His hunch had been right. When the black wolf was sighted and the rumors began, he’d already been certain.
Kieran had returned. After five years the boy had come back, as Joseph had always known he must.
It was inevitable.
Howie and his friends burst out of the cafe, swearing and muttering. Joseph had no time to deal with Howie now. He slipped around the corner, his gaze still tracking the woman’s truck as she pulled from the parking lot and headed out of town.
Another chance. Joseph closed his eyes. In the eleven years since Kieran’s escape from Joseph’s guardianship, he’d returned to Minnesota only once. To kill, and escape again—this time as a wolf, elusive and swift, lost to Joseph far too long. But Joseph had known the time would come when the boy must be drawn back to the only place where he might find redemption.
Perhaps it was not too late. It had plagued Joseph, knowing his work was unfinished, his duty unfulfilled, and Kieran free with no one else to control him.
Joseph glanced once more at the subsiding commotion near the door of the cafe. The boy had nearly lost control, but in the end he had not. Joseph felt a strange regret; if the boy had changed, they’d all have known. It would no longer have been Joseph’s secret—what others had called his madness, his superstition.
But that would be too easy. It was Joseph’s to do. There was still some small hope for Kieran; that the boy had not succumbed was proof enough. Joseph knew his own weakness. Even now he could not kill the boy. Not yet.
And the woman… Joseph walked back to his truck, absently stroking the polished wolf’s tooth that hung from the age-worn leather thong around his neck. He’d known about the woman, of course. He always kept track of the wolf researchers, on the chance that they could provide news of a certain black wolf for whom he had waited these five years.
But he had not thought the woman special, had paid her no more attention than the others of her kind. Why had the boy gone to her? When had he become human again? Did she know what he was?
She had been with the others in the cafe. But none of the others understood what they had witnessed. She had touched him when he stood on the brink, and he had remained human.
If she knew… Joseph felt the wolf’s tooth bite into his palm. He dropped his hand. One thing at a time. First he must observe, and wait. At the very least the boy trusted the woman; he wouldn’t run at once. There would be time to plan. Recapturing Kieran now would not be so easy as it had been when he was a grieving boy, numb with the shock of his parents’ deaths.
The woman might be ally or enemy; in the long run it wouldn’t matter. Joseph knew how to be patient.
“I can’t let you go, boy,” he said softly, though Kieran was long out of his sight. “I must finish this one way or another. If you can’t be saved…” He shook his head and started the truck down the long road toward home.
“There must be an end,” he muttered. “There must be an end at last.”
* * *
“It’s a beginning, Kieran,” Alexandra said as the truck pulled into the gravel drive. “At least we have somewhere to start.”
Kieran followed Alexandra to the door and into the sanctuary of her home. He was no longer uneasy within these walls; they kept him close to Alexandra, and bound him to his human nature. His rage was gone. The beast could not waken here.
Sudden exhaustion gripped him, the lingering aftereffects of the near change. He found his place by the stove and settled there, eyes half-shut. He listened to Alexandra’s quiet footsteps as she moved about the cabin, folding out a bed from the sofa and laying food out for him on the living room table.
Hours passed, uncounted. Several times he saw Alexandra writing in a book she kept very close, like something precious. He would have given much to know what she put on the pages. There was a distance in her, an inner silence he didn’t know how to break.