Chapter 10: What Maud Kept

Maud was feeding the goats when something white came out of the trees.

She told me afterward that she had the shotgun up and the safety off before she saw its eyes.

They were grey.

She lowered the gun.

"Well," she said to the empty yard. "There you are."

I don't remember lying down.

I remember the cold boards of her porch under my belly.

A quilt landed across my back, and her old hands moved through my fur.

"Come back to me now, girl," she said. "Nobody here will hurt you."

I shifted.

It hurt less going back.

The fur drew in and my bones slid home.

Then I was a woman again, naked and shaking on a porch in the snow.

Maud wrapped the quilt around me twice and held on.

"Four," I said into her shoulder. "Are they still there? Maud, are they still there?"

She put her palm flat on my stomach and shut her eyes.

I felt them move under her hand.

"Four little kicks," she said. "All four. Sounds like a card game in there."

I laughed, and then I was crying.

Joanna arrived twenty minutes later with mud to her knees and rose thorns in both sleeves.

She stood in the kitchen doorway and stared at me.

"You're sitting on a chair," she said slowly. "In a quilt. Drinking tea. This morning you were behind bars."

"I climbed out."

"I saw." Her voice cracked.

"I was standing under the porch when something white came off the roof on a road of ice. I thought I was losing my mind."

"You're not."

"Nora." She dropped onto the chair across from me. "That was a wolf."

"I know."

"You don't have a wolf."

"I know."

Nobody said anything for a minute.

Keep reading free with an account. Start Substitute Luna, Runaway With His Quadruplets from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.