“Alex has had more control than that lately,” I said, seeing Victor still looked doubtful. “Maybe she had an accident and passed out or got confused and shifted and ended up in the woods ‘cause it’s familiar.”
“Fine,” Victor said. “But we’ll go together or not at all.”
He was weirdly insistent about that for somebody who hated being around me most of time, but after refreshing ourselves on Alex’s scent, thanks to her pillowcase, the three of us left for the woods, careful not to be seen by anyone else who had to stay behind. Victor could say what he liked, but I needed to track alone, to push out all of the distractions I didn’t need. So as soon as I had the chance, I slipped away from the others.
I found a quiet spot and stripped off my clothes. Naked and cold in the winter air, I shivered, but it was a good shiver, full of anticipation. I was rarely overcome by the need to shift, but I savoured the experience in ways the others couldn’t. I closed my eyes and let the wind embrace me. The scent of dirt and tree andlifewas vibrant in the air. The woods were full ofus, our scents, our markings, our trails. I just had to follow and see where they led me.
My back arched as the first change came. My bones reshaped, my face lengthened, and my fingernails turned into claws. I fell to my knees and dug into the earth the way Nathan had taught me, grounding myself to something real, tethering myself to nature itself. The shift was fast, urgent. Soon I was covered in coarse curls of brown, the backs of my legs feathered with hair that would get matted as soon as the first drop of mud touched me.
I relaxed completely in a way I couldn’t as a boy. Because as wolf, I was a shadow. Victor and the others forgot about me because they no longer needed to use me to cope. They were more comfortable in wolf form, but maybe that would change with age.
I lifted my snout and shook myself off. Getting used to the change could be disorienting, but a quick inhalation soon sorted me out. There were fresh scents mingled with old, and an uncomfortable thread mingled within. A wrongness. There were secrets in the woods. All I had to do was seek them out.
My heart raced, but my wolf remained calm, ready. Nose to the ground, we took the first step forward. The skin prickled on my back as I heard Victor and Mara in the distance. They were too noisy, too hasty. They were too busy trying to place themselves above each other in the pack to see what lay beneath the obvious scents. I was free to focus on my surroundings.
I started moving, slowly at first, then quicker as I drew close to a trail that had once belonged to Alex. I couldn’t tell how old the scent was at first, but soon, I recognised it as at least a week old. Now that I was focusing solely on her, I realised that Alex had left a lot of scent trails in the woods, spent a lot of time running through them, apparently. Not always alone, judging by the tracks. For a moment, I fervently hoped a wolf hadn’t lost his mate.
Time ticked on. The others had to have lost patience and given up already, but I kept going, moving slowly, double-checking, sorting through a puzzle of scents to find the most recent. A part of my brain enjoyed that, using more than my eyes and nose to fill out the details. And a part of me knew I wasn’t going to find a happy ending.
I wasn’t sure how long I spent in the woods before I caught the first scent of death—the kind I remembered from childhood. A true dark death, not the good death that comes from a rabbit or a deer. Old death, not something from a minute old kill. More like hours.Not food.
For an instant, I panicked, memories resurfacing, but that wouldn’t help Alex, wouldn’t help the pack. I pushed forward until I was on the other side of the woods, the part near the stream. Few wolves ventured out there. It was too close to houses that didn’t belong to us, but Alex and Mara hadn’t cared about that. I often saw them hanging around there. It took me a few more moments to realise there were quite a few scents I recognised, and not all of them were wolf. Something unnatural masked the other scents almost completely, but I couldn’t connect to what it might be.
Ignoring the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I continued on with my task, confident I would find something at the end of the trail.
And at last, I did.
Behind a rotting tree, hidden under the mask of nature’s decomposition, was a grave. Shallow, but deep enough to have remained hidden if someone hadn’t interfered.
I sat by the mound of dirt and took in the scene, imagining it play out in my head. Someone had knelt right where I was, dove their hands into the dirt, digging it away, until they reached a body. A hand was clearly visible, but the scent of death was confusing because an animal had been buried on top of the body.
I couldn’t trust my nose anymore, but the hand revealed a hint, a black ring that I knew belonged to Alex.
I raised my head and howled, a long, deep mournful sound that would travel far and wide. Dogs barked in the distance, alarmed by some instinct they were only half-aware of. Somebody would eventually come, and if they weren’t too upset, they might even catch Margo’s scent lingering around the grave.
Chapter 21
Margo
My cheek was wet,my body stiff and uncomfortable. I opened my eyes slowly, then shot up into a sitting position as I realised I was on the ground behind my house.
So cold.
I gaped at my hands in slowly-dawning horror. My fingernails were filled with dirt. As though I had…
Oh, no.
It had happened again, just like before. Except this time, I still had a chance to hide it.
Shivering, I slowly climbed to my feet, my limbs barely obeying. I brushed dirt off my damp jeans then tried the back door. Locked. I ran round the side of the house, looking for the spare key Mam insisted on keeping taped under a window ledge. I glanced around. No car in the drive. My parents weren’t home. Good. I checked my phone for the time. School was long over. I hadn’t made it there at all.
I unlocked the front door and went inside, straight for the bathroom where I scrubbed my hands for at least ten minutes, trying to get all of the dirt out from under my nails. The warm water melted away some of the cold, but the trembling refused to stop.
I got changed, threw my dirty clothes straight into the washing machine, then sat on the bottom step of my stairs and freaked the hell out. I had done it again. Sleepwalked. Who had seen me this time? I couldn’t even remember falling asleep. I remembered getting off the bus on the way to school, and then…
I searched the house. My school bag wasn’t there. Where the hell was it? My fingers shook as I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was insane. I had to be. I was losing my mind, my control, and the only place for me was some kind of mental institution.
How could I tell my parents I had been sleepwalking without even falling asleep? Or worse, that I had fallen asleep on the street somewhere. And my bag, full of books we couldn’t afford to replace. I ran my hands through my hair, sweat trickling down my back. I couldn’t fixthis.