The Voice began to fade, just as he willed it to become clear, to give its true name. Your only hope, boy. Your only hope…
Kieran shivered. There was no hope within the Voice or anything it told him. He wanted to call it enemy, and yet there was no certainty even in that.
“Who are you?” he demanded again, spinning around “Who are you?”
Kieran’s cry finished as a howl. From the forest another call came—not the Voice, but the howl of a wolf, one and then another.
Wolves. They were very near, challenging him in the most ancient of ways. He listened, motionless, until their howls faded, until the stars had shifted in the sky and he could hear only the beat of his own heart.
But in the wake of that silence something else stirred—a profound familiarity, a sense of urgency that tugged at his most powerful instincts.
Kieran lifted his head and sifted the air. From north and west the call descended. A summons, though he didn’t understand how he knew.
For an instant it was blindingly clear. This was the answer, this fragile thread that pulled him. North and west.
He began to cross the clearing and stopped. Slowly he looked back toward the cabin. The battle within him was brief.
He could not go where that summons called him. Not yet. Not while he understood so little about himself.
Not when the one certainty in his heart waited within those cabin walls.
Alexandra was still his only anchor, the only connection between his past and his future. She had promised to help him, and she would never break that promise.
He needed her.
Wrapped in utter silence, he walked back to the cabin.
* * *
Alex knelt by the closet door and hugged the stuffed wolf to her chest. It felt silky and cool against her hot cheek. She had gone straight to the closet and the box without thinking, desperate for distraction, and found her old toy—something she could touch that couldn’t talk or assume or challenge with golden eyes.
“You were never afraid of Shadow,” Kieran had said.
He was right. A stuffed animal was just about her speed at the moment.
Her thoughts were tangled and confused and nonsensical, her body hot and aching. Sleep was out of the question, had been since Kieran had spoken to her with such simple eloquence of things he couldn’t possibly understand.
She listened for the sounds of his restless footsteps, as she had done since she left him at her door. Now, at last, he was silent, but the silence gave her no comfort.
She turned the stuffed animal’s expressionless face toward her and touched the marble eyes. “I wish you could talk,” she whispered, and laughed at herself. She’d made a similar wish only yesterday, and look where it had gotten her.
Her journal had always been enough before, enough to confide in and share her most private thoughts. But she’d left it on the kitchen table, and she wasn’t prepared to risk finding Kieran awake.
Not now. Not until she got ahold of herself and figured out what to do.
With no clear idea of her purpose, Alex set down the wolf and looked at the unopened boxes in her closet. Methodically she unstacked them until she could reach the one at the very bottom.
The heaviest. The one filled to the brim with fairy tales.
She pried open the flaps, her hands not quite steady, and pulled out the top book. The Sleeping Beauty. One of the first she’d ever owned. She ran her fingers over the dogeared cover, stained with something she’d spilled on it as a child. She set it on the floor beside the wolf and reached for the next, flipping through each book more and more quickly, searching for… something.
For answers.
But no answers came until she reached the final book in the box. It was also the newest—the last her mother had given her before the accident. A lavishly illustrated version of Cinderella.
The inner cover was still inscribed with the words Mother had written in it: Never forget to dream.
But she had. She’d let herself forget for a very, very long time, forget the simple joys she’d known as a child. Even her love of nature had lost its innocence. She’d pushed the past away; now one of her banished memories had jumped out and bitten her, and she didn’t know what to do with it.