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

by Lena Mae Hill

Rage races through me, along my branches and over my leaves. But I am stuck, unable to move. When I was trapped in Mother’s attic, at least I could hope. When I was trapped Harmon’s basement, at least I could read, talk to him, formulate a plan. Even being trapped as a human when I wanted to be a tiger was bearable. This—this is not. I remember reading Dante’s Inferno on the long days in Harmon’s basement. And I think now that Dante had it right—the worst circle of hell, the worst torture, is being stuck.

  Something brushes against my leaves, the branch still outstretched to touch Harmon. The wolf lets out a cry as if in pain, and I recoil. But the wolf stays, whining on the ground beneath my branches. Another wolf joins him, and for a while, they remain there, communicating silently in some language I never understood and so cannot now. At last, they change into human form. The moment they are in human form, I recognize them as if I have sight again. Fernando and Zora.

  It could be worse.

  “Who are you?” Fernando asks, but it’s Zora who reaches out and touches me.

  She spreads her palm flat against my bark, and I can feel the defiance rolling off her.

  “Stella,” I say, as urgently as I can, hoping it will convey to a language she can understand. In all the days I’ve been part of this ghostly forest, days that blur together into weeks and now months, I’ve never asked how to speak to humans. I’ve never asked if it takes practice, if I’ll have to learn a new language.

  Zora gasps and pulls her hand back. “It’s Stella.”

  I guess that’s a no on the new language.

  “Are you sure?” Fernando asks.

  “I’m sure,” she says, her voice ringing with excitement. I admit, that’s the last thing I expected from Zora. I was hoping I could convince her, maybe even bribe her, to tell someone about me. Bargaining has always gotten me what I want with Zora, but this time, she offers no resistance or resentment. “Wait until we tell the others,” she says. “Let’s mark her and go tell them.”

  “You’re going to pee on your sister?” Fernando asks.

  “Good point,” Zora says. “Let me find a rock and I’ll chip off some of her bark. And maybe pee on her just a little. She deserves it.”

  There’s the Zora I know and, right now, completely love. I don’t even care that she’s marking my tree like I’m her territory.

  When they’ve marked me, they shift back to wolves and run off to join the pack further down the valley. I can feel them better than I could as a human, through the other trees, the other ghosts. I wait, so relieved I want to melt. All night, I wait, and wait, and wait. It feels like a hundred years. But no one comes for me.

  By morning, I realize they’re not coming.

  Chapter 23

  Somehow, I misread Zora’s excitement. Or maybe she told the woman she thinks is her mother, and Yvonne told her not to tell anyone. For all I know, she killed Zora to keep her silent. It seems she has no qualms about murder when it suits her purposes.

  Or maybe she told Harmon, and he didn’t believe her. I know how crazy it sounds. “By the way, I ran into your mate in the forest last night. Oh yeah, and she’s a tree.”

  I won’t let myself consider the other option. That he’s already married, and it’s too painful to come up here and be devastated all over again, knowing that it’s too late. I won’t let myself hope. Because if Zora told Yvonne, she won’t just silence Zora. She’ll find a way to get rid of me. She’ll be furious that I reached out, that I tried to communicate with someone. Tried to get free.

  And what happened to my body? Yvonne herself told me the dangers of projecting. She told me what could happen to a body. If she told Harmon I was dead, and he buried my body, it’s probably nothing but a skeleton by now.

  Or, if I’m super-duper lucky, I haven’t decomposed quite so far. I could come back as a reanimated corpse, because everyone wants a zombie for a bride.

  I’ve given up hope when I hear the rustling of the trees, excitement building as they relay a message. Someone is coming, a human is coming. Does it belong to anyone here?

  I try to quash my hopes, knowing it could be anyone. And then he is there, standing beneath my branches. My soul, my mate.

  He clears his throat, uncertainty rolling off him in waves. “I don’t know how this works,” he mutters. “Is this you?”

  I reach for him, stretching my limbs, my leaves aching for a touch. He tenses, but after a moment, his fingers stretch towards me, tentative and a bit afraid. “It’s me,” I say, sending the message with all my strength.

  Harmon sucks in a breath. “Stella? Is it really you?” His voice breaks with emotion, but he quickly recovers himself. “Does this mean you’re dead?”

  “I’m here.” My vocabulary seems limited, my ability to speak muddled. Now I know why Doralice couldn’t have a conversation. There are only simple phrases, not all the small uncertainties and filler words I want to use.

  I don’t know if I’m dead. I don’t know how this works. If I leave this tree, will I pass into the spirit world? Did my body die while I was here? How would I know?

  “How do I get you out?” he asks. While I’m stuck in frustration, he is already moving ahead, looking for solutions.

  “Set me free,” I whisper to him through my leaves, a feeling more than words.

  “How?” he asks, his own frustration coming through.

  “Cut down the tree.”

  He’s quiet a long moment. “What if it kills you?”

  I want to tell him I’ll take the chance, that this is death anyway. I want to tell him some of the ghosts long for death, long to be free. But all I can do is repeat the same instruction. Cut me down.

  “I don’t know if I can,” he says quietly. “Not if it might kill you. If I know you’re here, I can visit.” He breaks off for a moment, his fingers caressing my leaves. “But I guess that’s not fair to you. To keep you trapped here, like an animal in a zoo, so I can come and see you, talk to you. You’re not a headstone.”

  His words cut deep, into my core. He gave me up for dead. He’s grieved me, maybe is still grieving. To him, I was gone. Does that mean he’s moved on, has taken over the pack, has united with Astrid, the shifter queen? I can’t ask these things yet, until I have a voice and can formulate the words I want to say.

  “I’ll come back for you,” he says. His voice sounds older, wearied. And then he is gone.

  The trees mutter and whisper, ask me questions. But for once, I am too despondent to respond. Though I can talk to them, communicate fully in the language of ghosts, I have nothing to say.

  I wait again. All this waiting. It’s good the ghosts have each other, or they’d surely go insane from the waiting, the endless passage of time, the changelessness of the changing seasons.

  And then one voice cuts through the other ghost voices, a voice I know well, a presence I loathe and fear and long for at once. “Stella. My daughter.”

  I draw up instinctively, putting up a layer of protection around myself.

  “You’re going home,” Mother says—my real mother, Talia. Not Yvonne. “You can still do that, you have a body. You were not torn free as I was.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “She put you here, didn’t she? That witch. That sorceress, the queen of the mirror. You’re not the first she’s done this to. Only the first who escaped.”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it escape,” I say. “I’m here in the forest, locked inside a tree like the rest of you.”

  “Not like the rest of us,” she says fiercely. “You have a second chance to live, Stella.”

  “I’m beginning to think it’s not much better than being a ghost.”

  “You’re wrong. You may never understand, but Yvonne ruined my life long before she took it.”

  “So Yvonne killed you. She snatched your body and became your mirror. And she’s living your life.”

  “Not for the first time. Last time, I had the protection of a curse. A loophole. But this time, she crept in while I was sleeping.
When I wasn’t expecting it and could not keep her from invading. A thief in the night.”

  “That sucks, Mom. It really does. I’m sorry.”

  She’s quiet a long time. “I made mistakes,” she says. “I always knew that one day, they’d catch up to me. I suspect she has been visiting me for a while now. I’d wake in the morning as tired as when I went to sleep. Things didn’t feel right. But the last time…when I tried to wake, she held on tighter. I couldn’t push her out. The bond between myself and my body was torn. Maybe it was because I’d left my body before, and the bond that held me to it was never the same. Maybe I had been waiting my whole life for her to come back and claim my body again. Or maybe, in some way, I knew I deserved it. But you don’t.”

  “I did the same to your father.” Being here, in this forest, connected to all the trees and the ghosts, has done something to me. Like they said, it’s hard to hold on to anger as a tree. I don’t even hate my mother anymore. She tried to warn me about Yvonne. That was still her. The next time I saw her, she was someone else. The mirror. The sorceress.

  “You were a tool of your own father’s,” Talia says after a while.

  “For once, we’re in agreement.” How could I have known what would happen, when I was three years old? Still, guilt seeps through me. Maybe I deserve it, too.

  “I know that you don’t owe me anything,” she says. “But I want you to do something for me, if you can.”

  “Okay…”

  “You need to kill Yvonne.”

  “About that…”

  “No one will be safe with the sorceress here. She’s the only one powerful enough to project the way she does. Now that your father is gone, there’s only two people who can do what you can do. There’s you, and there’s her. And she won’t stop as long as she knows that.”

  The trees sigh and whisper, gossiping about my mother’s broken silence, about our conversation, about whether Harmon will return.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  “I hope you do. Because if it were up to her, you’d be here forever. And she’d be living your life, lying with your mate, raising your children, enjoying your freedom. As you, not me. And no one would ever know it wasn’t you. She’s not your babysitter. She’s an evil enchantress. And as soon as you are back, she’ll try again. She’ll never stop trying, until you’re dead.”

  “Okay, okay. I got it.”

  “I mean it, Stella. I may not have been good or fair to you. But I did try to protect you. So I’m going to try one more time. Her time was over a long time ago. She’s kept living by taking the lives of others. They were not hers to take. And she’ll stop at nothing to have more power, more beauty. Harmon won’t be safe. Your children won’t be safe. I speak from experience. This experience, seeing my child in this forest.”

  Did she just call me her child? Part of me still twists when she says it. For so long, I wanted that more than anything. A family, somewhere to belong.

  But it’s too little too late.

  “May you have the strength to face her,” she says. “Remember, Stella. You are not only a girl. You are a tigress. A mighty hunter. It is in your nature to kill, just as it is in your nature to love Harmon, to want what is yours.”

  What is mine. My body, my life. Harmon. A family. But it won’t include her.

  At last, I feel a pull like no other, a need full of pain and longing and desire and love. Harmon is coming back for me. My soul swells with hope, with overwhelming gratitude and joy.

  “Mother,” I say, before it’s too late. “Do you want me to do the same for you? Do you want me to come back and cut down your tree? I can free you.”

  She’s silent a long moment, so long I think she’s ignoring me again. But at last she speaks, just as Harmon reaches me. “No,” she says. “But maybe someday, when you have fulfilled your purpose, when all the peoples of the Three Valleys can pass without notice from one valley to the next, when everyone lives in harmony and there is no danger in it…maybe you can bring your children here to play.”

  She doesn’t say more, doesn’t beg, doesn’t grovel for my promise. She doesn’t say they need to play under her tree, or that I should tell them about her. That is not my mother. She may not apologize and offer phony peace offerings or ask to be my friend. But I can live with that.

  “I’ll do that,” I say. I will do a million things if I can just be human again. Forgive my father for keeping the truth from me. I’ll never know how my life would have been if I’d known who I was all my life. But the truth is, those years of not knowing were happy years.

  I’ll forgive my mother. She was cruel, but life made her that way.

  I’ll take care of that human body I took for granted, that I scorned because my tiger form was so superior. Now I’d give anything to be a weak, clumsy human. I’ll take care of my human side, cut my hair, find a middle ground between the beauty-obsessed kid I was when I arrived in the Second Valley and the slob I was when I left it.

  I’ll forgive the wolves for their fear of me. I won’t let my own fear of them keep me from the one I love more than anyone. I’ll accept my sisters as family, because they are the family I have left. I will do so many things I should have done before, if only I can get my human body back. This tree is no place for a human soul. All I want is to be free of it.

  Until the ax bites into my flesh.

  Chapter 24

  Pain shrieks through me, through every fiber of my being. Through my bark and trunk, my branches and twigs, my leaves. Through the tree that I am, because this is my body. It travels inwards, spiraling towards my soul, residing here.

  “I’m sorry,” Harmon says, his voice ragged. “I can’t do this. I can feel how much it hurts you.”

  After a moment, I force the silent screams to calm, to form into words. I force them through every screaming inch of my tree. “Keep going.”

  He must hear the determination in my words, because he pulls the ax free and swings again. Pain washes through me. My pain. His pain. The horror of what he’s doing. The chance that it won’t work, that he’s killing his mate. That I’m asking him to.

  The blade slices through my flesh again, and again, and again. I scream with each blow, but when he stops to swipe the sweat from his brow, his breath coming in quick, jerky gasps, I tell him to go on.

  The forest with all its ghosts pays silent witness to my torment. I am voiceless, soundless, sightless. Nothing but a lightning rod of agony, silently screaming as the ax bites into my flesh. It is blinding, insanity-inducing pain, ripping through me with each strike as it conquers my outer walls, my bark, into the softer flesh. He swings again, and the ax slices deeper into me. I won’t stop him.

  The moment the last fiber of wood splits from the stump, before the weight of the top half begins to fall, I am hurtling from the tree with a shriek that contains all the things I could not express. The depths of pain I never knew existed, the anger and frustration and fury and helplessness—all of it comes out in one earth shattering shriek, like a sonic boom as I snap back towards my body at the speed of light. I hit with the force of a lightning bolt.

  The force of the blow stuns me senseless for a moment. It’s like I’ve hit a wall made of the finest, clearest quartz, one that I can’t see even with my inner eyes, my sightless new knowing. At first, I think I’ve been thrown backwards by the blow, that I’m tumbling away into space. But then I sense the shattering of the crystal, the fragments splintering and flying in every direction like shrapnel as I blast through a barrier, back into me.

  The grinding, shrieking squeal of the crystal plates raking across each other punctures my eardrums with its ferocity. I scream again, trying to clutch at my ears.

  And suddenly, I can.

  I’m back in a body of substance, heavy and warm again, my hands clumsy as I reach for my ears. Choking, I lean over, and a single piece of apple falls from my lips. Something so small, seemingly so benign as a bite of apple, still white with a bit of shiny red skin, almost
killed me. Lying back, I blink dumbly at the sky, the trees above, the boy bending over me. All of it is so bright, blindingly real and solid.

  “Is it really you, Stella?” Harmon looks ten years older than the last time I saw him, with the finest lines at the corners of his eyes. His cheeks are wet, but he’s laughing, too, pulling my body into his lap and smiling down at me. He brought me my body, laid it at my feet.

  “It’s me,” I whisper.

  “You better not ever leave me like that again,” he says. “That’s a direct order from your Alpha.”

  “I’m not a wolf,” I say, my voice a strange croak. My face feels strange when I smile, like I’ve gone to the dentist and I’m completely numb. I just know my face is doing something totally weird that I didn’t tell it to do.

  “I don’t care,” he growls. “It’s still an order.”

  “You don’t get to order me around. I’m bigger than you,” I remind him.

  “I have a whole pack at my disposal,” he says. “You’re only one tiger.”

  And then he’s laughing, wiping his cheeks, his lips finding mine. Heat rises in my core, bringing me back to life, reminding me what it feels like to have blood in my veins, heat in my body. My arms twine around his neck, and the relief of being able to move my limbs at will engulfs me as I embrace him. My fingers sink into his thick hair, my mouth hungry for his mouth, my body hungry for his body. I tear at his clothes, desperate to feel human again, to enjoy this human body in a way I haven’t since finding out I was a shifter.

  Sure, being a tiger is great. But this—this is what it feels like to be truly alive.

  Chapter 25

  When we’ve finished with our reunion, Harmon dresses in silence. I’m still not used to this whole sleeping-together thing, since we’ve only done it the one time, so I dress with my back to him, trying not to analyze his behavior. Still, when I finish and we both stand, I have to clear my throat to rid myself of the awkward tension.

  “So…are you married now?” I ask.