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I hear the soft swish of the rug hitting the floor to turn my head back to my sister. Everything about this room aches somehow, as though it's one of my scars being reopened whenever the doorknob is turned.
    "Sorry," she whispers. She rises from the bed and sets the picture frame back on the nightstand, in the exact spot where it came from. I rise and smooth the quilt where we
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    wrinkled it, then follow her to the door. She shuts it quietly, as if there's someone on the other side whom she doesn't wish to disturb.
    "Why don't you go into town to rent the movie for tonight? And we need more gauze," I add, swinging open the refrigerator door. Rosie nods and grabs a canister off the countertop, rooting through a few layers of cookies to find a plastic bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. She removes two and reburies the bag.
    "And take your knives." Rosie looks at me skeptically but straps the belt that holds her hunting knives around her waist. I'm overprotective, I know. But then, I know that the Fenris are everywhere.
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    CHAPTER FOUR
    Rosie
    My mother is the only one in our family who ever learned how to drive, and for all her faults, I have to admit I sort of admire her for it. Oma March insisted that cars were a waste of money, and once she was gone, Scarlett adopted the sentiment, so I'm used to a lot of walking. Downtown Ellison is only a half hour or so by car, but it's a good two hours by foot and bus. I trudge down our gravel road, two canvas shopping bags in hand--I learned the hard way that plastic store bags can break during a long trek.
    The hills and farmland surrounding our cottage are the very definition of "rolling." Everything rolls endlessly--the trees into forests, hills into the horizon, clouds into mountains. Nothing really seems to end here, like we're situated on the roundest part of the earth. Whenever they show clips
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    on the news of cities or deserts or steep-pitched mountains, it almost feels as if those places couldn't possibly exist--nothing can truly be that jagged, or that flat, or that sharp. The scattered few times I've been to Atlanta were even stranger, as though I were walking inside a storybook that couldn't possibly be real.
    I find a rock and tap it with my foot as I walk. Halfway to the bus station. Scarlett would rather walk than ride the bus on the rare occasions she goes into Ellison; she says when she sits with people for that long, they begin to feel comfortable staring at her. Once, someone slipped her a card for a plastic surgery consultation. People don't understand that Scarlett is who she is because of the scars, because of the bites and wounds and pain.
    When we were little, Scarlett and I were utterly convinced that we'd originally been one person in our mother's belly. We believed that somehow, half of us wanted to be born and half wanted to stay. So our heart had to be broken in two so that Scarlett could be born first, and then I finally braved the outside world a few years later. It made sense, in our little pigtailed heads--it explained why, when we ran through grass or danced or spun in circles long enough, we would lose track of who was who and it started to feel as if there were some organic, elegant link between us, our single heart holding the same tempo and pumping the same blood. That was before the attack, though. Now our hearts link only when we're hunting, when Scarlett looks at me with a sort of beautiful excitement that's more powerful than her scars and then tears
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    after a Fenris as though her life depends on its death. I follow, always, because it's the only time when our hearts beat in perfect harmony, the only time when I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are one person broken in two.
    I finally reach the bus stop and check my watch--I'm right on time, if the buses are running exact today. I sit down in a patch of soft clover and hunt for a shamrock with four leaves while I wait, using one of my knives to pick through the leaves. I