Page 38 of The SnowFang Secret


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I looked away. “Is Equinox a big party?”

Emily’s smile seemed a bit strained, but the other she-wolves with us twittered and one, about ten years older than me and not usually resident at the heart, said, “Sure is. Starts during the afternoon, goes until midnight.”

“If you find the right company.” Another one waggled her brows at the first.

“Ohhhh,” I said, feeling like an unkissed virgin, which was hilarious, considering even as an unkissed virgin I hadn’t felt like an unkissed virgin, much to Sterling’s excited concern. Could still hear his voice when he managed to stretchvirgininto three syllables. He knew how to handle rowdy, he knew how to handle virgin, he hadn’t known how to handle rowdy virgin.

I looked towards the trees and refocused on the mess of ribbons and ornaments that confronted me.

The mess wavered in my vision, the shadows deepening, the cluster of ornaments at the bottom like debris and ruins. I reached down into the bag. The shadows curled around my skin like purple-dark fingers.

“Just get to decorating it any way you like,” Emily was telling us, her voice far away.

…you have to decorate it for the pups…

The bottom of the bag was filled with debris and paint chips and chess pieces: bishops, rooks, queens, in both colors, of many materials, in a thousand different shapes, some battered, some ancient, some new.

Thatsound. That horriblesoundwhen the Mother-Wolf from my nightmare had flung the brown pup into the wall.

I yanked around and the bag went flying.

“Summer,” the older she-wolf said, her hand on my wrist, and she’d somehow gotten very close while I’d been off wandering around in my dreams.

I was shaking. Bobbing up and down and jiggling side to side. Like myboneswere shaking inside my meat-suit, butIwasn’t.

“You okay?” she asked.

I swallowed around dust and debris in my throat and tried to ignore the ringing in my ears that sounded like the pup hitting the wall over and over again (was that just the beat of my heart?). “Yeah, I am.”

One of the other wolves picked up the bag.

“Did anything break?” I mentally kicked myself. Breaking holiday decorations wasn’t good luckorgood manners.

“Don’t worry about it. Something breaks every year.” The bag was passed back to me.

“Summer, you okay?” Emily asked, with some meaning in her tone. My new namebitinto me.

“I’m fine.” I shrugged off the hand of the older she-wolf. Time to get started hanging these decorations, which were a little too much like the swags that Cye and Jun had made, especially the one that they’d hung on my bedroom door, complete with its mischievous herbal offerings. I shoved my hand into the bag and reached around for a random ornament and a piece of ribbon. My fingers twitched, and the ones on my left hand refused to work while the silver scar danced and lashed along my nerves as my heartbeat pounded in my ears.

…thump…

…thump…

…thump…

Somewhere in a back room of my brain, the dream played on repeat, now with my own mother dancing to the song.

Emily grabbed me by the arms. “What’s going on with you?”

She-wolves: cutting through the bullshit since sometime-BCE. Emily knew who I really was, and she was staring at me likebitch, you BETTER hold your shit togetheror she was going to be grabbing my tongue and twisting it into a knot next.

“I thought I saw something in the bag.”

“Saw something?” Emily asked. “Like a cockroach?”

I shook her hands off. My left fingers danced and twitched. I pretended not to notice. Time for the truth, because lying about the Moon’s Gift was a stupid thing to lie about. “Sometimes I… I see things.”

“Seethings?” Emily prodded.

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