We Walk As Wolves

Chapter 8

Cass

The stone was cold under Cass's feet. 

The bars of his cell weren't metal, not exactly. They were more like strips of the white tree bark he'd seen in the forest, thin and brittle, bu they had their use. They created a draft in the cage, a blockade that snuffed out any trace of the heat that had slipped through when the children had first hauled him in. 

He tried to study the barricade of trees, tried to figure out what about them could cause the brutal temperature drop, but his teeth clattered together until his vision rocked and his thoughts rattled into a blur. 

His waterlogged socks had frozen, grown stiff around his calves. The children had stripped him of his remaining clothes. Precautions, he assumed, against the weapons he didn't have. He supposed there was some good in it - he wouldn't have to feel Bella's cold blood seeping through the stitching of his shirt and into the crevices of his skin any longer. 

But he still felt the stains of it. 

The children had left his bounds alone, and the frozen rope had started to tear at his skin, lines of blood drooling down his wrists like coiling snakes. 

He hadn't planned to die this way.

But maybe he deserved it. From the moment he slipped up, the moment the shadows had found her - maybe he deserved whatever the world could spit back at him: for Bella's death, for allowing any of it to happen in the first place. For all the promises he couldn't keep.

His mother had warned him, about the shadows, about what they did to the children, in her own way. In ways he hadn't understood before. Now, he wasn't sure what to believe, wasn't sure he really knew the woman at all. Had she known about the island? About all of it?

What do you remember? Bella had asked him, back on the ship. 

He remembered the ring of the doorbell. Remembered his father shoving a bag into his arms and pushing him out the back door. I'll find you. I'll find you when it's okay, he'd said. I'll let you know when it's safe to come home, I promise. 

He'd never seen his father again. He'd waited, cradling Bella in his arms behind the rotted porch of an old diner, for two weeks. Searching for a sign. Any indication his father had remembered his promise. But when London's temperatures began to drop and Bella's only coat had been stolen, he'd worked up the gall to go back to the house on his own. 

He'd found a locked door. Boarded windows. Floors coated in thick layers of dust. As if they'd never existed. As if the life he'd had with his parents had been nothing more than a dream. 

He tried to conjure up memories of them, of his mother's shaking hands and his father's stern laugh. His vision smudged with dark splatters at the corners. He tried to get on his feet, tried to keep his muscles from constricting until he couldn't move. His pulse throbbed slowly beneath his skin. 

He huddled further into the corner, wrapping his arms tightly around his knees. He focused on his breaths, as they dove down his throat and then released in a white cloud in front of his lips, as if counting them would ensure they continued. 

Even if he could gather enough of his strength to break the cell apart, he wouldn't know where to go. The children had blindfolded him as soon as he was free of the net and had shoved him roughly, blindly, through the thick forest by his bounds, like a cow dragged into a slaughter cart. 

Time moved differently on the island, but he couldn't tell whether it dragged slower than London or ran faster, or if time just ceased to move at all. Parts of the island were warmer than others, as if each season had been deposited into a specific part of the world, but the red light of the moon had remained constant, slinking through the treetops, following after Cass like a starving cat.