Chapter 8: What Wolves Remember

When I woke up again it was afternoon, and there was a wolf lying across my feet.

He filled half the bed.

His black head rested on the quilt beside my knee, and his ember eyes were open and fixed on me.

"You're going to ruin the Pruetts' mattress," I said.

His tail thumped once.

My arms didn't hurt.

I pushed back the sleeve of my borrowed nightgown and found the lines had stopped just below my collarbone.

They hadn't gone any higher while I was out.

"Did you do that?"

The wolf lowered his head onto my shin and gave a long breath through his nose.

"You can't keep it off me," I said. "It doesn't work like that."

He looked at the lines.

Then he looked at me, and it was plain he knew that and wasn't going to listen.

The bedroom door opened without a knock.

"Linnet Ashgrove," said Mom, "I told you noon."

She came in with a casserole dish wrapped in a dish towel and her mouth set hard.

She had walked straight through a house full of Abyss lords to get to me.

She stopped when she saw the wolf.

He lifted his head and looked at her.

"Well," Mom said, after a while. "He's the right color for a barn cat."

I laughed, and it hurt, and I didn't care.

She set the casserole on the table and looked me over with her hand on my forehead.

"They told me downstairs you burned a lady's hand to the bone."

"She grabbed me."

"Then I'd have burned the other one." She turned and looked at the wolf. "You. Who's the one in the cream coat to my girl?"

The wolf's ears went flat.

"That's what I thought," Mom said, to nobody. She patted my cheek. "Eat that while it's hot."

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