Chapter 75

Ruby

“Keep your coat on, Ruby,” Atwood says as he solemnly descends the stairs. “We have to go somewhere.”

The grim look on Atwood’s face makes my heart start to race. He comes down the stairs and grabs his coat off the hook.

“Where are we going?” I ask as we step back out into the cold and head toward the car.

Atwood simply opens the passenger side door silently, shutting it behind me once I get in. He gets in on the driver’s side and pulls out of the driveway.

“Atwood?” I ask as we start to drive down the road.

He grips the steering wheel so tight that his knuckles turn white.

His demeanor is frightening me at this point, but I decide not to ask any more questions and just let him drive in silence.

Soon enough, as we turn down the winding roads with tall pine trees on either side, I start to realize where we’re going.

We’re headed toward my village.

My mind starts racing a million miles a minute. Did he find out about my plans to escape with Cayden? Is he going to confront the both of us, or perhaps leave me there? My heart starts to race as we get closer to the village.

But then I see it.

The little houses that once dappled the side of the road on the outskirts of the village are now nothing but rubble and ash.

“Atwood, what’s happening?” I ask, but he simply continues driving.

We approach the village slowly. Through the trees, I can make out the burnt remains of the houses that I once knew so well.

Atwood stops the car along the side of the road. Without speaking, I get out of the car, not even closing the door behind me, and run toward the village.

“Ruby, wait! It’s not safe!” Atwood yells behind me, but I don’t listen. I weave between the burnt houses toward the center of the village and stop in my tracks when I see the destruction.

Atwood catches up with me, the sound of his shoes crunching in the snow echoing through the silence. Some of the houses are still smoldering and smoking.

“Ruby, I’m so sorry,” Atwood says breathlessly, grabbing my hand. I yank it away and pace across the square.

“That was the library,” I say, pointing to a pile of rubble. There are scraps of paper from the books lying about, wet from the snow. “And that was the school.” I point at another pile of rubble. The brick foundation is the only thing that is still standing.

“That was my friend’s house from grade school, and-”

I walk over to a particularly large pile of rubble on the far end of the town square.

“This was the meeting house.”

I stop short in my tracks as I look at what was once our meeting house. The place where we held school dances, birthday parties, town hall meetings.

It’s a graveyard now.

Glimpses of burnt and bloodied bodies peek out from beneath the rubble.

“Ruby-” Atwood says, approaching me.

“I have to see what happened,” I say quietly, crouching down. “I have to see them one last time.”

I reach out and touch the hand of a person beneath the debris, closing my eyes. It’s cold and stiff, frozen from the winter air.

When I touch the person’s hand, I’m transported into a vision.

The sun had gone down an hour prior. People were going home after a long day of work. Children were playing in the snow outside their homes. In the town square, there was an old woman ringing a bell for donations for the school. Christmas carolers milled about, singing merrily around the large Christmas tree in the square.

Cayden and his men had cut down the tree, just like they did every year. They had cut down the biggest, fullest fir they could find in the surrounding forest and dragged it back to the town square, where the children decorated it with tinsel and garlands made from popcorn and cranberries. The crows always ate the popcorn and cranberries, but we never minded. It was a symbol of good luck; the village would prosper in the next year.

But the crows never ate the garlands.

The first Bears appeared without any warning. They snuck in in their human forms, playing on the hybrids’ weak sense of smell compared to their Lycan counterparts. They slipped into the town square unnoticed; one even slipped a few coins into the old woman’s bucket with a sly smile.

When the first home went up in flames from the other Bears sneaking through the alleys, the panic began. The Bears shifted before anyone had the chance to collect themselves.

“Herd them up!” one of the Bears shouted. They gathered the people, even the children, in the meeting hall. They locked them up in there.

Cayden heard the screaming and smelled the smoke. He had just been leaving to go rescue me, but when he turned and saw the flames leaping above the trees, he dropped his backpack in the snow and sprinted back to the village.

He couldn’t shift. Despite being the alpha, Cayden could never shift. He relied on his own fighting abilities, his skill with weapons. But there were too many Bears.

He fought so hard, but it wasn’t enough. They killed him and threw him into the meeting house with everyone else, then barred the doors and set fire to the building.

When I come to from my vision, I can still hear the screaming of my people echoing in my ears.

“Ruby,” Atwood whispers, crouching down next to me. He cups my face in my hands and turns my head so I look at him, but I can only see a blur through the tears in my eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says.

He says something else, but I don’t hear it. The screams of my people grow louder in my mind, and suddenly I’m screaming with them, too, pounding my fists on the ground.

Atwood tries to comfort me, but I shove him away. My nail makes contact with his cheek, scratching his flesh so hard that it draws blood, but I don’t even notice. All I can hear are screams, and all I can see are the flames that burnt down the meeting house with my people inside.

I’m not sure when exactly I shift into my wolf form, but before I know it I’m running through the forest with the wind in my fur, leaping over rocks and tree roots. I know this forest well. I grew up here playing with my friends in these woods, and now they’ll never get to see these trees ever again.

Atwood has shifted, too. I can smell him behind me, chasing me; but he’s not trying to catch me, he’s not trying to stop me. I know that he’s just running with me because he, too, is devastated at the destruction.

The midterm exams, the drama with Beck, my mother’s brooch, and even the curse mean nothing to me right now at this moment. All of these problems seem so small and silly as I run through the forest like a flash of lightning.

I should have been here. I should have burned along with them. Maybe if I had been here, I could have even protected them, or at least died trying.