Page 63 of Echo North

I knew that voice. How could I know that voice?

“Please, Echo. Please.”

I let go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

IDIDN’T MEAN TO FALL ASLEEP.

But I woke with a start early in the morning to find the other side of the bed empty, sheets mussed where he’d lain, his shirt a shapeless linen puddle just on top.

I could still feel the warmth of his arm, the smoothness of his skin, the strength beneath it.

“Wolf?” I said into the cool gray light.

But there was no answer.

I got out of bed and dressed quickly, shivering. The room was cold, the house still, like it was holding its breath, waiting to see what I would do.

I paced through a corridor made of dying roses into the conservatory, and tucked myself into a window seat hidden by a large feathery fern. I stared through the glass at the winter wood, snow tracing the black branches with white.

The year was nearly up. There was only today and tomorrow, and then time would be gone.

I had failed to help the wolf.

And yet.

The arm I’d touched.

The voice I knew.

I knew, I knew, I knew.

“You cannot help me, Echo. You never could.”

The wolf’s words, the night I’d found him hunting in the garden. And yet Hal had spoken them, too, right after he’d played for me in the abandoned concert hall.

“Ask the right questions,”the smoke-woman had told me.

I picked away at the knot in my mind, pulled out the threads, examined them.

I asked myself:

Why was I not allowed to look at the wolf in the night? What would happen to him, really, when the year was ended? Who was the collector, and what did she want with him?

I leaned my forehead against the window, watched as my breath fogged up the pane.

I asked myself:

Why was Hal trapped in the books? Why were his memories bound behind glass? What had happened to him in the wood?

Why was there always a wood?

Outside, snow began to fall, turning the world into a blur of white. The wood was lost from view. I shut my eyes and let myself consider the thing I had come here to consider.

I let myself ask the question that terrified me:

What if Hal and the wolf were one and the same?