“A little.” She gave him a wry look. “Better enough that I won’t put another knot in Nathan’s tail.”
<I was concerned,> Nathan said from the front room.
<And rightly so,> Simon replied. <But Meg looks embarrassed, like a squirrel who fell out of a tree and is trying to pretend she intended to do that.>
With a huff of annoyance, Nathan went back to the Wolf bed.
“I’m fine,” Meg said. “I don’t want my friends to get hurt, and it’s hard knowing that what I saw wasn’t enough to save Heather when I was able to save the ponies and Sam. And maybe she did live longer than she would have if she’d continued working at HGR.”
And maybe she died much sooner, Simon thought.
CHAPTER 44
Firesday, Maius 18
Not only had Jackson returned her drawing of the Wolf song; he and Grace framed it and hung it in her room. They brought her more paper and more pencils in different colors. They spent time telling her that this shade of green was grass and that shade was tree that shed its leaves when Autumn walked the land and that shade was pine. They described, as best they could, the shades of water, but they knew water as shallow and sun warmed versus the coolness of a deep pool, not the color of the water.
She listened, soaking up what they said and wondering what was outside her room. Jackson and Grace weren’t the only Wolves here. She knew that from the song. But she wasn’t brave enough to ask if she could leave her room.
She thought about her new keepers. They refused to call her cs821. Once each day, they asked if she had chosen a name. They didn’t punish her for not choosing. They fed her, cleaned her clothes, made sure she had what she needed to wash herself and use the toilet. And they seemed pleased that she liked to draw.
Jackson and Grace. But as she thought of them, she didn’t see Grace. She saw Jackson and . . .
Taking a clean sheet of paper, the girl began to draw.
* * *
Jackson walked into the scarred girl’s room with a plate of food for the midday meal.
She sat at the head of the bed, her arms wrapped around tucked-up legs, her chin resting on her knees.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, only realizing how sharp he sounded when she winced. He set the plate on the desk and approached the bed, sniffing lightly so that she wouldn’t know he was trying to catch the scent of blood.
No blood, but something was wrong.
“I wanted to draw a picture for you and Grace, but I drew that.” She pointed to the paper at the end of the bed.
Holding it carefully by one corner, he turned it around. Then he sucked in a breath.
“Have you ever seen these places? Seen . . . images?” he asked.
She shook her head.
She’d never seen him in Wolf form, but she’d drawn his head, muzzle raised to the sky, the Rocky Mountains in the background. That filled the top left section of the paper. The bottom-right section was filled with the head of another howling Wolf. Filling the center of the paper was a human dwelling like nothing he would find around his home territory, an Eagle’s view of an island, and the thundering water known as Talulah Falls.
“That other Wolf isn’t Grace,” she said, sounding worried.
“No, it’s my friend Simon. He lives in Lakeside, a place on the eastern shore of Lake Etu.” He studied the girl. Her shaggy hair was a golden brown, and her eyes were green with flecks of gold. If she were a shifter, he’d think she belonged to the Panthergard with her coloring. “You drew this for me?”
She nodded. “It means something.” She looked at the desk, at the drawer where she kept the razor. Then she looked away.