Unlikely Magic: A Cinderella Retelling (Girl Among Wolves Book 1) Read online

  “How’s it my fault?” I ask. “I didn’t attack you.”

  “You might as well have,” she grumbles. “Besides, I’m hurt, and you’re healthy. I’d do it for you.”

  I snort at that. “Like you’ve done so much for me up until now.”

  “Get me the mirror,” she says, setting her cup down and lying back on the pillows again.

  I sigh. She’s always making me lug that enormous mirror up and down the stairs, at least once a day. “Why do you do that to yourself?” I ask. “It just makes you miserable to see your scars.”

  She blinks, a flash of hurt crossing her face. “If you had this hideous thing on your face, wouldn’t you want to see if it was ever going away?”

  I want to tell her that it’s never going away. Anyone with eyes can see that. It’s a wide, ugly gash. Maybe with plastic surgery, it could be fixed, but werewolves apparently don’t believe in real doctors, so I seriously doubt they’d spring for cosmetic surgery. “I don’t think I’d want to be reminded every day,” I say at last.

  “Yeah, well, we heal faster and better than you people,” she says, then hesitates. “I think.”

  “You don’t even know? Then why not go to a regular doctor, if it’s not going to raise suspicion.”

  She sighs and closes her eyes. “Do you heal fast?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.” I sink onto the end of the couch trying to remember if I’ve ever had an injury. Besides falling down the stairs and the weird fits I’ve had since, I don’t think I’ve had a real injury. Dad was always overly protective and worrisome. But it seems like my cuts and scrapes do heal pretty fast. “Do you think it’s because I’m half…well, because of Mother?”

  She opens her eyes and picks up her tea again. “Yeah, sure, that has to be it.” She’s looking at me suspiciously, as if I might be hiding something.

  “What else would it be?”

  “Nothing,” she says with a shrug of her good shoulder. Her other arm is still in a sling, and her shoulder is still bandaged where the wound cut deepest. “Are you going to get me the mirror or not?”

  “If you tell me something first.” Even though I found out their secret, I still feel like everyone is hiding something from me.

  Her eyes narrow again and she sips her tea. “Tell you what?”

  I take a deep breath. This is it. A bargaining chip. “Okay, so Harmon’s the pack leader’s son. And he’ll be leader one day, right? When?”

  She mulls this over, sipping her too-sweet tea. “It’s not set in stone,” she says at last. “Sometimes, the pack leader grows old first. So it could be, like, forty years or something. But probably sooner. The Alpha has to be able to protect us. That’s his job. He knows to step down when that might not be possible. And…we don’t always live to be old, like regular people.” She stares into her cup, frowning.

  “Because of fights and stuff?”

  “I didn’t go looking for this fight, if that’s what you’re implying,” she says. “They attacked me. But we all defend the pack. Those bastards in the next valley, they’re heathens. So yeah. It’s not like Zechariah will be around in forty years.”

  “So he just decides to give Harmon his job whenever he feels like it?”

  “Of course not,” she says irritably, jerking at a pillow behind her shoulder. “It’s a big deal. It might be nothing to you, but it’s everything to us. Our Alpha has to be someone we all trust to lay down his life for us, and we’d do the same for him in an instant. No hesitation. No question. And the new leader has to be coronated at a total lunar eclipse.”

  “That’s not weird at all,” I mutter.

  “There’s one coming up, but Harmon’s not ready, and Zechariah’s still fine,” she says, like I haven’t spoken. “But there are other things that happen at an eclipse.”

  “Like what?” I ask.

  Zora smirks. “I think I’ve answered plenty of your questions. Now bring me the mirror.”

  I hesitate, debating whether to press her further. But she did answer more than one question, and now I have the answer I was really looking for. I’m sure as hell not waiting forty years. If it’s not happening for a while, there’s no reason for me to stay. Harmon made it sound like it would be soon. I stand and trudge upstairs. Zora has never spoken that much to me since I got here, and I realize with a start that I might not hate her anymore. Yes, she’s unbearable to serve, but she’s just a person. A person and a wolf.

  I lift the heavy mirror from her bed and carry it down. Now that I know how long it will be, I need to start planning a real escape. And if I’m going to do that, I need to act normal, not let on that I’m plotting. So I bring her the mirror, and when she tells me to leave her alone, I go outside to work, leaving her to look at her ugly scars and fantasize about them disappearing. My own fantasies need shaping into a concrete plan.

  Whatever she wants, I’ll do—cook her special food, bring her books and cards, massage her legs, clip her toenails and empty her bedpan. And every day, I’ll go upstairs and bring down the heavy, beautiful mirror so she can look at herself while she brushes her thick, dark hair, which has grown past her scarred shoulder now. In return, she’ll tell me something. Afterwards, as I do now, I’ll struggle back up the stairs with the mirror clutched in my arms while Zora screeches at me not to drop it or she’ll throw me out to the same fate she endured. Every day, she makes it clear that I will not survive. Maybe not. But I’ll be armed with knowledge now. Even Superman had a weakness. Wolves must have one, too.

  15

  On the full moon, I think maybe Zora will have to stay home with me, which will make her even more unbearable than usual. But when I ask if she’s going, she shoots me a withering look. “Of course I’m going,” she snaps. “I already transitioned from wolf to human. Obviously I’m not going to sit around here with you all night.”

  Yes, because that’s such an appealing prospect for me. I bite my lip and don’t say anything, mostly because I’m trying not to smile with relief at the thought of her being out of the house, unable to order me around. Not that I’ll have a thrilling time without her. Maybe work on sanding my empty bedframe, do a little reading about native plants and animals, though the books upstairs don’t make mention of half-animal, half-people creatures roaming the Ozark Mountains.

  I enjoy the solitude for the first time since I arrived, though. After a month of being whined and screeched at, it’s nice to have only a couple grey mice as company. As usual, the howling starts up just after the moon rises, and I look up from my book. Their lonesome melody still makes the hair on my arms stand, and I go to the window and look out into the darkness. I wonder if my sister is healthier in wolf form. If they will encounter any of the enemy pack this month. I wonder what Harmon is thinking of on his hunt.

  Returning to my couch, I switch off the light and fall asleep to the chorus of their distant howls and the gusting wind through the enchanted trees that makes me feel cold even though it’s not yet winter. Sometime in the night, I startle awake. I lie in the dark, my heart pounding, listening. Is someone here? Reaching under the edge of my couch, I wrap my fingers around the handle of my claw hammer.

  The noise that woke me comes again, a ticking sound at the end of my room. It’s not a scrabbling noise, like when the mice run around inside the walls. It’s not a woodpecker tapping, either. It comes again, and I slink from my bed and tiptoe to the end of the room, the hammer clutched in my hand, ready. I stop at the window, flattening myself against the wall before stretching my neck to see better. Something hits the window, and I jerk backwards and almost drop the hammer.

  Heart racing, I nearly scream when something brushes my bare arm. But it’s only the curtain swaying in the breeze. I work up my nerve and lean past it, peering down into the moonlit yard. Harmon is standing there, about to throw something. It hits the window again, and I sigh with relief. I pop out the screen and lean out, gripping the window sill. “What are you doing?” I whisper urgently. “Someone is going t
o see you.”

  “Then come down,” he says, grinning up at me.

  “I can’t,” I whisper.

  “Your family is still hunting,” he says. “They’ll never know.”

  My heart races for another reason now. It’s not exactly the usual circumstances, but oh god, to sneak out and see a boy…

  “I’m locked in. And the door doesn’t unlock from the outside, either. There’s one key, and Mother has it.” As I lean out, my hair spills around my shoulders, catching in the breeze.

  “Come on, Rapunzel, let down your hair,” he teases, still smiling. “You must have something up there you can lower down. I’ll climb up. Or you can climb down. I promised we’d talk soon. This is our chance.”

  To talk to a boy. A cute boy, a boy who wants to talk to me for some inexplicable reason. A boy who snuck away from his friends to see me.

  “Hold on,” I say, ducking back in. I look around my room, but I don’t have any rope, and even if I did, I couldn’t climb back up it. At last, I grab the two sets of sheets I use for the couch. Four sheets at six or seven feet each should be enough. It can’t be more than twenty-five feet to the ground, and I can hold onto the knots. I stand at the window and quickly make them into a chain, yanking the knots as tight as I can. Thanks to the muscles I’ve gotten from swinging a hammer all summer, I think the knots will hold me.

  “Impressive,” Harmon says with an approving nod when I toss the end out the window. “Got anything to tie it to?”

  “Stop talking so loud,” I hiss. “Just because they’re out hunting doesn’t mean they won’t hear you with their wolfish hearing or whatever.” I glance around. I don’t have a radiator, and the chimney is too far from the window. At last, I tie it around a broomstick and brace the broom across the windowsill.

  “Genius,” Harmon says with a grin, seemingly unconcerned with being overheard.

  “So you coming up or what?”

  Harmon tilts his head and peers up doubtfully at the end of the rope dangling above him. “That’s higher than I can jump.”

  “How far is it?” I ask, leaning out further.

  “Don’t fall,” Harmon growls.

  “Okay, fine, I’m coming down. Don’t look at my butt.”

  He shakes his head. “No promises.”

  “You better not,” I say, straddling the windowsill. I turn and lower my legs, twining them around the sheet rope. Taking a deep breath, I ease my weight down onto it. The broom handle seems to be holding, but it still takes a bit of courage to let go of the windowsill altogether. Falling and smacking my head hard enough to bring on a blackout nightmare fit would probably not leave the best impression.

  When the broom holds, I let out a breath of relief and let myself slide to the first knot, then the next, then the next. This is easier than I expected, and again, I think how oddly grateful I am for all the manual labor my mother has forced me to do.

  When I reach the last knot, I’m still hanging a good ten feet off the ground. Crap. I didn’t account for the several feet of sheet that would be taken up by each knot.

  “What now?” I hiss. “Should I jump?”

  “No,” Harmon barks, running over to the wall under me. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  “Get out from under me,” I snap. “And don’t look up.”

  “Fine, fine,” he says, putting up his hands and backing away. “Not like I’ve never seen a girl’s butt. We’ve only undressed together every month for the past eighteen years.”

  “You’re eighteen?” I ask, wrapping my legs around the rope and holding onto the lowest knot with my hands. It’s such a normal question, asking how old he is. Like he’s a normal guy and I’m a normal girl, not hanging ten feet off the ground by a bedsheet.

  “Are you going to climb back up?” he asks.

  The thought of leaving him now, when I’m so close, nearly stops my heart. I just want to talk to him. To be near another human being, even if he is a wolf one night a month. “I’m okay. I’ll just hang out here.”

  “Hang out?” he asks, cocking one eyebrow.

  “You better not be laughing at me,” I say. “This is your fault.”

  “How’s it my fault?”

  My arms are starting to ache, and I let go to wipe my hand on my pajama pants. Harmon gasps and runs back over.

  “I’m not going to fall,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Hold on, I’ll make a harness.” I shimmy over the first knot and hold it between my thighs while I wrap the loose sheet end around each leg and tie it in front of me. I’m sitting in a lopsided, off-balance sling, but at least I don’t have to worry about wearing out my arms and not being able to climb back up when I need to.

  “So,” I say, twisting around so my back is to the house and Harmon isn’t talking to my butt. “What’d you come over for?” The forced casualness of my question makes it awkward suddenly, and I wish he was back to laughing at me dangling in a sling like a moron.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” he says with a shrug, shoving his hands in the pockets of his jeans. His broad shoulders hunch inside his hoodie.

  “Why didn’t you go hunting with the rest of your…pack?” I ask, feeling stupid saying the word.

  “I did,” he says, smiling. “I’m a good hunter. I already ate.”

  I try not to think about what that entails. Ripping the throat out of a cute baby deer? “And showered, I hope?”

  “Nah, just changed,” he says. “I’m a tidy eater.”

  “So you changed, hunted, ate, and came back to get your clothes before you came over here. But I still don’t get why.”

  “You didn’t want me to get dressed first?” he asks with a smirk.

  I remember seeing him peel off his clothes to change to a wolf that first time, and my face warms. I’m glad he can’t see it reddening by moonlight. Can he? Everything is shades of black and silver to me, but I don’t know what wolves see, or if he sees that way when he’s in human form.

  “I meant why’d you come over? I know you said we’d talk soon. But it seems like a big risk. For you. Couldn’t you get in trouble with your dad?”

  “I’m not afraid of my father,” he growls.

  “I would be.”

  “I have to do as he tells me,” he admits grudgingly. “But not because he’s my father. That’s how it is for us.”

  “You already know you’re going to be leader one day?”

  “I’m the most dominant male in the pack.” His shoulders straighten and his chest swells with pride. “That, and everyone thinks I’m the wolf in the prophecy.”

  “What’s the prophecy?”

  “It was foretold by our founders, the first wolf people,” he says. “That we’d be united with the other supernatural communities one day, under someone with a mark of wisdom.” He reaches up and strokes the lock of white hair behind his ear.

  “Wow. It must be hard for you to wait, knowing that.”

  “It will happen when the time is right.” He is far from convincing. I can practically see him vibrating with energy at the thought, as if he’s shimmering with anticipation. For a second, his eyes seem to glow silvery, like the full moon sinking in the east.

  I swallow hard and let the rope twist sideways before I push back to face him. “How long exactly do you think you’ll have to wait?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, glancing at the woods. “It was easy to obey when I was a kid. The older I am, the harder it is to obey my father. It goes against my nature. It’s…smothering.”

  I remember him in the woods, fending off the pack, and being forced to submit to his father or have his throat ripped out. A shiver goes through me. “I’m sorry.”

  He snorts and looks up at me. “Don’t you dare apologize to me,” he growls, his eyes flashing again. “It’s killing me that I can’t get you out of there.”

  “Yeah, but you’re here,” I say. “You’re talking to me. That’s more than anyone else has done.”

  “It won’t always be this way,” he says
, but he won’t look at me. He never really answered my question. How long? Zora did, though. Forty years. The thought makes my bones ache as if I’m already an old woman. The crazy old lady in the attic.

  “You don’t have to come here,” I say. “Like you said, you can’t help me. Maybe it’s better if we don’t risk this, for now. What if they find out and won’t let you be leader?”

  He scoffs and shakes his head. “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “So you’re guaranteed the position? What if you died or something?”

  “Not guaranteed,” he admits after a pause. “They could expel me from the pack if I broke an important law. If my father forbid me to talk to you, and I did, I’d be shunned. I could never see or speak to anyone in the pack again.”

  I shiver. “Is that like…a death sentence?”

  “No. I’d be a lone wolf, or find a new pack and fight for the position of Alpha.”

  “But you’d never see your family again?”

  “No.”

  “Then you shouldn’t risk this.”

  “He didn’t forbid me from talking to you,” Harmon says, his jaw set. “I’d like us to be friends.”

  Friends. My heart twists at the thought. I haven’t had anything close to that for so long, haven’t even had the hope of it.

  “I’d like that, too,” I whisper. After a moment, I swallow hard and go on. “But why? Seriously, I’m glad, but…why me? No one else talks to me.”

  He glances off at the woods. “You’re different,” he says.

  “Um, yeah. I’m well aware.”

  With a frustrated sound, he rakes his hand through his thick hair. “I’ve known almost everyone here since I was born. And then here comes this girl who looks like my friend but isn’t, and I’m not allowed to talk to her? It’s making me crazy, Stella.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. He’s been thinking about me? Going crazy to talk to me? The thought that maybe…but it’s too unsettling to even let myself think it.

  Suddenly, Harmon’s head whips around, and he raises his face and inhales deeply. “Get back up as fast as you can,” he says, his voice low and urgent.