More faces came and went, fading in and out of the wind. Somewhere my pup was hungry. Somewhere my sisters huddled before a fire, mourning me for dead and clinging to secret hopes. This was the price I would pay for betraying them.

The howl ripped out of my throat with all the anguish of their imagined cries. It was a sound unlike anything I had ever made before, and it ripped my soul loose from its foundation. It went on for a long time, longer than I had breath, and then a hot tongue licked my frozen face, and I realized that the howl was no longer my own but the cry of the she-wolf, her teats heavy, her muzzle lifted to the storm. The rest of the pack materialized out of the snow, even the black wolf little more than a white shadow.

“Rowan.”

The roughness of her voice and the feeling of weightlessness as she lifted me in her arms registered on the same level as the swirling snow, and felt only slightly more real. I felt the harsh fur of the bear against my face and lips, and then we were flying, the bear’s strides parting the blizzard until the iron gates loomed ahead, and then the smell of roses overwhelmed me.

She had let the girl go.

It had seemed harmless enough to show her the lake’s secrets. She had not expected to find pain out there on the ice, and then the storm had risen to meet night and not even the wolves could track Rowan’s scent.

Her grip tightened on the still body in her arms. The storms had never hidden something from her before, but this storm had been different. It had fought her, wrestling against the power left to her by the witch, twisting and snarling whenever she tried to grasp it.

“Come back to me,” she said into the stiff, frozen hide of Rowan’s hood. “Come back to me.”

She had seen her future as the winds swept away all evidence that a girl named Rowan had ever lived. Empty hallways, abandoned rooms, roses creeping across the unmarked graves of everyone she had ever cared for, or could have cared for, leaving her alone with her wolves for all eternity.

That might have been enough, once.

“Not yet,” she pleaded with gods she’d never believed in. “Please, not yet.”

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Warmth.

The thought drifted through the dream of spring, echoed in the rush of meltwater. I soaked up the feeling. It had been a while since I’d been warm, because . . . my mind hesitated, as skittish as a wild animal.

Snow. Wolves. The Huntress.