To say good-bye. Like her. To Shadow?
“My family was here for the summer,” he said. “Just like yours. Only now there’s a place we have to go, far from here. I don’t know if I’ll ever be coming back.”
Why should she care? She flung a glance around the glade, hoping against hope that Shadow might appear.
“I left my parents to find you,” he said. “I had to talk to you, to tell you…” He gnawed his lower lip and broke off. “My name is Kieran Holt.”
The statement was so abrupt and absurd that Alex almost laughed, but somehow this wasn’t funny at all. “You came to tell me that, and I don’t even know you?”
The boy frowned, and for an instant there was a glimmer of anger in his mild, open face. “You have to listen to me,” he said. “There isn’t much time. They’ll be coming after me.”
He had all her attention now. He’d run away, just as she had. To find her, he said. “What do you want?”
A lock of dark, ragged hair fell over his brow. Alex wanted to push it back up. “It isn’t easy to say,” he muttered. “I’ve never… had a friend.”
Strange. The boy was so strange. He wasn’t anything like the older boys back home who acted so stuck-up and rowdy. But there was something about Kieran she almost liked, something she almost understood. As she’d come to understand Shadow. Maybe if she’d met Kieran earlier…
She walked a few steps toward him and stopped. “If you know Shadow, help me find him. We can both say good-bye.” She looked into his eyes. “You know where Shadow is, don’t you? Please… help me find him.”
He let out a ragged sigh and rose to his feet. “You can find him,” he said. “He’s here. Very close.” His smile flashed and faded again. “I—I am—”
From somewhere very close the unmistakable report of a gun snapped off the end of Kieran’s words. His head came up. An eerie, familiar wail broke into a long sob of despair.
Shadow. Alex whirled toward the fading cry and began to run, forgetting the boy, hardly watching the uneven ground ahead of her. The howl sounded again, closer still.
“I’m coming, Shadow,” she called. “Wait for me!”
She ran blindly, branches of sumac and dogwood slapping her face and catching in her hair. The violent crack of a second rifle shot froze her muscles in midstride.
“No,” she cried. “No!”
Alex surged into motion again and broke through the final barrier of brush. On the other side lay a nightmare.
Two wolves sprawled prone on blood-soaked earth, one pelted gray and the other black. The gray wolf was very still, but the black one moved feebly, working its paws fitfully in a search for purchase, for some final hold on the life slipping away.
Beside the wolves stood a man. His back was to Alex, but she saw the rifle in his hand, and the way he stood over the dying animals with his head thrown back in victory. Alex crouched, wrapping her arms around her stomach to keep from crying out.
“Two less,” the man murmured. “Two less monsters in the world.” He lowered his rifle and poked at the heaving ribs of the black wolf. It jerked, and the great head slowly lifted to regard its tormentor. Alex bit her lip and stared at the animal’s pain-filled eyes.
The wolf was Shadow’s father.
As she watched, stunned, the spark of life began to fade in the animal’s gaze. It lowered its head, and as it did it saw Alex; she felt the weight of its stare as she’d done so many weeks ago.
And then the life of the great wolf shuddered out and was gone. The man prodded the wolf a final time.
“There is one more, isn’t there? Your offspring. I can’t let him go to become what you are—”
He broke off. Alex forced her gaze up from the dead wolf to the place where the killer stared, just beyond the massed trunks of a basswood.
“Shadow,” she choked.
The man swung around. Alex watched him aim the rifle at her and pull it up and away. Only his eyes were visible above the scarf wrapped about his face.