“Maybe no one does until they haven’t got any choice.” She studied him in silence. “Alex told me about your losing your memory. She also said you know where you’re going.”
“Yes.” It didn’t matter if she knew. “Northwest.”
“Something is calling you that way, isn’t it?”
He took a step toward her. “How do you know so much?”
“How do you know so little?”
He stiffened. Was she mocking his loss of memory? But there was no mockery in her voice, and only sadness in her eyes. Her eyes that saw so much.
With a sudden lunge he caught her arms. “Tell me what you see when you look at me,” he rasped. “Tell me.”
She didn’t try to escape. “I see a blind man.”
He tightened his grip. “Am I a danger to Alexandra?”
“You know the answer to that yourself.”
Abruptly he let her go and backed away. “I know how Alexandra sees me.”
“Do you, Kieran?” Julie said softly, rubbing her arms. “What are you really afraid of?”
He laughed briefly and bitterly. “You’re very wise, Julie. Too wise for me.”
“Not wise enough.”
“I could still leave now—”
“Do you know what you’d be leaving Alex to face?” Julie snapped. “Not only Peter’s murder and the cops, when she’s been associated with you as a suspect, but Howie’s bunch as well. They have it in for her now, since they think she was defending a wolf that’s turned man-killer. They never needed much of an excuse.”
“They think—”
“Yeah. Some of the townies think a wolf killed Alex’s friend. So I’d advise you not to do any running around here as a wolf.”
Kieran bared his teeth. “They’d never dare to hurt Alex.”
“Maybe not. But are you going to run off and let her deal with whatever you leave behind?”
“Julie? Kieran? Is everything okay?”
Alexandra stood in the cottage doorway, rubbing her eyes. Kieran felt his heart lurch at the simple sight of her standing there, so beautiful and vulnerable and infinitely precious.
And even now the beast growled and paced and shivered with wanting her.
“Good you’re up, Alex,” Julie said, striding past him. “It’s about time you were on your way. Everything’s arranged. I’ve got the old rust heap ready—no one’s gonna recognize that baby, it’s been sitting in our yard so long—and enough food to tide you over for a while.” She glanced at Kieran as if only the most ordinary conversation had passed between them, “I understand you’re heading northwest.”
“Northwest?” Alex said, her gaze seeking Kieran’s.
“So Kieran says.”
“That’s not much of a destination,” Alex commented. “You don’t have any better idea of where you want to go, Kieran?”
“Maybe this will help.” Julie pulled a battered and much-folded map from her coat pocket. She beckoned Alex and Kieran to join her within the faint yellow beam of the cottage’s porch light.
“Take a look at this, Kieran,” she said, pressing the map out flat against the wall. It covered Canada and the northern United States from Saskatchewan to British Columbia. “Anything seem familiar?”
Kieran looked. He studied the crisscrossed lines of a hundred roads, major and minor, and the vastness of Canada above the border. He traced the Trans-Canada Highway with his finger, felt a strange excitement sizzle at file ends of his nerves.
The names of towns small and large dotted the areas close to the border, some of them hauntingly familiar. Places he had once passed through as a wanderer? He caught images of vast tracts of prairie, distant mountains, highways stretching to the horizon.
And a woman’s face. Just for an instant—dark-haired, pretty, smiling at him. He put his hand flat over Saskatchewan and Manitoba, as if he could trap the image in place. But it vanished, and with it all familiarity.
“Some of this I think I recognize,” he said to the women. “But I don’t know the destination.” He looked again, farther west into the mountainous, bent-L shape of British Columbia. “Here. That’s all I can feel. Here.”
Julie chewed her lower lip. “Okay. It’s something. Why don’t you choose a place to head for. I know it would make me feel a helluva lot better if I knew where you guys were going.”