“Like what?”
“Well,” I begin, staring at the cooler ahead. “For starters, she doesn’t rule the Fenris—she’s running from them.” I tell him about Keelin, about Mora’s coat.
Lucas’s face darkens. “What if the Fenris have beaten you to her?”
I cringe. “I’m trying not to think about that, actually. But the Fenris aren’t up in this area—the map in Grandma Dalia’s cookbook shows the packs stop farther south. It’s too cold for them here, I guess.”
“That doesn’t mean they can’t throw on a coat,” Lucas says.
“Lucas…” I sigh. “I’m going after her either way.”
Lucas is quiet a long time, considering this, but then nods. He rises and offers me a hand. I accept it and stand up, just in time to hear cheering from the crowd by the window.
“Is that the plow?” I ask the other stranded customers.
“Yep,” a fat man says, hoisting his pants up a bit. “And a bunch of cops.”
“Doing what?”
“Got me, something at the restaurant.”
“Oh god,” I say, and dash for the door.
“What?” Lucas calls from behind me, but I don’t get a chance to answer before I’m out in the cold. I run as best I can, stumbling through the snow. Blue-and-red lights bounce off of it; even squinting, all I can see are silhouettes ahead. Lucas is shouting behind me, but I can’t take the time to turn around and explain—
“Get your fucking hands off me!” Flannery shrieks. “I’m the ex-Princess of Kentucky!”
“Enough,” a large female cop says, sighing under her breath. “Keep it up and we’ll charge you with resisting. That’s a lot more paperwork than I want to fill out. Don’t make me do it.”
“You bet your ass I’m res—”
“Shut up, Flannery!” I snap. She lifts her head, deflating a little when she sees me. The cops look over, raising their eyebrows.
“And you are?” the one leading Flannery asks.
“She’s my prisoner.” Flannery laughs. “I fought an army to win her.”
“Quiet,” I repeat. “I’m her friend. Sorry, she’s—”
“Under arrest,” a male officer finishes.
“For dining and dashing?” I ask in disbelief. “Can’t she do dishes or something?”
“For lifting the wallets off about twenty-three people in there,” the male officer corrects me.
“Oh, Flannery,” I groan.
“Easy pickings,” she says, lifting her chin at the cop defiantly.
“Seriously, shut up,” Lucas says firmly. Flannery opens her mouth to cuss at him, but I glare hard enough that it keeps her quiet. “Where are you taking her?”
“Wesley station. You can post bail for her there.”
“Got it,” Lucas says, then looks at Flannery. “Cooperate.”
“Who are you?” Flannery asks, sounding annoyed.
“He’s trying to help you. Just listen,” I say as they manhandle her toward the car. Something is sinking in me—they’ll book her, take her photo. Even if we get her out, her mother will know where to find her now, just like she was afraid of. I can see the fear in her eyes, a layer mostly hidden by anger.
The cop shuts the door, answers a radio call, and then climbs into the front seat. Lucas drops a hand on my shoulder as the car eases forward and turns down the road the snowplow just cleared.
“That’s your gypsy princess?”
I sigh. “That’s her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
They’re holding Flannery for twenty-four hours and refuse to make an exception—primarily because she wouldn’t stop singing Shelta songs at the top of her lungs on the way to the station.
“She’ll be fine. We’ll pick her up tomorrow when they open,” Lucas tells me as I drop into the passenger seat of his car. It feels strange and low to the ground after riding in Wallace.
“I know,” I say. “I just… I shouldn’t have left her.”
“You can’t be responsible for everyone, you know,” he says, starting the car. I don’t answer.
Lucas books a hotel room on the edge of Lake Superior. I can’t see the island, given how dark it is, but I can feel it. That’s where she is—does she have a private boat to get there? Her own plane? I wonder how long they have, before she turns them to beasts—how long Kai will have.
I wonder if it hurts.
“How does she do it, do you think?” I ask Lucas absently as I sit in a chair by the window, knees drawn up to my chest.
“What?”
“Turn them into wolves. How does it work?”
“How does anything work?” Lucas says, shrugging. When I look unconvinced, he tries again. “There are some things in the world that defy explanation.” Lucas looks out toward the island. Every so often I think I can see its outline in the darkness, but it’s a trick—there is nothing but shadows outside at the moment. He clears his throat and speaks again.
“What are you expecting to happen on Thursday?”
“I… I guess I expect her to cause a blizzard or something and—”
“Not from Mora,” Lucas says. “From Kai.”
“I expect…”
I don’t know what to say, because I can’t quite separate what I expect from what I simply want. I want Kai to run to me. I want him to renounce Mora. I want us to get away and never think of her again.
But I expect it to be much harder than that.
“I expect him to be different,” I finally say softly. “He must be. Even if he hasn’t… changed. Do they ever change back, once they become wolves? I mean, permanently change back.”
“I…” Lucas extends the vowel for a long time, and I can tell he doesn’t want to say the truth. I look at him pleadingly, and he relents. “When someone becomes a Fenris, they aren’t really the person you knew anymore. It’s like… the monster lives in their body. Uses their voice and their eyes. But if he’s changed, it won’t be him. Not really.”
“What if it’s different with her? I mean, you didn’t even know she existed. The wolves with her look different—” My voice sounds whiny, childlike.
“Maybe,” Lucas says, holding up his hands. “Maybe. But you have to remember that they’re very, very good at what they do. The wolves will manipulate you. They’ll play to your emotions, make you vulnerable. And then they’ll kill you.” His voice is gentle when he says this, but it does little to soften the blow. “So if he’s changed, Ginny, but you think the boy you knew is still in there somewhere…”
“I’ll be wrong,” I finish for him.
“You’ll be taking a risk I wouldn’t take,” Lucas corrects. “So the real question, I guess, is… if he’s changed, do you want him alive as a monster?”
“He wouldn’t want that,” I say. “I know he wouldn’t.” Kai—the real Kai, not the one Mora has created—wants to be a musician. He wants to live in tiny apartments and take trips to foreign villas and drink coffee in shops tucked away from the masses. He wants to make the world more beautiful, and he wants to do it with me.
He doesn’t want to be a monster, and I love him too much to let that happen, even if it means I have to live without him forever. That’s what the loudest voice in my head is saying; a cool, collected voice, one I know I should listen to. But there’s another voice, a softer one, that’s crying in the back of my mind. Maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe he won’t have changed. Maybe it’ll all be okay.
Please, please let it all be okay.
Lucas looks so grim that I have to avoid his eyes; I look out the window at the darkness as he speaks. “I was never much of a hunter. I mean, if you need me to… I’ll try. But if you’re waiting till he gets close enough for you to be sure, it might be too late to do anything.”
“I know,” I say, though I’m not sure I really knew until this moment: Kai might kill me.
No. Not Kai. The monster, the monster who killed Kai might kill me, too. The monster Mora created, controls.
“I’ve got a knif
e,” I say weakly. “Flannery taught me how to use it.”
“Will you use it?”
I swallow. I can’t answer.
“All right,” Lucas says, exhaling loudly. “I’ve been driving all day—I’ve got to get some sleep. You should, too.”
“I will,” I say. “I just can’t. Not yet. Will I keep you up?”
“No,” he says. “You’re fine. Let me know if you need anything.”
“You’ve done more than enough.”
“Well. Still,” he says, and smiles. He walks to the bed on the far side of the room and yanks the spread back, then buries himself in the blankets. It isn’t long until his breathing becomes rhythmic and slow. I reach to the side and flick the lamp off; the room vanishes into complete darkness for a few moments until my eyes slowly adjust. There’s a glow outside, the smallest bit of moon combining with a few streetlights. I can see the red light where the hotel’s dock ends, but I don’t know where the horizon is. Everything in front of me is black. Black and cold, as far as the eye can see.
Sometimes, when my mom’s work schedule meant she came in late and left early, Kai would spend the night at my house. It was an accident the first time—he fell asleep while we were doing homework and we didn’t wake up till six o’clock the next morning. It even started as an accident the second time. He was frustrated with Grandma Dalia for embarrassing him at the store—shouting at the produce manager when he didn’t know what St. John’s wort was.
“It’s crazy. She’s crazy. Can’t she just let it go? I feel like I have to spend my life looking over my shoulder just to make sure she’s not looking over her shoulder,” he said, falling onto my bed and staring at the ceiling.
“She’s just scared,” I said. “She’s always scared.”
“You believe her? About the beasts?” he asked in disbelief.
“I believe it’s real to her,” I said—I’d never told him about how the man in the grocery store parking lot looked at me, about his costume face. “I don’t know. She seems so normal, other than all the beast talk. What if she’s right?”
“And St. John’s wort can stop shape-shifting beasts from attacking me?” Kai said warily.
“Well. Maybe not right about everything,” I said. I sat down beside him with my back propped up against the headboard. It was already late, my room illuminated by a lamp on my nightstand with a crooked shade. We talked for another hour, then two, about Grandma Dalia’s eccentricities, before the conversation lulled and I yawned.
“Are you staying?” I asked. He looked at me, then at the clock. One thirty in the morning.
“Yes,” he said. I reached over and clicked off the light, and suddenly there was more space between Kai and me than there’d ever been before. We were pinned to opposite sides of the bed, each of us afraid that any touch would make things awkward. I fell asleep that way, stiff and uncomfortable from trying to stay in a perfectly straight line.
But when I woke up at four, Kai’s arm was around me, my head against his shoulder. He was breathing slow, still asleep, his face turned toward mine so that I could feel his breath across the top of my head. I hesitated, then draped an arm across his chest and drifted off again. It was always like that, afterward—we would start the night splitting the bed in half, but always woke in the middle, pressed close.
In the dark we always found each other.
Mora stared out over the ice, leaning against the door frame of the cottage. As immense as her powers were, she couldn’t thaw the lake instantly, return the ice to violent, deep water that few would venture across. Freezing was easy enough—she just pulled heat away from the water. But thawing? Thawing required the sun, warmth, things that were beyond the scope of her talents. The best she could do was crack the ice here and there, break it into smaller and smaller pieces until it collapsed.
Kai and two other guards walked up the hill together and drew her attention from the white horizon. Their arms were bare, revealing gray-blue skin, which made Mora smile—Kai was coming along well. Perhaps he was finished….
“Kai,” she called out. “Come here for a moment.” Kai broke from the others and tried to jog toward her but stumbled in the thick snow. Mora laughed, which made Kai grin as he hauled himself to his feet.
“Yes?” he said when he finally reached her.
“Do you remember a girl named Ginny?” she asked, running a finger along her collarbone.
Kai hesitated, then nodded. “She’s a girl I used to know. I can’t remember what she looks like.”
Mora frowned—she’d hoped he would have forgotten her entirely by now, given how fast he was changing initially. She couldn’t be down a guard on the off chance Ginny or the Fenris made it across the lake. Mora reached down, letting her fingers dance along the inside of Kai’s wrist. “Edward and Larson are inside. They’re going to play a little concert for me. Join them?”
“Of course,” Kai said, then followed Mora into the house. The door remained open, casting snowflakes across the gray wood floors. Larson was clearing his throat, standing by a piano that Edward was polishing gently. Most of her current guard were pianists or strings players. There’d been a period where she’d mostly wanted woodwinds, and another where she collected folksy guitar players—most of them poor, dangerous-looking boys with a swagger she enjoyed.
Mora went to the opposite side of the room and sat down on a stiff-cushioned couch while Kai ran to fetch his violin. She drew circles with her fingernails on the couch arm, smiling at the way her rings sparkled like blocks of ice on her fingers. Eventually, her eyes wandered to the bookshelf at the far end of the room.
In the center of one shelf was a ship in a bottle, one she found in an antiques store ages ago and bought with a smile and a kiss. It was beautiful, intricate, with giant white sails and CITY OF GLASGOW written on the side in gold. She bought it because it reminded her of a ship in the ocean, one she and the other ocean girls lived near. It was the only thing that anchored them to a single spot in the vast, unforgiving sea. The bottled ship was polished and sleek, but the one underwater had anemone-covered staircases, shelves covered in starfish, and still-corked bottles of wine, things she eventually saw as part of her home, the way humans might see a bedroom set or a front door.
She’d tried once, ages ago, to help her ocean sisters leave the Fenris. She tried to find the boys they loved, so they could be kissed and freed. She never found a single boy—never even worked out where to start looking. How do you find a boy who loved a human girl, when the human girl is fading fast, turning darker by the day? It was impossible. Mora decided it was better to accept the fact that she was a fluke, an accident, and embrace her new life.
A life she wouldn’t give up now, not over some stupid girl unable to leave well enough alone. Kai returned, violin in hand; she smiled at him and folded her hands in her lap. He spent a few moments tuning the instrument, then raised his bow, looking nervous.
“Go on,” Mora whispered, and Kai obeyed. He drew the bow across the strings; a low, solid note filled the room, swimming through the walls and floorboards. Edward joined him with high notes on the piano. Larson began to sing in Italian, voice booming like the loudest instrument of all. Mora sighed and sat back. Such talent shouldn’t be left in a mortal body to age and rot, she thought, pleased with her selections.
When they finished, she let her eyes dance across them, her gaze remaining on Kai the longest. Finally she rose and walked over to Larson.
“Larson,” she said, leaning in to drag her lips along his collarbone. “You’d never leave me, right?”
“Of course not,” he said immediately. Mora smiled, kissed him deeply and bit at his lip. She stepped away and left him looking starved and wanting. She moved to Edward, who turned around on the piano bench to face her.
“What about you?” she asked him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and allowed him to pull her into his lap. Mora always liked the way Edward held her—he cradled her, as if she was something precious. “Do you
want to go back to your old life?” she whispered in his ear, pressing a palm against his cold chest. It felt like rock, smooth and solid.
“I don’t remember it,” Edward said, shrugging. “How could I leave you for something I didn’t even bother to remember?”
Mora tilted her head, relieved she hadn’t gotten rid of Edward after all. She stroked his cheek, then rose and walked toward Kai. She inhaled slowly, keeping her eyes locked on his. A gust of snow swept through the house, up and around their bodies, drawing them closer. Kai sighed as Mora slid a hand up his chest and wound her fingers through his black hair; it looked like spilled ink on her pale skin. Kai set the violin down on the piano as Mora teased at the bow that remained in his right hand. She ran her fingers up the boy, up his arms, and finally curled both hands behind his neck.
“Kai,” she whispered, arching her back so her chest met his. “Do you love me?”
“Of course. More than anything,” he answered, and brought his lips down to kiss her. She shook her head and pulled back; Kai shrank beneath her hands.
“I mean it,” Mora whispered, voice now barely audible over the wind that whipped ever louder outside. “Do you love me? Promise you’ll never leave me? You’ll protect me?”
“Yes.” This time, his voice was breathy and serious; his eyes on hers. Now she locked her hands behind his head, pulled him to her mouth, and kissed him so hard she felt him flinch with pain. It was only a moment, though, and then he gave in to her and wrapped his arms around her tightly, lifting her off the ground. When Mora finally released him, Kai’s eyes were beautifully dark, the color of tree bark in the winter.
“Am I like the others now?” he asked as he set her feet back on the floor.
“Darling,” Mora said, running her fingers across his lips. “You’re perfect.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I blink, unsure when, exactly, it got bright enough for me to see. It’s gray outside, misty and monochrome. Wind rattles the naked branches of the tree outside the hotel room window, sending wafts of snow across the balcony.
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