The Wolf King

  The Wolf King

  Jovee Winters

  JoveeWintersPublishing

  Contents

  The Wolf King

  The Wolf King

  1. Rayale

  2. Rayale

  3. The Heartsong (aka Red, aka Violet)

  4. Rayale

  5. Violet

  6. Ewan

  7. Rayale

  Untitled

  8. Ewan

  9. Violet

  10. Rayale

  11. Ewan

  12. Rayale

  13. Ewan

  Epilogue

  Untitled

  Other books by Jovee: Blue Moon Bay cozy pnr mystery romance

  The Wolf King

  Copyright March, 2018 Jovee Winters

  Cover Art by Phatpuppy

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  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning, or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Jovee Winters, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in the context of reviews.

  Applications should be addressed in the first instance, in writing, to Jovee Winters. Unauthorized or restricted use in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.

  The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patent Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.

  Published in 2018 by Jovee Winters, Colorado Springs, CO United States of America

  The Wolf King

  My name's Red. My friends call me Violet, but I was once known by another name, The Heartsong...aka the darkness of the land. Once upon a time, I was a killer, a hunter, with only one goal in mind. Ending the Big Bad Wolf and taking back my power. But somewhere along the way, I realized the real enemy was myself. We fell in love, we made a life. And then a curse came and ripped it all apart. Now my lover and best friend can't remember who I am, and most days I can't remember him either. The curse has shaped us back into the former versions of ourselves. The dark, evil, and worst parts of us. All I know is I need to kill. I need to hurt something, and the only thing I know to do is to hunt the biggest and baddest beast in all the lands. But something inside of me has begun to stir. Memories of another time, a different place. And a man I once loved more than reason or sanity should allow. I have to break this curse on me, on us, before its too late. But to do it I'll have to try and remember our once upon another time...

  One

  Rayale

  The sun’s rays were but a spark of fading orange-gold in the gathering dusk of encroaching night. I stood upon the highest peak of Dragon’s Tooth Ridge. The wind whipped violently through my braided hair, causing the tips to lash at me like agitated serpents.

  Wetting my lips, I cautiously approached the massive stony entryway of Ying’s home. Or rather, what had once been Ying’s home.

  It’d been ages since I’d last seen my friend, but a dragon’s memory was eternal, and unless the curse had somehow altered hers, she would know me.

  Swallowing hard, I prayed to the gods that she knew me. Because I had no other options left.

  Kingdom, at least the one I’d once known, was long gone. And though the fairy council worked diligently to fix the mess Blue-now-Pink had created, not everyone would get the fix they so desperately needed.

  Some lives would be forever altered, but I’d be damned if I let that happen to me or mine.

  Gripping my flute tightly, I gathered whatever dregs of courage remained in me and, in a voice as clear as a bell, I called out to her.

  “Ying! Are you there? It’s me. It’s—”

  “Rayaaaale.” The dragon’s voice was a low rumbling vibrado that pulsated through the soles of my heels and made me shiver involuntarily. We’d once been friends, but dragonbornes, at their heart, were wild, ancient creatures that did not think as humans did—though their alter form appeared, on the surface, to be just that.

  My heart stuttered as I watched the shadows within the cave gather and coalesce into a massive shape of scales, long limbs, and powerfully flexing muscles.

  Ying was dragonborne, one of the very last there was, which meant she was a shifter. Both human and animal, her species had once been plentiful, but they’d long since gone extinct. All that remained now was Ying, so far as we knew.

  The growl of the approaching dragon caused my knees to buckle, and I had to bite down on my bottom lip hard enough to feel the sting just to keep my wits about me. It’d been centuries since I’d been around Ying, trapped as I’d been in a vortex of time—a world of dreams, puzzles, and eternal riddles that had fundamentally altered me in ways I couldn’t even begin to fathom and feared knowing.

  As she walked out of the tunnel, her form began to reshape itself, growing smaller, more compact, until what stood before me wasn’t the long, sinuous ivory-scaled body of an ancient dragon, but the stunning visage of a woman completely transformed from the one I’d once known.

  Her hair was white as snow and trailed down to her ankles. A tiny circlet of gold, sprouting shimmering white flowers, encircled large, curving ebony horns that protruded from her head. The horns were pierced through with elaborate chains, and their sharply pointed tips gleamed silver. Her irises were soft-pink, and her features were far more mature than I’d remembered them being. Back when we’d run together, she’d still worn the flush of youth upon her cheeks. There’d been a plumpness to her body that had turned ripe and sharp with age.

  During our years together, she’d always preferred to wear pink, the color of youth and first bloom, but now she wore a cheongsam, the ornate traditional dress of her people. It was a fiery red fabric with gorgeous golden threading, denoting her status as a dragonborne in her prime. The gown had a shell-scooped bodice and was sleeveless, allowing the lambent image of a dragon at rest that was inked upon her collar and down both arms to peek through. I didn’t know where she’d gotten the gown, considering her homeland was nothing more than an empty gaseous space in the endless cosmos, but I’d always known that Ying—just like any good dragon—had a mountain full of treasure she kept hidden away from the rest of the world.

  I gasped, looking at her.

  “You’ve hit your final metamorphosis,” I said, a touch of awe in my words.

  She nodded slowly. “I have, bewitching one.”

  My heart trembled to hear her call me as she’d once done. Though we’d changed much, I knew from that name that the curse hadn’t altered her memories of me or the lives that we’d once led. It was that recollection of who we’d once been to one another, what she’d once meant to me and I to her, that was likely the only thing preventing her from killing me where I stood.

  Dragons were territorial and easily angered. But they were also ancient, wise, and fiercely loyal.

  “Why have you come to me?” she asked, voice still resonant with that of the beast. Once she’d called me sister, once we’d laughed and played together, but deep down, I’d always feared that we’d lose our bond when she hit her final stage of being. It made me sad to think that time had come.

  What if she didn’t help me? What if she no longer cared? Ying had not been born of this world. Her world had been built of blood and bones and ashes. It was lost forever to time, existing in her long memory alone.

  But instinct was intrinsic and I was ashamed to admit that after the curse I’d not given her much thought or notice up until q
uite recently. I had no idea what types of changes she’d been forced to endure in this lonely isolated place she called home now. And whether being set apart from the rest of Kingdom had altered the sweet woman she’d once been into something more like her warring matriarchs of yesteryear.

  She was truly alone in this place, a dragon without a thunder—the dragon name for a familial herd—to call her own. Kingdom had its share of dragons, but a dragonborne and a dragon might as well be two completely different species. They were not the same, though they appeared to be so to the untrained eye.

  I bowed my head, held my hands together in front of me, and prayed to the gods that she hadn’t changed so much.

  “I… I need help.”

  Seconds ticked by. My heart was pounding so hard that it felt as if it had permanently lodged itself in my throat. I trembled, imagining all sorts of terrible things she could do to me if our bond were no longer true.

  The dragonborne had been eradicated for a reason, sad though it made me—they weren’t known for playing well with others. But Ying had always been special, different. Even her mother had said Ying would be the one who’d survive where the others could not because she’d had the one thing they’d all lacked.

  Empathy.

  But she’d only been a child then. The final stage of being altered them into their true and most powerful form, and I had no idea whether she would still be who she’d once been.

  Swallowing hard, I dared to look up and was transfixed by the burning red of her gaze. But she was not looking at me. Instead, she was staring at a spot just over my left shoulder.

  Her breaths were even and deep. The wind tossed the tips of her hair, and the blossoms in her crown broke off and undulated around her trim body. She looked like a mystic, a wise shaman, not at all like the rough-and-tumble friend of my previous life, who’d liked nothing more than the thrill of the hunt and nights spent sleeping beneath the stars. She was part of the life I’d had before the curse had laid waste to all I’d loved and held dear.

  So much had changed since the curse was cast. Not just for me, but everyone. I’d been sent on a quest by the Pink to search out the whereabouts of Red and her Wolf, Ewan.

  Wolf was the father of Lleweyn, my one and only love. As much as I had hated Lleweyn at one point, and as much history as we had, I could never abandon him. And I could never again have him if I couldn’t restore the balance of all that the curse had stripped from us.

  I’d searched high and low for months for any trace, any sign of either Red or Wolf, but had found neither. It was like they’d simply ceased to be.

  My only solace was that Lleweyn was still trapped in Medusa’s stone. And so long as he remained, I knew there was still a chance. But with each day that had passed with no sign of Red and Wolf to be found, I had begun to lose faith that I would ever again be reunited with my one true love.

  That was, until three nights previous, when I’d been sleeping beneath the stars. I wasn’t sure why I’d heeded the dream or why I’d woken up, startled and glancing all around the woods. I felt more comfortable under the stars than in a dwelling with four walls. But in the wind, I’d heard the echoing cries of Lleweyn telling me to go find Ying.

  Find Ying, the wind had cried at me, shivering with the strains of his deep, accented rumble, and I’d nodded, tears streaming down my face. Sure in my heart that I’d not truly heard Lleweyn at all, but the deepest desires of my own desperate heart. Still, I’d stamped out my campfire and had immediately turned toward the West.

  So here I was standing high upon the tallest cliffs of the tallest peak in all of Kingdom, thinking I’d made a colossal fool of myself. What could she know? What could she possibly know?

  Nothing was the same anymore.

  Nothing.

  Her eyes glowed like heated magma when she finally turned them on me. I went absolutely still, hardly daring to breathe as I was pulled into her ancient gaze, feeling as though I were falling into some deep, bottomless well of darkness.

  I dug my nails into my palms, struggling to resist the hypnotic pull of the dragonborne, fighting to remain in the here and now and not lose myself to the madness of her kind’s mystic arts.

  “I remember,” she said succinctly.

  I blinked, not sure what she meant. I didn’t know how I should respond, so I said nothing, hoping she’d share more or give me some direction as to where she was going with this.

  She nodded again, slowly walking forward, bridging the gap between us. The perpetually blooming flowers cascaded all around her and her power rolled off her form in waves, lashing against me. I winced. I knew she didn’t intend to hurt me because when she noticed my wince, she immediately stopped moving and looked aside, her beautiful face full of unrelenting sadness.

  “Being with me is painful for you now, is it not, sister?”

  The breath I’d not realized I’d been holding escaped me. I didn’t want to tell her about the pain, but Ying had never abided lies of any sort, even the kind meant to protect her feelings. Dragonborne were intractable and unyielding in their belief system.

  “Yes, Ying. It is pain. But it is also pleasure. I have missed you.”

  She glanced at me from the corner of her eye, a ghost of a smile on her full pink lips. “And I you. I remember our hunts. Those were joyous days.”

  I gave a weak smile back. “They were some of my happiest days.”

  Her nostrils flared, and though she’d not taken another step toward me, she was finally looking at me head on. “The boy. The soul stealer.”

  She’d never been fond of Lleweyn. Not that I could blame her—he had stolen my soul. I hadn’t altogether forgiven him, myself. But with time, distance, and the fact that we existed in a completely different reality, I wasn’t quite as inclined to hang onto old grudges.

  I nodded. “He is in me, Ying. He was always in me.”

  She closed her eyes. “I’ve always known it, Bewitching.”

  When she looked back at me, her eyes no longer glowed like heated magma. They were the soft tinge of pink that made her look both alien and enchanting.

  “For three nights, I’ve dreamt of the soul thief, heard his voice crying out to me through time and distance.”

  I twitched, heart hammering violently in my chest. “Lleweyn? You… you’ve heard him?”

  Had the dream voice truly been his then? I’d not thought so, believing it to be my own fractured mind playing games on me, but what if… My fingernails dug into my palm and a fissure of thrilling agony zipped down my spine like a bolt of lightning, making me heady and breathless.

  She nodded. “He is in agony. His stone heart slowly leeches the life from him. If he remains trapped much longer in Medusa’s enchanted rock, he will become the very thing that is keeping him alive.”

  I gasped, shaking all over. “Wh-what? He’s dying?”

  She wet her lips, saying nothing, but her eyes said it all.

  A sound somewhere between a wail and a cry slid off my tongue, and I nearly toppled to my knees.

  She rushed toward me, grabbing hold of my arm and holding me fast. Her grip burned, and I smelled the stench of burning leather. She did not have control over her powers just yet. Her metamorphosis must have been very recent. It would be years more before she mastered containing her fire.

  But the pain of her grip helped ground me, helped me to focus on the task at hand. Once she was sure I was okay on my own, she reluctantly let me go.

  Her fingerprints had burned themselves into my forearm, and the smell of my skin offended my nostrils. My arm stung, throbbing in cadence with the beating of my pulse. Ying looked down, and the whites of her eyes were laced with veins of blood red.

  “It only hurts a little, my friend,” I murmured and hid my hand behind my back. Her nostrils flared, and she said nothing, but the red slowly faded back to light pink.

  She took a step back and clenched her fingers together.

  I nodded and told myself that it wasn’t the time to assua
ge guilty feelings or hurts of any sort. Time was a commodity of which I had precious little. I needed to gather my thoughts and focus on the task at hand. For three months, I’d been searching for any hint of Ewan and Red, so fixated on my task that I’d not thought about the prospect of failing. I was not a loser. Whatever I set my sights on, I succeeded at.

  And this would be no different.

  “How much longer has he?”

  She shook her head. “I do not know. Only that he grows weaker every day. I have traveled the ley lines in the darkness of night, knowing that soon you would come for me.”

  It was eerie how different she was and just how similar she was too.

  She was ten times more powerful than she’d been when she and I had run the forests, but in her eyes, I still read the bonds of sisterhood. Even through curses and time, she was still my friend.

  I smiled softly at her, and she returned it.

  “Did you find anything, Ying? Anything that can help me?”

  “I believe I have.”

  I gasped, fighting to contain my joy, fighting not to cry and whoop to the skies like a madwoman. After three months of fruitless searching, to think that I might be on the cusp of discovering them… it almost didn’t feel real.

  But at her frown, my smile slowly slipped. I cocked my head, feeling chilled all over.

  “What? What is it?”

  “They do not exist in this realm.”

  “Earth then?” I asked, voice sounding hollow even to my own ears. I gripped the silver flute in my hands tightly, rubbing my thumb over the reed to steady my frazzled nerves. I’d never had any desire to travel to the dead place. That was what I called Earth because of its lack of magick and the closed minds of its citizens, who didn’t believe in magick at all. But I was familiar enough with Earth to think I could do alright there, so long as I was able to get in and out quick.ly “Red was once taken to the earthen realm…”