She smiled as she knelt in front of me, her joints popping in protest. “You only have to want the change, to make it happen. Think about your human form. Focus on reclaiming it.”
I blinked at her, then I turned to assess the threat from more vines slithering slowly toward us. Beyond those, I heard a symphony of other sounds, and I realized that the monsters—and maybe the dark wood itself—were closing in on us. We should go. Surely I could reassume my human form in a safer location.
Another whine leaked from my throat with that thought.
“I’ll watch over you, child.” My grandmother stood and tucked back one side of her cloak, revealing a hatchet with a distinctly sharp blade, hanging from a belt buckled around the waist of her dress. “Get going, now.”
So I closed my eyes and thought about my human form—the only form I’d ever known, until a few minutes ago. I visualized my feet, with high arches and long second toes. I remembered my arms, my somewhat bony wrists, and the narrow fingers that had grown adept at kneading dough. I thought of my face. Of the sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of my nose and the highest part of both cheekbones. And of my hair, long and strawberry blond, which shone like copper in bright sunlight.
Suddenly that full-body cramp enveloped me again, and I fell to the forest floor, writhing as my joints popped and my bones ached. As my skin itched viciously and my muscles contracted painfully.
Less than a minute later, it was all over, just like before. Only this time, I found myself curled into a ball on a bed of dead leaves and sharp twigs, naked and shivering. But in my own human skin.
“Gran?” I sat up, knees tucked to my chest, trying to ignore the way that bits of the forest floor were poking my bare backside. “What’s happening? The wolf didn’t bite me. How could I be infected?”
“Get dressed, chère. I’ll explain on the way to my cabin.”
Shivering violently, I looked around as I pulled my clothing closer and was disappointed to realize the dark wood was once again a land of murky shadows. That was still much better than I’d ever been able to see in the dark wood before, yet a far cry from the clarity I’d had in that inexplicable wolf form.
“Hurry, Adele,” my grandmother urged, and I pulled my dress over my head as fast as I could, trying to push back the feeling of exposure and vulnerability that my own nudity inspired. “Stand and turn,” she said, and when I had, she tightened the laces of my bodice, then tied them. Gran snatched my cloak from the ground and shook it free of leaves and twigs, then she draped it over my shoulders.
“This way. You strayed quite a bit from the trail.” She took off in a direction I couldn’t identify without the sun visible overhead, and I bent to grab my broken lantern.
“I—Gran, I didn’t stray from the trail. I was chased from it by a huge werewolf!” I turned to stare down at the dead wolf. “What about . . . that? We’re just going to leave it?”
“I’ll come back for what can be used. The forest will dispose of the rest,” my grandmother insisted, gesturing for me to follow her. “The dark wood is full of monsters, you know.”
I nodded as I followed her deeper into the forest. “Everyone knows that.”
Three
“I’m sure you must have questions,” my grandmother said as I trailed her through the dark wood, my gaze constantly roving, on alert for threats.
“Just a few.”
Her soft laughter floated back toward me as I took in my surroundings, and the thing that most struck me, now that I could actually see in the dark wood, was the fact that the forest itself truly seemed to be alive. While I’d had that feeling before, experiencing it up close was entirely different.
Unless she was asleep, my sister, Sofia, was constantly in motion, as if she just couldn’t sit still. The dark wood moved like that. As if it were breathing. Fidgeting. Waiting impatiently to be given something to do.
Or someone to eat.
Vines slowly coiled, wrapping around branches or twisting their way toward the ground. Limbs swayed without the aid of the wind. Branches seemed to grasp for me as I walked, like hands reaching out from the darkness. But for the first time in my life, I could see well enough to smack at fluttering, stick-like bugs the size of my palm when they tried to land on my arms and shoulders. I could sidestep a deep shadow blinking at me from beneath a clump of underbrush—a shadow that appeared to have teeth.
“Adele?” My grandmother turned to look back at me, and I scurried to catch up.
“Sorry. I don’t understand what’s happening. I’m a werewolf?”
“Yes.”
“How is that possible, if I wasn’t scratched or bitten?”
“You were not infected by the beast you killed. However, your transformation was triggered by your contact with it. The wolf has always been in your blood. This has always been your fate.”
“What does that mean? And how did you know that was me?” I gestured, one-handed, in the direction of the spot where she’d found me. “How did you know I would be out here?”
Her smile felt strangely reassuring. “Tonight is the full moon, child. You were born under this moon, sixteen years ago.” She stepped over a thick root as it rippled up from the dirt in her path, moving with the ease of a much younger woman. With more grace and quicker reflexes than I’d ever seen from her. “Your mother and I have been planning for this day for a very long time.”
“You planned for my candle to go out on the path? For me to be attacked by a—?” And suddenly I understood. “You made this happen. Why? How?”
“Your mother rigged the lantern. I released the wolf.”
“I—what?” I stopped, and when she realized—again—that I wasn’t following, my grandmother turned, impatience flickering behind her pale eyes. “Where did you get a werewolf? Why would you send him after me?”
“Her,” Gran corrected. “I tracked and captured her this morning. Unfortunately, I was too late to stop her from attacking a merchant wagon.” Her shoulders slumped beneath the weight of a failure more profound than anything I could imagine. “I think it was on the way from Oldefort. The driver and his wife both lost their lives.”
“We weren’t expecting a merchant.” They were few and far between in the winter months, and when Oakvale was forced to send people through the forest for emergency supplies during the harshest part of the year, the village watch always sent an escort with them. The group invariably left in the middle of the day, heavily armed, carrying torches and lanterns. We hadn’t lost any merchants in several years.
Oldefort, evidently, was not so fortunate.
Gran nodded gravely. “My greatest sorrow is that I cannot protect the ones I don’t know to expect.”
“Protect them? How would you protect a caravan, alone in the dark wood? And how did you capture a werewolf?” I blinked at her in the shadows. “I don’t understand how any of this is possible.”
Gran glanced pointedly at the ground near my feet, and I looked down to see another woody vine reaching for my ankle. “They aren’t always that slow,” she said. “They’re still testing you.”