I grimaced with disgust.

  “I have fathered many children with my fairy concubines,” Delano continued on. “They are accepted neither in the pixie nor the fairy worlds, for they lack great power. But a child of a Summer Royal would have great enough power to overcome the natural antipathy Pixies feel towards Fey, and vice versa. I could father one of the most powerful rulers Skirnismal has ever known. After all, Breena's blood is strong. She has the power of Summer in her veins. And, though half-mortal, she was powerful enough to survive the fairy kiss...”

  I gaped. “She what?”

  “Your spies are less astute than my own,” said Delano. “When the Prince Kian kissed Breena, she did not go mad. She did not die. She was strong enough to bear the force of his passion.”

  The image of Breena and Kian kissing flitted across my subconscious, and a wave of agony passed over me.

  “No...”

  “Poor fool,” said Delano. “Silly puppy dog. You thought she loved you, didn't she? You trotted around after her – after all, you wouldn't even be in this mess if you hadn't been fool enough to come back for her, fool enough to follow her as she willingly tossed your life in the gutter to save her precious fairy prince.”

  “How dare you!” I struggled against my chains, my hands itching to clutch Delano's neck and throttle him where he stood.

  “You think she cares for you – even as a friend? When she tossed your life aside as if it meant nothing to her!”

  “It wasn't like that!” I shouted. “She was doing the right thing. She owed Kian her life!”

  “And she didn't owe you anything?”

  “She couldn't have known what was going to happen...”

  “She took the risk,” Delano's yellow, scaly teeth glinted in the candlelight. “How much do you think that the Princess Breena really cares for you? Not much, evidently. I must say, Logan, I'm disappointed in you. A proud warrior like yourself, turning into a puppy out of desire to mate with a bitch in heat...”

  “How dare you talk about Breena like that!” My face was flushed with rage. “She would never love you!”

  “Now now,” said Delano. “Let's not get hasty, here. Luckily, I have no such compunctions. I don't care who Breena loves. Her emotions are of no concern to me. What I want is her hand in marriage and my children in her belly – what she feels matters little to me.”

  Yet as Delano spoke, I saw a flicker of sadness in his eyes. Was he really so cruel and callous as he pretended, I wondered? His voice briefly shook, and it almost seemed as if he, too, regretted Breena's disgust with him.

  “Yet that is not the only thing I need from you, Wolf,” Delano continued. “There is something else you know. Something else you possess. My soothsayers have spoken. They have identified you as a special Wolf indeed.”

  “Me?”

  “You are the Wolf Prince, are you not?”

  “Yes,” I began, confused, “but what does that...”

  “Then you will give me the Wolfstone.”

  “The what?”

  “Don't play coy with me, Wolf. My soothsayers have predicted it – you are the true carrier of the stone.”

  “I don't even know what it is!”

  “You know full well – your filthy race, when they bartered away all that was pure and magical in exchange for their bestial powers, gave away your immortality to the Queen Panthea, who gave you in turn your red blood and your fetid animal filth, is that not so?”

  I seethed at his words. “In a manner of speaking, I suppose,” I forced the words out through gritted teeth.

  “And the immortality of your race – an immortality we pixies would no doubt find useful, too – was it not contained in a stone? A blood-red, shining stone hidden among your people?”

  “I've never heard of such a thing!”

  “My soothsayers do not lie,” scowled Delano. “And I highly suggest that you do not risk lying to me either. Unless you want to pass another month languishing in my dungeon.”

  Suddenly, I remembered what Alistair had said about the source of Wolf immortality. Could this stone be what he was talking about? I flashed back to the dreams I had about the Red Wolf – dreams that seemed so powerful, so real...Was there any truth at all in what Delano said – did I somehow have information about the Wolfstone?

  “I've never heard of any stone,” I said. Whatever I knew, I certainly wasn't going to share with Delano. “And the story about Queen Panthea is just a myth. Wolves have never been immortal.”

  “Lies!” snarled Delano. “Do you really mean to defy me?”

  I snarled right back. “Yes, Delano, I do.”

  “Very well...” Delano leaned back into his throne. “Then I suppose I have no choice but to return you to the dungeon. Your torture will commence as soon as my soldiers finish sharpening their tools.”

  I refused to drop his gaze, staring at him with steely eyes. Although my stomach churned at the idea of returning to the dungeon, I refused to betray any fear.

  “And Logan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don't expect quite so much food from now on. It looks like the kitchen's going to have a shortage of crusts of bread.”

  His cruel, glinting smile was the last thing I saw as Delano's men dragged me back into the dungeon.

  Chapter 13

  The tortures began again. If I had thought that the previous round of beatings and burnings had been nigh-on-unbearable, the next set was worse. Delano evidently thought that I needed to be subdued at any cost, and was doing all he could to break my spirit. My rations dwindled to mere crumbs of bread; the ache in my stomach was almost as bad as the stinging of my wounds. The water I was given was brown and filthy, and I gagged many times while forcing it down, knowing that to drink was my only chance at life.

  A life that meant nothing any more. For Kian had kissed Breena! He had touched his lips to her in that deadly kiss, and she had withstood it. She had kissed him back – their lips had touched. Their bodies had entwined together. I knew what that meant. Their love was more than a mere infatuation – more than her mere gratitude for his kindness. Something real and true was happening between them, something I could not hope to understand. And yet, though I could not comprehend it, that made it no less real. Every time I closed my eyes the image of the two of them locked in congress appeared before me, filling me with twined feelings of revulsion and desire. I could not picture her lithe, graceful form without picturing his muscular frame besides her; I could not dream of her perfumed lips without imagining them bruised and bitten by his rough passion. The pure, idealized form that Breena had always taken in my imaginings was now polluted: she was no longer my Breena, the best friend whom I had loved for years, the one with whom I had grown up, the one with whom I had shared all my secrets, but now a stranger to me. In one short week she had changed so much. She had this whole fairy life of which I knew nothing, could understand nothing. She had a new love, a new duty, a new destiny, a new calling....

  And I had only this pain inside me.

  At times I dreamed of Gregory. How happy we had been there together. Two Feyland creatures playing at normalcy, walking in the woods behind Gregory High School together, smelling the fresh pine and sweet fir, crunching the leaves with our feet! We had shared so many secrets: I had bared my soul to her – telling her all my innermost thoughts except the one that haunted me most. My love for her. We had cooked together, played together, walked and talked and laughed together – she was my Breena. The Breena I knew. The Breena I loved.

  And now she was this woman: taller, stronger, healthier, more confident. A woman whom I loved and yet could not recognize. She had changed so much in my absence. I knew the air of Feyland acted on visitors this way – the magic of Feyland had tapped into the magic in her blood, transforming her into the powerful queen she had always been meant to be.

  And I could not begrudge her that. But yet how I wished she could have made that transformation with me – how I wished we could have discovered the secrets of Feyland together! But instead she was gone, off with Kian, exploring a destiny that I would never know. For I knew now that I would never make it beyond the walls of this dank and forbidding castle. It was too late. I couldn't give Delano the information he wanted, and when he realized that not even torture would wrangle the information out of me, I knew that he would give up on me immediately and have me killed. I only hoped it would be quick.

  But I couldn't bear the torment of waiting. Not knowing which day would be my last – which worm-filled piece of bread, which bile-tasting glass of water, would be the last I ever drank. My brain grew hot and my forehead blazed with fever; I grew dizzy and lost my sense of direction, of time.

  I started dreaming again. The Red Wolf returned to me, those vivid dreams alive with such color, such vibrancy, that they seemed realer than the dungeon that surrounded me. I was the Red Wolf once more – but this was not the battle-hardened, rough soldier I had dreamed of before, the one who prepared to face down the Dark Hordes. This was a younger Connell – not a Wolf at all but a full-fledged fairy, his scarlet wings the only presage of what would come to pass. This Connell bled silver; he did not transform.

  He – or rather I – was traveling from village to village, asking every inn-keeper, every tavern-owner, the same question, like the refrain of a song. “Do you know where lives the Queen Panthea, the bringer of the most ancient magic?”

  “No,” came the response – one by one they all denied ever having heard of any such Queen. A few scoffed and jeered: “that's just a children's fairy tale! You might as well have said we've seen Billy the Blue Mouse or the Fir Fairy,” they said, quoting two tales Connell – like the rest of his kind – had been brought up upon as children.

  But Connell was not deterred from his goal. He had faith. The Queen Panthea was out there, he told himself, and he was determined to find her, even if it meant walking to the ends of the earth, into the center of the twin suns of Feyland themselves.

  The Dark Hordes were coming. He had sensed it in a dream – a vision that woke him and left him drenched with nightmares and sweat – and although none of the other Fey believed him he was certain it was true. The Dark Hordes were coming, and he was the only one who could stop it.

  He and his half-brother, the Prince. Their father, when he was alive, had taken two women as his wife, one after the other, and each woman had borne him a son. But they each had died in childbirth, and only the two brothers remained. The two last scions of a once-noble Fey family. But it was better, Connell thought, that he had no family to see him do what he had to do now – wandering the countryside like a poor beggar, chasing after fairytales. Those that saw him mocked him as mad. “There goes Connell, the mad visionary,” they chanted. “He believes that creatures out of children's stories are coming to attack us!”

  How ashamed his father and mother would have been, Connell thought, if they had seen him humiliated like this. But he was undeterred. He knew the Dark Hordes were rising. He could sense it. And his vision had told him that only Queen Panthea could give him the answer, tell him how to stop it.

  Only his half-brother believed him.

  But Connell knew that this particular mission was his alone.

  At last Connell came to an ancient city – decimated by an avalanche of snow a hundred years ago, it was little more than a collection of ruins now. But it was a cold night, and Connell needed shelter, and so he huddled up in the barely-standing remains of one stone house. He slept under the stars, repeating as he did every night his sad refrain:

  “Feyland magic, show me the way.”

  That morning he woke to find an old crone standing over him, her withered face unable to conceal the brightness and beauty of her scarlet eyes. “You talk in your sleep,” she whispered to him. “I know what you seek. The others do not believe, but I believe. The Queen Panthea slumbers in the Island of Isolation, three hundred miles north of Calaman City by the Sea of Barnaclea. It is a dangerous road – you must follow the shining star (it is called Calthon's Star). You must not get eaten by dragons, or banshees, or six-headed snake-beasts that live underwater. You must fight off the sharks and the mad mer-creatures. If you do that, you will reach the island. At the center of the island is a cave surrounded by fire. Only the worthy can enter. And if you enter it without being burned alive, you will find Panthea. And you must wake her with a single kiss.

  “But be warned. Her kiss is deadly. It burns through the immortality in a Fey, making him little more than mortal.” And then she vanished.

  Connell shivered. The old crone spoke of terrors that would strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest of his men. But Connell knew that even the most fearsome mer-creatures would be a preferable foe to the Dark Hordes. Feyland hung in the battle. And so he set forth.

  It was just as the crone had said.

  He encountered many challenges on his journey. He battled with sea monsters, and he thrust his trident into the hearts of vicious mermen; he barely survived shipwreck and storms, and lost nearly twenty men when a great tsunami nearly sank the boat. But Connell did not waver in his plans. No danger, he knew, was as great as the danger presented by the Dark Hordes. And if he died in the attempt to save Feyland, so be it. It was worth it.

  And then one day, after many years at sea, when Connell had grown bearded and haggard with exhaustion, and his hands had grown rough and blistered with the salt of the water and the ache of his wounds, he found the island of which the crone had spoken. It was a tangled chaotic place – vines were overgrown over ancient ruins, and all was green and savage. Nobody had been here, Connell knew, in centuries; the ancient magic was strong here, strong and untouched. As he made his way through the jungle, forcing his way through brambles and twisted grape-vines and miles of brush, he began to feel a sense of hope at long last. Could this be the home of the mysterious Panthea, the old Queen of ancient Feyland, who slumbered, awaiting the deadly kiss that would awaken her.

  Twenty different beasts guarded her cave – giants and banshees and dark phoenixes and savage sphinxes – Connell fought and killed all of them, each time adding another wound to the many silver scars that streaked his once-marble frame.

  And then at last he entered the cave. The Queen Panthea lay before him, slumbering upon a slab of marble. Her lips were red and half-parted. She was beautiful and yet terrible – she had a strange agelessness: she was neither a maiden nor a crone, but rather a creature that defied all time.

  This was the moment, Connell knew. It was time for him to awaken her. Even if it meant sacrificing his immortality in the process. He had no other choice. He leaned in and touched his lips to hers.

  Immediately he felt his life force ebbing out of him, felt the deep power within her pulling out his magic, clutching at it, stealing it. He trembled; his knees shook; at last he fell to his feet, screaming in agony.

  Panthea sat up straight, her eyes blazing. She coughed, and from her mouth she produced a small red stone, the color of animal blood. She took it and placed it in Connell's hands.

  “You have sacrificed much, young man,” she said. “You clearly wished to find me. What brings you here – what made you risk such dangers?” Asleep, she had been terrifying; awake, her palpable power left Connell breathless.

  Connell trembled as he recounted his story to her. When he had finished, Queen Panthea nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “I will help you. But it will come as a sacrifice. First you have given me your immortality. Now, I will need your magic. To fight these beasts you must become beasts. Your blood must run red, not silver. Hold out your arm.”

  Connell did not hesitate. He did not cry out as she punctured a vein in his arm with a sword, catching droplets of his blood in a capsule. He watched her go to the mouth of her cave, hunting and killing a wolf with a single shot of an arrow from her enormous bow, and then return the carcass.

  “These two bloods will mingle,” she said. “And make you a hybrid, too. I will come with you to Feyland. I will do this for all of your men who wish it. And then I will return to sleep again – but this time, young Wolf, you will not find me. I can be found only once by he who seeks me, for I am never in the same place twice. I told you my location once – I came to you as that crone – for I found you worthy. But I will not come to you again.”

  And so Connell and his men became wolves.

  And Connell, to the end of his days, kept the stone that Queen Panthea had produced from her mouth. Panthea had ordered him to guard it well, with his life; he kept it hidden from all prying eyes.

  I dreamed this dream over and over again, and then I was awakened by a rough kick to the stomach.

  It was a pixie guard.

  “His majesty wishes to see you again,” the pixie scowled.

  Chapter 14

  I groggily got up, stumbling to my feet. The dream had been so real, so vivid, that coming back to myself was like crossing universes. I had lived alongside Connell the Red Wolf; I had been Connell. In my dreams I had been free of the torture, free of the pain. I had lived in an ancient time more magical than even the revered territories of Autumn Springs. But now here I was again – back in the dungeon. No light. No food. Only filthy water and nightly beatings. Last night, such treatment – combined with the memory of Breena's love for Kian – had reduced me to despair. I had prayed for death, looking upon oblivion as a deliverance. I had waited hopefully for that final blow, that definitive kick, that would release me from my agony and let me sleep the wandering sleep of the Dead. I had dreamed of being set upon that mysterious path from which return was impossible.

  But as I faced the pixie guard, who grimaced as he struck me full across the face, crowing aloud as he did so, I no longer felt such despair.