She swung the rifle around and leveled it directly at his heart.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” she said. “But we’re going to go back into the cabin now. You need help, and I—”
His amber eyes focused on the rifle and flashed to her face. He should have been shivering, hunched against the cold, but he stood as if he were in his element. “No,” he growled. Alex could have sworn the hair on his head lifted.
She took a step toward him, the rifle firmly aimed. “Please… go back.”
She was utterly unprepared for his next move. With a sudden lunge he batted the rifle from her hands. Alex tumbled into the snow and rolled, trying to put as much distance between herself and the man as possible. The rifle landed just out of her reach. She searched desperately for the wild man’s position.
He was on his knees on the snow, exactly where he had been standing a moment before. His arms were stretched rigidly to the sides, and his body trembled with paroxysms as if he were in the midst of a terrible seizure. Even as Alex watched, horrified, his eyes rolled back beneath his lids, and his mouth opened in a cry of pain and despair.
A strangeness came over her vision then. She rubbed her eyes fiercely, struggling to focus on the impossible.
For the man was… blurring. The edges of his strong body melted, drifted into mist, and a dark cloud drew about him like a magical cloak. All Alex could see was the cloud, a black void against the snow. Until it began to solidify, take on a new form: four-legged and equally dark, the edges of it softened not by mist but by a heavy pelt of rich midnight fur.
The wolf crouched where the man had been, and his brilliant amber eyes looked directly into hers.
“Shadow,” she croaked. For it was Shadow, and his eyes were the wild man’s eyes.
There was no difference at all.
Chapter 4
Alex sat back hard. Nausea kicked at her stomach; she rolled sideways in the snow and lay there, running it through her mind.
He had changed. The wild man—the man with Shadow’s eyes, who could hardly speak and walked around stark naked and devoured raw meat—had turned into a wolf.
No. It can’t be possible
Once, long ago, Alex had believed in fairy tales. The magical summer with Shadow had proven all the stories Granddad and Mother had told her, snug by the fireside and wide-eyed with wonder. In time she’d replaced the stuff of dreams with the marvels of nature, and that had been enough.
But this went far beyond any wonder nature could produce.
Alex forced herself to look again. The black wolf lay in the snow with his slanted eyes tightly closed, panting heavily. He looked perfectly miserable.
Humanly so.
Since the accident, Alex had never had any occasion to doubt her sanity. Her mind was the one part of herself she was certain of. A scientist needed objectivity, a keen eye for observation, a superior ability for analysis. She’d never let her love for her subjects interfere with her studies.
Until Shadow had come to her.
Now Shadow was exactly where the man had been. Black with a white star on his chest. Alex thought of the white streak in the man’s black hair, remembered the way he’d growled, his broken speech and eating of raw venison—and her speculation that he had been out in the woods far too long.
A silent laugh choked her. It all made a bizarre kind of sense in hindsight.
Sense? She got to her knees, staring at Shadow. She hardly noticed the way her hands were freezing, plunged to the wrists in snow.
I saw it happen, she thought. I’m not crazy. I saw it. She was a scientist. If she couldn’t believe what her own eyes told her—if she couldn’t trust herself——she had nothing left to trust.
Fighting off the lingering nausea, Alex rocked back on her heels. The wolfs eyes opened. He whined again, a perfectly heartrending sound, and tried to stand. His legs gave out from under him; he looked like a clumsy puppy, and just as harmless.