Soulmate

by L. J. Smith

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  For Marion Foster Divola

  CHAPTER 1

  The werewolves broke in while Hannah Snow was in the psychologist’s office.

  She was there for the obvious reason. “I think I’m going insane,” she said quietly as soon as she sat down.

  “And what makes you think that?” The psychologist’s voice was neutral, soothing.

  Hannah swallowed.

  Okay, she thought. Lay it on the line. Skip the paranoid feeling of being followed and the ultra-paranoid feeling that someone was trying to kill her, ignore the dreams that woke her up screaming. Go straight to the really weird stuff.

  “I write notes,” she said flatly.

  “Notes.” The therapist nodded, tapping a pencil against his lips. Then as the silence stretched out: “Uh, and that bothers you?”

  “Yes.” She added in a jagged rush, “Everything used to be so perfect. I mean, I had my whole life under control. I’m a senior at Sacajawea High. I have nice friends; I have good grades. I even have a scholarship from Utah State for next year. And now it’s all falling apart . . . because of me. Because I’m going crazy.”

  “Because you write notes?” the psychologist said, puzzled. “Um, poison pen letters, compulsive memo taking . . . ?”

  “Notes like these.” Hannah leaned forward in her chair and dropped a handful of crumpled scraps of paper on his desk. Then she looked away miserably as he read them.

  He seemed like a nice guy—and surprisingly young for a shrink, she thought. His name was Paul Winfield—“Call me Paul,” he’d said—and he had red hair and analytical blue eyes. He looked as if he might have both a sense of humor and a temper.

  And he likes me, Hannah thought. She’d seen the flicker of appreciation in his eyes when he’d opened the front door and found her standing silhouetted against the flaming Montana sunset.

  And then she’d seen that appreciation change to utter blankness, startled neutrality, when she stepped inside and her face was revealed.

  It didn’t matter. People usually gave Hannah two looks, one for the long, straight fair hair and the clear gray eyes . . . and one for the birthmark.

  It slanted diagonally beneath her left cheekbone, pale strawberry color, as if someone had dipped a finger in blusher and then drawn it gently across Hannah’s face. It was permanent—the doctors had removed it twice with lasers, and it had come back both times.

  Hannah was used to the stares it got her.

  Paul cleared his throat suddenly, startling her. She looked back at him.

  “ ‘Dead before seventeen,’ ” he read out loud, thumbing through the scraps of paper. “ ‘Remember the Three Rivers—DO NOT throw this note away.’ ‘The cycle can be broken.’ ‘It’s almost May—you know what happens then.’ ” He picked up the last scrap. “And this one just says, ‘He’s coming.’ ”

  He smoothed the papers and looked at Hannah. “What do they mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I didn’t write them,” Hannah said through her teeth.

  Paul blinked and tapped his pencil faster. “But you said you did write them—”

  “It’s my handwriting. I admit that,” Hannah said. Now that she had gotten started, the words came out in gasping bursts, unstoppable. “And I find them in places where nobody else could put them . . . in my sock drawer, inside my pillowcase. This morning I woke up and I was holding that last one in my fist. But I still don’t write them.”

  Paul waved his pencil triumphantly. “I see. You don’t remember writing them.”

  “I don’t remember because I didn’t do it. I would never write things like that. They’re all nonsense.”

  “Well.” Tap. Tap. “I guess that depends. ‘It’s almost May’—what happens in May?”

  “May first is my birthday.”

  “That’s, what, a week from now? A week and a day. And you’ll be . . . ?”

  Hannah let out her breath. “Seventeen.”

  She saw the psychologist pick up one of the scraps—she didn’t need to ask which one.

  Dead before seventeen, she thought.

  “You’re young to be graduating,” Paul said.

  “Yeah. My mom taught me at home when I was a kid, and they put me in first grade instead of kindergarten.”

  Paul nodded, and she thought she could see him thinking overachiever.

  “Have you ever”—he paused delicately—“had any thoughts about suicide?”

  “No. Never. I would never do anything like that.”

  “Hmm . . .” Paul frowned, staring at the notes. There was a long silence and Hannah looked around the room.

  It was decorated like a psychologist’s office, even though it was just part of a house. Out here in central Montana, with miles between ranches, towns were few and far between. So were psychologists—which was why Hannah was here. Paul Winfield was the only one available.

  There were diplomas on the walls; books and impersonal knickknacks were in the bookcase. A carved wooden elephant. A semi-dead plant. A silver-framed photograph. There was even an official-looking couch. And am I going to lie on that? Hannah thought. I don’t think so.

  Paper rustled as Paul pushed a note aside. Then he said gently, “Do you feel that someone else is trying to hurt you?”

  Hannah shut her eyes.

  Of course she felt that someone was trying to hurt her. That was part of being paranoid, wasn’t it? It proved she was crazy.

  “Sometimes I have the feeling I’m being followed,” she said at last in almost a whisper.

  “By . . . ?”

  “I don’t know.” Then she opened her eyes and said flatly, “Something weird and supernatural that’s out to get me. And I have dreams about the apocalypse.”

  Paul blinked. “The—apoc . . .”

  “The end of the world. At least I guess that’s what it is. Some huge battle that’s coming: some giant horrible ultimate fight. Between the forces of . . .” She saw how he was staring at her. She looked away and went on resignedly. “Good.” She held out one hand. “And evil.” She held out the other. Then both hands went limp and she put them in her lap. “So I’m crazy, right?”

  “No, no, no.” He fumbled with the pencil, then patted his pocket. “Do you happen to have a cigarette?”

  She glanced at him in disbelief, and he flinched. “No, of course you don’t. What am I saying? It’s a filthy habit. I quit last week.”

  Hannah opened her mouth, closed it, then spoke slowly. “Look, Doctor—I mean, Paul. I’m here because I don’t want to be crazy. I just want to be me again. I want to graduate with my class. I want to have a great summer horseback riding with my best friend, Chess. And next year I want to go to Utah State and study dinosaurs and maybe find a duckbill nest site of my own. I want my life back. But if you can’t help me . . .”

  She stopped and gulped. She almost never cried; it was the ultimate loss of control. But now she couldn’t help it. She could feel warmth spill out of her eyes and trace down her cheeks to tickle her chin. Humiliated, she wiped away the teardrops as Paul peered around for a tissue. She sniffed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He’d found a box of Kleenex, but now he left it to come and stand beside her. His eyes weren’t analytical now; they were blue
and boyish as he tentatively squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry, Hannah. It sounds awful. But I’m sure I can help you. We’ll get to the bottom of it. You’ll see, by summertime you’ll be graduating with Utah State and riding the duckbills, just like always.” He smiled to show it was a joke. “All this will be behind you.”

  “You really think?”

  He nodded. Then he seemed to realize he was standing and holding a patient’s hand: not a very professional position. He let go hastily. “Maybe you’ve guessed; you’re sort of my first client. Not that I’m not trained—I was in the top ten percent of my class. So. Now.” He patted his pockets, came up with the pencil, and stuck it in his mouth. He sat down. “Let’s start with the first time you remember having one of these dreams. When—”

  He broke off as chimes sounded somewhere inside the house. The doorbell.

  He looked flustered. “Who would be . . .” He glanced at a clock in the bookcase and shook his head. “Sorry, this should only take a minute. Just make yourself comfortable until I get back.”

  “Don’t answer it,” Hannah said.

  She didn’t know why she said it. All she knew was that the sound of the doorbell had sent chills running through her and that right now her heart was pounding and her hands and feet were tingling.

  Paul looked briefly startled, then he gave her a gentle reassuring smile. “I don’t think it’s the apocalypse at the door, Hannah. We’ll talk about these feelings of apprehension when I get back.” He touched her shoulder lightly as he left the room.

  Hannah sat listening. He was right, of course. There was nothing at all menacing about a doorbell. It was her own craziness.

  She leaned back in the soft contoured chair and looked around the room again, trying to relax.

  It’s all in my head. The psychologist is going to help me. . . .

  At that instant the window across the room exploded.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hannah found herself on her feet. Her awareness was fragmented and understanding came to her in pieces because she simply couldn’t take in the whole situation at once. It was too bizarre.

  At first she simply thought of a bomb. The explosion was that loud. Then she realized that something had come in the window, that it had come flying through the glass. And that it was in the room with her now, crouching among the broken shards of windowpane.

  Even then, she couldn’t identify it. It was too incongruous; her mind refused to recognize the shape immediately. Something pretty big—something dark, it offered. A body like a dog’s but set higher, with longer legs. Yellow eyes.

  And then, as if the right lens had suddenly clicked in front of her eyes, she saw it clearly.

  A wolf. There was a big black wolf in the room with her.

  It was a gorgeous animal, rangy and muscular, with ebony-colored fur and a white streak on its throat like a bolt of lightning. It was looking at her fixedly, with an almost human expression.

  Escaped from Yellowstone, Hannah thought dazedly. The naturalists were reintroducing wolves to the park, weren’t they? It couldn’t be wild; Ryan Harden’s great-grandpa had bragged for years about killing the last wolf in Amador County when he was a boy.

  Anyway, she told herself, wolves don’t attack people. They never attack people. A single wolf would never attack a full-grown teenager.

  And all the time her conscious mind was thinking this, something deeper was making her move.

  It made her back up slowly, never taking her eyes off the wolf, until she felt the bookcase behind her.

  There’s something you need to get, a voice in her mind was whispering to her. It wasn’t like the voice of another person, but it wasn’t exactly like her own mental voice, either. It was a voice like a dark cool wind: competent and rather bleak. Something you saw on a shelf earlier, it said.

  In an impossibly graceful motion, from eight feet away, the wolf leaped.

  There was no time to be scared. Hannah saw a bushy, flowing black arc coming at her and then she was slammed into the bookcase. For a while after that, everything was simply chaos. Books and knickknacks were falling around her. She was trying to get her balance, trying to push the heaviness of a furry body away from her. The wolf was falling back, then jumping again as she twisted sideways to get away.

  And the strangest thing was that she actually was getting away. Or at least evading the worst of the wolf’s lunges, which seemed to be aimed at knocking her to the floor. Her body was moving as if this were somehow instinctive to her, as if she knew how to do this.

  But I don’t know this. I never fight . . . and I’ve certainly never played dodgeball with a wolf before. . . .

  As she thought it, her movements slowed. She didn’t feel sure and instinctive any longer. She felt confused.

  And the wolf seemed to know it. Its eyes glowed eerily yellow in the light of a lamp that was lying on its side. They were such strange eyes, more intense and more savage than any animal’s she’d ever seen. She saw it draw its legs beneath it.

  Move—now, the mysterious new part of her mind snapped.

  Hannah moved. The wolf hit the bookcase with incredible force, and then the bookcase itself was falling. Hannah flung herself sideways in time to avoid being crushed—but the case fell with an unholy noise directly in front of the door.

  Trapped, the dark cool voice in Hannah’s mind noted analytically. No exit anymore, except the window.

  “Hannah? Hannah?” It was Paul’s voice just outside the room. The door flew open—all of four inches. It jammed against the fallen bookcase. “God—what’s going on in there? Hannah? Hannah!” He sounded panicked now, banging the door uselessly against the blockage.

  Don’t think about him, the new part of Hannah’s mind said sharply, but Hannah couldn’t help it. He sounded so desperate. She opened her mouth to shout back to him, her concentration broken.

  And the wolf lunged.

  This time Hannah didn’t move fast enough. A terrible weight smashed into her and she was falling, flying. She landed hard, her head smacking into the floorboards.

  It hurt.

  Even as she felt it, everything grayed out. Her vision went sparkling, her mind soared away from the pain, and a strange thought flickered through her head.

  I’m dead now. It’s over again. Oh, Isis, Goddess of Life, guide me to the other world. . . .

  “Hannah! Hannah! What’s going on in there?” Paul’s frantic voice came to her dimly.

  Hannah’s vision cleared and the bizarre thoughts vanished. She wasn’t soaring in sparkling emptiness and she wasn’t dead. She was lying on the floor with a book’s sharp corner in the small of her back and a wolf on her chest.

  Even in the midst of her terror, she felt a strange appalled fascination. She had never seen a wild animal this close. She could see the white-tipped guard hairs standing erect on its face and neck; she could see saliva glistening on its lolling red tongue. She could smell its breath—humid and hot, vaguely doglike but much wilder.

  And she couldn’t move, she realized. The wolf was as long as she was tall, and it weighed more than she did. Pinned underneath it, she was utterly helpless. All she could do was lie there shivering as the narrow, almost delicate muzzle got closer and closer to her face.

  Her eyes closed involuntarily as she felt the cold wetness of its nose on her cheek. It wasn’t an affectionate gesture. The wolf was nudging at strands of her hair that had fallen across her face. Using its muzzle like a hand to push the hair away.

  Oh, God, please make it stop, Hannah thought. But she was the only one who could stop this—and she didn’t know how.

  Now the cold nose was moving across her cheekbone. Its sniffing was loud in her ear. The wolf seemed to be smelling her, tasting her, and looking at her all at once.

  No. Not looking at me. Looking at my birthmark.

  It was another one of those ridiculous, impossible thoughts—and it snapped into place like the last piece in a puzzle deep inside her. Irrational as it was, Hannah felt a
bsolutely certain it was true. And it set off the cool wind voice in her mind again.

  Reach out, the voice whispered, quiet and businesslike. Feel around you. The weapon has to be there somewhere. You saw it on the bookcase. Find it.

  The wolf stopped its explorations, seeming satisfied. It lifted its head . . . and laughed.

  Really laughed. It was the eeriest and most frightening thing Hannah had ever seen. The big mouth opened, panting, showing teeth, and the yellow eyes blazed with hot bestial triumph.

  Hurry, hurry.

  Hannah’s eyes were helplessly fixed on the sharp white teeth ten inches away from her face, but her hand was creeping out, feeling along the smooth pine floorboards around her. Her fingers glided over books, over the feathery texture of a fern—and then over something square and cold and faced with glass.

  The wolf didn’t seem to notice. Its lips were pulling back farther and farther. Not laughing anymore. Hannah could see its short front teeth and its long curving canines. She could see its forehead wrinkling. And she could feel its body vibrate in a low and vicious growl.

  The sound of absolute savagery.

  The cool wind voice had taken over Hannah’s mind completely. It was telling her what would happen next. The wolf would sink his teeth into her throat and then shake her, tearing skin and ripping muscles away. Her blood would spray like a fountain. It would fill her severed windpipe and her lungs and her mouth. She would die gasping and choking, maybe drowning before she bled out.

  Except . . . that she had silver in her hand. A silver picture frame.

  Kill it, the cool voice whispered. You’ve got the right weapon. Hit it dead in the eye with a corner. Drive silver into its brain.

  Hannah’s ordinary mind didn’t even try to figure out how a picture frame could possibly be the right weapon. It didn’t object, either. But faint and faraway, there came another voice in her head. Like the cool wind voice, it wasn’t hers, but it wasn’t someone else’s, either. It was a clear crystal voice that seemed to sparkle in jeweled colors as it spoke.