“Hold on,” Chey said. She’d just thought of something. This all happened when you were eighteen?”

“Nineteen,” he said. “I was born in 1895.”

She shook her head. “You don’t look a day over forty,” she said. Except his eyes were old. They’d always looked old to her.

“We change almost every day. When that happens we don’t just sprout hair and grow our teeth out. Every cell in our bodies is altered and renewed. They never have time to age. It’s true, Chey. I’m a hundred and eleven years old. And for most of that time I’ve been a wolf. I can guess your next question, but I don’t have an answer. I don’t know if we die of old age or not. I feel as healthy as I did the first time I changed, but beyond that I just don’t know.”

Decades—maybe centuries of endless transformation. Of waking up naked in the frozen forest. Chey shivered and it wasn’t because she was naked. “You were telling a perfectly good story,” she said. “Don’t ruin it with reality now. I promise, no more interruptions.”

Powell nodded. She could only see the back of his head but she was sure his eyes were misty with recollection—and not the good kind, not nostalgia. It hurt him to remember all this but maybe it helped a little too to get it off his chest. She wasn’t sure if she liked being his confessor or not, but it was too late to turn back.

“This beautiful French girl turned into a wolf before my eyes. I guess you’ve never seen the whole transformation—the first time you saw me change, you were changing too. It’s a weird thing to see. The body turns ghostly and transparent. Almost like the human being is fading out of existence. You can see the skeleton melting like wax from a candle, you can see the entire body collapse in on itself. Then it seems to stagger back up to its feet and become solid again. Color and then solidity return—but in a new form. Suddenly you’re staring a vicious animal in the face.

“I stepped backwards, away from this monster. Behind me the silver cage stood open and inviting. Even as the she-wolf lunged for my throat—and believe me, she didn’t waste a moment—I leapt back into the cage and slammed the door shut. The key was in the lock and I turned it hurriedly, locking myself in. For just a moment, though, my hand was outside of the cage. She got her teeth into it. She clamped down. Then she tore it right off and swallowed it like a piece of meat.

“The pain was unbearable, of course. I screamed and fell back on the filthy straw at the bottom of the cage and screamed and kept screaming. I wrapped my belt around my spurting wrist to try to stop the blood loss. The whole time the she-wolf was throwing herself at the cage, over and over, making the bars ring like bells. The pain just got bigger and bigger, but the horror I felt was almost worse. I imagined what it would be like to live the rest of my life, my normal human life, with only one hand. I’d seen plenty of amputees on the battlefield. Bits and pieces of soldiers were always being blown off. I’d never thought it could happen to me.

“While I lay there feeling sorry for myself my buddies were upstairs. The Baroness de Clichy-Sous-Vallee was tearing them to pieces. I saw what was left of them later and it wasn’t much more than scraps of their uniforms and the occasional bone with shreds of meat still attached. Lucie, I came to realize, had gone out of her way to protect me from that fate. She hadn’t even wanted to turn me into a wolf, at least not right away—it was just bad luck that I’d reached for that key at the wrong moment. She couldn’t control herself when her wolf was on her. None of us can.”

“You sound like you forgive her,” Chey said, a little startled.

“Not at first. But with time… when the moon set the Baroness and Lucie came downstairs and let me out of the cage. They saw at once what had happened to me and they knew I was part of their family. Instantly they treated me that way, even when I fought against them. Even when I called them horrible names and threatened to kill them. They knew better. They knew I would come around.”

“The cage,” she said. “Why did they have that cage?”

“You haven’t guessed, yet?” Powell asked. “Lucie was the black sheep of her family. So to speak. She’d been injured by a wolf some time before I met her. Some time centuries before I met her. She claimed not to remember how. She claimed that she wanted to confess when she first changed, that she wanted to turn herself in but it would have shamed her family if people knew about what she was. So they had the cage built, and for twelve hours out of every day they locked her inside. She would smash against the bars, batter at them with her own muscles and bones, but she couldn’t get free. For generations one member of the female line of her family had tended to her, sat with her, prayed for her soul. The Baroness was the last of those. When the war came, and the castle was abandoned by the family, the Baroness had volunteered to stay behind and take care of Lucie. Instead, the moment the two of them were alone, she turned to Lucie and said that she’d been watching the wolf for years and that she wanted it too. She wanted that strength and power. She said that in the anarchy of the war they could be together as a pack of two, that there was no need for cages anymore. That Lucie could run free and hunt as she pleased. Lucie was crazy enough to think that was a great idea. So they made it happen. The Baroness was Lucie’s great-great-great niece, you see, and when I met her she had been a wolf exactly twice. Lucie brought my buddies and me to her because she hadn’t learned how to hunt yet. She needed to feed, Lucie decided. And so she did.”

“But why did they protect you?” Chey asked.

Powell’s shoulders tightened. “Because they wanted a mate.”