Free The Silent Strength of Stones by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Matt Stawicki Page B

to connect with her, own her? But I knew that, didn’t I, the way he had held her too close? Maybe he thought he was just goofing around. Maybe not. I said, “Bad. But you’re okay now?”
    She closed her eyes and, after a moment, nodded.
    I let a moment slip by. “You have to say yes?”
    “Mm-hmm,” she said, “for it to work right.”
    I remembered saying no and yes to Willow. She had stopped pushing when I told her no. “Did I say yes to Evan?”
    She stirred. She looked up at me. “Yes,” she said, “and he didn’t even ask you. You put your arms around him. You said you had always wanted him. He wasn’t even trying to fetch you, but you came.”
    “Oh.” I had dreamed of him and longed for him. I wondered if I would be able to live my dreams, or if this would turn out like all those stories about people who get their wishes and find out just how sorry they can be. “If Jeremy is doing something you don’t like, you have to tell him so he believes you that you want him to stop. You can do that,” I said, thinking of how her voice had made me do things.
    She stared into my eyes for a moment, then smiled. “Yes,” she said. “Of course.” She pulled my head down and gave me a little kiss.
    Alison and Murray began a twin-fiddle version of “Ozark Moon.” Willow and I waltzed. I remembered how afraid I had been in the store when we first touched, and thought it was weird how comfortable I felt with her now, as if we had exchanged some sort of vows, even though I knew more scary things about her than I had before. “Are you my girlfriend?” I asked her after the music stopped.
    “What?” she said, startled.
    “I feel like you are.”
    “But I can’t marry you. I can’t marry anyone unless the Presences sanction it.”
    “I’m not talking about marriage,” I said, alarmed. I knew even less about her than I had thought.
    “What are you talking about?”
    “I like you, you like me. We date. We don’t go out with other people as long as you’re my girlfriend and I’m your boyfriend.”
    “How long does it last?”
    “Until we break up. You can do that whenever you want. How much longer will your family be staying?” Suddenly I wondered: if Evan owned me, and he left with Willow and her folks, would I have to go too? Could he make me? Or was it all just a joke? Ridiculous. Absurd! It had to be a joke. People didn’t own each other, not anymore, and how could a wolf prove ownership of a person? It would never hold up in any court I’d seen on television.
    Then again, it wasn’t a legal matter. Something had happened to me. I had heard and understood a wolf speaking, and the words he had said had done involuntary things to me.
    What if it wasn’t a joke? Pop would stop it. I didn’t know how I was going to get away even when I was eighteen, a moment I’d been planning for years (pack what I needed, what little money I had saved, slip away and catch a ride with Hank, the Laceys’ produce driver, whose acquaintance I’d been cultivating. Pop might check with all our regular vendors to see if one of them had given me a ride, but he probably wouldn’t think of Hank. At least not right away ... Get down to the valley and disappear). Pop’s expectation that I would stay and work at the store was so strong it was smothery.
    Pop would just expect me to stay; how could Evan fight that?
    What if he could fight it, though?
    “As long as we must,” said Willow. “The skilliau are strong here and listen to us, but they are stubborn and want courting. You can’t just take one by force.”
    “Skilly-what?”
    She laughed and said, “We’ll be here a while.”
    “So while you’re here ...”
    “All right.”
    I gave her a kiss. “And then if Jeremy still bothers you, you tell him you’re my girlfriend, and I can rescue you.”
    She glanced toward the bench, studying Jeremy, who was talking to Megan now. “Voice will work on him, Nick. It’s very strange. I do things to you that Aunt