“Do you remember the time we met the skunk?” Kieran asked.
She opened her eyes. He knelt by the log, heedless of the wet soaking the knees of his jeans, and stared into the shadowed niche.
“Yes,” she said. “Your fur smelled for days, and Grandma had to soak my clothes in tomato juice…” She covered her mouth with her hand. “I remember.”
He stood, gazing at her. “Tell me what it was like for you, Alexandra.”
“It was magic,” she whispered, hearing herself use a word she’d stop believing in. Fairy tales are real. “It was the happiest time of my life.”
“And mine, Alexandra,” he said softly. “It must have been.”
She turned and pressed her cheek to the tree’s cool bark. “So strange,” she murmured. “Until now I’d never been completely sure how much of it was my imagination.”
“It was real,” he said.
Fairy tales… Alex swallowed and took hold of herself. She was in danger of becoming a quivering mass of sentimentality, and that was not to the purpose at all. Remember why we’re here. She pushed away from the tree.
“You remember our times together,” she said. “Does this place make the past any clearer in your mind?”
“A little.”
“Do you know where you went from here when you left me each day?”
He tilted his head to the sky, black hair spilling over his shoulders. “The times when I wasn’t with you are still dark.” He looked at her with that focused intensity she could never quite get accustomed to. “You talked about the wolves you believed were my parents. The man who killed them. Who was he?”
“A poacher. I’d never seen him before.” She folded her arms tightly and walked across the little clearing. “He was talking… about wanting to kill every last wolf in existence. I don’t remember most of what he said. All I could think about was keeping Shadow safe from him.”
Kieran was silent a long time. “Then I didn’t die because I was with you.”
She stiffened. No. The edge in his voice wasn’t accusation. She’d been trying to help him, save him. “You’d come to me as a boy,” she said, keeping her back to him. “To tell me what you were, I think… that you were Shadow. You said you’d left your parents to find me, that they’d be coming after you. And then there was a shot—”
Twigs cracked behind her, and she turned. Kieran gripped the bare branches of a sturdy birch sapling, breaking them one by one with chilling deliberation.
“What did this man look like?” he asked.
Alex tried to reconstruct the poacher’s face in her mind. Hard green eyes, a severe mouth, cold and deliberate words that wouldn’t quite come clear. She described what she could, watching the slow transformation of Kieran’s expression.
It was just like when he’d shifted in the cafe: rigid jaw and lifted lip, narrowed inhuman eyes, and a body preparing, muscle by muscle, for violence. His breathing came harsh enough for her to hear in the forest’s stillness.
“Kieran?” She took a step toward him. “Do you know him?”
The branch in Kieran’s hand cracked in two pieces. He let go of the hapless tree and closed his eyes. “It’s gone,” he said. “For a moment I felt—It’s gone.” He looked at her, his ferocity faded to bleak acceptance in the space of an instant.
“I’m sorry. Maybe—” She stared down at her feet. “It’s possible there are things you aren’t ready to remember.”
She regretted the platitude as soon as she’d spoken it, but Kieran seemed not to have heard. He walked to the edge of the clearing, staring into the sun-dappled forest. “You said you study wolves, Alexandra.”
The non sequitur caught her off guard. “It’s my life’s work.”
He looked back with an odd little half-smile. “It must have seemed ironic. That I came to you for help.”
“No,” she said slowly, joining him. “Not ironic at all. There’s a kind of rightness to it. I became a wolf researcher because of you.”
“Because of me,” he repeated, his voice very low.
She picked up a fallen pine branch and brushed it back and forth like a broom, making shallow parallel grooves in the snow. “My fascination with wolves began here, with Shadow. With you. If I hadn’t—”