They snatched the girl off her tire swing in the backyard and dragged her into the woods; her body made a shallow track in the snow, from her world to mine. I saw it happen. I didn’t stop it.
It had been the longest, coldest winter of my life. Day after day under a pale, worthless sun. And the hunger — hunger that burned and gnawed, an insatiable master. That month nothing moved, the landscape frozen into a colorless diorama devoid of life. One of us had been shot trying to steal trash off someone’s back step, so the rest of the pack stayed in the woods and slowly starved, waiting for warmth and our old bodies. Until they found the girl. Until they attacked.
They crouched around her, snarling and snapping, fighting to tear into the kill first.
I saw it. I saw their flanks shuddering with their eagerness. I saw them tug the girl’s body this way and that, wearing away the snow beneath her. I saw muzzles smeared with red. Still, I didn’t stop it.
I was high up in the pack — Beck and Paul had made sure of that — so I could’ve moved in immediately, but I hung back, trembling with the cold, up to my ankles in snow. The girl smelled warm, alive, human above all else.
What was wrong with her? If she was alive, why wasn’t she struggling?
I could smell her blood, a warm, bright scent in this dead, cold world. I saw Salem jerk and tremble as he ripped at her clothing. My stomach twisted, painful — it had been so long since I’d eaten. I wanted to push through the wolves to stand next to Salem and pretend that I couldn’t smell her humanness or hear her soft moans. She was so little underneath our wildness, the pack pressing against her, wanting to trade her life for ours.
With a snarl and a flash of teeth, I pushed forward. Salem growled back at me, but I was rangier than him, despite my starvation and youth. Paul rumbled threateningly to back me up.
I was next to her, and she was looking up at the endless sky with distant eyes. Maybe dead. I pushed my nose into her hand; the scent on her palm, all
sugar and butter and salt, reminded me of another life.
Then I saw her eyes.
Awake. Alive.
The girl looked right at me, eyes holding mine with such terrible honesty.
I backed up, recoiled, starting to shake again — but this time, it wasn’t anger that racked my frame.
Her eyes on my eyes. Her blood on my face.
I was tearing apart, inside and outside.
Her life.
My life.
The pack fell back from me, wary. They growled at me, no longer one of them, and they snarled over their prey. I thought she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, a tiny, bloody angel in the snow, and they were going to destroy her.
I saw it. I saw her, in a way I’d never seen anything before.
And I stopped it.
