She had much to learn about being mistress of her own home, but years of being the equivalent of her parents’ servant had given her a good base from which to build. Tidying, basic cooking, and mending were all skills she possessed. There were certainly worse places to start from.
Her tasks done for the day, Josephine sat in the center of the combined living and bedroom, her trunk propped open in front of her. Anticipation simmered in her belly as she waited for Otto to come inside. The full moon was creeping closer. She’d kept track of the days, but there was truly no need. She could feel the restless energy in her blood, the pacing of the beast eager to run free.
It would be her first full moon unsupervised. It would be her first transformation in front of Otto — or rather, the first he would remember. It would be their firsttogether.
Thoughts of what would happen, what he would think of her afterward, if he would experience any changes himself had grown in volume and intensity with every passing day. Otto assured her that all would be well, especially now that they were blissfully alone, but she couldn’t help the gnawing worry.
Of course, that worry was amplified by what she knew would happen tonight. What she would makecertainhappened, no matter what Otto thought. He’d given her a den. They were alone. They had all the time in the world.
Now, at last, on the night before the full moon, Josephine would have her bite.
Needing to occupy her restless hands, she decided to finally sort through her belongings. She hadn’t had a chance to go through her things since their escape. In truth, she hadn’t really wanted to, as everything she owned was tied to too many awful memories.
But she had also sorely missed drawing and painting. Now that she was in their new home — theirden —she summoned enough bravery to inspect what had made it out of the fire while her mate’s hammer tapped a rhythm on the roof.
Incredibly, nearly all of her possessions were intact. The worst damage was to her clothing, as the smoke had seeped through the cracks in the lid to stain them beyond salvaging. Her diary had shared a similar fate.
She made to set the diary aside but paused for a moment. Gazing down at the well-worn cover, she smoothed her fingers over every crease and fold, as well as the raw edges of the paper she had made and sewn in herself over the years. It was bittersweet to hold it in the light of their new hearth.
She’d begun keeping the diary only a few days before her father injected her with lyssa. It held every trauma, every memory of the people who’d come through her father’s lab and later the barn. It was full of grief and pain.
For a taut moment, all Josephine wanted to do was toss it into the hearth. She wanted to watch the past burn just as the homestead burned. What greater symbol of her triumph than reducing her father’s legacy to ash in her own hearth?
But then she remembered Rasmus. She remembered the man who pressed the pencil to her throat. She remembered the elf who fought so hard they were forced to call for help in removing him, and how he’d gone out of his way to avoid even scratching her. She remembered every face, every word. She remembered every ugly thing ever said to her in those cells, and every tiny connection made between herself and those poor subjects, good and terrible.
What if all those people were dead? What if they weren’t? What if the diary in her hand was the only remaining evidence of their lives, of the crimes committed against them?
She could not destroy it — not only for them, but for herself. The diary was a record of pain, but it was one of resilience, too.
So Josephine gently set it aside, on the edge of the thin rug she’d laid down on the floor in front of the hearth, and thought,I can’t leave my past behind because Iammy past. Better to keep it close and see it for the strength it has imbued in me than to attempt to destroy it in bitterness.
Breathing a little easier, she turned her attention back to the trunk. It was a relief to find all her art supplies, carefully stowed away in pilfered cigar boxes, tins, and jars, were entirely untouched.
Josephine carefully laid out her stacks of drawings and rolled canvases on the floor before the hearth. There were hundreds of them, most of which were done on thin sheets of recycled newspaper she’d soaked, mashed, and dried herself. There were paintings of every size, of every subject done in paints of her own making, watercolor, or the very rare oil paint she’d been given for particularly good behavior.
Charcoals mingled with ink drawings and studies lay alongside master copies from books and newspapers. She had not kept much of her early work, finding it painful to look at such unskilled renderings and painstaking copies of woodcut newspaper prints, but a few pieces survived her culling. Peering at it all, she realized that she had inadvertently created something of an archive, beginning at her earliest attempts to those last, frenetic renderings of her mate done on her bedroom floor.
It was as much a chronicle of her life as the diary was.
Her whole world, real and imagined, lay in those piles and rolls now spread across the rough floor of their cabin.
“Now that is a sight.”
Josephine jolted, surprised by her mate’s rough voice. She turned and found Otto slowly closing the cabin’s front door, his eyes heavy-lidded and his cheeks flushed from cold. A chill wind circulated through the tiny home for just a moment before the heat of the stove beat it back again.
Flushing, as she always did when Otto gave her a look like that, she explained, “I was waiting for you and thought I ought to go through my things.” Worried that he might miss how homey she’d made the cabin while he worked outside, she moved to gather up the piles. “Don’t worry, I’ll put them back—”
Familiar body heat radiated behind her as Otto knelt, arms extending to stop her nervous hands. Callused fingers, cold from working outside, wrapped around her own. “Don’t. You promised to show me, remember?”
Her throat convulsed with a nervous swallow. “I did.”
Otto lifted one of her hands to press a kiss to her palm. “Then show me,kone.We will decide which ones to hang on the walls.”
A deep bloom of warmth filled her chest. Her parents had never even considered hanging one of her paintings. They found her art to be as useless as she was. At first, Josephine had taken it up in a last ditch effort to impress them, but that hope was squashed when her mother sneered at a drawing she found in one of Josephine’s pockets.
“Where’d you find this trash?”Evangeline had asked.“You shouldn’t pick things up off the street, Josephine.”
She was twelve.
