Echo North(55)

And I’d nearly killed the wolf.

I felt him climb into bed beside me a long while later. My tears were dry by then and I was profoundly glad. I didn’t want him to catch me crying, not after everything he had suffered.

We lay a long while in the silence and the dark, not speaking. I knew he wasn’t asleep—his breathing was too quick and sharp for that.

“Echo,” he said at last, his voice tight with pain. “Thank you for saving me.”

I took a breath. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I attacked you.”

The image of him lunging at me, eyes wild, teeth dripping red, would haunt me forever. “What would have happened if I had broken the mirror?”

On his side of the bed, the sheets rustled. “It would have killed me.”

I cursed myself.

“Echo do you remember the day you freed me from the trap?”

My heart seized up. The blur of white. The blinding pain. Looking in the mirror for the first time at my ruined face. “Of course I do.”

“I have fought the wildness every day for nearly a hundred years. But sometimes—sometimes it seizes me no matter how I resist. Like it did with the trap. Like it did today. And that—that is when I hate myself the most.”

“Wolf—”

“When I hurt you.” His words were choked, like he was fighting tears. “I hurt you from the moment I met you. I do not mean to, but I cannot seem to help it. I—I do not want to hurt you anymore. You should leave. Go back to your father’s house. I will see you safely through the wood in the morning.”

“But I promised you a year. I gave you my word.”

“There is only one day left. It doesn’t matter.”

“I will fulfill my promise. I’m not leaving you.”

I listened to him breathing, three heartbeats, four. “If you are certain.”

“I’m certain.”

He said nothing more.

Sleep stole slowly over me, and as I was slipping into the realm of my dreams I thought I heard the wolf’s quiet voice at my ear, just a breath away. “Forgive me, Echo. For what I have done. For what I will do again.”

And then, in the last few moments of consciousness, human fingers tangled in my own, and a heartbeat that was not mine beat quick and sharp in my palm.

When I woke in the morning I was once more alone in the bed, but I knew with absolute conviction that the voice and hand had not been a dream.

And it was time to prove that to myself.





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I ROSE AND DRESSED, DONNING A FUR cloak against the chill permeating the room, and skipped the breakfast the house had laid out for me. I went straight to the library.

The magic mirror was still locked in its cupboard in the back room. I took it out, settled down on the floor, and pulled out a hair and pricked my finger.

“Show me Hal.”

The surface of the glass rippled and changed.

I saw the wolf in the room behind the black door, roaring and raging, ripping the glass baubles down from their strings. His cries seemed to shake the room, and his fur and his bandage were streaked with blood. Behind him the spider clock ticked, whispering and whirring, the mechanism winding down.

The mirror shifted. I saw Hal pacing a shadowy corridor, his body so faded it was nearly translucent. He dropped to his knees before the mirror that contained his memories, bowed his head into his hands. His shoulders shook as he sobbed.

The image blurred before me.

There was only one day left, and I didn’t know what to do.



I PACED THROUGH THE WINTRY garden, huddled in furs, my breath a white fog before me. Panic seethed in my mind, festering like an open sore.

Hal was the wolf, the wolf was Hal, and I had less than a day to save him.

Snow clung to my eyelashes and the last of the dead roses dropped their petals to the ground like blood. God in heaven, I didn’t know what to do.

“I have fought the wildness every day for nearly a hundred years,” whispered the wolf’s voice in my head.

I blinked and saw the clock, the gears winding down. Maybe all I had to do was wait, see the year through to the very last day without lighting the lamp. Maybe when the time was up the wolf would transform into Hal in front of my eyes and be free forever. The Queen of the Wood had said the truth was always simple.

But what if I was wrong?

Ice stung my cheeks and I pulled my hood tighter. A mouse scurried beneath a tangle of dead ivy, scrabbling for seeds in the snow. My boots crunched and the wind bit sharper, but I didn’t turn back to the house.

I couldn’t stop seeing him, tearing the baubles down from their strings, howling in rage. Kneeling in the shadowy corridor, weeping.

In the fairy stories, there was always a thing to do. A kiss to give. An object to retrieve or destroy. A magical sword. A magical mirror.

Or a lamp, perhaps?

“There is one thing you must not do,” the wood queen had told me, “one rule you must not break. You must break it. That will nullify the enchantment. That will free him.”

But Hal had said: “She always lies.”

I trusted Hal, certainly more than I trusted the queen—but what if his enchantment forced him to say that? What if lighting the lamp was the way to break the curse?

I’d promised to live with the wolf for a year. I’d promised to never look at his face in the night.