Incarnadine

Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

"Lena, I'm going out with Nick tonight."

"Uh-huh," I answered, distracted.

"I was wondering if you want to join us."

I didn't look up. "No, thanks."

"Hey, I'm talking to you. What are you drawing, anyway?"

Jamie's face hovered, casting a shadow on my sketch. I huffed, irritated. "Jamie, look. I don't want to be a third wheel, okay?"

She stared at me.

I sighed, setting down my pencil and book. "Sorry. I'm a bit snappy today."

"How's the hot date."

I shut my eyes. I didn't want to share that with anyone, not even Jamie. "Best moment of my life so far."

"Huh. What's up with your drawing, anyway?" She pointed at my sketchbook. "I'd never seen you that furious before when you draw. You acted like a half-mad artist."

I glance at my own sketch. The meadow. The lake. The honeydew rain. I was close now.

The night before, I'd dreamt again. The dream was very vivid.

Duane had never sent me off to the other village as he had promised to do. It had been my choice to stay with him. I didn't want another life like the one I'd had for fifteen years—being scorned for being different, struggling to fit into communities I didn't belong in, all alone in a village that must have surely heard of stories from their neighbor village. I wanted to live a life for real.

He had let me stay with him.

For the first few seasons, we had only spent our time as nothing more than two persons coexisting together, sometimes a girl and a wolf. My first winter in the forest had been a hard time for food. Duane had had no trouble hunting for himself, but he always had to hunt for more to feed two mouths. In gratitude I tried to find some herbs and essence to cook a humane meal for us, but sometimes days it had been so cold that the clothes I had brought with me—which weren't a lot at all—couldn't even warm me up. At the freezing nights I would curl up with Duane in his wolf form to share his heat.

I remembered everything so vividly, that if I had felt I was just dreaming some tale before, I was definitely living in the tale then. Every flashes of our time together, every walks we took, every sunrise and dusks—all the forgotten memories unraveled themselves to me like pages of a book.

And I also remembered how it had happened. How we first realized it.

I had tried making up for my stay by finding some fishes in the lake. The harsh winter hadn't frozen up the water, but the water had been very cold. When Duane went out hunting in the forest as a wolf, I would spend my time on the lakeside, trying to bait the fishes with some leftover piece of meat. I had never gone further than the lakeside, for I wasn't able to swim.

And then, one afternoon in the second winter, I lost my footing on the slippery ice and fell into the cold lake water.

The lake didn't have a current, and I was still near the side enough to grab on the edge, but the ice slipped from my fingers, and I fell deeper. I had kicked, flailed my arms in desperate attempt to hold onto something. Black spots had covered the edges of my vision, and I had almost let myself surrender.

And then I was carried off to the land.

Everything had been so numb, so cold. My eyelids felt so heavy, as if they had been sewn shut. From my clogged ears, I had heard someone saying my name—it felt like I was still underwater.