A crack of twig, the hoot of a far-off owl, the flitter of a moth at the corner of my vision. The sights and sounds of a forest in its primal hours. The dark, moonless night draped us in its cowl. Three bobbing lights marched toward us from the village, and I prayed the glow of their flames wouldn’t reveal our hiding place.
My hand slipped to Sebastian’s knee and he shifted beside me. We crouched behind a wide oak where we could still see the outline of the girl’s body lying in the snow.
I thought I might feel Ama first—the vibrations of her footsteps, the pounding of her wild heart. But I didn’t.
She twined around the trees with her long, elegant body. Her steps never faltered nor made a sound. Her black nose was bent low to the ground and the beautiful crest of fur stood thick and proud around her neck. I knew it to be golden—even if the night now stole its color.
Sebastian followed my gaze and tensed beside me. His chest rose and fell frantically with quick, silent breaths. I gripped his knee again, urging him to stay still.
Ama nuzzled the dead girl’s hair. She licked her cheek with a long, pink tongue. Then she softly, gently, nipped at the bloody skin at the girl’s stomach. There was no wildness here—instead, a precision I’d never seen before.
“Eat,” Sebastian whispered. His eyes darkened with anticipation.
I untangled my legs and stood. Sebastian pulled at my coat and tried to bring me back down to him.
“What are you doing?”
I ignored him and kept my eyes trained on Ama. Her black nose and shining eyes. The teeth curving from her top lip. The long, strong legs with the tufts of golden fur at the back of each hock. She looked like the lions in the church’s painting, Daniel in the lion pit, but she was more than that. More human. She didn’t completely lose her normal shape when she transformed. She wasn’t like any kind of animal I’d ever seen before. She was like an artist’s imagining. The sense of awe never went away—no matter how many times I saw her like this.
“Ama,” I breathed.
Her head dipped delicately, and she sniffed as if smelling my voice on the breeze.
“Ama, it’s me.”
My sister padded one large foot in front of the other and turned toward me. She lifted her nose and stepped closer. The light in her eyes gleamed and her white teeth shone even without moonlight. I stumbled toward her and she ran for me. I opened my arms to her, but she kept going. She leapt through the air toward Sebastian.
His hands shot up over his head and he crouched into a ball. It wouldn’t matter once Ama was on him. Her teeth were like razors. And all Sebastian had to protect himself was a musket he couldn’t fire from close range.
I slipped the knife from my belt and aimed. I might hit him, but if I didn’t do this, there would be no uncertainty—Ama would tear him to shreds. The cold hilt slipped through my fingers, the weight of the knife suddenly gone.
Ama shrieked as the blade split her shoulder, and my stomach clenched at the sound. I hated hurting her.
Sebastian scrambled over to my feet.
“You got some of the tincture on your clothes, didn’t you?” I called.
“A little dribbled down the side of the bottle when you drew out the cork. I didn’t touch my hand to my mouth, though. The poison isn’t inside me.”
No, but you’re marked.
Ama was still under control. She wasn’t feverishly killing—gorging on any warm body in her path. Here, now, she went straight for Sebastian. Straight for the cloying scent of honeysuckle laced with lavender. My sister was still under my power.
I drank in my relief. Ama could still be controlled.
She might have lost control once or twice, but she wasn’t completely wild. Not quite yet. I could still cure her with the right spell.
“Get up,” I yelled to Sebastian. If she tried to attack again, I didn’t have another knife to throw at her.
He scrambled to his feet and picked up the musket, aiming it at my sister. My blood froze in my veins.
“No, don’t! Ama!” I realized my mistake too late to stop myself.
Sebastian whipped his head around to look at me. “Why do you keep calling it Ama?”
“Sebastian, please!”
The sound of footsteps crunched in the snow and broke the charged intensity of our little circle. Dark blood trailed through Ama’s fur but she didn’t limp as she followed the sound of voices coming closer—the priest and whoever he could convince to come with him. They would have makeshift weapons, pitchforks and shovels. No real match for Ama. She moved away from us, winding around the trees as she closed the space between her and the villagers.
“Let’s go. Now!” I said.
We didn’t want to be found here in the woods at night—a girl unaccepted by the town and the lord thought of as a murderer.
I picked my way forward through dead brambles and over fallen logs. The clouds overhead drifted apart and the moon finally shone its pale light into the forest. Broken spiderwebs glistened like silver thread. The trees, tall with thick branches breaking open the earth at their feet, stood in silhouette against the sky. A deep vibration, a steady hum, rose through my feet and trilled through my stomach, chest, arms, fingertips.
Magic stirred in the forest. Somehow, I felt it tingling through my veins. It didn’t make sense—I wasn’t the magic one, I hadn’t been cursed. Maybe I’d just been around whatever magic had cursed Ama for so long now, I could recognize it.
“Marie.”
I felt a light tap between my shoulder blades and I spun around. Sebastian stood there with the barrel of the musket pointed at my face.
Sweat prickled under my arms, and my dress stuck to me under my coat, shockingly cold when I pressed my arms to my sides.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
Sebastian ignored my question, but his lips curled into the imitation of a smile. “Tell me about the beast.”
I wouldn’t. Not even with a gun in my face.
“You know as much as I do. And now we’ve seen it, we have to do more, anything to stop it.”
Like wake up a magic book.
The smile grew too big, showing too many of Sebastian’s teeth. “You’re lying.”
I searched the trees behind Sebastian for Ama. I heard her, the snarls rumbling from her throat, threatening the people approaching.
“Remember, Sebastian . . . you still want me to make Lucien better.”
His hold on the musket shifted ever so slightly and it dropped a breath lower.
“You called the beast your sister’s name. Why? You told me Ama was dead.”
A movement behind Sebastian’s shoulder drew my gaze. The shadows stirred. Emméline stepped from between two pine trees, the brittle needles brushing against her leather breeches and falling to the snow-dusted ground.
“What are you two doing out here, and why do you have a musket pointed at Marie’s face, Sebastian?”
He lowered it immediately and looked to me as if I could offer some explanation to Emméline.
“We were just . . . we gathered with Père Danil and the other men,” Sebastian said.
“But they’re all way back there. They’ve had too much ale to cover any ground,” Emméline said.
I wanted her to go away. Ama was here somewhere in between the trees, and though I wasn’t scared of her encountering a few drunken villagers wielding pitchforks and shovels, Emméline’s well-strung bow was another story. Most villagers weren’t allowed to own weapons, by the king’s law, but Emméline and her family had never counted themselves rule-followers. She’d grown up with a bow in her hand and she knew how to use it.
“We got ahead of the group,” I explained. “We’re looking for the beast.”
“But you said you wanted me to kill it, Sebastian. You know what you promised me.”
Sebastian took a step toward her. “I do. I haven’t forgotten, but . . . the thing killed my parents.”
“That’s what you say,” Emméline said.
I couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. She was using that ambiguity against him though, and I didn’t like her playing games like that.
“The beast went that way,” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from where Ama had actually gone.
Emméline looked me up and down, her cold gaze sending shivers along my arms and legs.
“I don’t need your help, witch,” she said.
The word slithered from her mouth, and old fear washed over me like frigid river water. I hadn’t cared about the sharpness of Ama’s teeth or even the musket’s barrel in my face. But this was different. Witch was the most frightening word we possessed. Once it slipped from the lips of some accusing face, it could never be called back. It would feed on whispers and fear until it was too big to ignore.
“I’m not a witch.”
I knew people thought badly of us in the village. We were poor and unwelcome in many circumstances, but no one had ever flung that accusation at us. We weren’t taunted, not until the dolls first started arriving on our doorstep. The dolls . . . could they have been from Emméline? Has she guessed? Does she somehow know about Ama’s curse? Does she think I’m the witch who did it?
She tossed her long braid over one shoulder and pulled an arrow from the quiver on her back. She notched it smoothly in the bow and I couldn’t help admiring how skilled she was, how easy and natural the movement was for her.
She pointed the iron tip of the arrow at me and a growl ripped from the earth behind me. Ama sprang forward from the trees, landing between Emméline and me.
“Sebastian.” I reached for him, afraid Ama would smell the honeysuckle again. He hesitated but eventually gripped my fingers. Ama pawed the ground, scratching at it with long, white claws. I couldn’t stop my feet from moving backward. Sebastian followed. Emméline trained her bow on Ama and my heart contracted.
“Run!” I yelled, but I didn’t know to who—Ama, Sebastian, myself?
The zip of an arrow cut the air beside my ear and I dove into Sebastian, pushing him to the snow. Then we both scrambled onto our knees and half crawled, half ran toward the edge of the trees with Ama and Emméline behind us.