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“It is decorated!” Someone had covered it all over with wax and the Archives.
“Decorate it for the pups!”
Another question bubbled to the top of my struggling mind. “Are those our pups?”
She clucked her tongue. It didn’t sound like either a correction or affirmation. She waggled the index finger on the hand holding the pup, jostling it so it cried piteously.
“Give them to me,” I pled with her with the stupidity of dreamers. “Mom, is that you? Mom, what did you do? What did you know?”
“The room.” She kicked a piece of rotted carpet in my direction. “This is no place for the pups!”
I lunged through her legs again. This time I rolled, slid, and managed to snatch the gray puppy up in my jaws before she could nail me.
I spun around with the pup in my mouth before I realized I couldn’t get both puppies in my maw, and the war-form still clutched the third, brown pup. I looked around frantically for somewhere to stash the pups while I fought the she-wolf.
The other gray pup whimped and whined, nosing around my paws and shaking with the effort of crawling towards me.
The blue necklace dangled and danced, throwing a pattern of light across the brown pup’s soft fur.
The war-form howled in fury. “If that’s how you want it!”
She curled her massive arm back and flung the brown puppy.
I would have screamed except I couldn’t drop the one pup I had.
The puppy smashed into a wall, hung there for a second, then slid down into the debris. A trail of red-glossy-blackness followed its little body.
My heart, my blood, every single part of me screamed except my mouth. The pup in my maw hung silent, fragile as ash. I didn’t even dare keen a cry for the brown. The ash might blow away.
“Look what you’ve done.” The voice that was Cerys and my mother scolded me.
The little brown body didn’t move.
My heart howled, howled, howled. Gaia did not answer.
“Do as you are told, Winter!” The war-form flung a handful of paintbrushes at me. The swirls of her head shifted and churned.
I dropped the gray next to its littermate and cowered over both of them. She flung more and more debris at me, demanding I decorate the room, and I was ungrateful since hadn’t I been allowed to decorate it exactly as I pleased?
The war-form loomed over me.
“Give me the pups and I’ll go,” I whispered. “Just give them to me. Just let me take them and we’ll be gone forever.”
Her now-empty claw moved towards my skull while she held the blue necklace high and out of reach.
“I don’t want the necklace, or this, or anything. I’ll go human. I’ll disappear. I swear it. Let me take them away from here!” I huddled lower over the babies, heart thundering, and they began to cry as she came closer. Too young to see, plenty old enough to smell terror and danger. My heart kept screaming to a goddess who did not answer.
Her palm pressed over my head, blacked out my vision, and then her claws clamped down into my neck—
* * *
I woke up drenched in sweat and gasping for air.
I made some sort of awful sound that I half-heard and grabbed at my neck. I squeezed hard. Flesh and muscle met my fingers. Head still firmly attached. Skull intact.
“Winter!”
Sterling caught my elbow before I smashed it into his face. He had been the one saying my name.
