Behind him was the cabin with his parents inside.
His parents had been dead a long time. Even to his fevered eyes, their faces were starting to look all wrong. He’d managed to deceive himself when they were only cold, but the slow bloat was harder to deny.
He felt small on the mountain, small as a child, crouched shaking on the stone and the snow. He knew what was coming.
She was coming. His familiar, the only one Nick would ever have.
He was the last in an ancient and powerful line of witches. Heir to the magic of the Scratch family, born beneath a blood moon in a forest grove and taken home to a long-desecrated church. She’d come that very night. In the morning his parents found a wolf sleeping with their baby, curled together in a cradle made from a hollow tree.
His parents often told Nick the story of Amalia’s coming. They were proud people, and proud of Nick, born with magic so strong it called a familiar to him as soon as he drew breath. Other witches warned a werewolf wasn’t a safe familiar. The goblins who became familiars usually took a shape that suited their witch companions, but a werewolf was at once too human and not human enough. Their changing shapes came with divided hearts. A divided heart could turn savage.
But his parents, arrogant then as Nick was now, laughed at the idea of danger. If Amalia was a monster, it reflected more glory on their son for taming her. They scorned the warnings of lesser witches.
Nick never knew anything else. She was well-known and dear as the light of the moon to him. He took his first steps clutching on to her dark, rough fur. His parents were always busy, distant and important figures. His tales at bedtime were her hunting stories, relayed in whispers only he could understand. She was huge and terrifying to any other kid’s eyes, but she didn’t scare Nick. “Oh, my Amalia, what big teeth you have,” he used to say. She’d snap at him lovingly, strong jaws inches from his skin, and he’d laugh.
They were each other’s world, until Nick started wanting a wider world. Nick learned to be charming, to draw people to him despite their fear of her.
Perhaps it was Nick’s fault from the beginning. Amalia got angry and rough with his playmates. Even Nick’s parents grew concerned about what they’d done, letting the big bad wolf into their child’s cradle.
His parents talked about caging her. Amalia showed him pictures in his mind of how it would be. No more races through the woods, silver light in her fur. No more living wild and free, but only snarling, trapped, hopeless in the dark. Being separated by steel and shadows, forever.
Nick chose her side. He did what she asked. He begged his parents to take them to the mountains, where Amalia could run with a wolf pack, work out some of her aggression. He promised he’d let her be caged when they went home. Nick lied, and in that lonely cabin far from help, his parents got sick. He did too, but he recovered, and his parents didn’t.
It was bad luck they fell ill in the mountains, he told himself, then and after. Amalia didn’t do anything. If Amalia did it, Nick killed them too.
His parents died. Nick lay in the cabin with their corpses for days, sweating out the fever, whining pitifully for help. Until he became desperate for coolness. He staggered out into the snow, falling to his knees. He almost lay down on that endless cold blanket, let himself be covered up by the hand of the night so he would sleep forever.
Only he heard the howl, more chilling than the howl of the wind. He saw the pack racing across the snow, arrowing toward him with Amalia at their head. He believed for a moment she was rescuing him, that she would take him home.
Then Nick saw her eyes and understood. There would be no going home. She had him right where she wanted him.
“Nobody’s coming for you ,” Amalia said. “Nobody cares that you’re here. You will die alone. There will be nothing left, no sign in any world that you existed. Not a drop of scarlet blood seen on the snow, not a child’s cry heard on the wind, not a whisper, not a tear. You’ll be nothing. ”
Amalia bared her teeth. Smile or snarl, what big teeth she had.
“Or you can come with me.”
He felt too sick to stand, but a Scratch should be able to accomplish this much. Get up , he ordered himself. It’s no good if you don’t get up. Nick fought to his feet and went with the wolves.
It was pure selfishness. He didn’t want to disappear. He should have been stronger, been loyal to his parents. He shouldn’t have gone with her. But he did.
Now Nick stood again in the place of his surrender, in the falling snow colder than any other snow. He braced himself, waiting for Amalia.
Another voice came to him instead.
“Nick, darling,” called his mother from the cabin. She’d taught him to read, taught him his first spells. He couldn’t remember his father’s voice, but he remembered hers. “My poor boy. You must be so cold. Come back to me.”
“Aren’t you …” The words cracked and broke between Nick’s fever-dry lips. “Aren’t you dead?”
His mother used to sit in their library at home, reading books of enchantment. He remembered the sight of her beautiful long hair falling onto the pages, her face always turned away from him. She had a sleek midnight waterfall of hair, not like Nick’s, which was always wildly curling and trying to escape control. Nick craved her attention, so he’d climb onto the seat with her and look at books too. When they heard he could read so young, her friends said he was gifted. His mother laughed and said: Naturally.
He wanted to read books with her again.
“I’m not dead, silly,” his mother assured him. “That was a fever dream. You’re sick and imagining terrible things that never happened, but I’m alive and well. I’ll take you home. None of it was real, my love, I promise. Open the door. Come inside where it’s warm.”
Nick turned and looked at his mother through the bars of a cage door. Her face was striped by shadows, but he could see enough. Her eyes were sunk far down into their sockets, her skin a yellow darker than parchment. Teeth grinned through her slack mouth like the skull her face would soon be.
Older witches who’d known her said Nick was as beautiful as his mother. Nick always smiled. The way he looked was useful. Most important, Sabrina liked it. But Nick didn’t enjoy the moments when he caught unexpected glimpses in darkened mirrors and traced the resemblance.
“You’re dead,” Nick told his mother. “I don’t remember what you looked like. I can’t even give you a living face in my memory.”
He turned away from the cage door and his mother. He hadn’t looked back the first time he abandoned his parents, and he didn’t now.
“You’ll have to do considerably better than that,” Nick drawled to Satan and the winter wind.
Putting endearments and soft words in his mother’s mouth was an insult to her memory. He didn’t remember much, but Nick knew he’d been proud of her. His mother was a real witch, her heart devoted to the Dark Lord. His parents never spoke of love to him. Amalia was the only one who did. “I love you ,” she’d tell him, from the cradle to the mountains. “I’m the only one who loves you, and you belong to me.”
Amalia was patient whenever he was sick or irritable, giving him the attention he desired. He hadn’t wanted to lose her. Perhaps that was what drew Amalia to him in the first place, that secret unspeakable weakness, the hideous flaw at the very heart of him. How Nick wanted the one thing a witch shouldn’t want: to be loved.