That doesn’t mean Vinca’s not causing trouble all the same. She’s a goddess. She can do all kinds of goddess-level shit—like not go away even when put away. For centuries at a time.
“What I have to wonder,” I say when Savi doesn’t speak, “is if someone down there at the bottom of Crater Lake isn’t quite as dormant as we’d like her to be.”
I realize that I expect her—or, more accurately, Iwanther—to dismiss my worry out of hand.
Instead, she makes a humming sort of sound. “Funny you should mention that,” she says after a moment. “I keep finding small, ritualistically dispatched creatures all over the place, lining the borders of my land.”
“Does that mean she’s stirring again?” I ask, my voice rougher than I’d like.
That it’s not only happening to me is ... not good.
“She can stir all she likes,” Savi says after a moment. “But to transform her tantrums in the deep into dead things on land would require a lot more than stirring. I broke her down significantly. She didn’t die, but she’s not capable of simply rising as she is. It would be a process.”
A bloody and terrible process, I’m sure. “Involving?”
Savi blinks, like she’s paging through all the horrible resurrections she’s encountered in her time. It takes her a minute. “A vessel, I’d imagine, and some kind of conduit—but that would be getting ahead of things. There would have to be a ceremony, because there’s always a ceremony. No doubt a sacrifice would be involved, but I doubt the blood of a handful of hapless rodents would be enough to ensure that a goddess might rise again. Vinca herself would surely scoff at such a downgrade.” Savi smiles. “Remember, there is nothing more vain than a god. It comes with the territory.”
I think of that horrible blackness rolling behind me, eating the woods as it went. “Defineceremonyin this context.”
She doesn’t. She lifts a shoulder. “I keep telling myself that if Vinca was truly attempting to ascend again, the oracle would be the first to know.”
“She said her dreams are little muddy lately,” I say, and note that I feel oddly protective of Winter when that shouldn’t apply here. The oracle’s ability to see the future shapes that future. Everyone knows this. She’s a public resource, and the state of her abilities matters.
I still want to protect my friend.
“I’ve actually been finding these gruesome little offerings for a while,” Savi offers up after a moment of quiet between us, filled by the birdsong in her thick spring trees despite the snow I walked through to get here. “Not only around the perimeter here. In the woods surrounding our cottages in Jacksonville, too.”
I stare at her. “You mean not just the one I found tonight?”
“They are always such tiny, insignificant little creatures. A raccoon at most. It’s hard to imagine there’s any kind of message there.”
“How have I not noticed a rash of butchered animals on our doorsteps? I would scent that immediately. From miles away.”
Savi gazes at me. “I scrub them off the scent profile when I find them lying around in public places, like the cottages.” When I stare back at her, she laughs. “It didn’t seem serious to me. Certainly not serious enough to do anything about it. There are any number of creatures who might take exception to Winter, to Winter and Ariel, to you and me and our mysterious little Briar living there all together. I couldn’t tell if the offerings were in protest or warning or just creatures sneaking around being creepy because they can. Besides.” Her gaze hardens. “A better question would be why whoever is doing this wanted to make certain you were aware of it this time.”
I don’t think of much else all the way home.
I don’t run through the mountains this time. I take the largely abandoned state road that used to connect the towns in this valley likelittle jewels strung along the same necklace—Bear Creek, in this case, then veer off onto the old greenway. I used to go jogging here in my human form, not the least bit intimidated by the scary people—mostly human—who lurked about along the wide, pleasant path along the river and liked to set fires, assault the odd passerby, and do as many drugs as possible.
They never bothered me. Back before the Reveal, it was always the marginal people—those who stayed on the edges—who could see me for what I was.
Now it isn’t humans who lurk, but they’re still more afraid of my wolf than I could ever be of them. I follow the path as it winds its way toward the center of Medford, now in ruins and overrun by vampires. Before I get there, I leave the greenway behind and take Stage Road again, letting it lead me into the foothills, with Jacksonville waiting just beyond.
It’s late when I find myself on California Street again, the main drag. The holiday lights tug at me. I feel something like nostalgia for the childhood I never had here. When I pause and think about it, a wolf slinking through the shadows long after the human curfew, I realize it’s the same longing I felt then. The yearning for a safe, sweet human life that involved roasted chestnuts, holiday parades, Santa’s lap beneath a decorated Christmas tree, and all the things that go with human holidays. Candles. Feasts.
I can’t imagine not being a wolf. Not beingme.But every now and again, on lonely streets in my childhood home, I remember too well what it felt like to wonder. Back when I couldn’t quite fathom what fate had in store for me, or what it meant for my future.
I pick up my pace as I lope up the hill, cutting back into the woods, thinking of Ty and these years I’ve had him in so many ways—if not the way he wants me now.
I would trade a thousand Christmases for a night with him, not that I’d tell him such a thing. He’s arrogant enough as it is.
I remember that hope and grief, tangled altogether inside me high up on that rock. So close to the stars before that darkness came for me. That quiet, irrevocable understanding that one way or another, this in-between time of ours is ending.
And I still can’t fathom how it will go, this future that fate has already decided for us, whether bitch goddesses rise in a rainstorm of blood or stay lodged down beneath the cold blue water of the lake, halfway to hell where they belong.
When I come barreling out into the yard at the top of the hill, Ty is so much on my mind, and in my nose, that it takes me a second to realize that he isactuallyhere, too.
Lounging there against the door of my cottage like he’s been there awhile.
