He caught the branch as it passed in front of him, stopping it in midsweep. “They’ve been here, Alexandra,” he said. He released the branch back to her and looked at the ground near his feet.
She followed his gaze and saw the tracks. Distracted as she’d been, she’d never even noticed them, but now she saw that they were everywhere.
Wolf tracks. She knelt awkwardly in her snowshoes, measuring the crisscrossed prints with her fingers. “I know these prints. I’ve heard this pack but haven’t had a chance to track them—”
“They’re very close,” Kieran said. He crouched beside her. “I smell them. Two males and three females.”
“You can tell all that?” Excitement bubbled up in her, unconstrained. “Do you realize what a researcher you would make?”
But he was not there. She looked up just in time to see him vanish among the trees.
His path was easy enough to follow. It paralleled the wolf tracks through a dense stand of second-growth pines and emerged into another clearing, bisected by a frozen ribbon of creek.
On one side of the creek stood Kieran, and on the other waited the wolves.
Alex froze. The pack was small, with three smaller grays who were undoubtedly the females, a brindle yearling male, and a big gray male in the lead. At any other time, in any other circumstances she would have been stunned and thrilled to find them so easily, so clearly visible for her to observe.
But nothing about this was normal. Five pairs of lupine eyes were fixed on Kieran; not so much as an ear twitched in Alex’s direction. The pack should have been running at the first sight and scent of her. She might as well have not been there at all, so thoroughly did the wolves ignore her. It was as if the very rules of nature had been turned upside down.
Even as she watched, the lead wolf began to advance on stiffened legs, his fur on end, tail straight out from his body. Every aspect of his posture shouted challenge. The other wolves followed the alpha male, radiating threat.
Kieran stared directly back at the alpha, yellow eyes clashing with yellow. A growl rumbled from his belly.
Alex called on every ounce of the detached scientific objectivity she’d spent the past years perfecting. The pack was on the verge of attacking Kieran, as they would never dare attack a human being. And he seemed to be doing his best to provoke them.
He must have known the wolves were no threat to her. But he must have known equally well they were a very real threat to him.
Her paralysis shattered, and she stepped over into a realm beyond thought or the rules she thought she knew so well. She swallowed to ease her dry throat, cupped her hands around her mouth, and yelled for all she was worth.
Movement exploded in a flurry of earth and sun-bright crystals as the wolves scattered. When Alex opened her eyes they were gone, leaving only churned snow in their wake.
Kieran stared after them, chest heaving. Alex let her quivering knees give out and sank to the ground.
“Well, Kieran,” she said shakily, “between the two of us, I think we’ve just set human-wolf relations back a decade.”
He turned. She didn’t know what she expected to see in his face; the same rage, perhaps, that he’d shown Howie in the cafe. But the stubborn defiance with which he’d faced the pack seemed burned away, leaving him strangely subdued.
“They wouldn’t have hurt you, Alexandra,” he said. “I wouldn’t have risked your life.”
She stripped off her mittens and scooped up a handful of snow to cool her hot skin. “I know. Wolves almost never attack humans. But they would have attacked you.” She wavered between sudden rage and boneless relief. “What in hell were you trying to prove?”
Kieran crouched where he was, too far away to touch. “I was trying to show you—” He broke off, jaw set. “They wouldn’t attack a human, Alexandra,” he said softly. “What does that make me?”
She pushed her anger aside, hearing the hidden pain in his voice. “In their eyes—” She bunched her mittens in her fists. “Maybe they see you as a wolf, Kieran. Or smell, or sense in some way we don’t comprehend. Wolves don’t easily accept outsiders, and you are in territory they claim as their own.”