Page 59 of Raised By Wolves

Waylon Eugene Meloy’s smile flashes in my mind. For a second, it’s like I can still feel his arms around me.

“I don’t think I want to, either,” I say. Not yet.

CHAPTER 42

ONCE HOLO AND I get all the tomatoes in the ground, Lacey goes out to check our work. I think it’s funny that she’s so obsessed with her garden when the whole meadow is edible. I wonder what she’d say if I told her that the cattails by the pond are delicious. Or that the plantain herb she calls a weed is good for poison ivy, or that the yarrow helps fevers and heals wounds.

“When’s that cake going to be ready?” Holo wonders.

I eyeball the timer. “Ten minutes.”

“I’m starving.”

“Whenaren’tyou starving?”

He shrugs. “When I’m asleep.”

I swear he’s grown two inches since we came out of the woods.

And the wolf pups are gaining about three pounds a week.

Assuming they’re still alive.

“Can we take the cake out early?” Holo asks, gazing longingly at the oven.

I’m about to scold him—no, that’s a stupid question—when a short, high yelp rips through the air. Then comes a longer, low wail.

I hear, “Kai?Kai!”

I run outside to find Lacey lying in the dirt at the edge of the garden. Her face is shiny with sweat and very white.

I drop to the ground beside her. A rock slices into my knee. I ignore it.

“Something—bit me,” she gasps. She’s clutching her left arm to her chest. Then she rolls over on her side, curls her knees up, and vomits.

Panic lights up my nerves.A rattlesnake, I think. But I manage to keep my voice calm. “Is it your arm? Your hand? Can I see it?”

Lacey doesn’t seem to hear me. She’s shaking, and now she’s crying in fear and pain. I gently tug on her arm, pulling it toward me. She squeezes her eyes shut and moans, “Oh God oh God oh God—” A trickle of bile runs out of the side of her mouth.

There.I see it. Two deep puncture wounds on the fleshy part of her palm near the thumb. There’s no blood, but her hand is already starting to swell.

“Holo,” I shout over my shoulder. “Call the hospital!”

Lacey’s face is going from white to green.

Does the kid even know how to work a phone?

“It’s okay, Lacey, you’re okay,” I say urgently. “Hang on, I’ll be right back.”

I rush over to a clump of plantain herb, grab a few leaves, and shove them into my mouth. They’re disgustingly bitterand tough. I chew them for as long as I can stand it and then spit them into my hand. I run back to Lacey and press the green fibrous pulp against the bite.

“This is plantain,” I tell her. “It’s good for stings and snakebites.”

But she’s hyperventilating. Her legs start spasming. There’s no meadow herb that’s going to help her now.

“Holo!” I scream. “Are you calling?”

Once the chief showed us a movie where someone cut an X through a rattlesnake bite on someone’s leg and sucked the venom out. But that was amovie, and this islife, and what we need is an ambulance.

---