Thyla by Kate Gordon Read Free Book Online Page A

smouldered in my belly, crackling and simmering, making me want to run away from the hospital and into the wilderness. I knew I was capable of madness. I didn’t want it to compel me out of the window.
    Despite my initial misgivings, I liked my room, my school, my new life.
    I didn’t want to leave.
    But the night air was intoxicating.
    I breathed it in and it seemed to fill not only my nostrils but my entire body, from my scalp right down to my toes. It smelled of wet grass and bark and dirt and something else. Something without words. Something wild .
    I wanted to roll in the dirt. I wanted to hurtle through the trees. I wanted to sniff things.
    I wondered if the other girls felt these urges, or if they were unique to me. I could not imagine Charlotte Lord wishing to leap out of a window. I wondered if the old me – the one before my accident – would have just leapt without thinking.
    My body pulsed and shuddered and I willed it to still. Something told me I needed to control myself if I was to fit in here at Cascade Falls.
    And if I was to find Cat.
    A voice whispered inside my mind. Howl , it hissed. Bay. Growl.
    ‘No,’ I whispered out loud. ‘I am in control.’
    The words felt familiar, like a mantra or a hymn. I was certain I had said them before. But what had I needed to control? This same burning, fevered desire to break out? What had I been trapped in before? What was I trapped in now ?
    I stretched out my fingers against the glass and allowed my eyes to blur. It seemed like my hand was part of the sky. Then, as I watched, half-squinting, my fingernails seemed to lengthen, my fingers curled up …
    Like paws. I gasped, blinking quickly, and looked closely at my fingers. They were normal. An eerie, unsettled feeling remained.
    I looked up at the sky, letting it soothe me. It was beautiful. I couldn’t see much of it above the high stone walls, but it was enough. The stars were like glimmering specks of sand, and the moon was almost full. It looked like an apple that had been peeled on only one side.
    ‘Hello, moon,’ I whispered, and my words flew out on the night air and up into the sky.

I didn’t sleep very much that first night, but when I did, I dreamed again one of my odd, unsettling dreams.
    I was floating in the sky overlooking a large building in the middle of a wide, green valley guarded by craggy hills.
    As I slowly drifted down towards it, I saw that nestled in the valley was a thin snake of buildings coiling around flat, muddy courtyards. The courtyards reminded me of the yard out the front of Cascade Falls, where you had stopped your car, and the trees seemed familiar too. The buildings I knew also, but it was a hazy memory. I felt strangely as though I had seen them on our car journey and yet I knew they did not look like any of the buildings you pointed out to me.
    They did not look like they were part of your world.
    As I flew farther down, I saw a young girl sitting hunched against the wall of one of the buildings. She was dressed very differently from the girls here at Cascade Falls – in a long pale cotton dress and a cloth cap.
    Her head was bowed and her face was hidden by her long hair.
    Her hands were grasping at the cloth of her dress, wringing it and then smoothing it out, over and over again.
    She sniffed loudly and looked up, her face angled away from me and still obscured by hair. I could see only part of a cheek, slick with tears.
    ‘Stop it!’ she whispered. ‘Stop crying! You don’t cry!’
    She rubbed at her face, roughly, then shook her head so suddenly that my dream self was startled. ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘It’s not true. They’re lying to me again. It can’t be true. It’s not true.’
    She looked up and off to the left, and I could feel that another presence was there. I tried to turn and see who it was, but my eyes were fixed on the girl.
    ‘Is it true? What they say? That she’s gone?’ she asked, her voice gritty. Then she shook her head