I’ve got to find him first…
She let herself experience the excitement and the challenge, savoring the brisk air and the rush of blood beneath her skin. The tracks were easy to follow. Alex kept her pace steady and rhythmic, listening to the sigh of wind in bare branches and the cautious rustles and peeps of birds. She loved this world, as she had loved it as a child.
How those men in town would mock her if they knew her most secret dream, her only fantasy: to run with a wild wolf pack, to become one of them, to know what it was to live in a world free of human cruelty.
Alex blew out a long trail of condensed breath and watched it drift skyward. She was as close now as she’d ever come to that dream. Even closer than she’d been during her undergrad work in Idaho and Yellowstone as part of the wolf reintroduction programs there.
And very late at night, when she lay in her bed on the edge of sleep, she imagined a bond with the wolves that let her see them as no one else could. She also imagined that they could see her…
She skidded to a halt as a great dark shape emerged from nowhere to block her path. Immense, black as night, yellow-eyed, the wolf regarded her with an utter lack of fear.
Alex met the slanted gaze and memory flooded back, washing away every other thought.
“Shadow,” she whispered.
She shocked herself with the name; even the wolf twitched its ears, as if to confirm her own absurdity.
She knew this wolf wasn’t Shadow. Her childhood companion would have died years ago. But this wolf was what the long-lost Shadow might have been, if she had seen him grown to adulthood. He even bore the same splash of white on his chest.
Perhaps he was Shadow’s descendant. If some part of Shadow had lived on…
No time for fairy tales now. This wolf was bigger than Shadow had been, surely bigger than any wolf ever sighted in Minnesota. One hundred and fifty pounds at least. Probably more. Wolves near this size were occasionally seen in Alaska, or the far north of Canada. Never here.
And he stared at her with an aggressive, almost human intelligence.
Alex moistened her dry mouth. Healthy wolves never attack human beings, she reminded herself. No wolf had ever attacked her. But this wolf should be running, long gone by now. Minnesota wolves knew too much about human treachery. This wolf looked as if it might be exactly what the farmers had said he was.
Fearless, reckless, a beast that had lost its natural distrust of human beings. A lone wolf the weight of a fully-grown man. A creature of which she should have the good sense to be afraid.
But she wasn’t. The wolfs beauty set her heart to thumping in a hard, ragged rhythm. She wanted to reach out and bury her fingers in his heavy black coat, test its depth and richness against her hands. She wanted to go on looking into his eyes for eternity. She wanted to be one with him, as once a child had been a soul mate with a black wolf pup.
The wolf started toward her with a lurching step and collapsed in the snow at her feet.
Alex cast off her strange paralysis and crouched just out of reach of the wolfs massive jaws. The animal’s breathing was labored, and his legs twitched spasmodically. A whine vibrated deep in his throat. The golden eyes closed. There were no visible signs of injury, but the other symptoms were devastatingly clear.
“Damn them,” she swore, her voice catching on the curse. “Damn them.”
She’d been too late. Howie or one of the other men must have put out poisoned meat even before she’d confronted them in the store. The poison they would have used was invariably fatal. Yet the wolf must have traveled some distance from Howie’s land, and he was still, miraculously, alive.
He had come to her as if he knew she wanted to save him.
Sickness rose in her, and she reached out to stroke the wolfs coat, offering the only comfort she could. The animal accepted her touch without so much as a shiver of fear.