“Well, it was kind of strange actually, now that you mention it. Romulus showed up and asked about you shortly after your friends left. Said he’d call and ask the doctor to come check on you if we needed it.”
“That was strangely nice of him,” I say suspiciously.
“Yeah,” Mom says, “but that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was what he said.”
I’m almost afraid to know what it was.
“Well,” I start, after she doesn’t elaborate, “what did he say?”
Her brow furrows. “It was so odd. I’m, here, give me a second to remember it correctly.”
I wait with bated breath while she screws up her eyes, her mouth wording something soundlessly to herself for a moment. When she opens her eyes again, her frown has deepened.
“He said something about how sometimes recovery is the more dangerous of the two options.”
“What the hell does that mean?” I ask.
“I don’t really know,” she says with a shake of her head. “But I really didn’t think about it at the time.”
Her face grows worried, and she looks suddenly unsure of herself. She stares off at the wall this time, her voice growing distant as she loses herself in thought.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have let him in.”
I know where this leads. The self-doubt is growing evident on her face.
She was like this a lot when we first left. I can’t let her slip back into that again.
Not when I still have so many questions.
“So, when I was out,” I start, then have to repeat myself again while she focuses back on me, “was there anything else? Did I say anything? Do anything?”
She blinks a few times, and then slowly starts to come back to herself. “Oh, yeah. I nearly forgot,” her voice has returned to its usual cheery self as she jumps up and starts rummaging around on one of the shelves behind her. “Those three friends of yours left you a gift when they came by.”
“By friends you mean …”
“The three impossibly attractive boys of Romulus’?” She eyes me sharply. “Yeah, I have eyeballs too, you know.”
Without a fever to hide my blush, I have to resort to sticking my face close to the steam from the tomato soup.
I wondered if that was part of the dreams too.
Nothing fools her, however. She grins at me with a sly smile as she hands me a small leather pouch.
I turn it over in my hand. It’s small, the tawny leather soft and worn.
“It’s a medicine bag,” my mom says. “One of the boys, Marlowe, I think, explained it to me.”
There’s a cord that wraps around the top part to pull the small opening of the pouch closed, and from the weight of it, there’s something inside. I loosen the top with my fingers and shake it upside down until whatever it is falls out onto the table.
I pick up the small green stone that tumbled out of the bag. It’s a piece of jade carved into the shape of a tiny wolf. My eyes immediately hone-in on it as the memory of the wolf-girl comes flooding back into my head.
“I think they said that part is a totem,” Mom says. “Though, I wasn’t really listening.”
She shoots me another one of those looks. “Who could, after all, with eyes like that.”
I ignore her comment just as she ignores the heightening color in my skin.
“A totem?”