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As soon as I entered, I knew that I’d only been partially successful. This gift of time was not infinite. Adam’s gun was still moving and I had only bought myself a little grace to do something about it.
I could see our bond, still frozen, though this time I could see that there were deep fractures in the structure, awaiting just one hard hit to shatter into nothingness. It made me reluctant to move for fear I would shatter it. Bran had not said “shatter” or “cut,” either, for that matter. He had told me to blow it up.
I just needed a bomb.
I’d been reading a lot of fairy tales since I’d put the pack in the place of peacekeeper of the Tri-Cities. Fairy tales weren’t factual, for the most part. But there was a surprising amount of information to be gleaned from them.
Since our Underhill escapee had started killing people, I’d read and reread a few more. The last fairy tale I’d read was the Perrault story “Diamonds and Toads,” where a girl is kind to an old woman at a well, and as a consequence, beautiful and valuable items spilled from her mouth every time she talked.
In the otherness, as in dreams, what I perceived was influenced with apparent randomness by the things that I’d been doing or thinking about.
Blow up the bond.
I opened my mouth and took out the golf-ball-sized pearl that emerged. It wasn’t exactly a bomb, for all that it was round. How was I going to blow up our bond with it? The pearl was luminous, the color a reminder that white was not colorlessness—in being white, the pearl reflected all colors. It struck me as something hopeful, that pearl.
Words are powerful things.
I don’t know where that thought came from. Maybe something I’d read, or something someone had told me. Maybe it was just a universal truth that came to me in that moment.
I brought the pearl up to my mouth and spoke to it. Then I took it and smashed it against the icy bond that stretched from my waist into the dark mist surrounding the little clearing I stood in. When the pearl hit, the bond cracked around it like the safety glass on my Jetta. I shoved the pearl inside and folded the cracked sheet of glass back around the hole. I wrapped my hands over where I’d damaged the bond, and it re-formed beneath my skin, becoming first smooth and then so cold I had to jerk my hands away.
What did you say?
I looked over and saw that a wolf whose gray coat, lighter on his back and darker on his face and feet, shimmered in the odd sourceless light of the otherness. He was curled up in the hollow of a tree growing on the edge of the mist. His tail wrapped around his body and draped over the top of his nose.
He was too small, too thin, and I’d never seen him hide from anything—but I knew him for Adam’s wolf.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him. This was my otherness and I had not summoned him—or Adam—here.
I’ve been driven out by the monster, he said, closing his eyes and starting to fade from my sight.
“Wolf!” I said, desperate to keep him with me. I was deathly afraid that when he disappeared, I would never see him again.
Do you have a question for me? he asked.
I opened my mouth to ask him something, anything to keep him here with me. And the words that came out of my mouth were: “What did the witch do?”
Ah, he said, lifting up his head. That is a good question.
Between us, separating us, a stage the size of a Manhattan apartment kitchen table rose until it was waist high. Mist from the edges of the clearing drifted to the top of the table and solidified until the witch Elizaveta and Adam stood facing each other upon the stage, both naked.
From this perspective I was struck by how perfect they both were. Her body was tall and strong with beautiful pale skin that looked very like the pearl I’d held in my hands. Her hair was long and dark. She looked like some artist’s rendition of an idealized female. And Adam … was Adam.
I’d seen this scene before but not from this observation point. Standing with the mists playing about their feet, they looked like something out of a Russian fairy tale—as if they belonged together.
Do not, warned the wolf harshly. Such thoughts have power here. We cannot afford to feed her magic with your foolish insecurities.
Right. I cleared my mind and tried to pay attention without judgment. There was something here that I needed to know.
The first time I’d seen this, I’d been in a position to watch Adam’s face. This time I could see Elizaveta’s as she stepped into his space, leaning her tall, naked body against his. She tilted her head and bent forward to kiss him.
Her lips touched his—and even though I knew what had happened and why, fierce possessiveness swept through me.
He was mine. She had no right to touch him.
Yes, said the wolf. We were yours.
Are mine, I thought fiercely. Are.
I didn’t say the words aloud, and I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me.
One of Adam’s arms wrapped around her waist, holding her to him, his hand flat against the small of her back.
He liked to hold me like that, protective and possessive.
His other hand cupped her face, then threaded through her long silky hair on its fatal journey to the back of her head.
As his fingers tightened, her eyes, which had been closed to savor his kiss, flashed open and comprehension slid across her face. In that second, when she knew she was going to die, magic slid from her mouth and into his.
Her magic carried her voice, her words, into him. You are the monster you think yourself to be.
He broke her neck, stepping away from her, allowing her body to fall away. But he put distance between them too late. Her death-gift sank into him, disappearing beneath his skin as he looked up and fell into parade rest.
Waiting, I remembered, for my judgment. I reached out for him and the scene faded away. My fingers brushed the stage and it altered under my touch, becoming the stump of a tree that some giant saw had cut more or less flat. The wood bit my finger and a drop of blood welled and landed on the stump.
This was my otherness, formed of things I knew. My stomach tight, I looked at the wolf and asked, “Was that something I saw, but didn’ t—” That night had been one horror after another, I’d been so tired by that point. “—didn’t pay attention to?”
It is what was, the wolf said, seeming a little less substantial than he had before.
He said, He was lost in that moment, for he believed the truth of her words before she gave them to him. His voice faded, growing softer. Twice born those words, his and then hers. So they took hold in his belief and made it true.
I walked around the tree stump and knelt beside him. He was smaller now, the size of a German shepherd maybe.
“What’s happening to you?” I asked.
He is becoming, answered the wolf tiredly. I am unmaking.
I pulled another gemstone out of my mouth. This one was an amethyst about the size of a marble, uncut and rough-sided. I took it and spoke to it, too. When I was finished, I held it out to the wolf, who eyed it.
What do you have for me? he asked.
“It won’t work if I tell you,” I said, following my instincts. “Eat it.”
He opened his mouth and consumed the purple stone. I waited, but there seemed to be no effect for good or ill. Maybe it would take time—real time, not otherness time.
He was no bigger. He didn’t move his body, had not moved anything but his head the whole time we’d been here.
