“Pick?” she said softly.
“I know, I know,” he muttered in response, fidgeting in her palm. “He’s backed off of you for some reason. Are you sure you didn’t do anything to him?”
“What would I do?” she snapped angrily.
“I don’t know! Call him! See what he does!”
She did, speaking his name softly, then more firmly. But Wraith didn’t move. Snow gathered on his dark, bristling fur, pinpricks of white. All around, the night was silent and cold.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to come back inside you just yet,” Pick mused. He shifted in her palm, a bundle of sticks. “Maybe he wants to stay out there awhile.”
“Fine with me,” she declared quickly, frustrated and confused. “I’m not too happy with him living inside my skin anyway. I never have been.”
Pick looked at her. “Maybe he senses that.”
“That I don’t want him to come back inside me?”
“Maybe. You made it plain enough to me. You probably made it plain enough to him.”
She shook her head. “Then why didn’t he leave sooner? Why didn’t he just—”
Then suddenly she realized why. Suddenly, she knew. Her revelation was instantaneous and stunning. He had stayed not because he wanted to, but because she wouldn’t let him go. He was living inside her body because she demanded it. It might not have been that way in the beginning, when she was still just a girl. He might have been responding freely to her need, which was genuine and compelling. But at some point, the relationship had changed. Subconsciously, at least, she had decided she could not give him up. She hadn’t been aware of what she had done, of the chain she had forged to keep him close. She had thought him gone, after all. It wasn’t until he had revealed himself in Seattle ten years ago, that she had even realized he was still there.
She was staggered by the enormity of her discovery, thinking at first she must be wrong. She had wanted him gone for so long that it seemed ridiculous to believe she could have bent him to her will, even in the most subliminal way, that she could have imprisoned him inside her without realizing it. But his magic belonged to her; her father and grandmother had given it to her. It was the way Pick said: magic didn’t just wander off of its own accord. Wraith was hers, and the strength of her need had persuaded her that she must keep him close, always and forever.
She stared at him now through the night shadows with fresh eyes, seeing the truth. “It was me,” she told Pick softly.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded.
“Don’t you see? I wouldn’t let go of him. I didn’t intend it. I didn’t mean for him to become a part of me. But I made it happen without ever realizing what it was I was doing. I thought it was his choice. But it wasn’t. It was mine. It was always mine.”
Pick rubbed his beard. “That doesn’t make any sense. You haven’t been happy about him living inside you for years. He must have known, yet he didn’t do a thing about it. So why is he standing up to you now? If he couldn’t or wouldn’t break free before, why is he doing so now? What’s changed?”
She looked back at Wraith, at his tiger face, fierce and challenging, at his gleaming eyes fixed on her as if they could see what she could not. “The morph,” she whispered.
“What?” Pick was confused. “Speak up!”
“The gypsy morph,” she repeated. “That’s what’s changed.”
She could almost see it then, the truth she had been searching for since John Ross and the morph had appeared on her doorstep three days ago. It was a shadowy presence that darted across her consciousness in the blink of an eye and was gone. It whispered to her of Little John, of why he took the form of a four-year-old boy and spoke her name and came to find her and called her Mama. It whispered to her of a revelation waiting to be uncovered if she would just believe.