Echo North(15)

And yet the pillow was smooth against my cheek, the quilt soft and warm. The sound of the slumbering wolf somehow comforting.

Was my father all right? Had he made it home?

Part of me ached for him, but I wept into my pillow, hating myself, because the other part of me—the largest part of me—wasn’t even really sorry. I’d left him, but I’d left Donia and the villagers and the stifling constraints of my old life, too. It gave me a strange sense of freedom.

Somehow, I fell asleep.



I JERKED AWAKE IN THE dark, skin drenched in sweat. Something was pounding on the bedroom door, trying to get in. No, something was roaring outside the door. Heat radiated toward me. Instinctively, I reached for the lamp, then remembered what I’d sworn and yanked my hand back.

“Wolf,” I stammered, straining to see him down below the bed in the blackness. “WOLF!”

He drew a sharp, gasping breath. “Echo?” His voice was strange and slurred with sleep.

“Something’s out there.”

There came a thud on the door, the sound of a rushing wind and high eerie laughter. The whole room seemed to shake.

“Wolf?”

“It is all right, Echo. Nothing can harm us in here.” What I’d thought was the strangeness of sleep I realized was an accent, a weird emphasis on his i’s and a’s.

Harsh, insistent knocking sounded on the door, growing louder and louder, mixed with the roar of some unknown beast.

“Do nothing,” said the wolf. “Do nothing. It shall pass.”

I shuddered and shuddered, sitting straight against the headboard and drawing the covers up to my chin. The compass-watch ticked steadily underneath my shift—I hadn’t taken it off.

Laughter echoed in the hallway, whispers in an unfamiliar language. Fear crawled through me. I wished it wasn’t so dark, and my mind jerked once more to the lamp on the end table.

“It will get in,” I whispered. “It will destroy us.”

“We are protected. As long as we don’t open the door. As long as—as long as you don’t light the lamp. She is … she is tempting you. She is testing your strength.”

“Who is?”

“The force in the wood. The force … binding the house.”

The room trembled as something hit the door with an earth-shattering bang, like it had been rammed with a tree trunk.

“You must get your mind off of it. The fire cannot harm you. She cannot harm you.”

I twisted my fingers together, tangling them in the blankets.

Another bang at the door. The wood creaked and splintered. A deafening crack, heat pulsing on my skin. I was shaking so hard I thought I would burst apart.

“Tell me about your father,” said the wolf.

“What?”

CRAAAACCKKKKK.

“Your father!” He had to shout above a sudden roaring wind. “Tell me about him.”

I dug my fingers into the mattress. “He’s good and kind. Even to me. Especially to me.”

“Why wouldn’t he be kind to you?”

“Because of what I am!”

“And what are you?”

“I’M A MONSTER!”

“You are no monster!”

The wind shrieked and screamed and twisted around us. I gripped the bed frame, shuddering.

“Tell me more about your father!”

I grasped for words behind my fear. “He loves my stepmother, but I don’t know why. He never—he never laughed at me. He never signed the cross to ward off my Devil’s face.”

“Your face was not carved by the Devil.” The wind died all at once, the roaring shrank away, and the wolf’s next words echoed overloud in the sudden silence: “IT WAS CARVED BY ME!”

The room stretched between us. The heat seeped away, as if conducting a strange slithering retreat back under the door.

“Then it was you, that day with the trap.”

“Yes.”

“Why were you there?”

“I was watching you.”

“Why?”

“I have always been drawn to you, Echo Alkaev. Even when I couldn’t remember why.”

It wasn’t a proper answer, and yet his words pulsed strangely in my heart, like their meaning lay just beyond my grasp. If he hadn’t been there that day, my face would be soft and smooth. The village would have accepted me. Donia wouldn’t despise me. I would have a future. But somehow, somehow, I didn’t hate him for it.

I chewed on my lip, slipping back down into the bed and laying my head on the pillow. “Is it over?”

“I do not know. But I will guard the door till the morning. Nothing will harm you.”

And I believed him.

I fell into twisted dreams, trapped in a winter wood, the wolf running one way, my father in Tinker’s sled hurtling the other. Everything was burning, and blood poured fresh from the scars on my face. Donia’s eyes gleamed in the dark, and she laughed as she shoved me into the fire. “It is all a monster like you deserves,” she cackled. “The Devil made you, and the Devil can take you back again.”

I wept in the snow and crumbled to ash, for I was only pages in a book, burned and lost and gone forever.

When I woke it was morning, gray light flooding through the window.