Red Riding Hood
Page 19
She stared back at the Wolf, weighing what it would mean to step forward. Those beautiful yellow eyes. Perhaps it would not be the worst thing…. And the idea became a fissure that widened inside her, like a crevice becoming a canyon. The solution was simple and dazzling. She felt there was some revenge in abandoning her will. The Wolf would not get Valerie, because she was not herself anymore.
She would let the Wolf take her.
She stepped toward the gate. It was surprisingly easy. She was just about to take the decisive step, the one that would bring her outside sacred ground, when Henry saw what she was doing and held her back, where the Wolf could not reach.
“I won’t let you destroy my home. I’ll go with you,” Valerie said. “To save them.” She felt her voice, high and false, coming from somewhere outside herself. She was not afraid of what would come next. She had decided. The world was not real to her anymore.
The stillness was deafening as the Wolf awaited her approach.
And then the spell was broken by a movement from the crowd behind her, from the very back. Someone coming, emerging, tripping over others’ knees and satchels.
Roxanne.
Roxanne kept her head down as she moved forward. Valerie’s heart skipped three beats seeing the beautiful sunset-colored hair. The Wolf she could bear. But not further accusations from those whom she had loved.
“I won’t let you make that sacrifice.” Roxanne stepped up beside her.
Valerie stared at her friend, not wanting to let herself believe. Roxanne gave her a brief nod, her eyes heavy with tears.
Rose stepped forward next. “Neither will I.” She looked at Valerie with a deep flush in her cheeks, remembering how she had acted earlier, caught up in the fervor.
Marguerite, shamed by her own daughter’s bravery, followed, as did other villagers, one by one: the tavern owner, the dye shop workers, woodcutters, friends of her father’s. Prudence was the last to join them, but in the end she, too, stepped forward, fighting her own bitter emotions.
Daggorhorn felt it was lifting into flight, a flock finding its wings together.
The town’s people, emerging from its nightmare, held to one another, raising a barrier against the Wolf. But it was also a barrier against the evil they had allowed into themselves. For a few moments, the center of the universe was right there, in the village churchyard.
The Wolf had not planned for this. It growled, furious, so close to what it wanted and yet unable to reach her.
The moon had disappeared from the sky. Morning had come, and the Wolf knew it could not stay or it would be revealed in human form. Its eyes blazed at Valerie for one last moment, then, with an enraged snarl, it charged into the night.
The villagers exhaled, afraid to look at each other, to break the spell. But they did, and still the Wolf was gone. They had done what was right, and they had done it together.
Only Valerie saw Solomon coming toward her, worse than the beast itself, ungovernable rage lining his face, ready to claim the vengeance he felt he’d earned. His one hand was held out, and Valerie reached out to protect herself. But he went for her head, cupping his hand, forcing all his weight into it, slamming her skull down against the stone wall. A ripple of shock passed through the shattered villagers.
Solomon clutched her by the hair and raised her face to meet his. “You will still burn, witch.”
Henry charged, and Solomon whipped around, ready to slash with his remaining nails.
But a bullwhip came first, whistling elegantly through the air, attaching itself to Solomon and jerking his arm back. Shocked, Solomon looked around and saw the Captain approaching, hard-faced.
“Under the blood moon, a man bitten is a man cursed,” the hulking Captain reminded his commander.
Solomon did not flinch at the truth. Still, he could not help saying, “My children will be orphans.”
“My brother had children, too,” the Captain sneered.
Father Solomon looked down at his arm, letting it sink in that the corruption was growing within him. He was no better than the Wolf he had hunted. He was a man true to his convictions, true to them to the bitterest of ends. He believed in purity and in purification; in the cold, unsentimental elimination of evil.
With his remaining hand, he made the sign of the cross.
“Forgive your lost sheep, Father. I meant only to serve you, to protect us from darkness…” he started but did not finish.
The Captain, who believed in revenge, too, swung his sword. Sharpened to something beyond a razor’s edge, it pierced quickly and cleanly through Solomon’s heart, without catching at the bone, just as Solomon had killed the Captain’s brother.
Roxanne looked away, but Valerie didn’t. An evil had been dealt with, one among many. She felt something on her temple. Blood trickling from the wound where Solomon had hit her head against the wall.
Just seeing it, wet on her fingers, made dizziness come over her. She sank to her knees.
Where is Peter? she wondered again.
Then the world became a nowhere place and lost its grounding. She fell down, down, deep into the center of everything.
29
Valerie reentered the world from a place of darkness. She looked around, recognizing the blanket. Grandmother’s. But hadn’t it once been white? Now it was red, the red of her cape. Vibrant, like something alive.
Soft snow had begun to fall again, forming huge, pillowy banks outside, as it never had before. It must have snowed all night. The sky was flat and white, like a dream. Valerie looked over at the shape next to her. Grandmother. It should have been Lucie. Where was Lucie? Gone. She would always be gone, as though she had never existed at all.
Valerie’s waking seemed to have woken up Grandmother, too. She rolled over to face Valerie and opened her eyes. They were wet and globular, her pupils expanded. Round like marbles.
“What big eyes you have, Grandmother,” Valerie noted calmly. She saw that every feature of Grandmother’s face was defined and accentuated. Valerie felt the way she felt when she drank too much water too fast, empty and full and dizzy.
“The better to see you with, my dear,” Grandmother said in a low muffle.
Her ears, too, were peeking out from beneath her tousled hair, strangely pointed.
“What big ears you have, Grandmother.”
“The better to hear you with, my dear.”
As Grandmother spoke these last words, she revealed at last her teeth—oh, her teeth. They looked longer and sharper than usual.
“What big teeth you have, Grandmother.”
“The better to eat you with, my dear….”
Grandmother lunged—
Valerie started awake with a strangled cry. Orienting herself, she found she was in her own bed, Roxanne lying asleep beside her, the morning light spilling across her face. Catching her breath, Valerie stared at her friend.
Roxanne was not Lucie, either.
Suzette, who had been beside the bed watching Valerie sleep, leaned down over her.
“Darling,” she began in a sweet voice that was foreign to Valerie. She had a faraway look in her eyes. Valerie looked at the deep wound marring her mother’s face; could it be infected? She looked around, and everything seemed strange, not as it should have been. Objects seemed dreamlike, too big, too small.
“I’ve made you some porridge, your favorite,” her mother said in the same sweet drone. Valerie breathed in. The smell of molasses was overpowering. She bit her lip. Am I awake? It was hard to tell anymore.
Suzette’s face was set in an unnatural smile. Valerie ducked under her mother’s arm and moved down the ladder barefoot, two rungs at a time.
“Valerie?” her mother questioned, her head cocked to one side, like a little girl putting on an act.
“I’m leaving now,” Valerie replied, pulling on her boots, gathering a handkerchief and some fruit for her basket and settling her scarlet cloak around her shoulders. Roxanne stirred in bed, opening her eyes, wiping her nose.<
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“Leaving?” Suzette asked, amused. “Where to, darling?”
“To Grandmother’s. I had… I think she might be in danger.” She also needed to find Peter, if he was somewhere to be found. And Henry.
“Oh, Valerie. You don’t always need to take care of everyone. I made porridge, your favorite,” Suzette repeated, resting her hand on Valerie’s cheek. Her hand felt clammy and cold. Reptilian. Valerie looked up at her mother.
“You’re safe with us,” she whispered. Roxanne peered down from the loft, her covers pulled up to her chin, blinking awake, unsure of what to make of the scene.
“Good-bye, Mother, Roxanne.” Valerie felt solitary, whole unto herself. She needed no one.
Valerie was met with the sting of the cold as she stepped out the door. It felt right, somehow. She needed a shock of something. She needed to know she was alive.
She tightened her cloak around her, slipped the hood up over her head. The blustering wind swept across her body, blowing into her cloak, inflating it with icy air. She held her basket in front of her, her fingers clutching the wicker handle. Windswept ice crystals lodged between the wicker strands.
No one was around.
As she walked through the village, the snow did not remember where she had been, her footprints neatly erased by more as the flakes fell in a thick blanket. She passed the brazen elephant, lying on its side, hacked open. Had someone been in there? Valerie shivered, thinking of Claude, of the cruelty she’d learned humanity was capable of. She was disgusted; perhaps it would be better to be a beast than a human.
The world of winter meant that people stayed inside. When a storm like this descended, it was impossible to know what lay around bends, what was kept hidden behind or ahead.
Someone came into view then. Valerie saw that it was Henry, saddling a beautiful steed, adjusting the stirrups. She warmed at the sight of him.
The Captain motioned to the soldiers, who were suiting up, and they retreated as she came near, perhaps out of respect for privacy but maybe out of mistrust.
“Valerie.”
The horse shifted, venting steam from its nostrils into the winter morning air, anxious to go, as though it were in the presence of something evil.
“Easy,” Henry quieted it. He looked proud. Dutiful. He had found a new calling. He would go after the Wolf. Good replacing evil, she hoped.
“You’re a warrior,” she said, her green eyes electrified.
“You are, too,” he replied.
Valerie wrapped her arms around him, standing on her toes to reach his neck with her lips. Gently, they found skin, which was soft and warm. It felt like something that would melt if it sat out for too long in the sun. It thrilled her.
She felt the smooth of Henry’s hand against her cheek. And then their bodies pulled apart, making a clean break.
He hesitated, running a hand through his light brown hair.
“What is it?” she asked.
“No one has seen Peter, Valerie,” he said, hoisting himself into the saddle. “And when I find him… I’ll do what I have to.” She felt the vastness of his shape atop the horse, and then he was gone, riding into the blank slate of wilderness, the great warrior.
Valerie felt indebted to him, for so many things. She had chosen evil over good, and he had stood by her, sacrificing himself to protect her from the Wolf, to save her from herself. She had broken Henry’s heart, for the love of Peter—someone who had always taken without asking. How had she not seen how steady and secure things could have been with Henry? She felt calm in her new understanding.
With each stride of Henry’s galloping steed, Valerie, who’d never needed anyone, felt a tiny hollow open and expand within herself.
Valerie ran, her feet alternately sinking in the snow and finding the brittle surface of the winter ground, her legs working smoothly, mechanically, moving her through the storm. She felt sure that something was very wrong at Grandmother’s… not that much was right anymore. Something was happening, something dark, and she had to be there because she did not have the strength to stay away.
She did not stop in the field to think of Lucie, or in the grove to think of Claude. Her heart did not flutter as she passed the Great Pine. Her losses, her past. The places were indistinguishable in the leveling white. She didn’t stop to find her bearings but rather let herself be carried by the momentum of urgency.
She passed the river, frozen over into a smooth top, like a bowl of milk. She heard the surface crackle as a branch was felled.
Finally, she came to the Black Raven Woods. She was not far from the tree house, a hundred yards, but the path she’d taken so many times now seemed endless. She was still light-headed from her injury, and the bleached world around her moved in and out of focus. The only sounds she heard were the gusts whistling through the frozen branches.
She glanced around. Nothing in the brush. Nothing ahead but where she was going, nothing behind but where she’d been. Clean sheets of snow were being blown to the ground by the second. Valerie moved forward, her knuckles white now from gripping the basket, the suede of her boots soaked through with cold. The hood of her long red cloak framed her pale face, her pink cheeks.
Instinctively, she knew just where to set each foot, having followed the route so many times. And yet she felt she was working too hard to move forward, as if she were swimming through oil. The air sliced through her, crisp and still, and the gray of the sky was scribbled with tree branches. There was an absence of scent; even her senses were frozen. In the cold, fingers were unfeeling, eyes were unseeing.
The snow began falling so thickly that anything farther than five feet in front of her was lost to the blooming white. She was not sure she was conscious. Valerie could feel the barely audible hum in the trees. Now and then something cracked, but when she looked, there was nothing.
And yet she could feel something behind her, approaching. She sharpened her hearing, tried to be silent even as she picked up her pace to a run. An animal. Surely it was an animal. Daylight, she reminded herself. Can’t be the Wolf.
Yes. Something was there. She was sure.
She heard it, louder. And louder.
Closer.
She slowed. She was not afraid, she told herself. It could be Suzette running after her, upset about the way she left the house. Or Henry, to tell her he would stay.
But… it could be the Wolf in its human form. Whatever it was, she decided, it could not be more awful than what she’d already confronted. She turned, beaten, ready to face a dark fate.
What she saw made her stomach lurch, almost brought her to her knees.
The dark apparition emerging from the snow brought her back to life, yanked her out of her surrender. She staggered backward a few steps but could move no farther.
It was Peter, her Peter, stalking after the girl he loved, the girl he could not live without. His black shirt was torn, his cloak missing.
“Valerie, thank God you’re all right.”
His face was glistening with cold. He was beautiful, the snow in his eyelashes like diamonds, the cool pink of his cheeks, the wet red of his lips. He was staggering toward her.
“I have to leave you.” His breath came in uneven bursts. “You won’t be safe with me.”
Whatever he was, he could not be bad. An amazing and terrible thought entered Valerie’s mind, clearing away all others.
“Peter…”
She stepped toward him, arms out. They gave in to each other, finally, their bodies fitting together. Her cold fingers warmed on his cheek, and his arms slipped underneath her crimson cloak as her long blond hair blew around them. Enveloped in a shelter of white, standing out in black and red, were just the two of them. Nothing else anywhere. Valerie knew that she could never be apart from him, that she was what he was and that she would be his always.
She didn’t care if he was the Wolf or not. And if he was a Wolf, then she would be one, too.
She made her choice and brought her lips to his.
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Is this truly
the end of
Valerie’s story?
Visit
www.redridinghoodbook.com
to find out.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank DAVID LESLIE JOHNSON AND CATHERINE HARDWICKE for creating magic.
JENNIFER DAVISSON KILLORAN, JULIE YORN, MICHAEL IRELAND, ALEX MACE, AND THE WARNER BROS. TEAM for their unswerving support.
MARCUS ANDERSSON, NIKKI RAMEY, PATRICK SANCHEZ-SMITH, AND ADRIANA STIMOLA for their encouragement and patience through the many drafts.
As always, I am indebted to CARROLL CARTWRIGHT AND MARY GORDON, who’ve taught me everything.
I would also especially like to thank ERIN STEIN, MY EDITOR AT LITTLE, BROWN, for taking a leap of faith and for being such a phenomenal guide.
Table of Contents
Front Cover Image
Welcome
Dedication
Introduction
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Two
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Three
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright
Ronee Blakley
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is a recent cum laude graduate of Barnard College. She is a recipient of the 2008–2009 Mary Gordon Fiction Scholarship Award and the 2009–2010 Lenore Marshall Barnard Prize for Prose. She grew up in Los Angeles and Mexico. She now writes in New York City and Los Angeles. Despite what the book may say, she actually prefers wolves to people.