Page 16 of Echo North

As if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. As if my promise was a matter of course. For a moment more I stayed on my knees, anger threatening to swallow me, and then I got up and began fumbling with the ties of my blouse. I had no nightgown, and so I stripped off my boots and skirt and blouse as quickly as I could and crawled into the huge bed in nothing but my shift.

“Are you dressed?” asked the wolf.

I drew the bedclothes up to my chin, the anger dissolved into misery. “Yes.”

He came around to the other side of the bed and curled up on the floor in front of the wardrobe, one eye open, staring up at me. “You will not forget your promise?”

Our earlier conversation echoed in my mind:

“What happens at midnight?”

“The magic ceases to function, and the house is unbound.”

Did that mean he would become unbound, too? What would happen when I blew out the lamp—what would happen if I lit it again?

“I will not forget.” I blew out the light before I lost my nerve.

Darkness flooded the bedchamber. I lay there with my eyes wide open, acutely conscious of the wolf on the floor; I was blind in the dark, but I could hear him breathing, the rustling scrape of fur against carpet as he adjusted his position.

“It is like any wild thing that has been tamed. It is sometimes safe, and sometimes not.”

My scars twinged with remembered pain, and I shifted uneasily. What was to keep the wolf from leaping into the bed and devouring me in the dark?

“Remember that it is wild, and be on your guard.”

Or perhaps it was the darkness itself keeping the wolf at bay, some lingering remnants of magic that kept him tame in the night, but only if he stayed in this room, and only if the lamp remained unlit.

Down below me, his breathing evened out: He was asleep.

But sleep didn’t come as easily for me. I couldn’t stop thinking about my father, about the hatred in Donia’s eyes, and my university letter crumbling to ash. About that moment in the wood when the wolf first spoke to me. Everything that had happened afterward was impossible—maybe I reallywasfreezing to death in a snowbank.

And yet the pillow was smooth against my cheek, the quilt soft and warm. The sound of the slumbering wolf somehow comforting.

Was my father all right? Had he made it home?

Part of me ached for him, but I wept into my pillow, hating myself, because the other part of me—the largest part of me—wasn’t even really sorry. I’d left him, but I’d left Donia and the villagers and the stifling constraints of my old life, too. It gave me a strange sense of freedom.

Somehow, I fell asleep.

IJERKED AWAKE IN THEdark, skin drenched in sweat. Something was pounding on the bedroom door, trying to get in. No, something wasroaringoutside the door. Heat radiated toward me. Instinctively, I reached for the lamp, then remembered what I’d sworn and yanked my hand back.

“Wolf,” I stammered, straining to see him down below the bed in the blackness. “WOLF!”

He drew a sharp, gasping breath. “Echo?” His voice was strange and slurred with sleep.

“Something’s out there.”

There came athudon the door, the sound of a rushing wind and high eerie laughter. The whole room seemed to shake.

“Wolf?”

“It is all right, Echo. Nothing can harm us in here.” What I’d thought was the strangeness of sleep I realized was an accent, a weird emphasis on his i’s and a’s.

Harsh, insistent knocking sounded on the door, growing louder and louder, mixed with the roar of some unknown beast.

“Do nothing,” said the wolf. “Do nothing. It shall pass.”

I shuddered and shuddered, sitting straight against the headboard and drawing the covers up to my chin. The compass-watch ticked steadily underneath my shift—I hadn’t taken it off.