Chapter 7: White Wolf

I ran.

I did not decide to. My legs knew how before I did.

The frost cracked under my paws and the woods opened up around me, dark and loud with smells.

Pine, wet bark, a deer bedded down half a mile off, woodsmoke from the Ironwood chimneys.

Ember laughed in my head.

"Faster," she said. "You've been sitting still for twenty-five years."

I ran faster.

Behind me I heard a heavy body hit the ground and change.

Then paws, long and quick, and a rust-brown wolf drew level on my right side.

He was enormous.

He did not crowd me or try to pass.

He kept exactly my pace, shoulder to shoulder, and let me lead.

I took him up the ridge, down through the creek, and back through a stand of cedar where the moonlight came down in stripes.

I had not known that anything could feel like this.

I was not tired or sore or sad.

For the first time in my life, nobody had told me what I was not.

At the top of the ridge, I stopped.

Below us, the Skagit shone silver, and the old bridge crossed it in a thin dark line.

Beyond it, on the far bank, the lights of the Black Fir pack house burned on their hill.

I stood there with my breath smoking.

"You can change back," Ember said. "Just think of your hands."

I thought of my hands.

The world shrank, and I was kneeling in the frozen grass in my nightgown, shivering and laughing.

A jacket dropped over my shoulders.

Torin crouched in front of me, in his jeans and nothing else, with his hair wild and his chest rising and falling.

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