Don’t you, Alex?
She opened her eyes, opened the book to the first page and began to read, all the way to the happy ending. And after the last line was another inscription: Never stop believing.
But she wanted to believe. Desperately. Maybe Kieran’s appearance was an unexpected gift, one she had to recognize for what it was—a key to her own past. Maybe she didn’t have to be afraid of him, and could still find her way to safety. The child she’d been had never been afraid.
Maybe, just maybe she could steal a little of her childhood back again.
She left the stack of books on the floor and went to her bed, taking the stuffed wolf with her. It wasn’t an answer, not completely, but she felt an easing in her heart. Perhaps, if she stopped fighting, the rest of the answer would come.
She smiled as she lay down and turned out the light, the wolf tucked in beside her. Maybe I’m not a coward after all.
Only in the last instant before sleep did she imagine that her counterfeit bedfellow was someone else.
* * *
The day was beautiful, with a dear blue arc of sky and weather warmer than any day she’d seen since her return to Minnesota—an omen that banished the last of Alex’s doubts. She sat on the porch and began to strap on her snowshoes.
“I think I know how we should get started on recovering your memories, Kieran,” she said.
Kieran turned. He had been up before she was, well before dawn. After a hasty breakfast she’d found him standing quietly in the clearing, looking northwest. He was dressed in the second set of clothes she’d bought him, minus the jacket; even in human form he seemed immune to the weather. His boots and the hems of his jeans were already crusted with snow.
He came to join her. “I have also been thinking, Alexandra,” he said.
His gaze was almost distant, half-hidden behind that perpetually stray lock of dark hair. She resisted a sudden desire to brush it out of his eyes and stood up instead, testing the buckles of her snowshoes with quick stamps.
Kieran looked toward the woods, his hands behind his back. “There’s a place I want to find.”
She stopped, alert and wary. “What place is that, Kieran?”
“Where you and I first met.”
Alex relaxed. “We were thinking the same thing. Do you remember where it is?”
“I think I do.”
“Can you find it?”
In response he turned and started out cross-country, breaking ground with no apparent effort. Alex hitched up her day pack and followed, making her own trail as Kieran headed unerringly in the right direction.
He ranged as a wolf would, sometimes ahead, sometimes briefly disappearing among the trees. Today he was Shadow. His steps were graceful and certain, finding purchase with his boots that she couldn’t have done without her snowshoes. Each part of his body flowed with a wolf’s grace, and when he turned to look at her his eyes were Shadow’s eyes, clear and incapable of deception.
There was no denying he was a part of this world. This was where he belonged. Everything he’d done since the incident in the cafe proved he wasn’t nearly ready to act as a man, but here, here he was safe. This was his territory. And hers.
Like the special place. She had passed by it several times since she returned to Minnesota, but she’d never stopped. Now, as they came upon it, she saw how it had changed. The skeletal remains of the fallen tree were still there, half collapsed after so many seasons of weather and insects. The shrunken hollow beneath was filled with snow—a hideout once big enough for a girl and a wolf.
Alex leaned against a tree and closed her eyes. For so many years she’d dismissed the memories of her time here with Shadow. They had hurt too much that summer after the accident when she’d gone searching for Shadow and hadn’t found him. As she grew older, they had become only another kind of weakness, burned away in the crucible of reality.
Now the memories had a purpose again. She set them free tentatively, releasing them from captivity as she’d taken her old books out of the box last night. Tasting them cautiously, as if they could intoxicate with too deep a draft.