Very briefly she considered making a run for it. But that would gain her no more than an uncertain freedom and a few seconds’ lead. He still knew where to go. He still intended to kill Kieran, whatever the reasons that drove him. And she was the only one who could learn his motives—and his weaknesses. She had to find a way to warn Kieran at the very least, stop Arnoux if she could.
And not only for Kieran’s sake if the most terrifying, unthinkable possibility were true.
She watched him in the rearview mirror as she found a place to pull off the expressway, where the trees were thick and a fire road led into the forest. She pulled over and parked. Arnoux was already waiting for her, the gun tucked in his coat pocket.
“I’m glad you made the choice you did, Miss Warrington,” he said. But his voice held nothing but glacial calm.
She knew then that he would have killed her if she’d tried to run. That for some reason he wouldn’t risk letting her go free to talk, in spite of his seeming certainty that no one would believe anything she said.
But now he had reason to believe her.
She took the last box of supplies and her suitcase out of the truck and carried it to Arnoux’s. This was it, then—the big gamble. Julie’s grandmother had seen this trouble, but Alex still hadn’t been prepared.
She tried to walk a fine line between normal unease and feigned confidence, hoping it would continue to convince Arnoux. He acted the gentleman, taking her luggage and loading it into his truck, then holding her door open for her. She almost choked on the irony of it. But he never stopped watching her.
They continued west toward Kamloops, and then took the provincial highway north and east deeper into the mountains. The night closed in around Alex. She was intently aware, every moment, of the man by her side. What drove him? Was he merely a man who sought what he seemed to think was justice, a fanatic, or something infinitely worse?
After a half hour of silence, she cleared her throat and looked at his set profile. “If we’re going to be allies,” she said, “we need to know more about each other.”
He glanced at her. “Fair enough, Miss Warrington.”
“Alex.”
“Miss Alex,” he said, with a certain stiffness, as if he didn’t know how to share even so slight an intimacy as first names. “But I already know much about you. Your sympathy for vermin—”
“Wolves,” she said evenly, “are not vermin.”
She was taking a risk, guessing that he might respect her more if she didn’t cower and bend easily to his will. He smiled, a grim set to his mouth, and nodded. “Now is not the time to convince you otherwise; But you want to know why I hunt Kieran Holt. Why I’ve made it my life’s work to stop him.”
“It would help,” she said. “It seems you’ve known him for much longer than I have.”
“Oh, yes. Much longer.” He shifted gears to compensate for the road’s steady ascent. “I knew him as a boy, before he was fully corrupted by his nature.”
Alex reigned back the hundreds of questions she wanted to ask, filtering them for the most essential. “In Minnesota? Is that where you knew him?”
He gripped the wheel and stared ahead. “That was where I found him. Where I took him in, and tried to make him human. That was where I failed.”
“And how did you find him? How did you come to realize… what he was?”
But he countered her question with another. “Did you know such creatures existed before he came to you, Miss Alex?”
This she could answer with complete honesty. “No. It was a fairy tale to me, and even after I saw it happen I questioned my own sanity.”
“Yes. As so many have questioned mine. Crazy old Arnoux.” He chuckled, a bitter, grating sound. “But I had reason to know the full truth of what he was long before I found him. I knew from my youth that such creatures are the hounds of Satan, the mortal enemies of mankind.”