off came at him from every side at the same time, eight at a time, from everywhere. He’d claw one away, and two more would fill the gap. Clubs came down on his back and his shoulders again and again and again. He’d never fought numbers like this. He and Rumor had badly underestimated how many bandits had crowded into this place.
He kept moving. He had to get out of the open, get to higher ground, get to something. He fought his way toward the big tree house, because that was where the one in charge was, and the animal part of him understood that the man in charge was the whole thing. Break him, and the rest would scatter.
Then the tree house door opened.
The man who stepped out onto the platform above was not like the other bandits. He was tall and thin, with bright red hair that stood out even in the firelight. His eyes were red, too—a deep, wild red that caught the light strangely, like there were hot coals behind each one. He had scars running down both sides of his face, a long, dark robe, and a staff that was taller than he was.
He looked down at the wolf wrecking the camp the way a person looks at a bug they’re about to step on.
Then he pointed the staff down, and fire came out of it. It came up out of the man’s chest somehow, ran down through the length of the staff, and rolled out the far end in a long wave of flame.
Walker dove sideways and felt the heat of it cross his back, singeing his fur. He came up moving. The bandits around him scrambled back—the first sensible thing they’d done all night. Nobody wanted to be standing near the thing the staff was pointed at, and that gave Walker his opening.
He hit the trunk of the oak beside the tree house and went up it in seconds, faster than he’d ever climbed anything in his life, and launched himself off a branch onto the rope bridge. It bucked and swung under him. He scrambled up onto the platform.
The man met him with the staff, swinging it, jabbing at his face and hands, quick and wild. But Walker was bigger and faster. He got inside the next swing, got both clawed hands around the staff, and pulled.
The man pulled back, and for the first time, the red-eyed man looked afraid. Panicked. He clutched the staff with both hands like it was the only thing in the world keeping him standing, and Walker felt it then, even through the noise and the fighting. This stick was the whole thing. Every bit of the man’s power ran through it. Take the staff away, and there was nothing left of him at all.
If I can just get this away from him, Walker thought.
Walker wrenched it sideways, and the man stumbled. The staff slid an inch through his clutching fingers, then another inch. He almost had it.
Then the man snarled, the red in his eyes flared, and the force came. No fire, no light—just a wall of nothing, a shove from something magic and huge and invisible. It caught Walker square in the chest and threw him backward off the platform.
He didn’t have time to think. The ground came up out of the dark and hit him and knocked every bit of air clean out of his body.
He got up. He always got up. But slower this time.
The bandits were on him before he’d even found his feet, clubs swinging, and now he was down among them with two arrows in his leg and no air in his chest. A fireball came down from the platform above. He twisted away, but it clipped his arm, and the burn was real and bad, and he heard himself yelp.
And he could feel it now. The wolf was starting to leave him, the smells going dull, the strength leaking out at the edges. He’d been in the camp too long. Far too long. He had spent so much of his time just trying to reach the man—the climb and the bridge and the staff—that it had run down without him noticing.
He tried to push forward anyway, back toward the tree, toward the staff, because he had been so close. Something hit him hard from the side and put him down on one knee, and the bandits closed in around him, and he made the calculation fast.
He could not win this. Not tonight. Not like this.
So he got up, and he ran.
He ran, and they came after him, loud, crashing through the brush, somebody blowing a horn. He was still faster than them, but not by as much as before, and the gap was closing as the wolf drained out of him.
He couldn’t go to the cave. If they followed him there and he turned back inside it, they’d find a beaten-up kid curled in the dirt, and that would be the end of everything. So he turned toward town. It was the only place left to go. He had to reach the part of Pond Fair the guard could protect before the bandits reached him.
He ran harder. The trees thinned out. He could see the first buildings, the warm glow of lamps and windows. His body was wrong now—smaller, lighter, his hands losing their claws out in front of him as he ran. He stumbled as he changed and kept running anyway.
He hit the first street of Pond Fair at a staggering run, barely a wolf at all, and then a regular boy again.
He fell.
He lay there on the cobblestones of the eastern street, scratched and bruised and scorched along one arm, breathing hard, listening to the bandits crash to a halt at the edge of the trees. There were too few of them to come into the town itself. They held at the tree line, torches bobbing, and came no closer.
Rumor had not been sleeping. He almost never slept well anymore, not since all of this had started. He’d been lying in the dark worrying about Walker when the noises came in through his open window: yelling, the clang of weapons, a horn.
He went to the window. He saw a shape in the distance, a person stumbling, running all wrong, and behind them, at the tree line, torches and movement.
He threw the window open and screamed, “Help! Help! Somebody help!”
He was out the front door in seconds, still in his sleeping clothes, running. He skidded to his knees on the cobblestones beside Walker.
“Walker?” He grabbed his shoulder. “Walker, are you okay? Walker!”
Lights were coming on in windows up and down the street. Doors were opening. And then Captain Briggs was there at the end of the street with two guards behind her, all three of them dressed and armed and looking hard at the tree line.
The bandits melted back into the forest.
Walker looked up at Rumor. He opened his mouth.
Rumor looked down at him. Then he looked at Briggs coming toward them. Then he looked at the torches disappearing into the trees, and at Walker lying burned and bleeding on the stones, and he made a decision.
“He’s the werewolf!” Rumor shouted at the top of his lungs—to Captain Briggs, to the neighbors in their doorways, to the whole waking street. “Walker’s the werewolf! He’s been protecting the village this whole time! He fought all of them, and they chased him home! He’s hurt! Somebody help him!”
Walker put his head back down on the cool cobblestones and passed out.
Of all the ways he had imagined this night ending, this was not one of them.
Wolf’s Blood, Episode Five: The Wizard of Pond Fair
Walker woke up in his own bed. This was better than waking up on a cave floor, which was how he had been waking up most mornings lately. His own bed had a pillow and a quilt and smelled like home. Those were good things. The rest of it was less good.
His arm was bandaged from elbow to shoulder where the fire had caught him. His legs ached. Someone had cleaned him up and put him to bed, and that someone was sitting in the chair beside him: his mom, with the particular look of a parent who has been awake all night and has a great many things to say. His dad stood in the doorway.
“Hey,” Walker said.
His mom looked at him. “Tell me everything,” she said.
So he did. The berries, and waking up in the yard with his shirt in pieces. Rumor in the library, and the map. The camps, one by one, and the stolen goods piled up in the cave. The legend spreading through town while he sat at dinner and said nothing. The big camp, the tree houses, the man with the red eyes and the red hair and the staff, and what it felt like to be hit by a force blast and knocked to the ground from forty feet up.
His dad sat on the edge of the bed, picked up Walker’s unbandaged hand, held onto it, and looked at the floor.
“You should have told us,” his dad said.
“I know,” Walker said.
“We’re your parents.”
“I know, Dad.”
His dad nodded slowly. He didn’t let go of Walker’s hand.
His mom leaned forward. “Are you done?” she said. “Is it over?”
Walker thought about the camp still standing in the middle of the forest, the red-eyed man watching from the tree house platform. “Not yet,” he said.
The citizens of Pond Fair had a lot to say about all of it. Walker didn’t hear most of it directly, but Rumor came by that afternoon and reported everything in considerable detail.
“So Mrs. Farren from the candle shop thinks you’re a menace and somebody should do something about you,” Rumor said. “But Mr. Ossie at the library says you’re the bravest person in Pond Fair, and he put the wolf’s blood page from the reference book under glass, because he says it’s historical now.”
“Nah, he doesn’t have to do that,” Walker said.
“He already did. He was really excited about it. And Captain Briggs wants to talk to you when you’re better. She’s not mad, I don’t think. She just wants to know everything.”
“Okay.”
“Also, your mom makes really good soup.”
“I know.”
Rumor had brought the map. He unfolded it on the bed between them, and they both looked at the circle in the center for a moment.
“He’s still there,” Rumor said.
“I know,” Walker said.
“The bandits didn’t leave. After everything we did, he’s still up in that tree house with his staff. He trashed all his other camps, but that one’s still there.”
The stranger arrived on the third day. Walker was sitting on the front step getting some air, his bandaged arm resting on his knee, when he saw a man come walking down the main road into Pond Fair. Old, unhurried, with a long traveling cloak, a bag slung over one shoulder, and a walking staff. He stopped someone near the fountain, said something, and the person pointed toward Walker’s house.
The man walked over, stopped a few feet away, and looked at Walker with his eyes narrowed.
“You’re the werewolf,” the man said.
“Sometimes,” Walker said.
The man almost smiled. “My name is Eraxus. I’m a wizard. A real one, before you ask, not whatever that was in the tree house.” He glanced at the bandaged arm. “May I sit?”
Walker moved over on the step. Eraxus sat down, set his bag between his feet, and looked out at the road. He had a long face, gray eyes, and hands marked with small old scars.
“I’ve been following stories about you,” he said. “A werewolf in Pond Fair Forest, knocking over bandit camps. I wanted to see for myself.” He paused. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner. That business with the tree house might have gone differently.”
“It might have,” Walker said.
“I have a problem,” Eraxus said, “and I think you can help me with it. But before I tell you what it is, I want to make you an offer.”
“What kind of offer?”
“Simply put, I help you clear Pond Fair Forest. We go in together. You become the wolf, and together we destroy the main camp and run the man with the staff out of these woods for good, and Pond Fair can go back to normal.”
“And in exchange?” Walker said.
“In exchange, you help me with my problem.”
“What’s your problem?”
Eraxus looked toward the mountains at the edge of the horizon, just visible above the rooftops of Pond Fair. “There are caves in those mountains. Deep ones. Something lives down in them, something that has been collecting magical things for years, getting stronger, preparing to move out into the open air. They took my spell book three years ago. I want it back, and I haven’t been able to get it back alone.”
“Yeah, those caves aren’t too far,” Walker said. He had been over that way a few times with his friends.
“No, not far. But the thing that lives there is deep underground, in the dark, winding tunnels of the mountain, and they’ve had my spell book for a few years now, practicing. Pond Fair is the closest village to those mountains and will be the first place they come when they are ready to come up to the surface.”
“Well, what do you need me for? You’re the wizard.”
“What you are,” Eraxus said, “what the berries make you, the creatures in those caves are afraid of, down to their bones. They are called Lurkers, and they hate werewolves. They’re terrified of them, you see?”
Walker made a face. Lurkers were in books and stories, creatures of the dark, deep underground, gross and evil. They looked like humans, but with pale white skin and long claws, and their eyes were all black, and they always walked hunched over. They never came out into the sun, and if people knew Lurkers lived in a cave, they never went into that cave.
“They have a natural fear of werewolves,” Eraxus said. “With you, I believe I can get in and get my spell book back. Without you, I tried twice and failed both times.”
Walker looked out at the road. “You should know about the staff,” he said. “The man in the tree house, when I went after him, he hit me with something. It wasn’t fire or light. It was just a wall of nothing, and it threw me off the platform, like forty feet, maybe more. I’ve tossed grown men around like sacks of grain, and this knocked me out of the air like I weighed nothing at all.”
Eraxus waved one hand, unbothered. “A stolen staff in the hands of a frightened bandit can still throw a punch. It’s a tool, and tools can be taken away.” He said it like it was nothing. “It isn’t the staff I’m worried about. It’s whether you can keep thirty men off of me long enough for me to take it out of his hand. That’s all this really comes down to.”
“He didn’t seem scared,” Walker said.
“Well, they never do. Not until you take their magical toys away from them.”
Walker wasn’t sure about this wizard or his problem, but he needed help to defeat these bandits, and right now, this wizard was the best choice. He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll do it.”
His parents took some convincing. Eraxus met them at the table and made his case plainly, but the truth was Walker had already been out as the wolf more times than they had known about, and they understood by now that the man in the forest was not going to leave on his own. Their boy was the town’s best hope, and this old wizard was offering to stand beside him. They gave Eraxus and Walker their blessing, in the hope that it would finally put an end to these bandits.
They had barely gotten the map open on the kitchen table when a sound came from outside. It started low, a kind of rolling murmur, far off like a crowd, and then came a single horn note, long and ugly.
Walker’s mom and dad were already at the window. Walker and Eraxus came and stood behind them, leaning to see.
From the window, you could see all the way down to the edge of Pond Fair Forest. The bandits, all of them, more than thirty, stood in a long, ragged line where the trees met the fields, torches in some hands, weapons in others. They weren’t charging. They weren’t doing anything at all. They were just standing there in the dark, looking at the town, letting Pond Fair see exactly how many of them there were.
And behind the line, walking slowly back and forth, was the man with the staff. He carried it like a walking stick, and even from this far, Walker could see the red catch in his eyes each time he turned his head. Some of the bandits were grinning. Some were snarling.
Down by the fountain in town, Captain Briggs and a handful of guards had formed up, swords drawn, holding the center of town. There were too few of them to march out and meet that line in the open, so they held, and they watched, and they waited.
Walker’s hand went to his pocket, to the berry pouch. Eraxus’s hand closed over his wrist.
“No,” the wizard said quietly. “That is exactly what he wants. You go out there now, alone, in the open, and they fold around you from every side. No cave to run to, no guard close enough to reach you. That line isn’t an army. It’s bait. We do this our way, on our night, not theirs.”
So they stood at the window and watched. After a while, a few minutes that felt much longer, the line began to come apart. The bandits drifted back into the trees a few at a time until only the man with the staff was left. Then he turned too, unhurried, and the forest swallowed him.
They hadn’t attacked, and somehow that was worse. They weren’t afraid. They were showing Pond Fair that they could come and stand at its door any time they liked, and there was nothing the town could do about it.
Captain Briggs came to the house later that evening. She sat at the kitchen table across from Eraxus, folded her arms, and listened to the whole plan without saying much. When they got to the part about Walker, what he was and what the berries did, she didn’t flinch. Rumor had told her days ago. She’d had time to decide how she felt about it.
“Half this town thinks the boy’s the menace,” Briggs said when they’d finished.
“And the other half?” Eraxus said.
“The other half saw him crawl out of that forest burned half to pieces because he’d been fighting our fight for the rest of us while we slept.” Briggs looked at Walker. “I know which half I’m in.”
She uncrossed her arms. “Here’s what I can give you. I can’t march the guard into these woods at night. We’d be cut to ribbons, and the town would be left wide open behind us. But I can have every able body in Pond Fair armed and waiting at the tree line. Bakers, farmers, whoever will come. And after what they just watched stand at the edge of town, plenty will come.” She tapped the table once. “You give us a signal, and we won’t wait around for a second thought. We’ll come.”
Eraxus nodded. “If I shoot a flare up into the night sky, you’ll know that we’re ready for your help.”
“Then we’ll be watching the sky,” she said.
Rumor had been sitting very still through all of this, which for Rumor was a miracle. Now he raised his hand slightly. “Uh, can I come? Into the forest, I mean, with you?”
“No,” Walker and Eraxus said at the same time.
Rumor lowered his hand. “I figured.”
“Your scouting got us this far,” Eraxus said. “That map is the only reason we have any plan at all. But the forest at night is no place for you.” He thought for a second. “So I’ll give you the most important job we’ve got. You stay with Captain Briggs and her people at the tree line, and you watch the sky. The moment that flare goes up, you’re the one who knows what it means. You get them moving. Everything might come down to how fast that crowd arrives, and that part is yours.”
Rumor straightened up. “Okay,” he said. “I can do that.”
They built the rest of the plan at the kitchen table that night, the four of them with the map spread flat. Eraxus showed Walker exactly where they would enter the forest and the route they would take to the main camp. He noted where tripwires were probably going to be, and they finished packing their things.
“We leave tomorrow night,” Eraxus said. “After dark.”
Wolf’s Blood, Episode Six: The Last Knight
They left the next night after dark. The plan was set. Rumor’s map and Eraxus’s small, precise marks, the trip lines and the lookouts and the angles of approach, all of it folded up and gone over until there was nothing left to go over. Now there was only the forest and the dark and the long walk.
Walker noticed that Eraxus made no sound when he walked. Not that he was quiet. He was silent. The leaves he stepped on didn’t crinkle. A puddle he crossed didn’t splash. There was some magical thing keeping him as quiet as a held breath. Walker tried to match it. He set each foot down slow and careful.
“How are you doing that?” he whispered.
“Practice,” Eraxus said, “and a bit of magic.”
Twenty minutes in, Eraxus stopped and held up one hand. Walker stopped. Eraxus crouched and pointed at something low between two trees. Walker looked for a bit before he saw it: a thin wire, barely there, strung about ankle-high across the path. Eraxus waved his hand above the wire, and it dropped to the ground. He found a second one, then a third.
Walker thought about the night he had run straight into a camp, how the whole place had exploded into noise before he’d gotten anywhere close, how he’d never known what tripped it. He thought about how different that night might have gone with someone beside him who knew where to look. He pushed the thought away. It didn’t help anything now.
The clearing appeared through the trees ahead, orange with firelight. Walker crouched at the tree line and looked at the camp. It was the same as before: the two tree houses in the old oaks, the rope bridge strung between them, the fires, the two sheds with their locked doors, bandits moving around in the firelight. There were more of them than last time. Word had gotten back about what had happened. The red-eyed man had called in reinforcements, and now there were way more than thirty of them down there, leaning on trees, sitting on logs, sharpening weapons, looking off into the dark forest.
Eraxus crouched beside him and studied the layout for a while. “Give me a count of forty after you start,” he murmured. “Don’t worry about where I am. You won’t see me, and you won’t need to. You keep them all looking at you. Keep them distracted.”
“And the staff?” Walker said. “The man with the staff?”
“Leave the staff to me,” Eraxus said. “That part is easy. Just keep the rest of them off my back while I deal with him.” He looked at Walker. “How long will you have once you’ve eaten it?”
“Not long, b-but long enough,” Walker said.
Eraxus nodded once. Walker reached into his pocket, pulled out the berry pouch, and shook one berry into his palm, small, dark, and bitter. He thought about all the things Pond Fair had lost since the bandits had set up in the woods, and the camp still standing in the middle of his forest like a splinter nobody had pulled.
But not for much longer.
He put the berry in his mouth. The pain came and went the way it always did, and then everything arrived at once: every smell, every sound. The owl, the creek, the smoke, the bandits who had no idea who was crouched in the dark watching them.
He looked at Eraxus. Eraxus nodded again.
Walker stepped out of the tree line and ran.
For a little while, it went the way he wanted it to. He hit the edge of the camp, moving fast, and kicked a fire again. Sparks and burning logs sprayed across the clearing, scattering the bandits. But they were ready. They knew he’d come. Two rushed at him from the left, and he grabbed one in each hand and threw them into the dark. He leaped to a shed, ripped the door clean off its hinges, and flung it spinning at another bandit.
And around the camp, things began to come apart through some unseen force. The rope bridge between the tree houses shuddered and dropped, both ends letting go at the same instant, the whole span falling into the dark with no one near it. Walker didn’t see how. He was busy. A shed folded inward, its walls crumpling like wet paper, as if something enormous and invisible had simply closed its hand around it. Then a weapons rack fell over all by itself. The bandits stumbled and looked around for what was doing it and saw nothing.
Walker was confused as well, until he realized Eraxus was good at this. He was ripping apart their camp from the darkness of the forest without even being seen, using some strange magical forces, and it was working. Walker could feel it working. For a bit, he let himself believe it was almost done. He was wiping the forest floor with these goons. They smashed into him with clubs, and it barely registered. He was werewolfing so hard right now.
Then the door of the big tree house opened, and the red-eyed man came out. He stepped off the ledge and floated to the ground. On the ground, he was taller than Walker remembered, the scars on his face catching the firelight in long shadows. He had the staff in one hand and an evil grin that looked permanently etched on his face.
Eraxus stepped out of the dark at the edge of the clearing. The two of them looked at each other across the burning camp, and Eraxus raised one hand and reached out with his magic to pull the staff away.
The staff didn’t move.
Eraxus’s hand stayed up. His eyes narrowed. He looked surprised. He pushed harder with his magic, and Walker felt it: a low pressure in the air like the moment before a storm. His ears popped, and the bandits nearby held their heads because the sheer amount of magic hurt. And the staff drank it down and did not move so much as an inch.
The red-eyed man smiled. He stared hard at Eraxus and gripped the staff with both hands. And Eraxus knew in that moment that he had severely underestimated it. He knew that there was no bandit leader. There was only this evil magic staff that had taken over the bandit.
Light ran up the man’s arms and into his chest and out through his skin, a deep red, until he was glowing with it, until the campfire looked dim next to him. A thin red light leaked from the corners of his mouth. His eyes were lit from the inside. He looked like he was going to explode with magical power. And when he spoke, the voice that came out wasn’t only his. It was the staff speaking through him, low and pleased.
“You thought this bandit found me?”
Eraxus threw everything he had. A barrage of magical sparks and blue flame rushed from the wizard toward the bandit leader. Walker felt it go off the way you feel thunder in your back teeth. The red-eyed man walked through it. He swatted the wizard sideways with one glowing arm the way you’d swat a moth, and Eraxus hit the dirt, slid, and struggled to get up.
“The bandit didn’t find the staff,” the doubled voice said. “I found him, and I own him, and soon I’ll use him to destroy you.”
Walker had stopped to watch this fight, but now the bandits closed on him all at once. This was the part the red-eyed man had been waiting for. He pointed the glowing staff, and the order came out in that doubled voice.
“The wolf. Destroy the wolf while I destroy the wizard.”
They swarmed, eight, ten, more, all at once and from every side, with clubs and arrows and grabbing hands, and it didn’t matter how strong Walker was when he was fighting so many at once. He clawed one away, and two more filled the gap. He could see Eraxus on his back across the clearing, and he could see the red-eyed man walking toward the fallen wizard, glowing, unhurried, the staff raised, and he could not get there. He could not get through them.
It was happening again. He was going to lose again.
And then, flat on his back with the glowing man standing over him, Eraxus raised his own staff and fired it straight up into the sky. A streak of white light tore up through the branches and burst high above the forest like a firecracker.
The flare.
The red-eyed man stopped. Red light dripped from his grin. “You missed,” he said.
“No,” said Eraxus. “I didn’t.”
Far off beyond the trees, a horn sounded. Rumor and the town guard had seen the flare and acted quickly. Another horn sounded, and then another. Then came voices, lots of them, and the bobbing orange of torches coming through town and into the forest, and under it all, the sound of a great many feet that did not care anymore about being quiet.
The town had been waiting for the signal, and the signal had come.
Captain Briggs came through first with the guard behind her, swords out, and behind the guard came Pond Fair itself. Mr. Akers, the baker, with a rolling pin. The candle shop woman with a hatchet. Farmers with pitchforks and scythes, and one man swinging a fence post. And right in the middle of it all came Rumor, yelling at the top of his lungs.
The bandits turned to face them. They peeled off Walker, all of them, all at once, to deal with the wave of furious villagers pouring into their camp. And just like that, the way ahead of Walker was clear.
“Walker!” Eraxus shouted. He was on his back, up on one elbow, the glowing man on top of him now. “Magic won’t touch it. It eats magic. It has to be you. Do you hear me? Take it from him. You’re the only one who can.”
Walker felt his time thinning at the edges. The smells were going dull. The fur on his arms was already not quite as thick. He had been in the camp too long, the way he always did, and the wolf was leaving him. There wasn’t time to be afraid of the glowing thing. There was only time to do it now or not at all.
Walker ran straight at the red-eyed man and hit him with everything he had. The tackle should have folded the man in half. It didn’t. He grunted and staggered and stayed up, and Walker felt the heat coming off his skin, and he understood right away that hitting this man was no good. Under the power of the staff, the man shrugged off pain. Walker could throw him into a tree all night, and it wouldn’t matter.
He grabbed the arm that was holding the staff. Walker pulled, and the man pulled back, and the staff glowed hotter between them, and it would not come free. The grip was the thing. The grip was everything.
Walker put his huge, tooth-filled mouth around the man’s wrist and bit down hard, his teeth sinking into the bandit’s skin.
The bandit’s hand sprang open.
The staff came loose, and the second it left the man’s fingers, the light went out of him like a snuffed lamp. The red drained out of his eyes. The glow faded from his skin. The terrible deep voice stopped mid-breath. And what was left, swaying there in the firelight, was only a man. Thin and scarred and ordinary and suddenly completely breakable.
Walker held the staff in both clawed hands and tried to snap it over his knee. It would not break.
“Eraxus,” Walker tried to say, though it came out more growl than word. He turned and tossed it. Eraxus caught it out of the air. And now that it wasn’t gripped tight in the fist of someone trying to kill him, now that it wasn’t being driven against him, the wizard could do his work. In one smooth motion, Eraxus flipped off his heavy robe and wrapped it around the staff. He used a length of rope to tie the evil staff up within the thick fabric.
“That will hold,” Eraxus said. “For now.”
The bandit leader looked at his empty hands. He looked at the wreckage of his camp. Then he did the only thing left to him, which was to scream at his bandits to fight, to stand, to do something. A few of them tried. It did not go well for them. Without the glowing thing in the trees giving orders, without the wolf pinned and the wizard down, they were just men who had spent three years frightening merchants, and they were standing in the middle of a burning camp, surrounded by an entire furious town and one enormous wolf and a real wizard.
It was over very quickly.
The last of Walker’s strength was going. He could feel himself coming apart and folding back down, getting smaller and smaller, the claws sliding away, the world going quiet and ordinary again. He turned back into a twelve-year-old boy right there in the middle of the camp, in the firelight, in front of all of Pond Fair.
Rumor got to him first, of course. He skidded to his knees in the dirt and grabbed Walker’s shoulder.
“You did it,” Rumor said. “Walker, you did it. You bit his arm. I saw it. You bit his arm right off. Well, not off, but you bit it, and the staff fell. Oh, Walker, you did it.”
“We did it,” Walker said. He was too tired to say much more.
Captain Briggs and two of her guards already had the red-eyed man by the arms. He didn’t fight them. He had nothing left to fight with.
“We’ll keep him in the town lockup tonight,” Briggs said, looking down at him. “Come morning, he goes to the city in a wagon, in chains, with a proper escort. There are people there who handle this sort of thing properly. He’s their problem now.” She glanced at Walker, and at the wreck of the camp, and at the town standing around in the firelight. She didn’t smile, because Briggs didn’t smile, but she nodded at him in a good way.
Eraxus stood holding the staff wrapped in his cloak. He frowned. “I underestimated this thing. It needs to be destroyed.” The old wizard seemed afraid to unwrap the staff from his cloak. But that was a worry for another night. Tonight, the bandit camp was burning low, and the town was already starting the walk home. Each resident walked back with a bag or a stack of stolen goods, looking to return them to their original owners in Pond Fair.
Walker’s legs had decided they were finished. Rumor half-carried him out of the forest under the first gray light of morning, talking the entire way.
