Legendary Beast
“Okay. Maybe they’re a little more afraid of you than they are of me and Ivan,” Soren said.
The white gelding’s nostrils flared, and Madeline had to tighten her legs and speak calming words to her mount as Lev hoisted himself up into the saddle of the frightened dun. He pounced as he would have if he’d been hunting instead of riding. He settled gracefully into the saddle even though it was a moving target, and masterfully brought the horse back under control with his strong hands and thighs—but more so with his aura of authority and strength of will.
Ivan was the alpha of the Romanov pack, but only because Lev had never vied for the position.
The horse trembled beneath him, but it stopped trying to rear up on its hind legs.
“Show-off,” Soren said. He’d come to stand beside Lev’s leg. With one hand, he held the bridle of the dun and placed the other on Lev’s knee. “Come back to us, brother. I searched for you too long and too hard for you to run away now that I’ve seen your face again.”
“To Straluci,” Lev said, giving his brother no reply. With a deft thump of his heel, he urged his mount to depart. Soren’s hand fell away.
The dun leaped forward, and Madeline’s horse followed at her direction. Lev refused to glance back at Bronwal or his twin brother. He couldn’t allow his brother’s love for his new wife to cloud his judgment. Her mother was an evil queen who must be destroyed. It was the only way.
As was his decision to never return. The brotherly connection he felt for his twin tugged at the very marrow of his bones as he rode away, but the wildness that haunted his soul was a stronger force. It propelled him away with the certainty that he could only protect those he loved by reclaiming the shift and leaving them far behind.
Madeline had seen an ATV in the stables. It was a mechanically propelled vehicle with cushioned seats. It wasn’t quite midmorning when she began to obsess about those cushions and regret the necessity of horses on the narrow trails they followed.
The deep, evergreen Carpathian forest had devoured them shortly after they left Bronwal. Meager spring sunshine barely penetrated the canopy above them as the horses stepped carefully on the path that was frequented by sure-footed deer and wolves and bears, more than domesticated animals.
What began as a hum to soothe the skittish horse beneath her became a nostalgic song softly murmured below her breath. She didn’t remember it exactly. The words came from somewhere inside her that was more warmth than memory. More feeling than thought. Tears sprang into her eyes and burned her nose when she realized she softly sang a lullaby. It was tentative, but it was there. More in her heart than in her mind.
“We’ll water the horses here,” Lev said, suddenly breaking off the trail and heading toward a stream that had been unobtrusively gurgling beside their route.
Needing to stretch and being able to stretch were two different things, Madeline thought, but her horse followed Lev’s and she didn’t attempt to stop it. There was no obvious clearing. Only a slight break in the trees allowed them to make their way toward a patch of moss above the water.
The white gelding came to a stop beside the larger dun, and she was somehow able to swing her leg over the pommel of her saddle. She hopped to the ground without moaning out loud. Lev seemed to ignore her. He didn’t make conversation, didn’t directly look her way, but she felt him. When he stood and tilted his head to drink, she could imagine his pleasure at the fresh, cold hydration. From a tingling awareness along her spine to the heat that rose in her cheeks, her problem was that she couldn’t ignore him. His presence was too noticeable to dismiss.
She jumped when he turned at her approach to hand her the container. She had been right. His attention was on her the whole time. Her every step was noticed, even when he didn’t look her way. She took the container and gulped too quickly. She ended up awkwardly coughing and gasping for air as she recovered from choking.
Lev still didn’t speak. He didn’t meet her eyes. She was glad. Her glances flicked over him constantly without settling. He made her nervous. It wasn’t fear of the wolf in him so much as fear of being caught watching him. She didn’t want her awareness of him to show. She didn’t want him to know that she couldn’t look away for long.
Suddenly, he broke away from the invisible awareness that seemed to draw them together in spite of forced disinterest on both their parts. Still unused to the scent of the white wolf in their midst, the horses snorted and pawed against their tethers as Lev approached. Madeline turned to see what he intended to do. When Lev pulled the ruby sword from its sheath on her saddle, the water container dropped from her fingers to the mossy ground.
She was supposed to become stronger and wiser. Instead, she’d left her sword half a dozen feet away.
Madeline took several steps toward the man who easily held the long warrior’s blade in one hand, but she froze when Lev came around the horses toward her. He effortlessly spun the sword in an arc of graceful but deadly movement around his large frame. He might have been a wolf for centuries, but his physicality as a man had only been enhanced by his time as a beast. His muscles bulged and relaxed and bulged again with his moves, as he seemed to test and then savor the heft of the blade as it arced around and around.
“You don’t remember the weight of it in your hand? Its power at your fingertips?” Lev asked.
A flush of heat spread from Madeline’s cheeks down to her throat and chest. She swallowed, suddenly very aware of the pulse at the base of her neck. If he looked, he would see her heartbeat throb, and it would no longer be throbbing simply from fear.
He continued to approach, effortlessly testing the blade as if he had no idea his words would call up a vision of him in her head, his power at her fingertips. In her imagination, she combined the blade with the man. Both powerful. Both intriguing. Both obvious omissions in her hollow memories. What he was asking was “How could she have forgotten such a sword?” What she thought was “How could she have forgotten such a man?”
And then she pushed such impossible thoughts away.
It didn’t matter what he’d once meant to her. For now, he was a necessary companion and also a potential danger to herself and to her child. She needed him. She also needed to be wary of the way he made her feel. He had said he couldn’t shift, but how long would his inability to call the white wolf last? She had to behave as if the threat of the wolf was with her every moment.
“I can’t reclaim the past I’ve lost. I can only move forward from here,” Madeline said.
Lev lowered the blade. He had approached until he was facing her, and he stood too close to continue to test the sword. Instead, he held it outstretched beside them. It wasn’t a threatening display, however—it was a pause. Whatever his intention, he’d been interrupted by his sudden awareness of her nearness. The sword was forgotten. He looked down into her eyes, and his whole powerful body stilled. His wide chest didn’t rise and fall. He didn’t move forward or back. He didn’t so much as blink as their gazes locked.
Madeline took in enough oxygen for both of them. Her respiration was shallow and quick. Too quick. She couldn’t look away. Instead, she searched his blue eyes for some indication of his intent. The blade was still in his hand, but his lids were low and his cheeks were flushed. His lips were slightly open and soft against the hardness of his angular face.
Her fingers flexed with the sudden desire to shave the wild growth that prevented her from fully appreciating his cheeks and jaw and chin. His beard was darker and more burnished gold than his blond hair, with no trace of the white streak that was more of a nod to the white wolf’s fur than to Lev Romanov’s age. The centuries showed more in Lev’s muscular hardness than they did in his general appearance. He looked as if he’d been born twenty-five or thirty years ago. Not in the Middle Ages.
She’d stared at herself in the mirror. Her age wasn’t apparent at all. She looked as if she’d fallen asleep at twenty and woken up the next morning. Except for the absence of light in her eyes. She was missing...something. The brown of her irises wasn’t as liquid as it should be. She needed to move forward, but the past she couldn’t remember might remain an emptiness in her for the rest of her days.
“Moving forward will help you recall. Whether or not you reclaim your memories will be your decision,” Lev said. He leaned slightly toward her, his face tilted down. Strands of thick, wavy hair fell forward, released from the binding at the nape of his neck by his movement. She clenched her fingers into fists to keep from reaching out to touch the startling white locks that sprang free.
“This sword was made for your hand. Your body will remember if you expect it to.” His eyes gleamed a brighter blue behind the white. She was relieved when he moved back to bring the sword up between them. He held it as Anna had held it, horizontally, as an offering for her to take.
“I’m not the woman I was before,” Madeline said softly. She’d seen him looking for the warrior she’d been. He searched for her now in between one blink and the next. His intense gaze burned its way deep into her soul, but he must have felt that his search came up empty because there were still no memories for her to recall. There was nothing but the weight of Trevor against her breast. “I can only remember the baby. I held him forever as I slept. I protected him in my arms for centuries. That’s the only knowledge of the past that I have.”
Now her fisted hands weren’t to keep from touching Lev’s hair. Her fists were for the witches who had kidnapped her child. She didn’t need any memories of being a warrior to know that she would fight to save the baby they’d stolen.
“Take this blade to save our child. Remember it, and it will remember you,” Lev said.
Madeline’s fingers opened, and she lifted her hands to accept the blade. Lev laid it across her outstretched hands. For a stunning moment, the sunlight shone through the trees and onto the ruby. It seemed to flicker to life. But then the leaves whispered with the wind, and shadows fell once more.
The ruby was as gray and dull as it had been before.
Chapter 5
Take this blade to save our child. Remember it, and it will remember you.
He’d wanted to say “Remember me.” The words had risen from his heart to his lips, but he’d stopped them just in time. He’d hardened his mouth against them. He was here to help Madeline save Trevor. He was here to find and kill Queen Vasilisa. That was all. As she’d said, the past couldn’t be reclaimed. But not for the reason she thought. She was still a warrior. She would always be a warrior. She’d been a warrior while she was sleeping, protecting their baby against her breast. Her eyes were troubled and wounded, but they still gleamed with determination and fury, even if they didn’t gleam with ruby fire.
He was the one who couldn’t reclaim what had been lost. Even as he’d reclaimed his human form, he’d known it. It wasn’t only his skin that had been scarred by the years of ceaseless wandering and torment. The white wolf’s rage continued to live beneath his skin like a never-ending howl only he could hear, and its claws had dug away his humanity too deeply for him to ever fully find it again.
His body was a sham, his desire for Madeline only an echo of what had been when he was a civilized man. When he’d released the sword into her hands, he ignored the spark caused by the phantom ghost of their previous connection.
And then he’d stepped back, prepared to be the cool and impersonal instructor she needed to help her remember the sword. Only the sword.
Him, she could and should forget.
The training session lasted only an hour, but when they were finished, Madeline’s arm was trembling and rubbery, and she was panting with exertion. Sweat had dampened her hair, even though the mountain forest was cold.
Lev didn’t pant or sweat. He had shown her every thrust and twist and parry, often with his hands over hers to demonstrate technique, but other than a wind-kissed flush on his cheeks above his golden beard, he seemed wholly unaffected.
“Our lives consisted of battle and training for battle. Your muscles will remember even if your mind doesn’t,” Lev said.
“There must have been other things. Like singing...” Madeline thought of the lullaby. Then she tried not to think of how Trevor had been conceived. “Um, dancing?”
They had walked back to the horses. This time the dun didn’t prance at all, and the white merely snorted at Lev’s approach. It was Madeline who tried to prance away when Lev reached to help her tired body onto the back of the gelding. He caught her easily, but in deference to her avoidance, he deposited her quickly into the saddle and stepped away.
Her waist still burned from the memory of his short-lived grasp—so strong and sure—even after they headed back onto the trail. Her exhaustion was as much from resisting the effects of his touch during her training session as from the exercise itself. He had taken no liberties. Each time he’d positioned her hands on the hilt or her shoulders and hips, he’d released her the moment the demonstration was finished. Yet her body still became flushed and sensitive. By the time the session was over, she ached for his touch to become more personal.
She had counted the seconds each brush of his hands had lasted.
“We sang and danced. Of course. In between our battles with the Dark Volkhvy. And all the while we didn’t realize we were kept in Vasilisa’s gilded cage. We were her most treasured champions. Until we were not,” Lev said.
“Did the Dark Volkhvy cause my long illness?” Madeline asked.
Lev pulled the large dun to a sudden stop. He turned in his saddle to face her. Madeline’s horse stopped at the dun’s hip because the trail was too narrow for him to pass.
“Is that what the witch told you?” he asked. She was suddenly on alert again after being lulled by the gelding’s steady hoof beats beneath her. Lev was deceptively quiet. She could feel a new tension in the air. She could see his stiff shoulders and his white-knuckled grip on the reins.
“She only said I’d been ill. Not how or why,” Madeline said.
“Queen Vasilisa spelled you into an enchanted sleep. One so deep and so long that it clouded your memories. Your past wasn’t stolen by an illness or the Dark Volkhvy. There is no Dark and Light. All Volkhvy are evil. Vasilisa most of all. She wasn’t your savior, Madeline. She was your tormentor. She stole you and Trevor away from Bronwal before she cursed us all,” Lev said. The howl was present in his voice again. More than ever. His words were husky rasps in the shadowed forest. The sun had entirely disappeared. The canopy was dense, but clouds must have rolled in high above them in a sky they couldn’t quite see.
Madeline’s body no longer ached from physical exertion or burgeoning sensual need. She’d gone numb from her forehead to her toes. Her fingers had gone slack on the reins, and the gelding shuffled aimlessly in its tracks with no guidance except for the dun’s broad hips ahead.
“She was helping me recover. She was making sure Trevor woke slowly so he wouldn’t be affected the way I’d been. She tried to protect him from the marked Volkhvy when they attacked,” Madeline said.
“Whatever she does, she does for herself. For her own ends. She isn’t human—never forget it. Long ago she took my father from his family and manipulated his genes to create a supernatural champion. He helped her. He provided an entire family of supernatural beasts to fight her enemies. We married and brought our warrior mates into her service. And she repaid us with a horrible curse. The Ether ate us, again and again. Once every hundred years we materialized. She wanted to watch our slow demise,” Lev said.
He kicked the dun and it leaped forward into a trot in spite of the rough path. The white gelding followed, and Madeline’s hands were too numb to pull it back. Was everything she’d learned since she woke up a lie? The Volkhvy on Krajina had been kind to her. Very unlike the marked Volkhvy who had attacked the island. And she’d felt Anna’s warmth. She’d instinctively trusted one of the other women who wielded a Romanov blade.
Lev had to be wrong about the Light Volkhvy. And if he was wrong about the Light, then he was wrong about Vasilisa, too. She was Anna’s mother. Madeline’s sanity was currently being saved by the idea that wherever Trevor had been taken, he at least hadn’t been taken there alone. Vasilisa would take care of him until Madeline could get there. She had to believe that, in spite of what Lev believed.
Queen Vasilisa had created the Romanov wolves, and she’d forged the enchanted blades for their mates. That much was true. The rest? Madeline’s mind seemed shrouded in fog. She had woken too quickly, Vasilisa had said. She’d risen from her long sleep too fast and left her memories behind.
It had been the white wolf’s howl that had woken her up. She’d echoed it. His howl had ripped from her throat and passed her lips as it sprang from her own chest. The crystal bed she’d slept in had been shattered, Trevor gone.
But as her horse followed after the dun that had already disappeared down the curving trail, Madeline wondered who had shattered the crystal and taken the sleeping baby from her breast. She’d blamed the white wolf for waking her too soon, but perhaps the blame didn’t lie entirely with him alone.
Her skin was as soft as the petals of a flower. The faint scent of roses was tangled in the auburn strands of her hair. As he’d tried to focus on reminding her of her prowess with a blade, he was distracted again and again by observations he couldn’t ignore.
The forest canopy above them was dense. The majestic spruce surrounding the mossy bank were lined up in seemingly never-ending rows of bitter bark and evergreen bows. But sunlight still peeked through and found its way in beams down to the top of Madeline’s head. The rays of light turned the waves of her hair to fire. The strands were a myriad of colors, from light gold to the deep red of tarnished copper. He’d grown up with a ginger twin, but Soren had ordinary red hair. Madeline had flames.
He forced himself to only touch her when necessary. He corrected her hold on the hilt of her weapon, and his fingers burned where they touched hers. He nudged her feet farther apart with the toe of his boot against her foot, and he hated himself for remembering his bare leg welcomed between her naked thighs. He pressed a hand against the small of her back to urge her to straighten her spine, and he quickly pulled it away rather than allowing himself to press her body against his.
It was an hour of the worst torture he’d ever experienced, but he endured it because in spite of all the observations that hurt him, he also noticed her shoulders begin to line up with her blade the way they should, directing the sword. He noticed that the sweat on her brow didn’t stop her from going through the forms he suggested over and over again.
She would be prepared to wield the blade against the Volkhvy even if it killed her. She possessed the same determination as ever. She didn’t need memories to drive who she was at heart.
Of course, he also noticed her breath catch and her body go still when he leaned in close behind her to position her elbows. For only a moment their bodies had been touching, from her back to his chest all the way down to hips and legs. The swell of her bottom encased in tight fawn leggings had been pressed against the tops of his thighs. He had paused for only a second, allowed himself to savor the touch but only for the blink of an eye, and then he had stepped back before his response to their mutual stillness could betray itself against the small of her back.
He had ended the session soon after, no longer trusting himself or his focus. She had seemed as glad to back away and return to the horses as he had been.
And then Madeline had brought up her enchanted sleep. She’d reminded him of why they were undertaking this journey in the first place.
Vasilisa must be stopped.
She had endangered his family for the last time.
He would lose them for good when it was all said and done, but they would be safe. That was all that mattered.
The problem with travel on horseback down a narrow trail where she was required to do nothing but let her horse follow the one leading was that she had hours to think. Since she couldn’t ponder memories, she was left reliving every second of her time with Lev on the mossy bank by the stream.
His body was inhuman in its hardness, but instead of being repelled by his steely arms and legs or the solid rock of his chest, she was drawn to him as if her soft body could soothe away the centuries of hardship that had caused his to turn to stone. She could tell he tried to keep his touch impersonal. She could also feel him fail each time he brushed his hand against hers. He leaned into her as if he was freezing and she was the flame.
She tried to keep the image of the white wolf in her mind, but even though she’d sketched the monster a thousand times, she failed. Lev Romanov was intimidating. He was tall and broad and as lean as any hungry hunter could be. But he didn’t act like a predator. Oh, he noticed her every move. He sensed every time she reacted to his touch. But he didn’t exploit her weakness.
Not even when, God forgive her, she’d hoped that he would.
He had held her from behind, and she’d felt every inch of his hard body against hers, including his obvious reaction to holding the small of her back to him.
Then he had stepped away.
She had quaked like a leaf afterward. Perhaps he had thought she had overexerted herself. He had ended their practice. He’d headed back to the horses. She’d been left to mull over the impossible: the white wolf she’d been told to distrust had refused to devour willing prey.
Chapter 6
They were being followed. As the forest darkened around them, Lev could detect the scent of wolves on the breeze. He was well used to wild wolves. He’d run with them for over a hundred years. They naturally bowed down to his giant white-wolf form. In his supernatural body, he was easily the apex predator of the mountain. Volkhvy power might be evil, but it had given him the power he’d needed to survive when Vasilisa cursed Bronwal.
Now his ability to shift was gone.
For whatever reason, he couldn’t set the white wolf free. It was as if his human body was unwilling to risk disappearing for another hundred years or more. He was drenched with sweat by the time the sun set, but he was still a man. He’d asked Madeline to ride in front when he first scented the wolves. She hadn’t looked back at him since then. If she had, she might have drawn the ruby sword from the scabbard at her knee. She would have seen his tension. She would have anticipated the arrival of the white wolf she feared.
Now she might have to draw her sword to fend off natural wolves instead.
“We’ll stop here for the night,” Lev said. He directed his horse toward the side of the trail, where a large spruce had fallen following a heavy snowstorm several months before. The branches were still filled with green needles, although they were dry and rustled with a sharp skeletal rush when the wind blew through them. He liked the fallen tree because it would form a barrier wall between the shadows of the forest and the open trail. It would be a line of defense against any wolves that might come from the trees. They would camp against it, and he could build a large fire between the massive trunk and the trail.
“We should keep going. I have flashlights in my pack,” Madeline said. She’d turned her horse around, but she didn’t dismount.