“Let me go.”
“There’s nowhere to go, Stella. It’s not safe out there. The trees would rip you apart in two minutes flat.”
“Out there?” I ask incredulously. “You locked me in a basement for two months and pretended to be there with me. You weren’t a prisoner. You’re the warden. My prison guard. Is that what you were doing when you listened to my plans for escape? Planning how to stop me? Or were you just using me for your own amusement, laughing at dumb, naïve Stella who’s never been out of her attic long enough to realize she was five houses down from her mother the whole time?”
“I wasn’t laughing at you,” he says. “And I never lied about it. You assumed.”
“And you let me,” I burst out, struggling furiously again. “Just because you didn’t technically lie, that doesn’t mean you deceived me any less.”
“You’re right.”
“So what was the point in all that?” I ask, ripping one hand free of his at last. I punch at his shoulder, his head. “Why not just let me go home?”
“It wasn’t my decision.” He grunts when the heel of my hand smashes into his lips, then snatches my hand and shoves it between our bodies, holding my wrists in one hand and sandwiching them between us.
“Oh, no, of course not,” I say, still wriggling to free my hands. “It’s not like you’re the Alpha and you can do whatever you want.”
“I can’t,” he says sharply. “I have to do what’s best for the pack. If that means sleeping in a cold basement so they don’t have to see me like this, until they can find a real leader, that’s what I’ll do. And if it means keeping you there when you’re too stubborn to see the dangers out here, then I’ll do that, too.”
“I’m not in your stupid pack,” I scream in his face.
“That’s the problem,” he growls. “If you were, you’d stay for the good of the whole.”
“Oh, poor Harmon. Sorry to be so difficult.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he says. “But you’re not leaving, Stella. It’s too dangerous. You’re too dangerous.”
I go still under him, the reality of his words sinking in. “So I’m going to be your prisoner for the rest of my life?”
“No,” he says. “You can join the pack.”
“What a noble thing to offer, Master Harmon. Join or be a prisoner. Hmm. Fair choice.”
“I thought you’d see reason,” he says with a small smile.
“Right, like that’s going to happen. Why would I believe a word you say?”
“Because I give you my word, and I don’t take that lightly.”
“Yeah, you gave me the whole spiel about wolves not lying,” I say. “Too bad it was a lie, so I can never trust a word that comes out of your mouth again.”
For a long moment, his eyes search my face. Finally, he slides his hand from between us, freeing my hands. “That is too bad.” He rolls off me and lays on his back, staring up at the leaves shifting overhead. Around us, the eerie rise and fall of frog song begins again after falling silent during the commotion. I gather up my energy, moving slowly so as not to draw Harmon’s attention. But just as I’m about to roll over and spring to my feet, his hand shoots out and clamps down on my arm. “Don’t make me chase you again.”
“Why? Afraid you can’t catch me anymore, now that you don’t have the unfair advantage of turning into a predator?”
“Oh, I’ll catch you all right,” he says. “As long as you can run, I can catch you. I’d just rather not go traipsing around the Enchanted Forest all night.”
“Is that supposed to scare me?”
“Yes,” he says, sitting up. “Speaking of which, we should probably go back.”
“The Enchanted Forest sounds better to me.”
“Come on,” he says, standing and holding out a hand. I stare at it, wanting to rip it right off his body. How can he act like this is all normal and okay? That I’m supposed to just accept it and move on as if it’s nothing more than an unfortunate blip on the radar. It’s not. I thought we shared something, even if it was something as awful as imprisonment, pain, and the madness-inducing boredom of the basement. But we don’t. Mrs. Nguyen tried to warn me. Keep your eyes open. Don’t believe everything you hear.
Now, I can’t run. Like he said, he’ll catch me. And just because he doesn’t have wolf teeth doesn’t mean he won’t hurt me. When a twig snaps nearby, I startle. After one more second, I take his hand and let him pull me up.
There’s a full moon in another week. I should have gone at the last one, like Mrs. Nguyen said. Instead, I chose Harmon.
I won’t make that mistake again.
But for now, I will play nice. I will pretend, lie, and deceive as well as he does.
With each step I take, my feet grow heavier and heavier, as if collecting more and more weight as I go. I try to memorize each tree, each landmark, but there are no landmarks and the trees look like trees, nothing more.
“You know, I’m glad you found out,” Harmon says, herding me along in front of him. “I was hoping you would. I never meant to lie to you, Stella. It’s just…by the time I realized what you thought, it was too late to correct you.”
“Yeah, you tried so hard. Too bad I’m too stupid to understand.”
“Well, you know now. That’s the important part. I don’t like secrets. Now we’re on more even ground.”
I stomp through the leaves, ignoring the rocks biting into the soles of my feet. “Oh, you mean master and slave? That’s more equal than when I thought we were both prisoners?”
“Slave? Really? What work did I make you do?”
“You’re right. Being a prisoner is so much better than being a slave.” I just need an opening, a break in the woods, so I can run. But who am I kidding? I need more than a gap in the trees. I need a wide-open road, or possibly a racetrack, and a pair of running shoes. A gun with silver bullets might come in handy, too.
“I’m sorry, I don’t see how I’ve treated you so badly,” Harmon says. “You saw a doctor. You were fed. You had clothes. Books. Games. I shared everything I have with you. And I offered you the bed. It’s not my fault you were too stubborn to take it.”
Tonight was my chance, and I blew it. I didn’t plan and plot what to do once I got out of the basement. Like usual, I ran as blindly as an animal. And I was caught like one.
“Oh, how noble of you,” I say, holding onto the anger so I won’t break down in tears at the thought of returning to that basement. “You didn’t beat and starve your prisoner. I’m still a prisoner, Harmon. I don’t care about stupid pizza and dresses. I want to be free.”
At long last, I step out onto the wide, beaten path that separates the woods from the grass in his backyard. Harmon stops, catching my elbow. “I’m sorry, Stella. I really am. That’s the one thing I can’t give you.” He looks so sincere that I almost believe him. But I know better now.
I turn away. My shoulders sag as I start across the strip of grass between the path and the house. It seems to shrink to only a few steps, and before I can memorize the damp, green feel of living grass beneath my feet, we’ve reached the back porch of the house, where the door still stands open.
“We can stay out longer, if you want,” Harmon says quietly, his fingers resting on my back for a second. “If you’re not too cold.”
I shiver, but answer honestly. “I never want to go back in.”
Harmon sits on the edge of the wooden porch and pats the spot beside him. I slump onto it. I can’t believe this is it. That this will be my whole life. I’ve dreaded the thought, but no one has ever come out and told me that’s how it would be. Not even my mother took away my hope.
“What’s so bad about this enchanted forest?” I ask after a minute.
Harmon finishes unbuttoning his flannel shirt, peels it off, and wraps it around my shoulders. Without putting my arms into the sleeves, I hold it closed around me, absorbing the warmth. It smells like a boy, not a dog.
“It used to belong to us,” Harmon say
s. “To the pack, I mean. This whole valley and the forest in it was ours.” He stops speaking, and I watch him carefully as he formulates what to say next. Is that his cue, his tell? Stopping to make up more lies?
“And?”
“And now it belongs to the witches,” he says. “The trees, not the whole valley. Our Alpha traded them for the spell to protect your mother.”
“Why do they enchant the trees?”
He shrugs. “I guess they don’t want them in their valley. The witches and all the other creatures live in the First Valley.”
“Creatures?” I ask, huddling into the shirt.
“You know. Fairies, imps, nymphs, trolls.” He glances at me. “Wraiths.”
“Okay,” I say, laughing at little. It’s so ridiculous. But no more ridiculous than werewolves. “And angels and vampires, unicorns and dragons?”
“Don’t be silly,” he says with a grin. “They don’t live around here.”
“So…all those things you mentioned. They’re dangerous? I mean, if I’m going to live here forever, shouldn’t I know these things?”
“Most of those things aren’t dangerous to us,” he says. “Sometimes mischievous. But the wraiths are the real reason the witches wanted the forest.”
“That’s a ghost, right?”
“A malicious ghost,” he says. “The witches have a binding spell. They trap the evil spirits in the trees of the Enchanted Forest.”
“So the trees are evil,” I say, nodding. I’ve always felt an eerie presence in the woods here, as if they were reaching out to snatch me up and devour me. Now I know why.
“The trees aren’t evil,” he says. “But some have evil spirits bound to them.”
I imagine being one of those spirits, bound inside a tree trunk prison. The wolves probably consider me evil. And Mrs. Nguyen. Anyone who mirrors another person. If I died, would they stick me in a tree for eternity? If I thought the basement dungeon was bad, being trapped in a tree sounds like literal hell.
“So your dad let witches put evil spirits in your trees, in exchange for a spell to protect my mom?” As I ask the question, I hear the faint echo of my sane, normal self, the one who lived in the real world until a few years ago, telling me that’s the most absurd sentence I’ve ever spoken. But a series of images flashes into my mind—Zechariah helping my mother carry home her share of the apple harvest, laughing with her under the pavilion, coming over to talk to her when I found out about them. Did he Choose my mother, but she Chose my father instead?
Everything feels suddenly dreamlike. The intoxicating scent of wet grass and roses. The silvery moonlight falling across the glittering grass, the fairy-sized flowers with their petals like stars, the undulating trill of frogs and insects in the forest, the cool, damp air hugging my legs and the boy’s shirt pulled on over a frivolous, fun prom dress.
For the first time in years, I find myself trying to wake up from this dream so I can call Emmy and tell her about it. It used to be a straight nightmare. Now it’s some kind of bizarro, funhouse nightmare, which is even more horrible in that it’s not that horrible. Life in the basement is boring and pointless, but it’s also easy. If I’ve ever been spoiled in my life, it’s now, when all I do is sit around reading, trying on my new clothes, and playing card games.
“My father didn’t make the bargain with the witches,” Harmon says. “Uriah did.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is?”
Harmon turns to me slowly, with a strange look on his face. “Yes.”
I sigh. “Well, I don’t. So just get it over with. Laugh at me. When you’re done making me feel stupid, go ahead and tell me who it is.”
“Uriah was your grandfather, Stella.”
“My grandfather.” I try to remember what people have said about him before. I know I’ve heard him mentioned. Harmon is watching me, waiting for a reaction.
Finally, slowly puzzling it out as I speak, I ask, “My grandfather gave the witches access to your forest? Which means…he was the Alpha. So my grandfather was…your grandfather. We’re cousins?”
“No,” Harmon says quickly. “That’s not how wolves choose their Alphas. It has nothing to do with bloodlines. That’s how shifters do it. That’s how they ended up without a leader. We select someone based on their dominance, usually when they are very young. I was raised to lead the pack. My father…” He breaks off and swallows, and I hear a clicking sound in his throat. “My father wasn’t Alpha until I was five or so. The elders had seen the mark in my hair and determined that I was the wolf of the prophecy. That’s why Zechariah was selected for Alpha. Because I was destined to lead. Not the other way around.”
“I don’t get it.”
“My father took over the pack from your grandfather, Stella.”
“Oh.” I sit with that knowledge for a minute. My father isn’t a wolf, but my mother is. My mother, proud and cruel and yes, regal on occasion. It makes sense. I can see it now, the shamed daughter of the king, a princess stripped of her title for rebelling.
“So in some weird way, I’m like…wolf royalty?”
He smiles. “We don’t really call it that. Although, now that you mention it, I wouldn’t mind if you called me Your Majesty every now and then.”
“Yeah, you keep on hoping for that,” I say. “In the meantime, tell me how my mother, the Alpha’s daughter, ended up married to an ordinary shifter, by arranged marriage, if that’s even true. Not really sure how much to believe you.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Harmon says, standing carefully on his injured foot. “Why don’t I let someone who knows the whole story tell you. That way, you don’t have to doubt whether it’s true.”
I stand, too. I don’t want to go back in there, but I’m cold even with his shirt on. “You should probably see Dr. Golden about that foot,” I say, following him to the door in the side of the house. “I think I felt something break.”
“Trust me, I felt it, too.”
“I’d say sorry, but you deserved it.”
“What’s another broken bone? I’ve got so many I lost count.” He opens the door, and the smell of damp earth wafts out, the smell of the basement where we’ve spent the last two months. At least he stayed down there with me instead of leaving me down there to go mad alone.
“Maybe you shouldn’t have locked me up,” I say, not wanting to step back into that black pit. “Then you’d have two less broken bones.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you’re sadistic?”
“No. Mostly people told me I was pretty.”
I expect him to laugh, but instead, his voice goes quiet and serious. “You are pretty.”
“So…you’re taking me to see your dad, right? The Alpha who can answer my questions about the last Alpha?”
“Stella,” he says, his paw reaching out to cradle my elbow. He stands there, blocking my way in, and waits until I meet his gaze. “You’re beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I say, reaching for my throat automatically, for the necklace that’s no longer there. My comfort for the past ten years is gone, and I have nothing to hold onto in moments of discomfort or awkwardness.
Harmon may think I’m beautiful, but he must not trust me any more than I trust him, because he doesn’t go in first and let me slam the door and run. He gestures for me to go ahead, and then steps back and waits for me to enter.
“I’m going,” I mutter, taking a last deep breath of fresh air. Holding the door frame for balance, I step down into the darkness of the basement. This entrance has stairs instead of a crooked ladder. They groan under my weight as I step down, and down, and down. Harmon closes the door, and we’re plunged into pitch blackness. I feel my way slowly down the next step, one hand on the dirt wall beside me for balance.
“Why is your dad down here?” I ask. “Is he injured, too?”
“My father’s dead.”
I stop, and he stumbles against me. I pitch forward, but his warm hand closes around my arm, steadying me. “What? Why didn
’t you tell me?”
“When?”
“I don’t know, how about when you found out?”
“It’s nothing you need to worry about.”
“You mean, you didn’t want me to know when you found out, because you wanted me to think we were trapped by the shifters.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“You know, for someone who calls them shifty shifters, you’re not much better.”
“I got it,” he snaps. “You think I lied to you, you’ll never trust me again. Let’s just go.”
“What are we doing, then?” I ask, taking another step and another, until my feet settle on the familiar gritty dirt floor. “I thought you were taking me to see someone who could answer my questions.”
“I will,” he says. “I want you to see your father.”
19
I emerge from the door into the bedroom and turn back to Harmon. “Why are we back here?” I ask. “Where’s my dad? What did you do to him?”
“He’s fine,” Harmon says, standing in the doorway, leaning heavily on the knob. “And you’ll get to see him. But not tonight.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. I should have expected this. “Let me guess. You’re holding him prisoner, too. Is that who was screaming that night?”
“Stella, no,” he says, sounding horrified. “A lot of wolves were injured that night. I told you what that was. And your father…”
“What about him?” I snap, exasperated by all the vague answers. “Can you please just tell me the truth for once in your life?”
“He’s with his people,” Harmon says. “The night of the attack, I was injured, but I sent part of the pack after you. I’m sorry I couldn’t come for you myself.”
“You sent them to bring me back here to be your prisoner?”
“To make sure you were safe,” he says. “If you were safe at your father’s, they would have left you there. But the shifters had you, and…they had other plans for you. We got your father, and he said they’d give you to us if we turned him over to them. So we did.”
Beastly Beauty: A Fairy Tale Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 2) Page 12