Resistance (Of Ember and Flame Book 1) by C.E. Ord

Author:C.E. Ord [Ord, C.E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OH Publishing
Published: 2021-12-20T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

For a moment after Coen had declared me “ready,” I’d felt fleeting terror, thinking that we were about to march off in pursuit of the ruby that evening. What he’d actually meant was that I was ready for something else entirely. The terror though, as it turned out, had been a completely appropriate response to his statement.

“Wolves?” I said, looking back and forth between Sebastian and Coen in disbelief. “Wolves?”

“Yes,” Sebastian said calmly, as if it were a completely reasonable and normal concept. “Wolves. In the forest, in the dark of night, while they hunt.”

Anything I’d gleaned from Coen’s inspirational speech earlier about channeling fear abandoned me completely, dread seizing my stomach as I thought of the human-hand-sized wolf prints we’d seen in these very woods only days earlier.

“I . . .” My words, like my composure, were failing me. I fell into silence, my mind spinning as I contemplated the task Sebastian had set me. To walk into the forest in the still of night; to wait for the wolves to come for me, to stalk and descend; and then to hold them at bay with only the power of my mind. It was insanity.

I’d seen wolves in the wild once as a child, when our parents had taken Tyler and I to visit Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Wolf spotting was a popular and fairly well-organized activity in the canyon we’d visited. But even at a distance of a few hundred yard, looking through binoculars and spotting scopes along with close to two dozen other tourists and a couple of park rangers, watching the raw savagery of the wolf pack as they had feasted on an earlier-felled elk carcass had sorely tested my flight-or-fight response. And faced with the unflinching brutality and power of the enormous, vicious beasts, even my nine-year-old self had known that flight was the only sane choice.

“Remember,” Coen said evenly, pulling me momentarily from my fast-escalating panic, “you already know how to do this. You effortlessly controlled over two hundred sheep on your first attempt yesterday, and you know how to monitor your environment now, to see what’s coming. You can do this.”

“Sheep—sheep aren’t wolves,” I said haltingly, my fear now mixing with rising anger that I was even being asked to do this. “They’ll kill me.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Coen said firmly. “I’ll be there—close enough that I can step in if you lose control—which you won’t. You can do this, and I have done it, many times before. You’ll be okay.”

“And you need to do this,” Sebastian said, his calm tone somehow both grave and matter-of-fact at the same time. “Samael and Achlaya will make the worst of the wolves here look like nothing more than puppies. You need to test yourself, against unpredictable aggression and power, to learn how to manage fear in its most primal, disruptive form. I would be failing you if I sent you out into our world, out to hunt Samael and reclaim your stone, without first testing you to the fullest extent possible.

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