Lily dropped her bedroll on the ground next to her sister’s and looked around. She didn’t see Juliet anywhere. The sun was setting, and by this time her sister would usually have some kind of meal waiting for the two of them. Lily laughed at her own annoyance. She was starting to think like some fifties’ husband who expected his wife to have dinner on the table as soon as he got home from work.
She reached out to Juliet and followed the connection between them to the perimeter of camp. Her sister sat atop a small rise that was covered in shin-high grass and dotted with vibrant spring wildflowers. Lily joined her, sitting down next to her in the fragrant grass. They looked out over a vast plain that was so mind-bogglingly large that it seemed to stretch on past the edge of the gathering evening, through the night, and straight on to the next morning. Lily fancied she could see all the way to tomorrow’s dawn rising behind this setting sun.
“Look at them run,” Juliet said.
An uncountable number of buffalo undulated across the plain like a dark tide of muscle and blood washing over the Ocean of Grass. The pounding of their hooves thrummed through the earth and felt like a heartbeat under Lily’s hand.
“Alaric told me about this,” Juliet continued quietly. “He said seeing it would open me up so wide that all the hurt inside would just spill out.”
Lily realized her sister was crying. She wished she could join her, but her hurt was more complicated than her sister’s. It wasn’t clean. When Lily did an autopsy on her love for Rowan she saw that most of the evidence pointed at her. And Lily had never been good at feeling one emotion at a time, like pure sadness or utter joy. Her sister had that talent, but not her. Everything Lily felt was tainted with other feelings, and sometimes she wondered if all the complications she put on her emotions kept her from ever really feeling anything. Except once. There was one night when all she had felt was love. Having that single taste just made it worse.
“Thank you for choosing me over Alaric,” Lily said. It was the first time they’d talked about it—the first time Lily acknowledged what Juliet had sacrificed for her.
“I couldn’t let you die,” Juliet replied, wiping at her face.
“Actually, you could have. I’m not your real sister.”
Laughter bubbled up through Juliet’s tears. “Yeah, you are. Only my real sister would drag me all the way out here.”
Lily dropped her head and let her shoulder shake with laughter. At least they could still share a laugh, even if Lily couldn’t cry.
“Where the heck are we, anyway?” Juliet said, looking around with a puzzled frown.
“Missouri, almost to Kansas,” Lily answered, even though that meant nothing to this Juliet.
“It’s flat.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean really flat.” Juliet shaded her eyes and peered into the tricky twilight. “What’s going on down there?”
Lily followed her sister’s pointing finger and saw a cluster of buffalo suddenly turn against the tide of their fellows. From between the parting buffalo came a pale, loping figure trotting across the plain.
“That’s the pale Woven,” Lily said, grabbing her sister’s hand and stiffening. She hadn’t seen the pale coyote in weeks, and Lily had thought she’d stopped following them.
“What’s that?” Juliet asked in a shaking whisper.
The pale coyote stopped and came to rest, and a hulking shape that Lily had never seen before came out from between the now-scattering buffalo. It was twice the size of the already large coyote Woven. Its snout was elongated and its ears pointed like a wolf’s, but the dark Woven’s long forearms ended in what Lily could see were clawed, but still human-like hands. The wolf Woven had a stooped back and slightly shorter hind legs, like a hyena’s, and it ran toward the pale coyote on all fours with a strange, rocking canter. The first word that popped into Lily’s mind was werewolf.