1. Chapter 1 #2
Jon, from the kitchen, does not look up from the kettle.
"Okay." Sophia plants her feet and spreads her arms wide. "That's your shoulder. That's where your shoulder was. On me. Standing up."
"That's not true," Renzo says.
"It's true. "
"Sophia, that would make her longer than that couch."
"She was longer than that couch."
"She was not.”
I look at Declan, who is the only one of us who measures anything in real units.
"You want it honest?" he says.
"I do."
"Draft horse." He rubs the back of his neck. "Not a regular horse. I've walked search horses through country like that, and you'd have looked one of them in the eye. Heavier through the front than that, even."
The room goes quiet.
"Your proportions were wrong," Freya says from the fireplace.
Everybody turns.
"Not wrong," she amends. "Different. The wolves here, when they shift, the shoulder and the hip sit about level.
Yours didn't. Your shoulders were higher.
Your chest was deeper, and your legs were longer for your body than they should be.
" She tips her head. "And your head was broader. That's what I noticed first."
"Great," I say. "So I was a big-headed horse."
"You were magnificent ," Sophia says fiercely.
"You were terrifying," Renzo says, "and I say that with love."
"Did I at least have a tail?"
"You had a tremendous tail," Sophia says.
"Obviously you had a tail," Declan says. "What would you have instead?"
"I don't know! It's my first time!"
Renzo throws a cushion at me. I catch it one-handed. Then I throw it back hard enough that it takes out the lamp shade.
"Sorry," I call toward the kitchen.
"Mmhm," says Jon.
Then Torres says, "Jess."
He's sat down on the arm of my chair, and he isn't laughing.
"I've seen a lot of shifted wolves," he says. "Feral, Frosthaven, all of it. Maybe hundreds." He shakes his head. "You weren't a big wolf, Jess. You weren't the same kind of thing. Put you next to Voss shifted and nobody says she's bigger . They say what is that ."
That's when I finally believe Jon wasn't being coy.
"Okay," I say. "Then somebody explain the other part. Why did everyone look like that? They wouldn't come near me. I took one step and half the faculty backed up."
Nobody answers right away.
"We didn't see much," Declan says carefully. "They pushed us back down the slope."
"We heard things, though," Sophia says.
"Fragments," Freya says.
"Somebody said direwolf ." Renzo counts them off on his fingers. "Three times, before anyone said anything else. Somebody said it wasn't possible."
"Somebody said they were extinct," Declan says, and he looks uncomfortable saying it, like the word doesn't fit in his mouth. "That they've been gone a long time."
"And then the Chancellor cleared the ridge," Renzo says. "Everybody off it. Fast."
"That's not what I noticed," Freya says.
We all look at her.
"The older faculty knew before anybody said the word." She says it calmly. "The younger ones were confused. They were looking around to see how to react. But the old ones stopped the second they saw you. They already knew what they were looking at."
Silence.
"Do any of you actually know what a direwolf is?" I ask.
"No," Torres says.
"I've heard the word," Renzo says. "Not enough to tell you why a man twice my age would go white over it."
"Nobody tells us anything," Sophia says. "That's the whole problem with this school. Which, by the way—" and she stops, and her head comes up, "—we passed."
Nobody says anything.
"No, I mean it," she says. "Are we all being idiots? All six of us passed. All six of us got a hundred merit marks, all six of us qualified, all six of us finished the Trial. All six."
I look around the room.
Torres, filthy to the elbows and still in his Trial gear. Declan with a split lip nobody's mentioned. Renzo with his boots on a professor's coffee table. Freya, who has been standing since she came in, and who now, slowly, smiles.
"Oh my god," I say. "We did."
The room comes apart. Sophia shrieks. Declan hauls Renzo off the couch by the front of his shirt.
Renzo did not consent to this. Torres walks straight into Jon's kitchen without asking anyone, and I hear cupboards, and Torres saying "Professor, do you want this jar or can I open it," and then food starts coming out by the armful — apples, half a loaf, a wheel of something, an entire tin of biscuits that I'm fairly sure was a gift.
Pickles stands under his lamp with his eyes shut, radiating disapproval at all six of us.
"Don't give him—" Jon starts.
Sophia is already in the cricket tub.
I sit there with my shoulder throbbing and my mouth full and five people arguing about how long I was, and for about ninety seconds I don't care what a direwolf is at all.
Then there's a knock on the door frame, and one of the graduate assistants leans in and says, "Professor. The Chancellor's asking for you."
The room’s energy drops.
Jon nods, reaches for his coat. "Jessica. You're here tonight. They can stay a while."
"And after tonight?"
"I don't know yet."
"Right." I set my plate down. "And when will you?"
"Hopefully soon."
"That's very comforting."
"It isn't," he agrees. He shrugs the coat on. And then, at the door, "Lock this behind me."
"Sure. Wouldn't want the bears getting in."
He doesn't laugh.
He's standing in his own doorway looking back at me, completely serious.
My smile fades.
"Do I actually need to?"
Jon pauses.
"For tonight," he says, "I'd prefer it."
Then he's gone down the path. Cold slips in through the open door before I close it, cross the room barefoot, and turn the bolt.
It's louder than it needs to be.
Behind me, Renzo is apparently still stuck on this.
"Was she really bigger than the couch?"
"Renzo," Sophia says.
"I'm asking."
"You've been asking."
"Because nobody has answered me."
"Knock it off."
"Fine." He pauses. "But she was, right?"
"Renzo."
"Done."
Torres comes up beside me at the door.
I look at the door. At the bolt I just turned.
"What now?"
Sophia makes an exasperated sound behind me.
"Now, you're just Jessica. Forget you shifted."
I look at her.
"Seriously," she says. "I don't care if you're a direwolf or a regular wolf or you wake up tomorrow and find out you're a fucking dragon. You're still you."
"A dragon would be cool," Renzo says.
Sophia points at him. "Not helping."
"I'm supporting her."
"You're hoping she breathes fire."
"Both things can be true."
Declan lifts his glass. "More importantly, Jessica passed the First Trial."
Sophia picks up my abandoned glass and holds it out to me.
"Exactly. We all passed. We're not letting a bunch of professors with terrible communication skills ruin our party."
I take the glass.
"I can get behind that," Renzo says.
"Of course you can."
"I've been behind it the entire time."
From the terrarium comes the faint scrape of Pickles launching himself after another cricket.
I lift my glass.
"Seven of us passed."
Sophia looks at the terrarium. "The lizard did not take the First Trial."
"He provided emotional support."
"He ate crickets."
"Exactly. He contributed."