The Queen of Wolves Read Online Free PDF Page A

yet understand.”
    “I’m not an idiot,” she snapped back, and pointed at me. “You watched me for years. You knew I would find you here, eventually. You’ve withheld the truth from me. Tell me now. Show me the secret place. The place where the wolf key fits the lock. If you must, drink all my blood. Bring the breath of vampyrism into me.”
    I felt what seemed a fist tightening at my chest. I willed my form to shift, as I had learned to do centuries before. I showed her the monster that I was—my canines grew to a size like a lion’s. I drew off some of my glamour that she might see the rotting corpse beneath my skin. I spread my wings wide, and revealed the kind of graveyard creature she had read of in fairytales and horror stories.
    “Is this what you wish for yourself, Natalia?” My eyes went white and yellow, and my skull showed through the thinning hair. “This is what exists beneath the beauty you see. Do not forget it, for I never have. I have seen it in mirrors, and know that while others may see and feel the flesh of a youth, I am this. If you wish to be both beautiful and hideous, then come to me. Give up your life. Die for immortality, and become the blood-drinker you despise.”

    7

    In a moment, I returned my visage to its former glory—a youth, barely past nineteen, thick hair at the scalp, the skin of youth —an angel of the alleyways. Each was an illusion—both the corpse and the young flesh.
    “I did not choose my fate. It was smashed against my soul. I chose the path of guardianship, rather than that of wholesale slaughter of innocents. What I do, I do to guard your realm. When I murder, it is within my instinct to do so—as the lion must chase down the antelope. What mortals do—when they slaughter and murder and war—is destroy their own kind.”
    I swooped down to her, standing before her. “You may judge me as you wish—only wait until my tale is ended. You have reminded me of the brutality of that world of my past—and of this one, beyond this city, full of the avaricious and the self-destructive.”
    “I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her arm and upturned her wrist toward my lips. “Drink from me. Show me the secrets that you’ve kept to yourself.”
    I grasped her wrist and drew her into my arms. My wings unfurled, and we rose in the air. I carried her out of the temple, to the fields of bones beyond the walls of Alkemara. There, where the flowers of the Veil grew thick in vines along the ancient ones, I drew out a vine, plucking two flowers from it.
    “Am I to get a lesson again about this flower?” she asked, crossing her arms before her.
    “If you need one, yes. If I squeezed the juice at the center of this small, sweet petal onto your tongue, you would cross the Veil and understand all. You would die, also. No mortal can drink of this and not breathe her last,” I said.
    She tried to reach for a blossom, but as soon as she neared it, it pricked her finger, and she withdrew it. About to thrust her finger in her mouth, I reached over and grabbed her hand.
    “I must withdraw the poison,” I said.
    I drew her hand to my own mouth, and sucked lightly at the pinprick wound. I tasted the copper of her life, and a slight essence of the Veil itself.
    When she withdrew her hand, the wound had healed. She reached for my left arm, and drawing up its sleeve, she said, “Will you tell me what this marking means?”
    There, like a tattoo of pale blue, just below my elbow, there was a jagged line that encircled my arm. “An old wound.”
    “Your arm was cut?”
    “Torn off, clean,” I said. “But there is sorcery that regenerates the flesh within me.”
    “Do all vampyres have such power?”
    “Many do,” I said. “Some do not. Some who have been maimed remain so, and others will draw back such limbs in a day’s rest.” I flexed my hand.
    “Was it cut off in battle?”
    I drew my sleeve back down, wishing to speak of other things, for I did not wish to remember the