Ghostly Snow: A Dark Fairy Tale Adaptation (Girl Among Wolves Book 3)

by Lena Mae Hill

  “The only thing that made you any different was that he thought you’d be the shifter queen,” Mother snarls at me. “But you won’t. So his desperate bid for Alpha status is gone. He won’t have any use for a patricidal shifter who can’t shift. If he wants to be Alpha now, he’ll do the smart thing and marry someone the pack approves of. And they’d approve of anyone over you.”

  “Liar,” I scream, but my throat is tightening. Smoke chokes my lungs and burns my eyes, and my hands are scorched from the ends of the hot branches. I didn’t touch the fire like my mother did, but it still hurts. Even worse, tears threaten behind my eyes. I can’t tell if it’s the smoke billowing off the fire and off Doralice, but I don’t want to find out if it isn’t. I won’t let Mother have the satisfaction of making me cry, won’t let her see that her words hurt.

  I turn and run from the clearing, into the woods. The snow squeaks under my feet, the dry leaves crunching beneath it. Behind, I can see flames licking up from the juniper tree, but I don’t go back. I can’t. She’s already dead, anyway.

  I stumble along blindly for a time, wanting to put as much distance between myself and my mother as possible. Still, I turn every few minutes and look back, expecting her to follow. But she doesn’t. She made her point already.

  An orange glow hovers at the top of the mountain, a glow cast by Doralice burning. But I don’t stop. So many questions tumble through my mind with the betrayal and hurt and fear. What if she’s right? What if Harmon only chose me because he thought I could secure his position? It’s not such a crazy thought. He barely knew me, and he’s known everyone here all his life, including my twin. Why not marry her, if she’s equally tied to the shifter crown? He chose me, though, because I’m a shifter, because they would claim me instead of my werewolf sister.

  After a time, I come out on a dirt road. The entire sky is starting to brighten. Smoke still clings to my skin, my hair, the air, but as morning dawns, my mind begins to settle. I turn and hurry along the road, towards a place that has answers.

  Chapter 16

  When I arrive at my father’s doorstep, I find the house dark and quiet. Not surprising, since it’s barely light out. I feel strange knocking on his door, but I’d feel even stranger if I didn’t. So I stand on the porch, waiting for him to come to the door. A flash of déjà vous rolls over me, so intense I sway on my feet. Knocking on his bedroom door, tiptoeing in, finding him dead.

  Except he wasn’t dead, I remind myself, gripping the door knob. He’d projected here, into an animal, and was captured by witches. By Yvonne.

  After a minute, I knock harder, refusing to give in and go inside, like I did before. And soon, I hear the creak and thud of footsteps inside. Dad opens the door, pulling a robe tight around himself. He looks older, worn and unkempt. I can’t remember if he’s changed since last spring, or if I’m still comparing him to the nerdy professor I grew up with, the regular guy, the jokester.

  He squints at me, then past me, then lifts his head and sniffs the air. “Fire somewhere,” he observes, his eyes narrowed at the trees behind me.

  I swallow and drop my eyes, not wanting to admit I burned down his first ex-wife in a fight with the second. “I have some questions,” I say, squaring my shoulders. I’m not a little girl anymore, one he can lie to and protect. I’ve seen enough at seventeen to be an adult.

  “You and me both,” he grumbles, turning away and shuffling into the kitchen.

  At least he doesn’t treat me like a kid, yelling at me for running off. But the thought makes me a little sad as I follow him into his cramped kitchen. Dirty dishes clutter the sink, something I would have taken care of if I still lived here. But I refuse to feel guilty. He’s a grown man, and if I can take care of myself, he certainly can.

  After he puts on a pot of coffee to brew, he comes to the table and sits at the one clear spot, where he probably eats every day. I sit opposite him, pushing aside a pile of catalogs and junk mail.

  “You been with your mother?” he asks after a long, awkward moment.

  “You could say that,” I say, looking down at my hands, smeared black with soot.

  “I guess I never was a very good father.”

  “Dad, you were fine,” I say with a sigh. I don’t want to get back into this, the way we’d go around and around last spring, with me reassuring him he was great even though, really, he wasn’t. But it’s the perfect segue into one of the conversations we need to have, so I start there. “I met Doralice,” I say, taking a long, steadying breath.

  He nods, his gray eyes calculating. “Is that right?”

  “Yes,” I say. “How come you never told me about her?”

  “What did she tell you?” he counters. “Been talking bad about me, I suppose.”

  “She didn’t say anything about you,” I tell him. “Mother told me who she was, or I wouldn’t have known. What happened?”

  “She died, that’s what happened,” he says with a scowl. He stands and goes to the counter to pour himself a cup of coffee.

  “I’m sorry.” For some reason, I had thought she died after the divorce, that he wouldn’t care. I didn’t mean to prod a painful memory. As selfish as he’s been, I can’t fault him for keeping this one to himself. When I imagine the pain I’d feel if something happened to Harmon, I know wouldn’t want to talk about it, either.

  “Is that it?” he asks, opening the refrigerator. He takes out a jar of milk and pours some into two cups of coffee steaming on the counter. Again, my heart tightens at the sight of him treating me like an adult. I used to love coffee, but I had to sneak it when I was at my friend’s house, because Dad said I was too young for it.

  “No,” I say, flattening my hands on my thighs to steady them. This is harder than I expected. I expected him to be mad, or happy, or at least have missed me. But he seems distant, like I’m a stranger. I guess, in a way, we are strangers now.

  “There’s a girl in the woods,” I say. “She says she’s the shifter heir. I guess that means she’s your daughter, since you’re the shifter king.” It’s hard to say that while looking at this man, with his messy, decrepit house, his overgrown beard and straggly hair, his paunchy middle straining against his worn bathrobe. I picture my mother in her stylish boots, her skinny jeans and parka, her hair in a long braid with a few loose strands framing her heart-shaped face. In comparison, my father looks like a pathetic old man.

  Dad brings the cups to the table and sits, his chair creaking under his weight. “Don’t have sugar,” he says, pushing a coffee cup across the table. “Hope you don’t mind it with just milk.”

  I don’t like it plain, but I don’t say anything. When he doesn’t answer my question, I go on. “She also says Yvonne is her mother. Did you…is she really your kid with Mrs. Nguyen? She’s so…old.”

  He sips his coffee, not meeting my eye. It’s clear he doesn’t want to talk about any of this. That’s why he never told me. Not to protect me, but to protect himself. The old resentment grows, and I ball my hands into fists in my lap.

  “It’s complicated,” he says at last. “But the shifters would accept either of you as their leader.” He smiles, his eyes going far away. “Either of you would do a hell of a lot better job than I have.”

  “You left them for over ten years,” I point out.

  He flinches, but says, “Not for nothing. I left to raise you.”

  “Why didn’t you take her with us? She’s your daughter, Dad. My…sister.”

  “Her mother wouldn’t let me,” he said. “She kept me from her. It wasn’t my choice.”

  I can’t help but soften towards him. I’m not really interested in ruling anyone, but I had to know. “Okay,” I say. “Let’s talk about something else. Projecting.”

  He eyes me suspiciously. “You been doing that?”

  “Not yet,” I say. “But I’ve been told I’m…gifted.” I choke over the word.

  “Your mother tell you about the time you did it before?”

  I hold my coffee cup
between both hands, my eyes fixed on it. “Yes.”

  “Well, then. You know why we all wanted to put a stop to whatever magic you possessed.”

  “Because I killed my grandfather.”

  “Uh huh. When your mother and I married, the only way she’d agree to it was if I moved over there, into the wolf community. Would have made more sense the other way around, for her to come here. But she was so attached, a real daddy’s girl. You know how wolves are about their Alphas. That loyalty doesn’t exist with shifters and their king.”

  A note of bitterness creeps into his words, but after taking a sip of coffee, he goes on. “I loved Talia, and you and your sister, so I went along with her request. Well, you can guess how much the shifters liked that. I’d abandoned them before I moved to Oklahoma.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, not knowing what else to say.

  He sighs. “It’s all right. But they didn’t like that I left them. I’d projected before, but Yvonne was the one who really got me interested in it. She was always a bit obsessed with it. And we did have a little relationship of sorts, before your mother and I married. Yvonne didn’t always look like Mrs. Nguyen. She was a little obsessed with beauty and youth, too. She’d do…spells and such.”

  He smiles fondly at the memory, but it still makes me squeamish to think of all those nights they’d sit up late talking in the kitchen, when she was an eighty-year-old woman. Now I really know why they were so chummy.

  “Well, she hoped it would be passed down genetically, my ease with it. She wanted me to try it with all my kids. You did it without any effort at all, turned into a butterfly when you were two years old and flew out the window. Scared your mother witless.”

  He laughs while I try to imagine Talia freaking out for my safety. “I guess I was okay?”

  “You were fine,” he says. “But she didn’t like projecting, said it was witchcraft. Wolves are so superstitious, have that whole legend of the mirror, this body snatching spirit that goes through the land taking over people’s bodies. But it’s not that easy. Most people could never force out a soul from a body—it would have to be a very weak or broken one, like Mrs. Nguyen. That’s how Yvonne was able to enter her body—because she was already dying.”

  “But I did it,” I say quietly.

  “Yeah, you did,” he says, sounding almost proud. “Your mother told me never to coach you in projection again, but we did it anyway. Our little secret.” He winks at me, as if this is some fun conspiracy, like we used to have when I was growing up. He always made me feel like we were a team, just us against the world. We’d get away with something, and he’d wink at me like it was an inside joke that only we got.

  The coffee suddenly turns sour in my stomach. “You told me to do it?”

  “I taught you to do it,” he says. “The shifters may not have liked me moving to the next valley, but I brought about peace between the shifters and wolves. A marriage alliance. The wolves let us hunt in their valley. We were peaceful with them, and in exchange, I had to live there and only shift into a wolf with them. But your grandfather wasn’t a good man, Stella. He was stingy as hell. He may have fooled your mother, daddy’s little girl, but he didn’t fool me. So when you got a little older, I told you to project yourself into him when I knew he was sleeping. I thought I’d make him walk outside and act like a three-year-old, maybe take him down a peg when everyone saw him acting a fool. I figured he’d wake up and pop you right out. That’s how it usually works. The soul has a hold on its own body. It knows where it belongs.”

  My hands are shaking with rage. “But I killed him instead?”

  “I never thought you’d be strong enough to hold onto a human body when the soul came back,” he says, shooting me a guilty, chagrined smile. Playing the innocent jokester again. “I didn’t mean to kill him. But as soon as Zechariah took over, he kicked us out. Said we’d broken the truce, since they let shifters in and we ended up killing their leader. They were pretty pissed at us both. And the shifters were pissed we’d broken the truce and they couldn’t hunt in the wolves’ valley, so they were out to get us, too. It was safer to go somewhere else, hide out a while. I always meant to come back when things settled down.”

  “But you never meant to tell me all this?” I rise from the table, gripping the edge to steady myself. A siren wails in the distance.

  “Now what kind of father tells his daughter she’s a murderer?” Dad says, holding up his hands in supplication. “You would have thought you were a monster. We had a good run in Oklahoma City. We had some fun, didn’t we?”

  “I’m not the murderer,” I say, the words hard as the balls of ice clicking against the glass panes. “You used me to do your sick business. You’re the murderer. I’m the weapon.”

  Lights flash against the window. For a second, my heart stops. I might know the truth, but to the world, I’m the one who killed my mother’s father. Momentarily confused, I think she’s called the police and told them. That’s why she didn’t follow me. But a long red truck sails by, red lights circling. Behind it, another one.

  When I turn back to Dad, he’s standing, too. And for the first time in my life, I’m afraid of him, too. He’s older than my mother, out of shape. But he’s still a foot taller than me, a big man all around.

  But his eyes aren’t angry anymore. He looks scared as he cranes to see out the kitchen window.

  “Forest fire,” he says.

  “But…it’s snowing.”

  “Dry leaves, strong wind,” he says. “It’s got plenty of fuel.”

  I shake my head, stepping back. First I killed my grandfather, then I might as well have killed Harmon’s father, and now I’ve burned down their forest? I’m like a curse on the Lunessa pack.

  And then a dart of ice pierces my heart.

  Harmon.

  Without a word, I race for the door, out into the snow. It stings my face, shocking after the warmth of my father’s house. I race for the road, where the next fire truck is making its way around the treacherous curves, on the slippery snow.

  Why didn’t I think of this before? Because it’s winter, and fires happen in the summer? Or because I was too angry?

  I curse the girl in the woods, the one who made me slow and clumsy. If I could shift, I could race the truck to the valley. But now, I’m just a human. Smoke churns in the air, and ashes shift down with the snow.

  Why didn’t I put out the fire in Doralice?

  “Thank you.”

  I spin around, opening my mouth to answer, when I realize the voice was inside me. I whip around the other way, looking for a tree, but there is nothing.

  “You set me free,” Doralice says in her dreamy, spooky voice. “Thank you.”

  I turn again, only to see my father staring up into the mixture of snow pellets and ash drifting down. “Come on,” I say, gesturing frantically. “We have to help them.”

  Without waiting for an answer, I turn and run.

  Chapter 17

  When we reach the top of the mountain, the smoke is so thick my eyes stream with tears. Dad is gasping for breath beside me, his shirt pulled up over his nose and mouth. Below, we can see the firetrucks trying to contain the fire. But even from here, with the sky as dark as twilight from smoke, we can see it’s too late for the wolves. Half of their beautiful little valley, peaceful and full of so many trees the green of them hurts your eyes in summer, is in flames.

  Panic washes over me when I think of them down there, in their little log cabins. Elidi, my twin. Zora and Mother, their friends, their pack. And Harmon.

  “Come on,” I say, leaping forward, down the slope. My feet slide in the snow, now covered in a grey crust of ash, but I don’t stop. I slide and tumble and race down the mountain. Within the wolf valley there are other hills and ridges and folds of land. But I head straight for the cabins. The firetrucks are close now, containing the fire. Later, they’ll probably say it was only a small one, only one mountainside burned. One mountainside, and a handful of cabins that belo
ngs to that crazy cult who never left their valley.

  I would have said the same thing when I arrived. But now I know better. It’s not just a crazy cult in their secluded valley. It’s a pack of wolf people, violent and brave and scared and naïve. Their homes that they built by hand, everyone in the community pitching in. Their mountainside, that they use for hunting when they turn into wolves, so they won’t have to hunt elsewhere and kill people’s livestock or trespass onto their land. The valley they plant crops in, pick apples in, provide for themselves in. They are completely self-sufficient—because of this valley.

  I come out of the woods near the road, which means I have to duck back so the firemen won’t see me. I sprint towards the cabins, along the clearing where the wolves gather every month as they transition into animal form. Through a short stretch of woods and out onto a dirt trail. The heat of the fire shimmers on the mountainside, scorching my skin, roaring like a thousand tigers. I duck back into the woods to avoid being seen by a firetruck that’s inside the little circle of cabins. Pulling my shirt over my nose, I race down the slope to my mother’s cabin.

  It’s been over six months since I was here, but it feels like a day. Nothing has changed—not the lamp I fixed that now sits at the end of the couch, or the smell of wood and dust and home that clings inside the house.

  “Mother,” I yell, my voice coming out hoarse. “Elidi!”

  No answer. My father clomps up the steps, grasping his chest and wheezing. “They will have gone,” he says between gasps for breath. “They’ve got a keen sense of smell.”

  “They wouldn’t just leave,” I say, dashing up the stairs. “They’d stay and defend their homes.” It strikes me then that I know these people. I may not like them, but I know them better than anyone in the world—better than the rebels on the hill, better than my own father. Despite everything, they were my family, my community.