The Wolfless Girl He Marked novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Thirty-Five Below

Freja outruns three trackers through a frozen creek, gets stitched and renamed Nora Keene by her aunt, and finds the glove she took smells of Anson Greaves.

The drop from the window jarred through my knees and into the lash wounds on my back.

My vision went white, and I bit the inside of my cheek until it passed.

It was two in the morning and thirty-five below.

The cold found the open cuts through my jacket and every one of them lit up at once.

I ran for the tree line, because the yard lights ended there and I knew the route.

Three miles north, then the creek, then the logging road to my aunt's.

I had walked it in my head every night for two years.

At the second mile I smelled them.

Three scents, upwind, about three hundred meters back.

Two came from the northeast, and one swung wide to cut me off from the southwest.

They had sent three trackers after one wolfless girl.

My father had never done anything halfway, including hunting his own daughter.

I turned toward the creek and walked straight into it.

The water was so cold it hurt, and my boots filled in two steps.

I waded downstream for ten minutes, because water carries no scent, and I held my jacket out of the current.

My feet stopped hurting around the fifth minute, and I knew that was bad.

I kept saying the same three words to myself: her warm kitchen.

I climbed out where a fallen pine lay across the bank.

A leather glove hung from a broken branch above me, snagged there by whoever had crossed this way first.

It was fresh, and it was still warm from a hand.

I almost left it.

Instead I pulled it off the branch and shoved it into my pocket.

Whoever wore it had hunted me, and I wanted to know who.

Then I ran the last mile on feet I could not feel.

My aunt's porch light was on, and she was standing under it in her nightgown and a man's parka.

Hedda Soderstrom had been a nurse for twenty years and a pack outcast for fifteen.

She did not ask me a single question at the door.

She looked at my back and said, "Kitchen. Now."

She cut my jacket off me with scissors and laid me facedown on her table.

The stitching took an hour.

She talked the whole time, low and steady, about the stove and the dog and the price of wood.

It gave me a voice to hold onto.

When she tied off the last stitch, she handed me a cup of broth and a pair of kitchen scissors.

"Cut it," she said. "All of it."

I cut my hair, and the long white-blond rope of it fell on her linoleum.

She worked brown dye into what was left and rinsed it over the sink.

In the mirror above it, a stranger with a dark crop and gray eyes looked back.

"You're Nora Keene now," Hedda said, and slid a driver's license, a transcript and a Thornfield Academy acceptance across the table.

The paper was real, and it was not cheap.

"I don't want to know what this cost you," I said.

"Then don't ask," she said. "Tilly will meet you at the gate. She knows who you are, and nobody else will."

"Thornfield takes wolfless students?"

"Thornfield takes anyone whose tuition clears," Hedda said.

"And your father's pack will never look for you at the school where the Greaves family sends its heir."

I looked at her.

"The Greaves girl is the one he's putting in my place," I said.

"Yes," my aunt said. "Which means that's where the answers are."

She drove me to the bus station before dawn.

She gave me a travel bag, a bus ticket and a kiss on the forehead.

On the bus, in the last row, I took the stolen glove out of my pocket.

I held it to my face, and the wet leather gave up its scent slowly.

Cedar, gun oil, and something warm and clean that I had smelled across a dinner table that same evening.

The third tracker was Anson Greaves.

He had pressed a cup of water into my hands, and then he had followed me into the woods.

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