Chapter 16: Dusk at the Water

Isla's POV

Two nights before the Winter Moon, I went down to the water at dusk with a bucket.

Four weeks had passed since I called the Council.

Torin had spent every one of them in the truck at the end of the shore road.

He had gone to the village that afternoon with Hugh, to count elders.

The doctor was still in the loft over the bakery, eating Bettina's bread and refusing to look out of the window.

I knelt on the shingle and dipped the bucket.

The ice had come back at the edges. The water beyond it was black.

Behind me, a branch cracked.

I did not turn right away.

I had lived two years in a pack without a wolf, and I had learned to tell a person's step from something else.

This was something else.

I stood up slowly, and I set the bucket down on the stones, and I looked at the tree line.

A wolf stood under the pines.

She was big, honey-brown, with hazel eyes that I would have known in any shape.

She came out onto the shore without a sound, head low.

Along the lake, the lone wolves on their porches went very still.

"Cecily," I said.

The wolf's lip lifted.

"Come to bring me soup?"

She came at me.

I had never fought anything in my life.

I had been told all my years that a wolf with no wolf was nobody.

My knees went out from under me, and the cold came up through my palms.

Then a hot stretch ran down my spine, the same one I had felt once before in the dark.

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