Chapter 12: The Second Fire

Bram was out the door in his jeans before I'd found my shirt.

I ran after him barefoot across the frozen yard.

The heat hit me twenty feet from the widow's cabin.

Fire was pouring out of the roof.

The door was shut.

Somebody had wedged a log under the handle from outside.

Bram kicked the log away and kicked the door in, and smoke rolled out at him black and solid.

"She's in the back," I screamed. "She sleeps in the back."

He went in.

He didn't hesitate at all.

The one-eyed man came limping across the yard in his long johns, dragging a hose from the pump house.

"Who did this?" he shouted. "Who wedged that door?"

The young man with the leg brace fell off his own porch trying to run.

I hauled him up by the arm and pushed him toward the pump.

"Water," I said. "Fill everything."

Then I saw them.

Three shapes at the edge of the trees behind the cabins, where the dead bracken ran down toward the stones.

Big men in dark clothes.

One of them was splashing something from a can along the back wall of the next cabin, the one where the old man slept.

I knew that smell now.

I knew it the way you know your own name.

Twenty-two years ago, someone had splashed it along the wall of the lodge where I slept in my cradle.

The cold white thing came up out of my chest so fast it tore.

I didn't decide to shift.

I didn't know how.

I was running, and then I was running on four legs.

The frost was blazing under my paws, and the whole night was sharp and silver and loud.

I could smell everything.

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