When Andrea and Kishar got home, Ainsel was still seated on the floor in their shared office, surrounded by the records of her strange life.

“She’s here,” called Kishar, the relief in her voice penetrating Ainsel’s haze of misery.

Andrea blazed into the room. “Ainsel, I told you to call us rather than walk home. What are you doing? Why haven’t you been answering your phone?”

Puzzled, Ainsel glanced at her cellphone, which showed no calls. Then she remembered that she also had a new cellphone, buried at the bottom of her bag. She rescued it and saw the four missed calls from Andrea, two missed calls from Kishar, and a missed call from Zoë, who had already updated Ainsel’s entry in her phonebook when Remy had returned her old phone.

“I’m sorry,” Ainsel said. “I found my old phone and I forgot…”

Kishar dropped her bag on the floor and knelt down beside Ainsel. “What’s wrong, sweetheart? Why are you digging through all this stuff?”

“A new boy at school said he knew what—where I’d come from.” Ainsel couldn’t help it as tears flooded her eyes.

“What?” said Andrea sharply.

Kishar shook her head and pulled Ainsel into a hug. “Was he teasing you or being serious?”

Ainsel tried to blink back the tears then gave up and rested her head on Kishar’s shoulder. “Both? He wasn’t being nice. He wasn’t trying to help.”

“What an asshole,” Andrea said angrily. She paced back and forth in a tight little line, then crouched down and started cleaning up the mess Ainsel had made.

Gently, Kishar said, “You still should have called us, Ainsel. Despite what those jerks at the police department think, it’s dangerous out there.”

Ainsel tried to remember her journey home. She hadn’t noticed anything, but she wasn’t sure she’d notice anything that wasn’t snapping at her heels. She’d been planning on meeting Tyler and Zoë after school, too.

“Oh, look at this,” said Andrea, the annoyance gone from her voice. She held up a print out of a block of text, above a picture of a silver-haired fairy girl. “The story of your name. You loved this story so much in the early days.”

It was the old Scottish folktale, My Ainsel, in which a little boy met a fairy child and they both protected themselves from danger by giving their names as ‘My Ainsel’—‘my own self’. Ainsel remembered how the feeling of familiarity that had swept around her each time she’d heard the story. It had been her nickname at first, and then when she’d had an opportunity to choose a name for herself, it had been the natural choice.

Andrea held the page up, comparing the picture to Ainsel. “You look even more like the painting now that your hair has grown out, too.”

“Maybe I came out of the book,” said Ainsel. She meant it to be a joke but she still felt despondent and the joke fell flat.

“Do you ever remember anything?” Andrea asked.

“Andrea!” Kishar bristled, her arms tightening around Ainsel’s shoulders.

Ainsel shifted, gently freeing herself from Kishar’s embrace. “No, it’s all right. I have dreams sometimes, but it’s nothing. I don’t know who I was. I thought I never would. I thought it was gone. But now—” she shuddered. “What if it’s coming back again?”

“Then you’ll face it,” said Andrea. “And you won’t be alone.”

“Zoë,” murmured Ainsel, then looked at her phone again. Zoë had left her a message. “I should call her back, let her know I wasn’t eaten by the big bad wolf.”

“Do that,” said Kishar. “Go wash your face. We’ll clean this up.”

Zoë’s message was strange. “Hi, Ainsel. Where were you earlier? I really need to talk to you. Something odd happened. I’m going home now. If you don’t call me soon, I’m coming to find you.”

Ainsel immediately called her back, but the phone went straight to voicemail. “I’m fine. I’m at home, too. I’ll answer if you call again.” She hesitated, remembering the urgent tone of Zoë’s voice, then called her home phone. When there was no answer there, either, the back of Ainsel’s neck prickled.

She wandered back to the office. “I need to go over to Zoë’s. I ditched her earlier and she’s not answering her phone and I need to make sure she’s okay.”

“I’ll drive you,” said Andrea immediately.

The sun was just beginning to set. If she’d walked home from school safely, Ainsel couldn’t imagine running into problems going to Zoë’s. Shadowy wolf packs that left no traces just didn’t fit in sunshine, even twilight. But the look on Andrea’s face brooked no disagreement.

“All right.” She couldn’t stand the thought of being driven everywhere for the rest of her life, but maybe if she survived the next few days, Andrea would lighten up the restrictions.

Kishar glanced at her. “Maybe it’s time to try to learn to drive again?”

Andrea shuddered. “No. The wild dogs would be a safer bet. Let’s go.”

Neither of Zoë’s parents were home, judging from the empty driveway. Andrea pulled right up and said, “Well, go on. I want to see that she’s safe, too.”

Ainsel hopped up and ran to the door, where she rang the doorbell. When there was no response, she ducked around the back of the house to look in through Zoë’s window, in case she’d had another mysterious attack of the sleepies. But the room was empty.

As she headed back to report to Andrea, dreading her foster mother’s reaction, her new phone rang. Immediately the gloom that had gathered over her lightened: it was Zoë.

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“Where are you?” she demanded by way of greeting.

“What? I’m coming home from the corner store. I had to get something for dinner. Where are you?”

“I’m at your house. I’ll wait for you to come home. Hold on.” Grinning, she ran the rest of the way to Andrea’s car. “She’s on her way home with dinner. I have a key—”

Andrea’s eyes narrowed and she blew an ash-blonde lock of hair from her face. “And you want to wait. Fine. Let me talk to her first.” She held out her hand for the phone imperiously.

Puzzled, Ainsel handed her the phone. Andrea had a brief conversation with Zoë about her plans for dinner, lectured her about wandering around alone, then handed the phone back. “Fine, Ainsel. You stay inside the house while you wait, and I’ll be back for you promptly at ten o’clock.”

Obediently, Ainsel unlocked the front door and stood at the foyer window, watching as Andrea drove away. “So what happened?” she said to Zoë.

“Oh. I’d rather talk about it in person. It was too weird to talk about over the phone. And I have to juggle these bags anyhow. I’ll see you in about fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Sure.” Ainsel put the phone away and leaned back against the foyer wall. But she could only spend a moment waiting like that. The long orange rays of the sun cut through the scattered gray clouds of the afternoon, enticing a sunset breeze to blow off the forest beside Zoë’s house. She cracked open the door and the smell of rain and earth mingled, pulling outside again. If she saw even a hint of a wolf, she’d head back inside—but if she saw even a hint of a wolf, and Zoe was still outside? No, no. She’d at least keep a lookout.

Restlessly she walked down the sidewalk, looking at the thin arm of trees that stretched up between Zoë’s house and her neighbor’s property. It was scarcely three trees wide, a boundary rather than a grove. But it stretched all the way back, joining with the real forest at the far edge of Zoë’s back yard.

Ainsel had no reason to go back there. She wasn’t going to do it. She walked away, down to the corner of the block and back again. Maybe she could go meet Zoë and help her carry her bags.

Something moved in the spur of forest. It was a boy, she realized. Not one she’d met before. He had brown hair and brown eyes, and he wore clothing that blended right into the trees: a faded green sweatshirt and worn gray cargo pants. When she met his gaze, he gave her a friendly little smile that she immediately found reassuring.

“What are you doing there?” she called.

“Keeping an eye on something.” His voice was a light, pleasant tenor. Cocking his head to one side, he asked, “Do you spend much time in this forest?”

Ainsel shook her head. “Not really. My friend lives here though.”

“Yes, I know. That’s what’s so mysterious,” the boy muttered.

Blinking, not quite sure she heard him right, Ainsel took a step forward. “What do you mean?”

“We probably shouldn’t talk,” said the boy regretfully.

Ainsel chose to ignore this. “What’s your name?”

He shook his head and smiled again. “Danui. I’ll be going now.” He stepped backward, fading into the trees with a startling speed.

“Wait, no!” Ainsel followed him. It was just a little spur of forest; she was surrounded on three sides by suburban homes. She wasn’t afraid of wolves here.

The trees in the spur were neatly tended, deadwood trimmed away and most of the usual underbrush removed. But the trees themselves crowded close together. Danui didn’t stop when she called, so she walked a little deeper into the spur. On the other side of a broad maple, she stopped abruptly. The ground was different in about a three foot circle. The needles and tiny plants were gone, replaced by churned earth.

No, it was churning earth. Ainsel blinked and looked at it again. Something stretched across the ground like a black tarp, bubbling and moved.

“Careful there,” said Danui, standing on one side. “I don’t know what would happen if you stepped in that before it finished forming. Nothing good, that’s for sure.”

Ainsel prudently stepped back, one hand on the maple tree. “What is it?”

“A hole. And it’s my job to close it.” He crouched down at the edge of the bubbling blackness and fished in his pocket. When he pulled out his hand, he held a tiny charm on a chain between two fingers. It looked like an especially sparkly fishing lure, flashing golden and green in the dim twilight. He waved the charm over the dark circle, then paced around the circle a few times, moving the charm steadily. As he did, the circle shrank, revealing the ordinary ground beneath it.

Ainsel watched, then transferred her gaze to Danui. He looked ordinary enough at first. He was cute without being intoxicatingly gorgeous. He had a nice smile and he looked like he’d be fun to hang out with. Why couldn’t he have been the new kid rather than Remy?

But thinking of Remy made Ainsel realize that the invisible inhuman aura that had clung to Remy also shrouded this boy. When he finished erasing the black spot and glanced at her, his eyes glinted wolf-yellow.

Ainsel edged to the side, toward Zoë’s house. “What do you guys want? What are you doing here?”

Danui shook his head. “We’d like to know the same thing about you.”

“Ainsel!” called Zoë from near her house. Ainsel glanced over her shoulder and when she looked back, Danui had vanished once again. This time, instead of following him, she retreated from the spur of trees.

“What were you doing in there?” Zoë asked, coming up her driveway with a double armful of shopping bags. The last hints of fading sunlight cutting through the clouds gave the light a strange, fey quality and the freshening breeze made Ainsel want to run away.

Instead she took some of Zoë’s bags so she could get the door open. “Talking to somebody. What’s been going on with you?”

“Oh.” Zoë looked self-conscious as she unlocked her front door. “I think Tyler already knows Remy from somewhere. I overheard the two of them talking, and there was another guy, too. Brown hair, brown eyes.”

“Green sweatshirt?” Ainsel followed Zoë into the house and put the bags in the kitchen.

Startled, Zoë said, “Yeah.”

“He was just outside. In those trees.”

Zoë digested that bit of news. “That’s creepy.”

“Yes,” said Ainsel fervently. “He and Remy are both creepy.” It wasn’t quite the right word. Neither of them made her skin crawl the way some of Kishar’s male college students did. But ‘he and Remy both turn into creatures who chase us through the forest’ would just sound crazy.

Slowly, Zoë said, “I think Tyler falls into the same ‘creepy’ category, Ainsel. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t think he’s actually our friend.” Her voice was strained.

Ainsel took Zoë’s hand, holding it tightly. “We’re friends though.”

Zoë’s brow darkened. “Yes. Yes, we are. I don’t know what the hell he’s doing, what stupid game he’s playing, but I don’t care. Here, let’s get dinner started. You can make biscuits.”

They worked together on dinner for a while, in comfortable silence. Ainsel mixed the flour with the butter, then grated cheddar into the biscuits. Meanwhile Zoë hummed as she braised beef and vegetables. When the meal was almost ready, Zoë’s dad called to tell her he wouldn’t be home until late. “And Mom’s out at another to-do, so I guess it’s just you and me.” Zoë gave the stew she was making a savage little stir.

Ainsel finished washing her hands after cutting out the biscuits and putting them in the oven. “We could take the biscuits and stew over to my house. Andrea would come get us. I mean, if you didn’t want to stay here.”

“No, it doesn’t matter. It’s not like I was planning on Family Game Night or something tonight. I was just going to curl up, sort my photos and go through my notes.” Zoë paused. “You didn’t see any more sign of those wolves today, did you?”

Ainsel hesitated, trying to find the right words. “I don’t think they were ordinary wolves.”

Zoë snorted. “What’s ordinary about wolves in these forests? I mean, coyotes, sure. Foxes, definitely. But wolves?”

Ainsel leaned against the sink. “No, I mean… That creature with them…”

Quietly, Zoë said, “I’m trying not to think about that. How can monsters like that exist?” She shook her head and looked down into her stew again. “It makes me feel like I’m going crazy.”

“You’re not,” said Ainsel. “I saw it too. It’s real.”

“Is that good? I think that’s good. I just wish….” Zoë trailed off, shaking her head. She didn’t look comforted. “Whatever. Let’s just eat and keep the curtains closed and hang out. I’m glad you came over.”