What Grows Dies Here

She’d been so vibrant. So fucking alive. Nothing could’ve happened to her, not when the memory was so fresh.

But even now, that image of her was draining from my head, slipping through my fingers.

“I brought you here because you need to lock it down,” Jay told me, watching me carefully. He was seconds from death. He understood that.

“Whatever happens in there. You lock it the fuck down,” he repeated. “For Wren. You hold on to all that rage and need for death, and you wait. First stop is going to be the hospital. Then we’ll get vengeance.” He nodded to my gun. “You’ll get to use that. I swear it to you. Right now you’ve got two wolves inside of you. One scrambling to find your woman, the other hungry for the blood of whoever hurt her. Feed the first one.”

His words penetrated slowly, as if traveling through molasses. Through water. I had already been welcoming the man I had been before. The weapon the government created. I did not feel back then. Not a fucking thing. I could turn off my emotions. Turn off who I was. That switch was still in me, and I was preparing to flip it because I was already resigned to having lost her.

But I wouldn’t flip it. Not until I saw her.

Slowly, I lowered the gun.

I went to feed the first wolf.

There was no hope in my heart.

I had faith.

Not in the fucking universe or some god.

No, I had faith that Wren would fight. My Viking woman would not go down easy.

WREN

I was in the in-between. In between worlds.

Dreaming. But aware. Outside of my body completely. Something bad, something awful was happening. I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind, but it didn’t matter much. Not here in the in-between.

I was nowhere specifically until I was there. In the woods of Romania. The wind was cold, and it seeped through the open window of the cottage I was huddled in. There was a warm cup of a strong-smelling tea in my hand. The other was being held by a wrinkled one. The woman holding it was old. Ancient, it seemed. Her skin was creased like tissue paper, her gray hair running down her back. She had on a long, flowing white and red dress that billowed with the wind. A jeweled headband sat atop her head.

I’d heard about her on my travels. Whispers. Witchcraft was common in the area, thriving, in fact.

That’s why I’d come here. Because I wanted to see real magic. Wanted to feel it. Wanted to know what my future had in store for me. And I wasn’t about to do this by halves. Which was why I’d hiked through the Boldu-Creteasca forest with my translator to find this woman.

As soon as I was in her presence, I knew this was real. As soon as she touched me, my body started. My heart jumped into my throat as my eyes met hers, deep pools of something foreign. Something ancient.

Fear, not something I felt often, prickled the back of my neck. A small, unexpected voice told me to turn around, hike back through the woods, find a warm, cozy bar and a handsome man and do something I was much more familiar with.

But I didn’t listen to that voice.

I entered the small cottage, took the tea and let the woman tell me my future.

She traced the lines of my palms and muttered in a language I didn’t understand. Candles flickered on every surface. Though I’d learned some rudimentary Romanian, I knew the language she was speaking was something else entirely. Something much older. My translator and guide, Mihai—a middle aged man with an excellent mustache and three children he adored—looked stumped too. He’d taken it upon himself to be my guardian since I was a young woman traveling on her own and he had three girls. He’d tried multiple times to direct me to the more mainstream vrajitoare in Bucharest, wary of the cursed pool that shared this forest. The one surrounded by otherworldly forces, animals refusing to drink from it. He was obviously afraid of this area and the woman in the woods. I told him I would happily go alone if he drew me a map of the area. His eyes had gone wide, and he’d started speaking rapidly in Romanian. He would not hear of it. We would go together.

That was where we stood then. In the cottage, with the howling wind and the strange heaviness of power that was not of this world, I got the feeling he really regretted his decision. I would make sure I tipped him very well. You know, if we weren’t both cursed by some ancient and powerful witch.

For some reason, I wasn’t afraid of her.

She was known as a great white witch, her power being what scared most people. That and what she knew, her proximity to that cursed pool.

I knew suddenly that whatever she had to say I probably would not want to hear. But there was no escape now.

Her eyes had been closed as she spoke that other language, but her grip suddenly tightened on my hand, and her eyes snapped open. The wind stopped abruptly. Everything went still. Quiet. As if we were sucked into a void of nothingness.

I couldn’t tear my eyes from her gaze, the one that had seen lifetimes.

Then she began to speak. Mihai was silent for a few moments, then he struggled to catch up, to translate.