Hidden Fox

Twenty

That hope lasted one day. Iris and I both got it bad the next. By the end of it, we were both physically on our hands and knees dragging ourselves into the cells. Every part of me was sore, but the hot spots included my ribs and my left leg; one look at my calf and my torso rose bile in my throat. My face hurt too, but without mirrors, I had no idea what it looked like.

As I laid there, defeat hit me in the chest with a pang. I had tried planning an escape many times over the months, but none of the ideas resulted in getting everyone out, and there was no way I could live with myself if I left even one of them here to suffer.

My brain was getting foggier, but I still held onto my name, and Xavier's face. Once in a while an image of May or August would slip through, or Emerald and her kids. It was enough to know I still had myself, even though I couldn't remember my pack's name, or the way mountains looked. Kallie helped, remembering what I told her once in every detail. If I needed a reminder that my name was April, not Aralia, she told me. Because of the stories I told her during our cleaning duties, I was able to hang on a little longer to the pieces of myself that were drifting away.

It had to be something in the air, or something in the needles they poked us with that made us forget, kept our minds fuzzy. I could only pray that it would come back to us once we were out in the fresh air.

The next time I cleaned, I noticed the snow that had piled up against the basement hopper windows recently was gone, and it was my only indication of how long it had been. I could guess maybe March, April even? I wasn't familiar enough with the area to know how long winter lasted here. All I could do was guess.

I wondered if I had been presumed dead yet.

The school might have even posted a whole news article on my disappearance! That would be wild if all my professors thought I was dead, but I managed to get out and show up to school next semester. The looks that would be on their faces!

I sighed, leaning against the cell wall, wishing it would happen. Preferably sooner than later! I thought with a glare up to the ceiling, imagining I was staring right into Selene's eyes. Eventually I slumped back and let my eyes flutter closed.

Something woke me, but I wasn't sure what. Blinking, I lifted my head from the concrete, feeling every stiff bone in my body as I tried to move and make sense of what was happening.

Wait. I thought, still slightly out of it. If it's April, I'm spending my twentieth birthday trapped under the ground in a five-by-five cube of bars. Well ain't life a bitch.

Bang! The door flew open, startling all of us to our feet. We shrunk back instinctively, expecting Ian, or some other horror here to retrieve one of us. Instead, a wolf stood in the doorway, the pelt as black as midnight and eyes as blue as the ocean. It's coat was bristling, common from the aftermath of a fight, but it looked utterly awestruck at what it had stumbled upon: eight, skeleton-like girls in a range of ages standing behind metal bars.

With the door wide open, sounds floated in: screams, howls, snarls, yells. The sound of a battle. Someone had found us; a whole pack by the sound of it!

I threw myself forward, clutching the bars between thin fingers, "get us out! Please!"

Following my lead, the other girls copied me, reaching for the wolf with their arms. After a moment, it snapped from its daze and cleared the steps to my gate. With a growl, it latched onto the padlock with its jaws, but nothing happened. It would break a tooth before it ever popped the lock off the gate.