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

by Lena Mae Hill

  “I should get back to him,” I say.

  “Wait,” Elidi says, then rushes ahead with her story. “That’s not what I wanted to tell you. After Mother asked that, I didn’t understand why Harmon would lie. So I borrowed the mirror from Zora, and I asked to see my sister. It showed me Zora. I guess that’s who I think of first when I use that word.”

  I nod, trying to hide how much that fact stings.

  She laughs a little. “So then I asked to see an image of all my sisters by blood. Instead of showing me two, it showed me four.” She nods at the mirror, and I glance back at it.

  “I know about Astrid. Dad’s daughter from…” I swallow, not wanting to say it. “Who’s the last one?”

  “Yeah, I guess Dad really wasn’t cut out to marry a wolf,” she says, approaching the mirror to stand beside me.

  I open my mouth to defend him—I’m a shifter, too, after all—but close it again. She’s right. Not only did he have a wife before my mother, he apparently has illegitimate children running all over these valleys. To be fair, when I was a kid he always said I was the only girl he needed, even when I urged him to date. Though women always flirted with him, and he was the friendly, gregarious type, he never brought anyone home. At least he spared me that, though he was apparently getting around just fine when he went out. Maybe that’s what all those late-night meetings were. Not work. Not shifting.

  Elidi goes on. “Remember how I said that a few times, we had short truces with the shifters?”

  “Yeah…”

  “When I was about six, there was a short one right after Fernando lost his arm. We’d go over to the shifter valley to see Dr. Golden all the time, on that same trail over the mountain I showed you.”

  “Right. She’s from here, too.”

  “For a while she lived there. I didn’t like Zora much then. She was my annoying tag-along sister. But Dr. Golden had a daughter I adored. We played together all the time that summer. Then one day Mother had a big fight with Dr. Golden, and we weren’t allowed to go over anymore.”

  She smiles and bites at a hangnail. “Except I went over anyway. Even after the truce was over, for a couple years, we’d sneak up to see each other and play in the woods. Then one day, she started acting really mean. I got mad at her and left, and I never went back. A few years later, we had another truce with them for a few months, and I went over with Mother, but she was gone.”

  “Because she lived in Oklahoma City,” I say. “Dad said that’s why we moved there. To be close to Dr. Golden.”

  “I think it was the other way around, because you already lived there. But I guess there’s a reason they wanted to be close.” She nods at the mirror. “I had no idea we were related. We were best friends, that’s all.”

  “That explain the big fight Mother and Dr. Golden had.”

  “Right.”

  “Except…Dr. Golden never mentioned a daughter,” I say. “I used to tease Dad about her, telling him they should get married so I could have a mom. And she came over for cookouts and stuff. They were friends, she and Dad. I don’t think she’d keep his daughter from him.”

  “When she came back to the Three Valleys last year, I asked her about Violet,” she says. “She said Violet went missing that winter after we stopped hanging out. They never found her. That was part of why she moved away—it happened here. But I can find her. With the mirror.” Her eyes glow with anticipation.

  I hesitate, wanting to be selfish, to hold onto it. Not because it’s beautiful, but because I can find Elidi with the mirror. If something happens to her, if she’s in danger, will my twin bond be enough? With the mirror, I could see if she was okay.

  But I know I’m being unfair. It’s just a thing, an object. Last time I held onto an object, I was so wrapped up in having something of my own that I didn’t even notice that the woman who gave it to me wasn’t my mother. “Okay.”

  Elidi’s eyes widen. “Really? I can have it?”

  “I don’t know how you’ll carry it.”

  “I don’t have to,” she says, turning it over. “The mirror isn’t magical. There’s a seeing stone buried in this wood. That’s why you can see.” She pulls a pocketknife from her pocket and starts gouging the wood. A cry of protest rises to my lips, but I hold it back. If she wants to find her best friend, our other sister, I can’t blame her. I want my family together, too.

  At last, Elidi finds it. She digs her knife deep into the wood and splinters it. A white, iridescent stone, about the size of a marble but elongated and flattened a bit, slides out like an egg. “A seeing stone,” she says in awe, picking it up and holding it cupped in her palms. “I’ve heard of these, but I didn’t know we had one all these years until your friend Kale told me what they did. Apparently, they’re priceless treasures to the faeries. There’s only a couple in the whole world.”

  “Won’t that make it dangerous for you to carry it around?”

  “I’ll be careful,” she says with a shrug, all reverence gone the moment she snaps her fingers closed around the stone and can’t see it. She slips it into her pocket and flips her knife closed. “And when I find our sister, I’ll come back. I promise. The four of us will be together for the first time, like a family.” A tiny smile begins to form on her lips, and I can feel the excitement radiating from her. “I always wanted a bigger family. I always hoped Fernando and his dad would come live with us. And now I have you, and Zora, and Dad’s two kids...”

  I start to point out she’ll be alone, not with all of us. That she’s leaving all she has on the chance she’ll find some friend she had for a few years when she was a kid, and who knows if the girl will even remember her or want to come back here. But I decide to be happy for her instead. “Are you sure you don’t just want to get out of here so no one can tell you what to do?” I tease.

  A grin splits her face, and she bites it back, as if slightly ashamed of how happy she is to be leaving. “After living with Mother for seventeen years, can you blame me?”

  “Not even a little.”

  Chapter 34

  When I get back to the fire, Harmon slips an arm around my waist and squeezes me against him. “I was worried about you,” he whispers into my hair. “What took you so long?”

  “I’ll explain later,” I tell him. “Right now, it’s time for you.”

  The elders come up and Harmon is sworn in. The confirmation is complete. Harmon is Alpha. We make a circle around the fire. The moon is just a bright slice, a crescent of silver hugging the edge of the growing red orb.

  Just as we take our positions around the fire, a branch snaps in the woods. The wolves freeze, their nostrils flaring. “Not this again,” Fernando’s father growls as fallen leaves rustle and crunch under approaching footsteps. Two of the other men strip off their clothes and begin to shift.

  I wait, my heart hammering, images from the last eclipse flashing through my mind with dizzying speed. A man who stepped out of the woods holding a lantern. A girl with red hair he threw at Harmon’s feet. Animals of all shapes and sizes emerging from the dark forest, tearing into the wolves. My mother’s scream of pure fury—I swallow hard, realizing now that she was going for that lantern. The one that contained Yvonne. If she’d killed her then, Yvonne wouldn’t have come back. I’m the one who saved her.

  In return, she killed my mother.

  But if my mother had just told me, had only explained everything to me then, I would have known better. Her secrets cost her life.

  At last, a figure pops out of the woods, stumbling forward and tripping on a long dress. Another flash of déjà vous sweeps over me. But this is a different girl, one with pale auburn hair falling loose from the braid that circles her head like a crown. She is, after all, the shifter queen. But right now, she looks like a flustered mess.

  Astrid straightens and smooths down her hair with both hands as if just realizing she has an audience. But before she can open her mouth to speak, I launch myself at her. She won’t get away this time. This time, the s
hifters didn’t send a big scary bodyguard with their offering. She’s just a small girl with scratches on her cheeks and twigs in her hair. And I can take her, even in human form.

  I slam into her, knocking her flat on her back. She won’t get away this time.

  “Wait,” she cries. “Don’t kill me!”

  She begins to scramble away, but I grab her and slam her onto her back, leaping onto her. With a shriek, she begins to shift. But before she can disappear into thin air like she did before, I straddle her narrow hips and grip her throat with one hand.

  “If you shift, I’ll snap your neck like the chicken you are,” I snarl at her, not sure if he knows I’m nowhere near strong enough to do that.

  “I won’t shift,” she says quickly, going still under me, her body going solid and fully human again. “Just please let me go.”

  “You’re the one who showed up uninvited,” I remind her. “What do you want?”

  “I need help,” she says, her eyes flitting from one corner to the other.

  I grab a rock off the ground and pull my hand back, clutching it in my fist. “No one here is going to help you,” I growl. “Give me my shifting back, and I’ll think about letting you live.”

  “Okay,” she says, gripping my wrist, trying to pry my hand from her throat. “I’ll undo it. Please, just don’t put me in your dungeon.”

  I narrow my eyes at her. “Undo the spell. Now.”

  She closes her eyes and takes a shaky breath, then whispers a chant. Inside, my tiger stirs, then roars angrily to get out. I let her.

  In seconds, I am not a girl in a white dress but a white tiger, outweighing this twig by hundreds of pounds. Keeping my paw on her chest, I stand over her, barely feeling her thin fingers digging into my fur.

  I open my mouth and let out a roar in her face, one so powerful it sends a burst of wind up the surrounding mountains, rippling the leaves on the ghostly trees that fill our valley.

  “Please,” Astrid begs, her whole body shaking. Tears fill her eyes, and I see how helpless she is. She’s pathetic now, helpless to stop me. That’s why she trapped me, just like my parents did. My whole life, I’ve lived in the confines of my human body, unable to be my whole self. Of all the people who made that happen, she is the only one left. My mother, my father, and her mother are all gone. There’s one person left to kill.

  I remember Harmon’s flat statement about what must be done. He had to kill Yvonne, because she had taken my mother’s place and was trying to take his. That was his fight. This is mine.

  I open my mouth to rip out Astrid’s heart, but my teeth sink into only fabric. She did it again. Enraged, I roar out my fury. But then I see something moving inside her dress. Just as a bird explodes from it, I leap forward, snapping her into my mouth. Her wings thrash uselessly against my jaws, her body clamped inside my mouth. Feathers struggle against my tongue. In that moment, I look up, and I see all the wolves watching. Waiting for me to dispense with this so they can get on with the hunt.

  No one would blame me. No one would think twice. This is what they would do. Kill the intruder and go about their business. We’re animals. It’s our nature.

  And yet…I wasn’t raised an animal. I was raised a human, and though it wasn’t by choice, I can’t shed that nature as easily as they can. But I can choose to shed it. I remember Harmon standing on my mother’s lawn the first day I shifted, telling me I had a choice.

  I can embrace my animal and kill my tormentor, as an animal would do. Or I can stay forever more allied with my human side, and show mercy, a trait that belongs to humans. And I’ve been human too long.

  My teeth tighten, and Astrid goes still in my mouth.

  The wolves are all waiting.

  But then I remember something else Harmon said. I’m an animal. But I’m also a human. And I know that right here on my tongue is the one thing I’ve always wanted, no matter how far it is from what I pictured when I prayed for a family.

  I drop Astrid’s body on the ground at my feet, a lump covered in wet feathers. My heart lurches as I roll her over, sure that she’s dead. Suddenly, I don’t feel quite so powerful. I feel like a bully, like my mother when she slapped me as I cowered in her attic. And I understand then why the wolves never intervened. It was her duty to protect the pack from outsiders, and she did. Just as quickly as it came, my anger dissipates, replaced by shame. My tiger slinks away, sulking, as I shift back to human. I send her a quick promise to let her out often now that I can.

  “Astrid?” I say, holding the raven in my hands.

  Suddenly, she shrinks in my hands. But I hold them tight on her, until I can only feel a tiny lump between my palms.

  I sigh. “Shift back to human so we can talk. I won’t hurt you if you don’t cast more spells.”

  After a long moment, the seed-like bug between my hands swells, and I scoot back as she smoothly slides into human form.

  “Are you done shifting?” I ask, grasping her neck in case she pulls any more tricks.

  She nods, tears pooling in her eyes.

  “Why are you here?” Harmon asks from behind me.

  “I need help,” Astrid says, sitting up and wrapping her arms around her naked form.

  “Why would we help you after what you did to me?” I ask, pushing her back again.

  “My mother made me do that. I’ll—I’ll tell you where she is if you let me go. I’ll do anything.”

  My eyes narrow. “Where is she?”

  Astrid points a shaky finger to the edge of the clearing and sniffs. “She’s in that tree.”

  “How do you know?”

  She sniffs again, wiping the tears off her cheek. “Because I put her there.”

  Slipping off her, I gather the tatters of my dress around me. Apparently, it wasn’t designed to fit both a human and a Siberian tiger. I’ll have to work on that. Maybe take that up instead of being a model—a fashion designer who makes cute clothes that work for both humans and animals.

  “Why would you do that?” I ask.

  “Because she locked me in that lighthouse my whole life,” she says, sitting up and scooting back, dragging her pretty dress in the dirt. Apparently, she’s more concerned about her proximity to me than salvaging her dress.

  “Oh, kind of like you locked my tiger inside me?” I snarl.

  “Yes,” she whispers. “I’m sorry. And I’m sorry if I interrupted the pack meeting. I just thought this would be a good time to talk to you, when you’re assigning roles. I didn’t come to fight. I didn’t even bring backup. And see, I even wore a dress.” She holds up a pinch of fabric, a hopeful smile on her face.

  “What do you want our help with?” Something about her is so naïve, so childlike, I can’t help but pity her.

  “I need help with…everything,” she says, gulping. “I don’t know how to be a queen. My mother always said she’d help me, but what she really meant was that she’d do it for me. And then you had to go and try to kill her, and if I hadn’t locked her in that tree, she’d have killed one of you. And now I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  She breaks off and covers her face, choking back a sob. “The shifters are terrible. They laugh in my face when I tell them I’m their leader. How do you get your people to gather like this, so orderly? And forget listening. They all think I’m a joke, and half of them won’t leave their trailers because they’re afraid their meth labs will explode while they’re gone. I hate them!” She breaks off again, takes a ragged breath, and bursts into tears.

  I glance up at Harmon for help, but he is only watching soberly, with the rest of the wolves. He nods towards her, his face serious. He’s trusting me to solve this, or maybe curious what role I want to play in shifter politics. My place here is established. I’m half wolf by blood. But I’m also a shifter princess. The possibilities race through my mind. If I was the shifter queen, we’d have an immediate alliance between the pack and the shifters. Or at least their leaders.

  I turn back to Astrid. “So you don’t want
to be queen? You want me to do it for you.”

  “Would you?” she asks, grabbing desperately at my arm, her fear forgotten.

  “No,” I say, pulling away. “That sounds horrible. They’d laugh at me, too.”

  “But you’re a tiger,” she wails. “I’m a bird. And you’re just as much the heir as I was. Let me do this as my duty to the shifter people. My first act as queen will be to turn over the throne to you.”

  “Why don’t you use your magic? You’re half witch, right?”

  She sniffs. “I’m not that powerful. I’m not even a real witch, because I wasn’t born with magic. She gave me magic to do whatever she needed me to do. Otherwise, I’m just a shifter. I can cast a few spells I learned from Mother Dear. But that’s it.”

  “Powerful enough to take away their shifting,” I say. “That would get their attention.”

  “They’d kill me.” She wipes her face, casting her eyes at the dirt. “I thought you might help. She always said you’d fight to be queen, and here I am giving it to you, and you don’t want it. I should have known she was lying. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come.”

  “I could try…” I say slowly.

  “Really?” Her eyes are so hopeful, so scared to hope, it makes my stomach turn. She’s the furthest thing from queenly right now, with her splotchy face, red eyes, and dirt-streaked body. Again, that hopeful smile trembles on her lips like a question. Now I know why she looks familiar—the cupid’s bow lips, her blue-gray eyes. If I look just like my mother, well, she looks like Dad.

  I hold up a hand. “I could try to help—if you agree to a treaty between the shifters and wolves. I need to be able to come and go between here and there without any danger to myself or anyone else. And we need hunting land now that one of our mountainsides is gone. It could take years to recover. I need the truce to last. Not just until you figure out how to be their queen. We should have a good relationship with all the valleys. We need to protect ourselves from outsiders, and it would be a lot easier if we all helped each other.”