Chapter 6: Night Five

I did not sleep on the fifth night either.

Every time I closed my eyes I heard the witch.

Ask him what he was buying.

Forty acres of rock and pine on the north ridge, bought by my brother three years before Odette fell ill.

I could not think what Jasper wanted with it, and I meant to ask him to his face.

The room Mathias had given me was at the top of the lodge.

It had a bed big enough for four and a window over the river.

Odette's body shook under the quilts.

It had always been cold, and no amount of wool would warm it.

At midnight I gave up, pulled on the borrowed sweater, and went down the back stairs and out into the snow.

The moon was almost full.

I stood in the yard behind the kitchen and looked up at it, and I felt my wolf stir.

She was under my ribs, a long way down.

I did what the witch had told me and let the cold in.

The first pull hurt more than anything I had felt.

Odette's bones were thin and my wolf was not.

For one long moment the two of them fought over the same space.

I went down on my knees in the snow with my mouth open and no sound coming out.

Something tore along my spine.

My hands hit the ground and they were not hands.

I heard myself make a noise, and it was a high animal sound.

Then it was over.

I was standing on four legs in the snow.

The whole yard was brighter and louder, and full of smells I could name one by one.

I looked down at my paws.

They were silver, with dark tips, and they were huge.

My wolf was mine.

She had followed me into the wrong body and she had brought her whole self.

I ran down the yard, into the pines and along the river's edge.

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