Page 59 of Winter's Edge
He was right. The snow was already coming down in big wet flakes, and we still had to get to Margin's Row before the whiteout hit. But with Grady hurt and Archer totally out of commission while he lay on the sleigh, and not being able to cut through the Crimson Forest to get there, the trek was slow. So slow I feared we wouldn’t make it home in time.
I sat on the sleigh next to Archer with his hand gripped in mine.Tears tracked down his face, and he kept his eyes squeezed shut, whether in pain or sorrow or both. I didn't blame him at all for not wanting to look at this cruel world at all right now. Sasha lay tucked in his side with her nose on his shoulder, never once tearing her gaze off of him, even though she had to be tired. Every once in a while, Archer would squeeze my hand which made my throat pull tighter. I almost wished he were mad at me for telling him where Ronin was, for getting his hopes up. Then maybe I could've put this consuming guilt I felt toward that. Instead, it was eating me up slowly.
My heavy heart pinched my lungs, making it hard to breathe, and harder still with the plunging temperature. I shivered farther into my two coats.
The faint scent of smoke still touched the air, even after we’d been going for some time. It must’ve seeped into our clothes, too, because it was all I smelled, like we were made of fire.
After taking my blindfold off, I saw what Grady saw from in front of our sleigh. Huge fluffy white flakes and tree branches already laden with them. A flat expanse of forest instead of rolling hills. I imagined we were getting closer to Margin's Row.
I hadn’t been able to ask Lee about Baba. If Lager took both Lee and Jade to sell them, what would he have done with Baba? The second gunshot I’d heard the day I’d left echoed in my mind, sharp and terrifying. I didn’t know whose gun it’d been, didn’t know if Baba was still alive or not, didn’t know where Jade and Lee were, and all this not knowing was slowly killing me.
To hide from all these worries, I started to tie my scarf back around my eyes—but stopped. Gradually, as if blossoming from a dream, warped, but familiar shapes appeared in the distance through Grady’s eyes. Eight of them. Eight similar cabins in a row and a small barn in front of the easternmost one. We came upon them from the rear out of Slipjoint Forest, and the closer we drew, the more broken the shapes became.
Scorched black piles of rubble. Only the stone chimneys remained, pointing like accusatory fingers at the early-morning sky.
Margin’s Row was no more. My home was gone. Burned to the ground.
“Nah.” The sound slipped out of me, a mix between a gasp and a moan.
Sasha raised her head, and my vision switched to hers, seeing me and my face stark as the rising snow, the hollowness in my eyes. My hands were outstretched, reaching toward everything that was lost.
“Aika.” Archer swallowed roughly. “Who did this?”
Grady glanced back, and I saw myself through him, saw the tears clinging to my lashes and freezing there. He stopped the sleigh, ducked underneath the harness he pulled it with, and limped heavily to my side.
I stood and stepped off the sleigh, my limbs frozen and seeming unattached to my body. “Grady, it wasn’t like this when you came here was it?” The words left me in a rush and jumbled over themselves, and then I sucked in a loud breath in anticipation of the answer I already knew.
He shook his furry head, his vision of me bouncing back and forth.
Oh god. I screwed my eyes shut and pointed at my cabin. “My baba was shot there. Outside.Please.”
It made no sense what I was asking. If Baba were still there, he was most definitely dead.
But Grady limped off anyway, seeming to understand my need to know for sure.
“Who did this?” Archer rasped. “Was it the bald man?”
Maybe. Maybe Lager had come back after he’d tried to sell Jade and Lee to destroy the rest of my baba’s business. Or to loot it first and then destroy it so that if I ever came back, I wouldn’t be able to compete with him.
Grady loped back then and shook his head. My baba wasn’t here. But he’d been shot, so where had he gone? Did Lager take him too?
Crushing defeat swept down upon me, and I stumbled to my hands and knees in the snow. I had nothing. Everything I’d had was taken away from me. My home, my horse, my means to survive,my family. Gone.
I screamed, the sound a relentless cleaving through the silence, and slammed my hands against the powdery snow. I screamed again and again. That sense of loss, the emptiness where all these things had been pressed in under my ribs and wrapped around my heart. And then? It erupted in flame. Still, I screamed until my throat felt ravaged, until I started to choke on my own rage searing through my veins.
I would get it all back.Allof it. And I would get the Crimson Forest back to my wolves, too, even if I had to burn everything down around it.
When I finally stopped, Sasha was whimpering inconsolably. Archer’s hand was clasped so tightly in mine that it almost hurt, and Grady had wrapped his tail around my shoulders.
My wolves. Our war. But to win, we couldn’t stay here so I could mourn. After all, I still had the poison Grady had lifted from Faust’s wife in my pocket, the weight of it a savage assurance, and Grady had a map of the Crimson Forest with writing all over it.
I hauled myself to my feet just as a distant howl sounded from the direction of Margin.
Grady immediately shifted into his human form and turned to Archer, Sasha, and me, his shoulders heaving under his coat and his gray eyes rounded. “That was Timothy.”
Their alpha.
Maybe everything hadn’t been lost.
