by Isla Jones
She helps me for a while. The better part of an hour, even. But she cannot hide it from me so late into the night. Her shaky hands, the coarse coughs that jolt her body. Grandmother really is sick.
I send her off to bed and tend to the wolf on my own.
On his back alone, there are three deep gashes to be healed. Punctures dot along his neck, a chunk is missing from his ear, and even his rear left leg is fractured.
I do it all myself, and I chant to Mother the whole time. This wolf needs Mother. He needs a miracle. Fortunately for him, I am a miracle with my salves and brews.
I only pause in my work when the wolf speaks to me. A deep sound that rumbles through him. It draws me to its eyes—they are open and watch me. Really watch me.
The wolf is conscious, aware, and gazing at me, though dazed.
My hand finds its cheek.
“I hope you are Dante,” I whisper. “Otherwise, I will undo all of this work and drive a phial of wolfsbane down your throat.”
The wolf blinks.
At first, I think he means to confirm that he is who I want him to be. But his eyes drift shut once more and they do not open again.
Sleep takes him from the pain.
25.
I wake in the armchair.
Candlelight flickers over the walls with the sapphire touch of the lantern encasing it. My fists find my eyes where they rub away all the crust that has gathered during my rest. It is hard to tell how much time has passed since I dragged the wolf into the cabin.
The wolf.
I wrench my hands from my face and squint at the herb table. Where the wolf had laid when I rested my eyes, is now a man’s body. He sits on the edge of the table and combs his fingers through his dark hair. Small muscles etch into his scarred chest—fresh scars from the battle outside. A milky complexion coats his body and his dark hair is tousled with pieces of grass and a twig through the strands.
My heart catches in my throat; I rise from the armchair, my slow and delicate movements a lie of the relief that flows through me.
“Dante.”
At the sound of my whisper, he looks up at me from beneath his long lashes. The sparkle is gone from his eyes, and in its place is a weary pain.
The shaky breath that escapes me cannot be stopped.
Dante slips off the table in all his nudity, and strides toward me.
“Ella,” he says and pulls me against him. His nose finds the crook of my neck, where his hot breath caresses my skin in a familiar kiss. “Ella.”
Why he repeats my name, I do not know—until it settles within me. The warmth that comes with my true name on his lips. Not Red. Not Sorceress. Healer, Gift, Made Witch. I am Ella.
Despite the urge that takes me to melt into his arms, I detach myself from him and draw away. My treacherous gaze runs him over, a mixture of awe, desire and fear brewing within me.
Dante is reluctant to let go. His fingers graze from my wrist to my hand, but then he, too, draws away and leaves some space between us. In that space, our doubts swarm.
“Do not fear me,” he says—no, he pleads with me in his gentle voice that aches for my touch. “I never meant to hurt anyone, Ella. Least of all you.”
It takes a second for me to realise what he speaks of. Dante hurt me, not with bites or claws that ribbon my flesh. No, he hurt me in other ways; ways just as painful as physical wounds.
At the reminder, my hand goes to my chest. Behind my skin, the ache burns stronger and spreads down to the emptiness in my gut.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask, unable to meet his gaze. “I might have helped you, I might have…”
Done what? There is no cure for wolf-venom. There is nothing I could have done.
Dante has no answer for me. He holds out his hand and echoes all he can; “I didn’t want this, Ella. I wanted never to harm you in any way. For that, I am sorry.”
I hesitate. His offered hand tempts me, not unlike the way my Witch Lure tempts him. And that is what this is. Lures and lies.
“This is your wolf talking, Dante. What you think you feel for me … it isn’t true.”
A smile takes his lips. “Then let us live lies together.”
I blink at him.
“Aren’t we liars and murderers? Why not be true to ourselves and in each others’ arms?”
I’m struck with an odd sensation. A strange feeling that warms me, so much so that it fills the void in my stomach. I think Dante sees me. That horrid, putrid darkness within me.
I think he likes it, whether it is his wolf-urge or not, Dante likes me.
“I will never allow you to bite me,” is all I say.
Hand still outstretched, he wiggles his slender fingers and says, “Then let me touch you.”
I do.
The moment my palm rests on his, I am yanked against his bare body. Predictable as he is, his nose finds its place at my neck, then travels up to my jaw. My eyes flutter shut as he nears the healing gash on my cheek. A chaste kiss touches beside the cut.
“Dante.” The stiff quiet of my voice threatens to break our moment. And it shall, for our moment must be broken before we let it carry us into a fantasy land. “We cannot be together. You must know that. Our secrets should remain so in the village.”
Arms tense around me, a new cage that holds me to him. “Why must you speak such truths, Ella? We are liars. Let us be so.”
Dante brushes a final kiss against my temple, then I am cold and without him against me. It is time for him to leave. He tells me with the way he averts his gaze, and how he searches for his clothes while he knows well that they were shredded in his change to wolf.
I take a fur cloak from the back of the armchair and offer it to him. It is the only piece of clothing that might fit him, and as he shrugs it on, I see that it hangs low enough to cover much of his nakedness, but his ankles and feet show under the hem.
Dante gives me that wink of his, but this time it is tainted.
We are tainted.
Before he leaves, he speaks last words that stay with me;
“To live our lies would be sweet like honey, Ella. Sweet enough to catch us both, bitter enough to keep us there.”
26.
For a while, I stand in the herb room, staring at the door he disappeared through. Seconds or minutes have ticked by before I drag myself to the door and push it aside.
The woods have swallowed him up already.
I wonder how he returns to his manor-house at the high hill of the village. Does he have a passageway like I do? A way to move in and out of the walls without detection?
With a sigh, I shove thoughts of him from my mind and look at the brown lump in the garden. Colton’s wolf-corpse, buried by a thick layer of snow and covered with the morn mist.
Grandmother comes around the side of the cabin from the herb garden.
She pulls an axe alongside her, the blade of it scraping through the snow.
“Grandmother.” I hurry down the steps to cut her off at the wolf-corpse. “Must we dismember him? A burial might suffice.”
“Girl, knock off your silliness.” She taps me on the head; I flinch. “We must cut off his head. Beheading a wolf is the way it is done.”
I kick the snow-lump, hard. “He looks dead to me, Grandmother. Decapitation won’t make him any more dead.”
Grandmother steadies me with a sharp glare. “It is deader, for future reference, and you couldn’t be more wrong. For a wolf’s soul to leave its corpse, it must return to human form. Beheading the beast is the only way to allow the body to turn human again. The head will forever remain that of the wolf.”
Silas’ body in a cage springs to mine, and his wolf-head on a pike.
“If you insist.” I take the axe from her, not because I feel I should be the one to chop up a wolf that my emotions are tangled for—but because Grandmother is poorly and weak.
With a studious look, Grandmother watches me. Then, she demands, “Today, you will take his head to the village and announc
e that you were the one to kill him. I will burn the body.”
My grim face doesn’t meet hers.
As Grandmother sets to stacking firewood, I unearth the wolf from the snow.
When he is completely free of snow, I have no other ways to delay what must be done. I bring the axe down on his neck. It takes five hits before it is completely severed. Either the axe is blunt, or it is harder to behead a wolf than I had expected.
As I ram a pike into his open throat, I let the bud of grief blossom within me.
In a way, I harbour a flicker of sorrow for his death. Yet, I know it was it best for me to let him die.
Colton’s actions were villainous. Mine were too.
We both wear our cruelties and evils. He was no better than me.
Still, to save myself I dismember him, help Grandmother burn his limbs piece by piece, then I trek through the woods to the village Square.
It is midday when I stab the pike into the soft snow at the church’s front.
For a while, I stand beside it, my grip firm on the pike—for all to know who ended the wolf. A lie. Just as Dante tells me, to live our lies is sweet like honey.
Villagers leak out from their homes. Small trickles of people that soon turn into rivers flowing through the lanes, until they swarm me in a crescent-shape. And in front of me, the Priest stands. He wears the same expression of every other ordinary around me.
Awe-struck. Inspired. Terrified.
With a mere glance at the wolf-head, they know that it is the wolf. Regular wolf-heads aren’t the size of a man’s torso. They don’t have bright yellow eyes or fangs longer than fingers.
Perhaps I am despicable. For when Priest Peter finally reacts and applauds me, and cheers erupt all around me, I smile.
Colton wanted to remove me, to take me away from the village and tear out my throat. But in his death, he has done the opposite.
Colton has secured my place in the village.
Now, thanks to him, I belong.
27.
Four Months Later
Grandmother fought me to the bones. Whether it had been her pride or her deep-rooted disdain for the village, she couldn’t abide my insistence that she move in with me.
Still, in her poor health Grandmother finally relented. It took only three months of my badgering for her to agree. Now, she lives to pester me whenever I am home. I’m not home often.
I spend my days in the apothecary shop I stole from the physician (Dante might have helped with the cost). Out back, I replanted most of the herbs and flowers from the garden at the cabin. It is protected by a tall fence of its own, next to the privy, and upstairs is my new home above the medicine store.
Grandmother had more than a few words about my purchasing a shop in the Square. It might be because we are from different bloodlines, one true witch and one made witch, but she doesn’t understand my need to belong. In opening the shop, it wasn’t to help others. I would be lying if I said otherwise. My shop is built on the foundations of my selfish needs—to be one of them.
Do not misunderstand me. By no means would I ever want to be … an ordinary. I merely want to live among them.
To do so, I must act like them.
Tonight is two moons before the full one. Superstitions still cling to the villagers, despite the wolf-head encased in a glass box outside the church. Priest Peter is as Grandmother told me once. Theatrical.
Theatrics or not, the village shuts down on these few nights a month. The ordinaries think the woods free of the wolf. Fear of more coming still lingers.
I close the shop before dusk falls upon us and check on the garden.
Behind my own private garden, I keep a piece of my old home. The loose wooden boards in the walls. Dante will come through the slats once he is satisfied with his roam through the woods.
Upstairs, I find Grandmother on her favourite armchair by the fireplace. The flames are low, almost drowned to embers. When she is at her weakest, she often forgets to tend to the fire. It only assures me that I made the right decision in bringing her to the village with me.
After I build a strong fire that floods the apartment with warmth, I boil water in the kettle and unwrap one of my rarer soaps.
Grandmother’s gaze traces my every move, rather reminding me of a wild animal sedated. It isn’t until I am pouring the hot kettle-water into a washbowl that she protests with a cough.
“You must be washed.” My voice is firm and my gaze harder still. “I won’t quarrel the matter.”
As Grandmother cared for me when I was a vulnerable child, I care for her in her old, brittle state. It is the law of nature. It is what I owe her, and—most of all—it is what I need to do out of my love for her.
She stirs in the armchair.
Perched on the table opposite her, I notice a small smear of blood at the corner of her parched lips. “Have you been drinking water, Grandmother?”
Grandmother mutters choked words that I do not hear. Though, I understand her clearly. A proud woman, a fierce witch, turned an ailing cripple who must be cared for by her own child. And that is what I am, is it not?
As much as I am her Granddaughter, I am her daughter.
She is my mother.
I carry the warm water to her and rest it on the table beside the armchair. With the black soap bar (made from goat’s milk, almond oil, and charcoal), I wet a cloth and rub it until soap suds run down my wrist.
Predictable woman. She fights me at first, but relents only after I have washed her arm. Her pride loathes the circumstance, yet she knows well enough to enjoy clean skin.
After her wash, which leaves her smelling of fresh almonds, I feed her.
Tonight, she hardly finishes her small meal of pulverised potatoes and soft lamb strips, stewed to the ultimate tenderness. Grandmother leaves more in the bowl than she ate. Each passing day, her dwindling appetite wounds me more and more.
“Here.” Grandmother’s voice is a whispered croak, rife with soreness. She hands me her small pocketbook. “I am in the mood for history.”
I take the book and kneel at Grandmother’s feet. From the light of the fire, I see the scrawled words of which Hemlock women have jotted down from time to time.
This is not the book, but it is a book of our people.
I read her the story of her first daughter. Sometime during, Dante’s wolf-howl can be heard from afar. An echo of him, deep into the woods. Far enough that those in the village who hear it, will think it little more than an ordinary wolf.
I move on to the next story she favours—Her own.
When it comes to the part where I am introduced, her hand reaches down and touches my cheek. The smile on my face cannot be helped. With that one touch to the horrid, twisted scar on my face, she tells me she loves me—she tells me that I am still beautiful to her.
She is wrong of course.
The scar tugs my skin and warps it in a jagged line from the corner of my eye to above my jawline. It does not bother me, Grandmother thinks it is a scar of my history that I should wear proudly (to overcome a true witch), and Dante…Well, he cares the least about the scar. I rather think he is fond of it at times.
A foolish wolf under a spell.
†††
Dawn seeps through the dusty windows and wakes me. I must have forgotten to close the shutters. My neck is stiff, my spine aches, and I realise—I had fallen asleep at Grandmother’s knees last night.
I draw away and roll my shoulders. A satisfying pop comes from the left, and then I crane my neck in hopes of the same relief. A night’s sleep at the foot of an armchair does harm to my muscles, but a night’s sleep in an armchair will do worse to Grandmother.
Wiping at the crust on my eyes, I squint up at her.
Soundly, she sleeps. Still, silent, and calm.
I shake her shoulders. “Grandmother, it is time to wake.”
She sinks further into the armchair, heavy and limp.
“Grandmother?” I shake her again, harder. “Wake up. I
t is dawn.”
Grandmother shakes. She moves with me, but not on her own. Her eyes don’t open, she doesn’t pull away from me.
I freeze and study her motionless face; her motionless neck where her vein should pulse and push against her skin.
My hands shake. I touch my fingers to her neck.
I draw back to the floor.
My gaze doesn’t leave her peaceful face. For a long while, I kneel at her feet and stare at her. Soon, her face distorts as though fog has settled over it—for the first time in my life, I shed tears and they warp her in my sight.
Salt droplets roll down my cheeks. Not many, mere trickles, but inside my heart weeps. Grandmother is gone. It doesn’t sink in. It doesn’t settle in my brain, it refuses to become a truth.
I am so entrenched in the moment that I can’t bring myself to look away. Not even when the floorboard creaks behind me. Dante, naked, in my home and searching for his clothes.
Still, I kneel at Grandmother’s feet, eyes on her slack features.
Dante comes closer to me. He slips into the tension with ease and crouches behind me on the floor. His hands find my arms, where they rest a long while.
I stay at Grandmother’s feet.
Dante does not leave.
28.
Epilogue
Grandmother’s death has not gotten easier for me. Three weeks later, and I still make to speak to her as I brew concoctions and stir soup. Sometimes, I turn to the armchair as though I expect to see her sitting there, reading from a book, or knitting herself a pair of stockings.
Three weeks, and each time I expect her to be there, she never is.
I had a weak moment. In the book—The Book—there is a ritual… A ritual so dark that, if Grandmother was alive still and caught me looking at it, she would beat me with the book. I almost brought her back.
Of course, it would not have been her. I know this. Her energy has passed, moved beyond this word and through the veil. But I want her back here on this side of the veil with me. Until Grandmother abandoned my soul, I never truly realised how alone I am.