“Leave you,” Gavin said, and I gasped as the grip around me loosened. “Even you can’t keep me from dying. You’ll be alone. You’ll have nothing. You’ll have no one. Let. Him. Go.”
Livingstone roared again. He turned his head toward me, jaws snapping, fangs inches from my face. “You can’t have him.”
“I’m going to kill you,” I promised him through gritted teeth. “When you least expect it, I’m going to kill you for everything you’ve—”
“Carter! Shut up.”
Livingstone shook me hard, my head snapping back and forth. The back of my skull knocked against the cave wall, and I was floating away. It was getting harder to breathe, but it seemed unimportant. I knew only the ringing in my ears. I said, “We heard them. The songs. Wolves. Ravens. The heart, always the heart. It means we’re coming home. They’re strong, and nothing else matters when we hear them. Kill me. It won’t matter. Because in the end, our songs will always be heard.”
“Don’t!” Gavin cried, and I didn’t want him to see this, didn’t want him to see what his father would do to me. For all his bravado, for his prickly exterior, he was still my shadow, still the timber wolf who followed me even when I told him not to. He was there, always there, and when he wasn’t, when he was gone, when he’d left with his father, I understood how a heart could crack so cleanly in two without even a whisper of warning. He’d been stuck as a wolf until I was about to die. He’d shifted for me.
I said, “Hey,” and “It’s okay” and “Look away. Please look away.”
The stench of his blood grew thicker as he demanded Livingstone let me go.
And then I was flying.
It was darkness, and then I was outside again, the air snapping cold against my skin. I screamed when I hit a tree and my back broke. The tree cracked, the wood splintering as it fell over. I landed on top of it, my body made up of useless limbs. I slid off into the snow. I couldn’t come back from this. It was too much. It was too big. Bones could heal, but I couldn’t feel my legs.
I looked up at the sky through the canopy. The clouds had parted above me, and through the gray, I saw blue, blue, blue.
“I am because I am,” I whispered.
“Carter? Carter!”
I screamed again when something in my back shifted back into place, and suddenly I could feel everything. I was on fire, my skin blackened and charred. I writhed on the ground, my arms and legs skittering in the snow. I rode the wave of pain, struggling to catch my breath.
And then he was there above me, wearing a halo of blue sky. “Get up. You have to get up. Carter. Carter.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled, and I cried out as the world tilted around me, the colors bleeding together in streaks of gray and white and blue. I was up on my feet, my arm around his neck, his cheek scraping against mine like a kiss.
He said, “Shift.”
He said, “You have to shift.”
He said, “It’s the only way. Shift, turn wolf.”
He said, “Now, now, now.”
I tilted my head back and I—
am wolf
i am wolf
hurts it hurts it hurts it
gavin
gavin
gavin
saying run
telling me to run
can’t