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I’m furious at myself, but I will take it out on these predators for daring to attack who I was not here to protect.
With my upper arms, I peel the biting wolves off my back, spinning and hurling them into the forest. A few others make threatening yips at me, baring their teeth. But I roar back and stand to my full height with all my arms out.
These wolves might be hungry, but they know a bigger and more dangerous predator when they see one.
One after another, they retreat, streaks of gray bounding back into the woods as twilight falls.
Ksenia is still on her back in the snow, and we both breathe heavily. I reach out a hand to help her, but she jerks away, scrambling back and eventually getting to her feet herself.
“Where were you?” she shouts, bending over and yanking her knife from the wolf’s belly. She cleans it in the snow without looking at me.
“I should have been here,” I say. “I should not have left for so long.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” she says angrily, and I see she is shaking. She’s cold. The sun has dropped below the horizon, and she is now covered in cold, sticky blood. Already, it freezes on her coat.
The temperature is dangerous for her frail human body, and if I do not work quickly, she will be in even more danger.
I sling the pack down from my back, dismayed when I see the wolves have torn it. What if they punctured the tent? But I cannot worry about that now.
Hurriedly, I pitch the small tent. It is meant for negative temperatures, but my chest clenches when I see that the wolves have indeed ripped the tent, too. But there are bags for sleeping, and I will zip her in both of them. The cold does not bother me.
Ksenia paces anxiously, back and forth, back and forth. She does not seem to be doing well, but I cannot even attend to her because I must get a fire started.
If I had been here like I was supposed to, all of this could have been seen to while there was still light in the sky. My head hangs as I race to the forest and tear branches from trees for kindling with all six of my arms, shaking heavy snow from them as I go.
I work quickly, but it is still too long before I have a fire crackling beside the tent with its terrible, flapping tear.
Ksenia doesn’t say a word as I work. But what is there to say? I have failed her. She moves close to the fire, and the flames dance off the thick mask covering her face to protect her from the cold. I worry about her exposed, fragile human eyes darting frantically as if she is having difficulty being still.
I race to gather more wood, trying to ignore the wolf’s blood on her coat as it melts in the heat of the fire and drips down her front onto the snow.
It takes another half hour before I have everything arranged—bags in the tent and a pot over the roaring fire with enough melted snow to begin stewing some wolf’s meat. The entire time, there is only silence from her.
I preferred it when she was yelling at me.
“I should have been here,” I say again if only to break the silence.
Her head jerks up at my words, and even though she has been sitting on a log I propped up by the fire for most of the last half hour, boots all but buried in the flames, she has not stopped shaking. “You keep saying that. But that’s not a real apology.”
I blink. I don’t think I’ve ever—My brothers and I don’t apologize.
It’s never been in our vocabulary. But she’s right. She deserves one. So I try out the strange words I know of even if I’ve never heard them said to me or ever said them myself. I take a seat in the snow across the fire from her. The cold does not bother me much through my tough hide.
“I am. . . sorry.”
Her eyes flash in my direction, even if they don’t quite land on me. “And you swear never to leave me like that again?”
I nod. “I give you my oath. I will not leave you again.”
“Where did you even go for so long?” she asks, and I can hear the pain of fear in her voice. She rocks back and forth on the log, gloved hands clutching her thighs. After cleaning the knife, she replaced it in the sheath in her pants pocket, and I’ve noticed one hand is always on the outline of it.
I swallow hard as I turn my eyes to the cooking stew. I don’t want to tell her that I abandoned her so that I could go walk amongst the dead in the nether realm. It would only invite more questions. . . But considering I almost consigned her to that dark land through my absence. . .
