Cold Spell

They’re holding Flannery for twenty-four hours and refuse to make an exception—primarily because she wouldn’t stop singing Shelta songs at the top of her lungs on the way to the station.

“She’ll be fine. We’ll pick her up tomorrow when they open,” Lucas tells me as I drop into the passenger seat of his car. It feels strange and low to the ground after riding in Wallace.

“I know,” I say. “I just… I shouldn’t have left her.”

“You can’t be responsible for everyone, you know,” he says, starting the car. I don’t answer.

Lucas books a hotel room on the edge of Lake Superior. I can’t see the island, given how dark it is, but I can feel it. That’s where she is—does she have a private boat to get there? Her own plane? I wonder how long they have, before she turns them to beasts—how long Kai will have.

I wonder if it hurts.

“How does she do it, do you think?” I ask Lucas absently as I sit in a chair by the window, knees drawn up to my chest.

“What?”

“Turn them into wolves. How does it work?”

“How does anything work?” Lucas says, shrugging. When I look unconvinced, he tries again. “There are some things in the world that defy explanation.” Lucas looks out toward the island. Every so often I think I can see its outline in the darkness, but it’s a trick—there is nothing but shadows outside at the moment. He clears his throat and speaks again.

“What are you expecting to happen on Thursday?”

“I… I guess I expect her to cause a blizzard or something and—”

“Not from Mora,” Lucas says. “From Kai.”

“I expect…”

I don’t know what to say, because I can’t quite separate what I expect from what I simply want. I want Kai to run to me. I want him to renounce Mora. I want us to get away and never think of her again.

But I expect it to be much harder than that.

“I expect him to be different,” I finally say softly. “He must be. Even if he hasn’t… changed. Do they ever change back, once they become wolves? I mean, permanently change back.”

“I…” Lucas extends the vowel for a long time, and I can tell he doesn’t want to say the truth. I look at him pleadingly, and he relents. “When someone becomes a Fenris, they aren’t really the person you knew anymore. It’s like… the monster lives in their body. Uses their voice and their eyes. But if he’s changed, it won’t be him. Not really.”

“What if it’s different with her? I mean, you didn’t even know she existed. The wolves with her look different—” My voice sounds whiny, childlike.

“Maybe,” Lucas says, holding up his hands. “Maybe. But you have to remember that they’re very, very good at what they do. The wolves will manipulate you. They’ll play to your emotions, make you vulnerable. And then they’ll kill you.” His voice is gentle when he says this, but it does little to soften the blow. “So if he’s changed, Ginny, but you think the boy you knew is still in there somewhere…”

“I’ll be wrong,” I finish for him.

“You’ll be taking a risk I wouldn’t take,” Lucas corrects. “So the real question, I guess, is… if he’s changed, do you want him alive as a monster?”

“He wouldn’t want that,” I say. “I know he wouldn’t.” Kai—the real Kai, not the one Mora has created—wants to be a musician. He wants to live in tiny apartments and take trips to foreign villas and drink coffee in shops tucked away from the masses. He wants to make the world more beautiful, and he wants to do it with me.

He doesn’t want to be a monster, and I love him too much to let that happen, even if it means I have to live without him forever. That’s what the loudest voice in my head is saying; a cool, collected voice, one I know I should listen to. But there’s another voice, a softer one, that’s crying in the back of my mind. Maybe he’ll be fine. Maybe he won’t have changed. Maybe it’ll all be okay.

Please, please let it all be okay.

Lucas looks so grim that I have to avoid his eyes; I look out the window at the darkness as he speaks. “I was never much of a hunter. I mean, if you need me to… I’ll try. But if you’re waiting till he gets close enough for you to be sure, it might be too late to do anything.”

“I know,” I say, though I’m not sure I really knew until this moment: Kai might kill me.

No. Not Kai. The monster, the monster who killed Kai might kill me, too. The monster Mora created, controls.

“I’ve got a knife,” I say weakly. “Flannery taught me how to use it.”

“Will you use it?”

I swallow. I can’t answer.

“All right,” Lucas says, exhaling loudly. “I’ve been driving all day—I’ve got to get some sleep. You should, too.”

“I will,” I say. “I just can’t. Not yet. Will I keep you up?”

“No,” he says. “You’re fine. Let me know if you need anything.”

“You’ve done more than enough.”

“Well. Still,” he says, and smiles. He walks to the bed on the far side of the room and yanks the spread back, then buries himself in the blankets. It isn’t long until his breathing becomes rhythmic and slow. I reach to the side and flick the lamp off; the room vanishes into complete darkness for a few moments until my eyes slowly adjust. There’s a glow outside, the smallest bit of moon combining with a few streetlights. I can see the red light where the hotel’s dock ends, but I don’t know where the horizon is. Everything in front of me is black. Black and cold, as far as the eye can see.

Sometimes, when my mom’s work schedule meant she came in late and left early, Kai would spend the night at my house. It was an accident the first time—he fell asleep while we were doing homework and we didn’t wake up till six o’clock the next morning. It even started as an accident the second time. He was frustrated with Grandma Dalia for embarrassing him at the store—shouting at the produce manager when he didn’t know what St. John’s wort was.

“It’s crazy. She’s crazy. Can’t she just let it go? I feel like I have to spend my life looking over my shoulder just to make sure she’s not looking over her shoulder,” he said, falling onto my bed and staring at the ceiling.

“She’s just scared,” I said. “She’s always scared.”

“You believe her? About the beasts?” he asked in disbelief.

“I believe it’s real to her,” I said—I’d never told him about how the man in the grocery store parking lot looked at me, about his costume face. “I don’t know. She seems so normal, other than all the beast talk. What if she’s right?”

“And St. John’s wort can stop shape-shifting beasts from attacking me?” Kai said warily.

“Well. Maybe not right about everything,” I said. I sat down beside him with my back propped up against the headboard. It was already late, my room illuminated by a lamp on my nightstand with a crooked shade. We talked for another hour, then two, about Grandma Dalia’s eccentricities, before the conversation lulled and I yawned.

“Are you staying?” I asked. He looked at me, then at the clock. One thirty in the morning.

“Yes,” he said. I reached over and clicked off the light, and suddenly there was more space between Kai and me than there’d ever been before. We were pinned to opposite sides of the bed, each of us afraid that any touch would make things awkward. I fell asleep that way, stiff and uncomfortable from trying to stay in a perfectly straight line.

But when I woke up at four, Kai’s arm was around me, my head against his shoulder. He was breathing slow, still asleep, his face turned toward mine so that I could feel his breath across the top of my head. I hesitated, then draped an arm across his chest and drifted off again. It was always like that, afterward—we would start the night splitting the bed in half, but always woke in the middle, pressed close.

In the dark we always found each other.

* * *