Ghostly Snow: A Dark Fairy Tale Adaptation (Girl Among Wolves Book 3)

by Lena Mae Hill

  “She’s a witch,” she says. “You can’t trust a witch.”

  “Yeah, and I’m a shifty shifter, remember? Wolves don’t trust anyone. And no offense, but compared to you, she’s basically my witchy godmother. I’ll take that over a jailer any day.”

  She rubs her temple, a gesture so familiar it twists something inside me. I hate that I know her mannerisms, that I know anything about her.

  “I know that was hard on you,” she says. “I’m sorry about that. I didn’t know what else to do. I was always trying to protect you, Stella.”

  “Bull. Shit.” I spit the words out, staring all my hatred at her.

  “Of course you don’t understand,” she mutters. “You don’t want to see my side of it, so you won’t. But you should be careful of that woman. She’s the true mirror. Do not trust her. That’s all I came to tell you, when I found out you were staying in witch territory. It’s the least I could do.” She heaves herself up as if just standing exhausts her. “Watch out for yourself.”

  “Funny. Everyone else is telling me to watch out for you.”

  The corners of her mouth twist downwards as if she smells something bad. “I’m not here to hurt you. In fact, I’m going now.” She holds up both hands as if in surrender, and it occurs to me that she doesn’t know I can’t shift. She thinks I’m sparing her out of kindness. I’m tempted to set her straight, but I think better of it. If she knew I was no threat to her, she’d probably have shifted into a wolf and ripped out my throat.

  “Wait.” I stand, moving toward her. I have the power of fear now, the same power she used over me so many times. For so long, I lived with the threat of what she could do to me. Now she can sweat a little. “Is Harmon okay?”

  “He’s fine,” she says, her chin rising. “I’d not hurt my own pack members.”

  “Just your daughter,” I say. “But I guess that doesn’t count, since I’m not a wolf.”

  “I didn’t have to come here,” she says. “I didn’t have to warn you.”

  “You shouldn’t have bothered,” I say. “I don’t believe a word you say.”

  “You should,” she says. “That witchcraft she does—projection. It’s more dangerous than you know. I hope this one time, you’ll listen when I tell you what’s good for you.”

  “Oh, that’s rich,” I say, balling my hands into fists. I want to slap her like she slapped me all those times. I want to knock her to the ground, make her shake with fear. “Like you kept me locked up for my own good? Like you lied to me for my own good?”

  She draws herself up to her full height and looks down at me in that way that makes me feel like a small, spoiled child. “Goodbye, Stella.”

  I don’t know why I let her get to me, why I let her make me feel anything, for even a moment. But I’m so angry.

  “Hey,” I bark, striding forward to grab her shoulder. “You don’t get to walk away this time.” When she turns, I have to fight the urge to shrink back from her burning eyes. I’m no longer that girl who cowered on the floor when she hit me.

  “Is that so?” she asks with that haughty tilt to her chin.

  Rage blooms inside me. I’m the one who can hurt her now. I’m the bigger animal. And yet, she still treats me like I’m nothing but a human nuisance. Before I know what I’m doing, my hand is whipping through the air, across her cheek.

  Chapter 9

  Stunned, I step back, releasing her shoulder, starting to apologize even as my hand stings from the blow.

  My mother doesn’t wait for the apology. She grabs my shoulders and throws me to the ground. A stone digs into my shoulder, and the packed dirt of the clearing knocks the breath from me as I fall flat on my back. I scramble to get up, but my mother leaps onto me, still young enough to be nimble and a hell of a lot stronger than me. Where is my damn tiger when I need her?

  Mother’s hand blazes across one cheek and then the other. “Don’t you ever disrespect me like that,” she snarls, her eyes flashing.

  To my utter humiliation, tears spring to my eyes. But my mother isn’t looking at me. Her eyes fix on something beyond me, across the clearing. At first, I think it must be Doralice, but she’s off to our right. Before I can twist around to see what’s gotten her attention, she’s knocked ten feet across the clearing, tumbling to a stop beneath Doralice.

  Kale crouches over me, his tiny, needle-sharp teeth still bared. He quickly draws his lips down to cover them, grabs my hand, and pulls me to my feet as if I weigh nothing. I’m used to his faerie agility—he rarely uses the vines to move through the trees, but leaps from one to another like he belongs to some other realm of suspended animation—but I’ve never stopped to think how much strength that must take.

  “Are you all right?” Kale asks, his brow furrowing.

  I quickly swipe the tears from my cheeks, the humiliation of letting them show worse than my smarting cheeks. Across the clearing, my mother shrieks like she’s been impaled. My stomach lurches. But when I turn to her, she’s not being shot with a thousand needles from the juniper, or dismembered by the vengeful branches of my father’s first wife. She’s crouched on one knee, her head in her hands. For a second, I think she’s crying, too. But then she stands, lunges for Doralice, and twists one of her branches until it snaps.

  Kale winces, but he doesn’t leave my side. My mother falls to all fours this time, her body wracked with something that looks like a sob. I can’t be sure, though, because she transitions into a wolf form and races off into the woods, leaving her skirt and boots behind. Her plaid shirt hangs awkwardly from her wolf shoulders as she slips through the trees and disappears down the mountain.

  The sound of thudding feet pulls my attention back to the clearing, where Uzula and Xela have emerged from the trail, faces flushed and eyes wide. “What happened?” Xela asks.

  “Nothing,” I mutter, glancing at Kale.

  He frowns but doesn’t contradict me.

  “Oh, Doralice,” Uzula says, rushing over to peer at the broken branch. Despite running through the woods, her hair hangs as silky and shiny as ever, not a strand out of place. She turns accusing eyes on me. “Did you break her?”

  I swallow hard. If I deny it, I’ll have to tell them about my mother.

  “It wasn’t her,” Kale says quickly. “It was…a werewolf.” He nods to the abandoned skirt and boots lying at the foot of the juniper.

  “Oh, you poor dear,” Uzula says to the tree, turning back to examine the raw, jagged wood showing through the break. The rest of the branch still hangs on below the break. For a second, I think she might actually straighten the branch and bandage it.

  But then Haven comes skipping into the clearing, her fox on her heels. “Ooh, boots,” she says, picking up one my mother abandoned work boots. Yorn comes clomping into the clearing a minute later, looking even grumpier than usual, with a groundhog hanging from his short, thick hand. Everyone keeps asking what happened, so finally, I sit down and give them an abbreviated version. They all sit around listening, except Uzula, who is still fretting over Doralice.

  “Maybe you should stay up in the trees while we’re out,” Haven suggests later, when we’re all seated along our log, eating meat from our bowls.

  “I spent years trapped in her attic,” I say slowly. “I’m not really keen to be trapped in the trees because of her.”

  “You wouldn’t be trapped,” Haven says. “And you could still come down and be with us when we’re here. But maybe, just until you’re shifting again, it wouldn’t hurt to be cautious.”

  “You don’t have to stay up there all day,” Kale says. “You could climb up if you heard someone coming.”

  I frown into my bowl and set it on the ground at my feet. “I can’t keep running from her forever. Letting her control me through fear is letting her win.”

  “There’s being brave, and there’s being stupid,” Yorn says, not looking up from the bone he’s gnawing.

  “We just don’t want you getting hurt,” Kale says quietly. His dark eyes a
re so intense I feel my face warming.

  “Yeah, we’ve gotten kind of used to your singing,” Haven says. “It brightens up the place.”

  “I don’t sing,” I say, my face getting even hotter.

  “You’re always singing,” Yorn grumbles.

  I am? I mean, sometimes I hum when I’m building something. I did that at Mother’s, just so I’d have something besides silence. When the mice weren’t around, it seemed preferable to talking to myself.

  “It’s not terrible,” Uzula assures me. “You’re no songbird, but no one’s eardrums have exploded yet.”

  “And your cooking’s not bad,” Xela says. “Less gritty than ours.”

  “I don’t miss the sand in my soup,” Yorn grudgingly agrees.

  “The spoons are a nice addition,” Kale says.

  “They make me feel so civilized,” Xela agrees.

  “I could do without all that,” Yorn says. “Just one more thing to wash.”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll stay at the nests,” I say. “If anyone comes, I’ll climb up into the trees and hide. Everyone happy with that?”

  I pick up my bowl to finish my food, only to find it empty. When I turn around, Haven’s fox is sitting a few feet behind the bench, licking his lips. His pointy little nose seems to twitch, his eyes gleaming with triumph.

  After spending years thinking of animals as terrifying, and then months thinking of them as food, it’s hard to get used to having a pet around. When I had mice, they always waited for their crumbs. I shake my head at the fox, but I know better than to scold it. It’s not just a pet to Haven. It’s part of her magic, somehow.

  I take the bowls and head for the stream. A minute later, I hear footsteps behind me and stand, on alert. Kale steps from the trees holding the black cooking pot and some wooden utensils.

  I relax and turn back to the stream. “I’m sorry about earlier,” Kale says, crouching beside me and scooping up water with the pot. “If you didn’t want me to say anything.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I say. “Thank you for…helping with my mother.”

  For a minute, we wash in silence. My mind moves back to a time I washed dishes beside Harmon, when he was still a stranger to me. The day of my first kiss.

  Suddenly, the silence with Kale feels stifling, awkward. “You didn’t have to come down here,” I tell him, plunging a bowl into the icy water. “I don’t need a bodyguard.”

  “I know,” he says, looking wounded.

  “I just meant, I’d feel like a burden if I had to be escorted everywhere. But thank you for coming down to make sure I’m okay.”

  “Just helping wash the dishes,” he says, his attention riveted on a wooden spoon I carved. We finish washing the bowls and spoons in silence. When we’re done, he holds out the pot, and I neatly stack the bowls inside, acutely aware of his warmth every time my frigid hands brush against him. In silence, we make our way back to the clearing, only to find it empty. Everyone has gone to their nests, leaving only a few coals glowing in the fire pit.

  “Don’t worry,” Kale says as we step onto the dark path leading to the hive. “I’ll keep you safe.”

  I cut my eyes sideways at him, but I don’t say anything. All I want to do is run away from this, all the way back down the mountain and back to Harmon, where I belong. Except I don’t belong there. I don’t belong anywhere, which lets me belong with these misfits.

  Back at the hive, I stop and wait for a branch to take me up. But this time, Kale slips an arm around my waist and, before I can protest, leaps into the tree. I stifle a cry of surprise. Kale sets me down on the platform, and I catch the glint of his sharp teeth as he smiles. “If you wanted,” he says slowly. “If you don’t feel safe…”

  “I do,” I say quickly. “I feel safe. Thanks for the lift.” Then, before things can get even more awkward, I head to my own nest. Inside, I zip myself into my hammock and lie there, waiting. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for, but I can’t sleep. Somewhere nearby, a couple of the others are still talking in low voices. After a long while, when the voices have fallen silent, I slip out of my nest. The night is bitter, and my breath makes plumes of white in the dry air. I creep along a branch, illuminated by the rising moon.

  When I reach the familiar nest, I hop up and slip through the opening in the branches. Haven’s hammock hangs slack like a deflated balloon. For a minute, I stand there staring at it stupidly. But then I climb out and tiptoe back along the branches, trying not to notice that Kale’s nest is rocking steadily. I slip back into my own nest and into my hammock, feeling guilty, as if I spied on them. But I’m also painfully lonely as I nestle down into my hammock and try to sleep.

  Not that I wanted to be with either of them, not in that way. I just wanted a friend to tell these things to, a friend like I haven’t had in years. But I guess Kale didn’t mean much by his invitation. Like Haven said on my first night here, he’s lonely. And all these misfits, they have each other. They have cut ties with their people. They can move fluidly from one nest to another. And although I fit in with them, my heart is somewhere else. I don’t know how to get it back, or even how to want it back.

  Chapter 10

  For a while, I stay close to the hive during the day. But it gets boring. I find myself actually missing life with my mother, when I had ready access to any tool I could wish for. If she didn’t have one, she’d borrow it from someone in the community, and within a day, I’d have it. Here, I’m surrounded by trees, by wood, but I have nothing to build with. And I have a feeling the trees might not be so friendly if I started cutting and plaining them to make furniture.

  After a few weeks, I start to wander. I’m careful not to wander down the side of the mountain into the wolves’ valley. But when I go the other way, I stumble upon an old rock wall one day, no more than a foot high and halfway buried in leaves. It’s the kind of old-fashioned wall that is nothing more than a snaking line of stones piled up to mark the boundary. Nothing solid holds the stones in place. I step over the wall and catch sight of something I haven’t seen in a long while—the white lookout tower I spotted long ago.

  I head towards it, not having anything else to do. When I reach the tower, I’m out of breath, my lungs aching with the cold winter air. The whiteness of it nearly blinds me as I step out from behind the trees. The tower stands in a small clearing, choked with thick, tan grass and tangles of skeletal briars. I have to crane my head back to look up at it, at the lone window near the top, beneath the red shingles of the roof. It’s a strange lookout tower, without an observation deck. More than ever, it resembles an old lighthouse.

  There’s no door on this side, but curiosity gets the better of me. I wade across the field, brambles ripping at my ragged skirt, a hand-me-down from Haven. I’m halfway there when I sense someone’s presence. My head swings around, and I scent the air before I catch myself doing it. Stepping up to the tower, I flatten my back against it and wait, holding my breath. The wall is rough behind me, with tiny cracks running through the thick layer of white paint. It obviously has not been painted in a long time—dirt and pollen and a layer of fine, dead algae cling to the walls. And under my hands, something sharp. When I look down, impossibly, it looks like tiny barnacles cling to it. Surely it can’t have come from the ocean. Why is a lighthouse in the middle of the landlocked mountains?

  Before I can ponder it further, a girl steps around the side of it, into my view. She has shiny, light auburn hair piled into an impossible stack on her head, like some kind of beehive hairdo from the 1960s. I recognize her instantly. Like the last time I saw her, she’s completely naked, despite the cold. Oblivious to my presence, she skips along until she’s right beside me.

  When she notices me, she shrieks, her hands flying to her mouth. A handful of hickory nuts fall from her hand and scatter across the ground at her feet. Without a word, she turns and dashes away, the nuts rolling under her feet as she goes. Recovering from my surprise, I spring after her.

  She’s surprisingly fast,
racing along the curve of the lighthouse, her bare feet seemingly accustomed to the jagged concrete ledge that runs around the base. I race after her, turning my ankle when I step on the edge of the ledge, which is about a foot wide and about an inch above the dirt, as if it were ripped up with the lighthouse and transplanted here instead of built here, like a foundation would be.

  I curse under my breath and step away from the wall, where I can run on the grass and dirt. Unlike her, I don’t have to worry about the thorns, since I’m wearing my mother’s boots.

  “Wait,” I call after her. “I need to talk to you.”

  I’m sure that at any moment, she’s going to reach the door and disappear inside. Instead, she begins to wave her arms, and a second later, the air bursts into a flurry of motion. I throw up my hands to shield my face from the swirling wind and dust. Through my fingers, I see a golden eagle flapping its wings, rising up and around the wall of the tower. The girl is gone.

  I sink against the side of the lighthouse, wanting to scream in frustration. But I’m also in awe. I’ve seen my father shift, and I know that shifters transition much more smoothly than wolves. But I’ve never seen someone shift like that, in mid-stride. I curse myself for being taken by surprise. I lost my chance to catch the girl who put this curse on me, forced me to be human again.

  Stepping back from the tower, I look up. The eagle has disappeared, but I don’t see it anywhere in the sky. It must have flown in through the window of the lighthouse.

  “Hey,” I call. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to talk.”

  The only answer is the wind rattling through the bare trees, rustling the leaves on the ground.

  “You forgot your nuts,” I try.

  Nothing.

  With a sigh, I turn and trudge back across the clearing. When I look back at the lighthouse, I’m sure I see a shadow moving in the window. But when I call back again, there’s no answer, no movement.