I Say Your Name in the Dark Nights by Jonathan Maberry

Author:Jonathan Maberry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

12

Amarok stood outside.

The ground around him was littered with a thousand feathered corpses. Sprawled among them were the torn and bloody bodies of a dozen wolves. Actual wolves. The pack that had come when he and his sister had called them. Wolves driven mad by the call of a kind of alpha they had never encountered, but whose dominance was sewn into the fabric of their race memory.

But dead now.

All dead.

Amarok stood alone.

Waiting for his sister to come out of the tower. He heard her howls, her screams, her cries. But the fire in the doorway had barred him from entering. Not the flames themselves—what was fire to one such as he? No, it was what burned.

Rose and hawthorn and blackthorn.

Sacred woods, but not from his religion. From an older one whose roots were dug so far into the past that all of human history was too young to understand it. He knew it, though. His kind knew it and feared it. Not silver, as the legends all said. Never silver. That was something his kind had whispered to the humans, a necessary lie.

It was never silver. It was always wood of the rose family.

And hawthorn was the worst of all.

So he waited. Not in wolf shape but as a man. The fighting was done, and he stood waiting to share in the feast with his beloved sister.

The fire moved.

It trembled for a moment and then was jerked backwards.

“Tikaani, my love,” called Amarok, “bring me his liver but spare his heart. Our master wants that, and his head. But, oh yes, a nice piece of liver from that drunken fool of a—”

Something came flying from the doorway. A head. Amarok laughed and caught it, delighted at his sister’s playful gift. He held it up to admire it in the downspill of moonlight.

He looked down into the dead eyes.

And screamed.

He did not see Kagen come through the doorway. He was too busy screaming.

And then he was too busy dying.

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