Her heartbeat began to accelerate. She had promised. She’d been given a chance to make good on that promise, and more.
It would be second-best to becoming a wolf herself—the impossible dream she’d clung to in the most hidden corners of her mind. To have the magic back again…
No. I don’t want this. It’s too late.
But it was already too late. She had given her promise.
She looked up at him. Shadow was in his eyes. The wolf was still there, inside him. And as long as he’s a wolf, I can understand him. As long as he’s a wolf, I’ll be safe.
Alex knew then that she’d gone right over the edge.
* * *
“Cheryl!”
Julie came wide awake, shivering in a cold sweat. It was the same dream again. The first one had come two weeks ago, the very night after she’d met Alexandra Warrington.
She pushed up from the desk, knocking the pile of invoices to the floor. Outside the grimy office window the watery noon sun seemed somehow unreal; the dream still filled her mind, far more solid than the bills and records she’d been contemplating before she fell asleep on top of them.
Cheryl. Julie scraped damp hair away from her forehead and closed her eyes. Before she’d met Alex, Julie hadn’t dreamed of her cousin for over a year. And those old, terrible dreams had been replays of the night of the murder, five years ago—the night Julie had found Cheryl’s torn and mangled body just outside the reservation.
These dreams were very different. And none had been as clear as this one. None had felt so urgent.
Julie grabbed a scrap of paper and began to draw. The image was still sharp: a broken circle, with darkness all around. Cheryl within it—alive, as she’d once been. Beautiful and whole, as she’d once been. Waiting. Waiting with unearthly patience while she held a mirror turned toward the opening in the circle.
Outside the circle stood Alex, facing the darkness, as if she couldn’t see Cheryl or anything else. And out of the darkness came a wolf. A black wolf that ran toward Alex and divided in two like water flowing around a rock. Each newly formed animal dashed again and again about the edge of the broken circle, so fast that they blurred like dark mist.
Julie dropped the pen, staring at the clumsy marks she’d made. If she’d dreamed only of Alex, it could have been easily explained. The first time she’d met Alex she felt a jolt of awareness, a feeling of affinity she hadn’t tried to question. Since then they’d become friends, though Alex was still guarded and cautious, afraid of reliving some hurt she’d faced in her own past.
But with these new dreams Julie knew that whatever had drawn her to Alex was more than a response to pain and loneliness.
Julie rubbed her eyes. She thought she’d put Cheryl’s death behind her, even though the murder had never been solved. Now she knew she’d been fooling herself. Even Alex had mentioned the murder yesterday. As if the coming of this new black wolf were an omen.
A broken circle. The spirits were telling her it wasn’t over yet. Something still remained to be done, and the time had come to do it.
She stood up and walked to the doorway into the garage, staring at the truck she’d been working on that morning. Alex couldn’t have anything directly to do with Cheryl’s unsolved murder. Five years ago Alex hadn’t even been near Merritt. She’d been somewhere to the west, doing graduate work with wolves.
But the dream said there was a connection. A connection between Cheryl and Alex, no matter how slight. And the wolves…
It was times like these when Julie wished she had Grandma’s gifts. But medicine people were born, not made.
Julie shrugged into her coat. Maybe it was time to drop by Alex’s cabin for a little visit. Maybe seeing her again would make it come a little clearer.
A broken circle. But broken circles could be mended, and Alexandra Warrington would have a hand in the mending.
* * *
“You’re probably freezing,” Alexandra said. “You’d better come inside.”