Chapter 29: Come Home

The wolf in me was being pulled out.

I could feel it straining across the grass toward Winifred's hands, and the whole ring was singing.

Torin held me up from behind with his arms locked around my ribs.

His own face was grey.

"It's going through me," he said through his teeth. "I can feel it leaving. Orla, I can't hold it."

"Don't hold it."

"I won't let her have it."

"Torin, don't hold it. Let go."

He stared at me.

The pull was so strong that my vision went white at the edges.

I understood it all at once.

A wolf given by a willing hand will stay. A wolf pulled out by a stranger will go anywhere it is dragged.

The drawing could only take what was being torn loose.

Winifred was not pulling it out of me.

She was pulling it out of the gap between us, where it sat stretched and half-held, and I was fighting her for it.

So I stopped fighting.

I put my hand flat on Torin's chest, where his heart was, where the growl had always stopped under my palm.

"Come home," I said.

Not to Winifred. Not to the stone.

To me.

The wolf lifted out of him in a rush of gold.

I saw it with my own eyes. Everyone saw it.

A bright shape, honey-colored, ran out of his chest and across my hand and up my arm, and flooded into me through the silver scar.

It filled me up, warm to my fingertips.

I cried out, and Torin cried out, and the moon went white.

Winifred's hands were on the stone, still speaking the words.

She was reaching for a wolf that was no longer there.

She did not stop in time.

The drawing needed a vessel to land in, and the vessel was herself.

With nothing to catch, it caught what it had, and it dragged out the wolf that was already inside her.

I heard it howl, long and grey and old, as it left her body.

The silver ring flared white-hot.

Her wolf rose over the stone, thin and grey, and then it went out.

Winifred screamed.

It was the first sound I had ever heard her make that was not controlled.

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