I stare at her, anger—once again—rising in me.
There was not an ounce of nicety in her tone.
Hell, she doesn't even look Silver's way.
Instead, Marie reaches out, takes my arm, and—once more—slides it through hers, tugging me along the wall, toward the shape of a distant door, away from Silver.
She literally just ordered Silver to do something. It got under my skin in an instant.
But Silver hadn't even seemed like she'd noticed.
Her expression hadn't changed, hadn't wavered...
She didn't seem upset by it...
And Silver told me what being a wolf was like, hadn't she? That you always know where you stand in the order of things, that the hierarchy is a constant that you feel and know with your bones...
I mean, yes. Sure.
But.
I may not “know werewolf culture,” as Marie keeps insisting, but I still know rudeness when I see it.
I cast a sidelong glance from under my lashes at my grandmother.
I study her for a few steps.
She carries her head high, her nose in the air, her chin up. She keeps her eyes a little narrowed, like she's perpetually figuring out the solution to a problem...
Maybe I'm the problem.
I'm not exactly giving her the benefit of the doubt, am I. I pretty much disliked her on sight, and that's never a very graceful thing to do.
Just as I've been thrust into a new situation where I'm in over my head, maybe she's feeling overwhelmed, too.
I cast what I hope is a surreptitious glance at her again. Now that we're through the door and walking together down a corridor, there's more light. There are windows placed in the rusty walls, the corrugated metal sagging in places because the rust has eaten completely through it...
Even with the snow moving through the often broken windows, through the holes in the walls, there's clearly enough light to see her by.
God...
She looks so much like my mother. Especially in her profile. The curve of her jaw and the upward tilt of her nose...I can't help but see my mother in her.
For that fact alone, I should give her some slack.
I don't know what it's like to be a werewolf.
I don't know what it's like to be a pack leader.
Or what it's like to have my daughter murdered.
I take a deep breath, determined to soften my heart.
I'm going to try.
But when we reach a large metal door and Marie pushes it open, she turns and gazes at me critically.
We stand at the brink of the out of doors. The insipid chill of the winter slithers over the floor, twining around my legs and sliding over my skin.
But that's not nearly as cold as her gaze on me.
“When I go into the water, you're going to have to come in, too,” she says flatly. “Take your clothes off if you don't want them to get wet.”
I stare at her.
“I need power to do this, to take the lock off.” Marie places her hands on her hips. There's not an ounce of softness to her expression. “So we're going for a little swim.”
Snow begins to drift in. I wrap my arms carefully about myself, gaze out at the falling flakes. They're hurrying in their descent to earth, piling up in mounds. The storm is growing.
“In the water,” I murmur, and my entire body does an involuntary shiver.
A sly smile comes across my grandmother's face. “Of course, we could get a good night's sleep in you and take the lock off tomorrow. Maybe one of our guys could head to town, get you a wetsuit. They do deep sea diving in the Arctic in those. You wouldn't be so cold if you were wearing a wetsuit. And then tomorrow, bright and early, it could happen.”
I blink.
Why is she so insistent on tomorrow?
“Is there something wrong?” I ask her. “Because if you need to take time to—”
“I don't need to take time to do anything,” she snaps. She straightens a little, pastes the smile back on her face.
It's a very, very fake smile.
“I'm just trying to think of you, dear.”
But no.
No she is not.
I don't buy that for a damn second.
I curl my hands into fists, and then very carefully uncurl my fingers. I take a deep breath, find some shred of diplomacy left inside of me.
“I don't want anyone else to get hurt because of me,” I tell her. “If I would be putting you out—”
She cuts me off with a quick shake of her head.
Her eyes are narrowed as she stares at me.
“You're not putting me out,” she says in the tone of someone who has been very, very put out. “Let's do this. Now.”
She gestures forward, out the open door.
I flick my gaze outside, out to the winter.
It looks so desolate.
Instantly, beyond the metal door, the encroaching forest begins. A thick layer of snow has blanketed the underbrush and smaller trees and bushes, but carefully threaded through all of that is a very clear path in the snow, angling down a hill and winding out of sight. Someone made their way through that deep snow, and recently, but not after this current snowfall began. There's a new, fluffy layer of white coating the older boot tracks.
And wolf tracks.
I step out into the woods, keeping my arms wrapped around my body for warmth. Yes, I usually run hot, but it's cold up here in the mountains.
The snow keeps falling, the temperature keeps dropping...
And I'm about to go for a swim.
Because of course I am.
No part of this could be easy.
Okay, Ella. Try to keep it together. It's just getting your feet wet a little. Hopefully. I give an inward groan and try to stay vertical as the snowy path stars to slant downward. The angle of the descent is growing steeper, and beneath the snow there's the occasional surprise of ice.
For her part, Marie pads quietly behind me down the hill, her booted feet hardly making any sound in the snow.
It's...disconcerting.
And she's not saying anything.
The one time I glance back over my shoulder, her face is set in quite the stormy expression.
I've got a bad feeling about this.
But then my attention is taken by something else.
I turn my nose up, sniff the wind.
But I hear it before I smell it.
Water.
Rushing water.
The path empties out on a narrow creek bed, coated with a crust of ice.
And there's the stream.
Though “stream” might not be the right word for it. It huge, looks wide enough to be a river.
Ice banks the edges, but the main water itself moves fast and loud, slicing through the landscape with a rushing roar.
“This is it,” says Marie, raising her voice to be heard as she gestures to the water.
And she lets her coat fall to the ground.
I close my eyes, take some deep breaths to keep from panicking.
This is it.
This is really it.
This is when the lock comes off.
This is when the wolf rises inside of me for good.
I open my eyes as a shadow passes in front of me, and then I close them again pretty quickly.
It's my grandmother, and—no surprise—she's already nude.
How in the hell do these wolves get out of clothes so quickly? They get undressed faster than I sneeze.
Marie doesn't give me so much as a glance as she saunters past me. Her chin is up, her shoulders back, and she's proud as her bare feet move over the ice, toward the racing water.
She sits down on the edge of the ice bank, her legs dangling into the froth, her rear on the bare ice. And then she pushes off that ice with her hands.
And she slides into the stream.
My heart is in my throat.
So, yeah. This is not going to involve a simple dip of my toes.
I'm going to have to get into the water.
All of me.
My grandmother does a few powerful strokes away from the icy bank, then she turns in the water, brows raised. She finds footing and stands. It's not that deep. It's a little higher than her breasts, which, I suppose, I should be thanking heaven for small favors: I can't see anything beneath the churning surface.
“Come on in,” Marie practically chirps. “The water's fine!”
Now, normally, this would said in a joking manner.
But there is a venom in her tone as she watches me from the water.
It cuts deep.
The whole “not liking on sight” thing?
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's mutual.
I take a deep breath, and then I'm fumbling with the bottom buttons of my jacket.
If I want the lock off my heart, then this is what I have to do.
Like it or not.
And I promise you: I absolutely do not.
Chapter 21: Frozen
I stand, naked, at the edge of the ice.
My toes curl over the sharpness, the break in the small, frozen bank of the stream.
I look down into the rushing water.
I take a deep breath.
I lift my arm from my breasts as quickly as I can.
I hold my nose.
I jump.
I couldn't bring myself to draw it out, to get acclimated slowly to what I know is going to be a profound, piercing cold.
So there's no adjustment period. No getting myself used to something that would be impossible to get used to.
I jump into the freezing water, and it covers my head and swallows me whole.
It feels like my entire body has fallen flat onto pavement from a great height. The cold is so jarring that it knocks the breath out of my body with a great whoosh, like a giant hand has closed around my whole body, squeezing.
My lungs compress, all the air pushes out, and then before I can start to ascend, get my face out of the water, I breathe in.
Water rushes into me.
I gasp, gagging, my whole body rejecting the water flowing down the wrong pipe, trying to reach my lungs. I push up, thrashing, trying to get my head above water, not because I know that this is what needs to happen, but because my body moves entirely on instinct.
Where I jumped is deep. Where my grandmother is standing is much shallower.
She watches my struggling with a raised brow and not a bit of sympathy.
I fight the water and the current, floundering in the frozen water. I manage to get closer to where Marie stands, though not easily. I'm coughing, my entire body wracked in spasms as I try to get the cold water out of my lungs. My body is trying valiantly (desperately) to deal with the impossible chill...
It's not going well.
My teeth chatter away inside of my mouth as I grind down, try to keep from biting my tongue involuntarily.
Marie doesn't seem even a little bothered by the freezing water. She said something about drawing power from the water, so who knows. Maybe there's something about her, some magic thing, that keeps the cold from destroying her?
I don't know.
But whatever she's got is something that I absolutely do not have.
I'm the only one standing in the rushing stream about to chatter all the teeth out of my head.
“Glad you could join us,” Marie tells me, arching her right brow just a bit further. Any higher, and it'll start to recede into her hairline.
I grimace, give another hacking cough and then shrug.
I can't get up enough breath to reply.
“Are you ready?” she asks me.
I nod.
“All right.” There's no preamble. No telling me what I might expect or what she's thinking of doing or even what might happen when she does it.
None of that.
All she does is step forward slowly, moving through the rushing water and places a cold, wet hand on my shoulder.
I'm glad I didn't know what to expect.
Because if I had...
I wouldn't have jumped into the freezing stream. I wouldn't have gotten the breath knocked out of me by the most profound cold of my life.
Hell, I wouldn't have even left the relative warmth of the building.
Because this is what happens:
Nothing.
Absolutely nothing happens.
I blink.
I wait.
But nothing continues to happen.
I cast a glance at Marie. Her eyes are shut, though not tightly—her face is serene. Her chin uplifted. Her hand, curling around my shoulder, isn't pressing down hard. She's not gripping me. The stream flows around us, and Marie and I stand together in the freezing water...
Marie opens her eyes and gazes at me in triumph.
“There you go. That should about do it.”
I stare at her.
“You should be able to change into a wolf now,” she tells me, then makes a little “shooing” motion with her hands. “Go ahead. Give it a shot.”
I shake my head, grimace, my teeth still clattering together. “I... don't... know... how...”
Marie sighs, casting her eyes heavenward. “Of course you don't.” She rolls her shoulders a little and let's her head fall from side to side. “All right. So, reach into the pit of your stomach with your mind. Tighten your stomach while you do so. You're reaching deep into your stomach for the feeling of the woods...”
The feeling of the woods...
I tighten my stomach. I close my eyes tightly, and I think about every hike I went on with my mother, the way the forest floor felt beneath my bare feet when I took my sandals off, the rich resin of the pine trees...
I open my eyes, give my grandmother a worried glance.
I glance down at my hands, under the water.
They're still hands, not paws.
“Nothing?” Marie frowns. “That's odd. It doesn't take more than the mere thought of wildness, of running, to get it started...” She peers a little closer at me, perplexed. “You can also think about a time you were angry,” she hazards.
I don't even have to think about it to recall that feeling instantly, because it happened just a few minutes ago.
It pops up in my head, fresh and painful: how my grandmother treated Silver just now. Who orders someone around like that?
“Nothing yet?” My grandmother pokes my shoulder with a bony finger.
I shake my head. My teeth have chattered so much that my jaw will forever be clenched now.
The cold has permeated my bones to a profound depth.
I'm made of ice.
Not literally...but I'm getting close.
My grandmother sighs. “Let's get you out of the water,” she tells me. She turns and strides across the stream, pulling herself up and out of the rushing flow by grasping onto a sapling and hauling herself up and out of the water.
She doesn't even strain.
I want to argue her, ask her to try again...but the cold makes it impossible for me to speak at the moment. So I stumble my way through the water after her. I, unlike my grandmother, almost lose my footing several times on the finicky stones of the stream bed. When I reach the edge of the embankment, I, grasp a sapling too, and try to pull myself up onto the bank.
I feel leaden, like every part of me has begun turning to stone in the freezing water. It takes me several attempts (and a moment where I genuinely thought I was going to black out), but I finally get my frozen muscles to cooperate enough.
I crawl out of the water and up into the snow on the stream's bank. My wet hands, sinking into the snow, turn the edges into crumbly ice. My skin burns, my feet are on fire, everything's on fire...
But not because I'm transforming into my wolf self.
It's because I'm crawling around in the snow naked.
I don't recommend it.
I manage to cover my more private areas with my hands and arms, even as I shake. I glance up at my grandmother and try to keep her eye conta
ct, even though staying still is a bit difficult at the moment.
I feel like I'm going to vibrate out of my body from how hard I'm shivering.
For my grandmother's part, she remains unfazed by all of it. Marie stares down at me, hands on her hips, a frown curling her mouth down at the corners.
“That was supposed to work. Shit,” she says succinctly. And then she shakes her head. “You should be a wolf right about now.”
“But... I'm... not...” I point out the obvious between teeth chattering.
“Well, we know one thing.” My grandmother sighs. “There is wolf in you. That wading out and staying in the stream bit, hell, even what you're doing right now, would probably be the death of a human. But you're managing pretty well. That's the wolf in you.” She reaches down and slaps my back.
I grimace and stare up at her.
Is she...smiling?
But no, she's clearly frowning again, gazing down at me with feigned concern.
She opens her mouth, is about to say something else, but the muffled sound of voices reaches us.
As my grandmother turns away to greet the newcomers, I see it.
Yes. It's there.
The hint of a very unfriendly grin.
It's wiped away immediately, of course, as she turns to face the two women—one of them Silver—who slide down the embankment toward us...
But it was there.
I couldn't possibly have imagined it.
I saw it, saw her mouth curl up at the corners with an insipid glee.
A chill moves through me by degrees...
But it has nothing to do with the winter weather.
Silver devours the space between us. She crouches down beside me, and then everything else is momentarily forgotten as she wraps me in her warm arms and drapes a heavy coat about my shoulders.
She draws me close, and the heat of her body burns through the first layer of my frozen skin. Everything blossoms into pins and needles as I begin to thaw out a little.
Silver searches my face for some hint of pain, squeezing me gently.
“What happened?” she murmurs, at the same time that the other woman—younger than Marie, and wearing a thick blue down jacket—nods toward me.
She asks a kind of normal question, considering the circumstances: “What's going on?”
But Marie, apparently, does not have time for this.
Wild Hearts Page 17