No, not friends.
Catskill thought of his mother’s words, of service to the mountains. Of family.
We are kin. We are pack.
Green awoke to a high-pitchedwhine.
His first desire was to stop the sound. He wondered what was making it, then realized it was him. It was the involuntary sound of his body objecting to being conscious, rejecting it like a foreign object.
The entirety of his skin was an open eye and the night air was dusted with cayenne.
“Oh my God.”
He rolled over.
His clothes were soaked from the wet turf and grass clung to his face. Every sensation was magnified to intolerable clarity. The smell of horse manure filled his sinuses. He placed a hand on the ground and noticed that he was vibrating. Not shivering, vibrating.
He coughed.
Phantom strings of iridescence unraveled from his mouth and braided in the wind like ribbons.
He sat up.
His tailbone vibrated against the ground like a phone buzzing on a table.
Valentina was crumpled in a small ball nearby, tendrils of pastel, frosted breath drifting from her nostrils.
Next to her were the halves of the broken log. The splintered wood glowed an eerie blue.
The wolf, Catskill, was gone.
Green stood.
Standing felt terrible.
There was a pulsing engine under his feet and his hypersensitive skin felt it in every cell.
He looked back toward the house. It was far across the field, but he could see the door was standing open, a rectangle of yellow light in the deeper shadow of the porch. A figure in white lay by the front stairs.
Spore-log? Or dead from the fawn’s presence?
Green touched the acorn in his pocket. A trade from a king of crows. A payment for a meal. Perhaps more.
He tried to prioritize. He was awake first. There were things to do, but thinking was difficult.
Valentina was alive.
Valentina had donethisto him.
He huffed out a breath and another shred of iridescence coiled into view and faded.
He decided his teacher could stay in the dirt for a bit and went to check on the house.
The moon was low and the first hint of dawn had washed the stars from the eastern sky.
Walking was not fun.
He moved with slow care. His bowels rumbled like a dryer full of sneakers. The glass fawn was not near and the certainty of that knowledge startled him.
