It happens so quickly there’s no time to react.
Right before my eyes, this girl jumps unnaturally high up into the air. In the time it takes for her feet to touch back onto the ground, they’re no longer feet, but giant paws.
One moment, a wild gypsy girl stands before me in the woods, a wicked smile on her face. The next, there’s a wolf—with an equally wicked curl to its lips. I’d think it was a trick of the light if it weren’t for the wolf’s fur. It’s the same rich, red-hued sienna as the girl’s hair. A striking color. A memorable color.
The wolf in front of me lets out a bone-chilling growl that makes all the hair on my body stand up. It bares its teeth at me once before it runs off into the woods toward the swell of howling in the distance.
The boys all immediately turn to look at me with panic on their faces.
“Well, that didn’t go so well,” Kaleb tries to joke, but it falls flat.
Rory shoots him a glare before looking back at me.
“Sabrina,” he says as calmly as he can muster. “Don’t freak out. Everything is okay, just let us explain what—”
“Don’t touch me!” I scream at him as Rory tries to reach forward and help me to my feet. When did I end up on the ground? “Get away from me!” I scramble backward, using my hands to push myself up off the forest floor before I take off running in the opposite direction.
I can hear the boys crying after me to stop and wait, but I am NOT stopping.
So much happened today that I don’t understand. But that, that one fact I’m sure of. I can’t stop.
“Sabrina, please!” I hear Rory calling.
“Just give us a chance to explain everything,” Kaleb shouts after him.
I can hear their voices behind me. I don’t an explanation now. I don’t think I can handle an explanation. A million thoughts race through my head as I try to process what I just saw, while at the same time, trying not to.
I’m not even watching where I’m going when I slam into Tom’s back.
It might be the first time I’m genuinely happy to see him, because it means I’ve found my way back to the beginning. I’m not lost. I’m not in “Free Territory” and whatever horrors that now holds.
I’m almost home.
It isn’t long after that I actually am.
It turns out that the bridge was actually upriver in the opposite direction. Jess, Aimee, and Tom hightailed it back to her car to check the other side of the bank as soon as they realized I wasn’t coming back up. When they still couldn’t find me anywhere, they feared the worst and made a few frantic phone calls. They were just about to call my mom when I showed up, but there’s still going to be a decent amount of explaining to do.
Tom tries at some point to put his arm around my waist in some sort of creepy gesture to help me into the car, and I’m so shaken up by everything else that I don’t have the energy to stop him doing it. It’s as if I’ve re-entered that twilight state between wake and dreaming. I don’t know what’s real anymore.
The lights above the sheriff’s car. The chatter of voices in my ear on the drive up to the cabin. The howling in the woods beyond the trees … the wolves. It’s all a blur of disjointed images and sounds.
I must pass out again at some point, because I don’t remember actually getting back to the cabin.
But I do, somehow, because I wake there some hours later.
I have no idea how much time has passed when the knocking on the door wakes me up. I hear my mom’s voice talking to someone outside, and I faintly realize I’m not in the loft as usual.
“I’m sorry, but she’s still asleep. She’s exhausted. I don’t know the whole story of what happened at the river, but you can wait here and see if she wakes up if you’d like.” Mom sounds more parental than usual. “She’s been talking about you.”
Talking in my sleep? If my face didn’t already burn, it would. I wonder what I’ve been saying.
“Thank you, yes, we’ll come in and wait.”
That voice sends shivers up my spine. It’s Rory.
What’s he doing here? I listen closer and can hear the shuffle of all three boys outside the door.
While they’re waiting, Marlowe obliges both of us with a watered-down version of what happened down at the river.