The Wolf and the Witch (Witch Walker, #3)

by Charissa Weaks

If he were wise, he would understand that I am no trophy. I am no prize. I am a shrew.

“What’s unpleasant for one might be pleasant for another.” He turns and stalks toward the gloom hovering between the trees. “I rather like your bark, witch,” he calls. “Though I’m more interested in seeing if you have any bite.”

“I know you do. I’ve seen you hovering for the last eight years. You and the sorcerer as well. As though neither of you realizes that woman” —he stabs a finger toward me— “can fucking take care of herself.”

“I want to be the woman who wields a god against Thamaos. I want to be the woman who wields you.” Fuck me. She doesn’t know it yet, but I fear she already is that woman.

The witch’s secret observations are now whispers to the wolf’s ears.” He winks one golden-brown eye. “You might be careful what thoughts you conjure, Miss Bloodgood. I just might make them come true.”

“You smell like bliss and ruin at the same time.”

I’m talking about the memories of that final year before Urdin killed my father. Memories that meant everything to you, because they were memories of a woman named Raina Bloodgood, who appeared at Min-Thuret late one summer night and fell under Un Drallag’s care.”

“Thamaos wasn’t only trying to reach Colden Moeshka, yet another pawn. He wanted to eradicate the silent witch his Seers warned him about.

“I think I was remembering my Raina. My virago.”

“I have crossed from the living realm to the realm of the dead,” he says, voice hard, words sharp as knives. “I have walked where only spirits trod. Now I know I did it for her. I was looking for her. I think I’ve always been looking for her, even if my mind didn’t understand. Even if it latched onto any other reason for my actions. Because my soul knew. It knew I would find her in the valley, and so I went there. It knew she would eventually be a witch in the vale, and so I took witches.

So how dare you tell me that I cannot find her. How dare you think that anything will keep me from her.”

“Three hundred years ago,” he goes on, “the love I felt for Raina, buried though it might have been, became my driving instinct. That part of me sought immortality, at whatever cost, a need masked by my guilt for Colden, so that not even death could become a boundary. So believe me when I tell you that time won’t stand in my way either. It hasn’t yet.”

“Because you’d let this broken continent fucking burn if it meant you were saving Raina Bloodgood in the process. I don’t have to know love to understand the obsession that comes with it.”

I smell her before I see or hear her. My little dictator.

“You admitted as much. And then you left me anyway. So maybe you need to figure out why you suddenly don’t believe that anymore. Why suddenly, you think I need a hero. I’m my own fucking hero. Don’t forget it.” She walks past me, smacking