judging from the newly exposed tree roots, witches’ fingers that poked crookedly out of the slick sides. The edge of the pit was jagged where it had collapsed; the rain must’ve been too much for the roof of an underground cavern. The resulting hole was eight or ten or fifteen feet deep, it was hard to tell. The bottom was filled with something like yellow-orange water or mud, thick enough to cling to the sides, thin enough to drown in.
Floating in the water was a wolf, its fur clogged and tufted with mud. It wasn’t whimpering now, just drifting in the water. Not even kicking its legs. Its coat was too filthy for me to identify.
“Are you alive?” I whispered.
At my voice, the wolf kicked convulsively and lifted its head to look at me.
Grace.
I was a radio tuned to all stations at the same time, so many thoughts inside me that none of them counted.
Now I could see the evidence of her struggles: claw marks in the soft clay at the water line, chunks of dirt pried from the side of the pit, a track worn smooth by a body sliding back down into the water. She had been here a while, and when she looked at me, I could see that she was tired of fighting. I saw, too, that her eyes were knowing, pensive, full of understanding. If not for the cold water around her, holding her body in wolf form, she’d probably be human.
That made it so much worse.
Beside me, Cole sucked in a breath before saying anything. “Something for it to climb on? Something to at least —”
He didn’t finish, because I was already scouting around the mouth of the sinkhole, looking for something that would be of help. But with Grace in wolf form, what could I do? The water was at least six feet below me, and even if I managed to find something long enough to lower into the pit — maybe there was something in the shed — it would have to be something she could walk on, since she couldn’t climb. Could I even convince her to walk on something? If she had her hands, her fingers, this still wouldn’t be easy, but at least it wouldn’t be impossible.
“This is all useless,” Cole said, nudging a branch with his foot. The only wood near the pit was a couple of crumbling, rotten pine trees downed by storms and age, nothing useful. “Is there anything back at the house?”
“A ladder,” I said. But it would take me at least thirty minutes to get there and back. I didn’t think she had thirty more minutes. It was cold up here in the shade of the trees, and I thought that it must be colder down in the water. How cold did it have to be for hypothermia? I crouched back at the edge of the pit, feeling helpless. That same dread I’d felt when I saw Cole seizing was slowly poisoning me.
Grace had made her way to the side of the pit nearest me, and I watched her attempt a foothold, her legs trembling with fatigue. She didn’t even manage to leverage herself an inch out of the water before her paws smeared back down the wall. Her head was only just above water, her trembling ears tipped at half-mast. Everything about her was exhausted, cold, beaten.
“It won’t last until we get the ladder,” Cole said. “It hasn’t got that much stamina left.”
I felt sick with the plausibility of her death. I said miserably, “Cole, it’s Grace.”
He looked at me then, instead of at her, his expression complicated.
Below us, the wolf flicked her eyes up toward me, holding my gaze for a moment, her brown eyes on my yellow ones.
“Grace,” I said. “Don’t give up.”
It seemed to steel her: She began to swim again, this time toward another part of the wall. It was painful to recognize Grace in this grim determination. Again she tried to climb, one shoulder forced into the muck, the other paw scrabbling above the water at the steep wall. Her hind paws were braced on something below the surface of the water. Straining upward, muscles twitching, she pressed against the clay wall, shutting one eye to keep the mud out. Shivering, she looked at me with her one open eye. It was so easy to look past the mud, past the wolf, past everything else, and into that eye, right into Grace.
And then the wall gave way. In