PRINCE OF WOLVES By Susan Krinard

Acceptance should have been enough. Joey’s happiness was real, more real than the phantoms of a previous life that sometimes haunted her dreams. But a new and strange restlessness came over her with the brutal cold of February, when Luke curtailed their walks and kept her confined to the cabin. The small gifts and enthusiastic loving continued, but Joey found herself stalking the cabin as if it were a cage, unable to shake the growing disquiet.

When Luke went for his daily runs, Joey began to walk the edges of the forest alone. She concealed her forays from Luke, knowing instinctively that he would forbid them if he knew, his protectiveness had almost begun to trouble her. She took pains to walk along previous tracks, using the new woodlore Luke had taught her to hide the evidence of her passage.

She made one concession to Luke’s fierce concern for her safety, she always carried the rifle he had insisted she learn how to use.

It felt heavy and awkward and wrong in her hands. Luke never used it, she had never seen him hunt with a man-made weapon, and the touch of the rifle seemed almost a betrayal of what he was. Of what they both were.

But she earned it, and she walked alone in the winter silence. She watched the squirrels, rulers of an empty kingdom, chasing each other through their vigorous courtship rituals, she avoided the musky spoor of a wolverine and found the places where herds of moose had yarded up, stripping the foliage and packing the snow with their heavy tread.

And she found the tracks of wolves. She knew Luke’s mark from among all the others, but she followed the lesser ones, drawn by the lure of that hidden part of herself.

It was on such a day that she discovered the tracks that did not belong. They blotted out the wolf spoor she had been following, blundering and awkward, human prints that violated the innocence of snow. There were many, a human pack’s worth, they intersected the wolf prints and paced them ominously.

Joey rocked back on her heels where she had been kneeling in the sullied snow. She could smell them with her newfound senses, and the stench was disturbingly familiar. There should be no trespassers on Luke’s land, especially at this time of year when even Nature forbade intrusion. The hair along the nape of her neck rose. She stood slowly, retrieving her rifle, closing her eyes, she breathed in the icy air, testing it. The men weren’t close, but they had passed not long before. Her senses shouted a warning.

It was then, when all her inner awareness was tuned to the invaders, that it struck. She felt the stab of pain so powerfully that her body collapsed on itself, doubling over around a phantom injury that made her cry out. Luke!

She fell back against the tree, managing somehow to cling to the solid weight of the rifle. Her vision blurred, and for an instant her mind went black with shock. The report of a gunshot, and then another, slapped the air violently. Her senses reeled under the twin impacts of debilitating pain and the revelation that Luke was in terrible danger.

There was no time to assimilate any of it. Her mind screamed and battered at the frozen walls of her body. She could almost see him, floundering in deep drifts, his blood staining the snow.

Joey drew in a deep, steadying breath and clutched the rifle as if it were her last grasp on sanity. She stared down at the human tracks and began to follow.

At first she walked, still dizzy with the repercussions of her mind-numbing awareness. But the urgency grew, she began to jog over the tracks, using them to break her path, new stabs of illusory pain making her stagger. For her they were not deadly, but for Luke… She forced her feet into the steady, mile-eating pace Luke had taught her. Her heart pounded as if it would force its way from her throat, marking rhythm in time to her sobbing breath and unvoiced cries.

The smell hit her like a wall. Forcing herself into utter stillness, Joey listened, she heard them then, gruff, angry human voices that taunted and argued, profaning the silence. She could not see them, not yet—but she knew they were there, beyond the next small rise of the forest. And Luke… She felt his pain and his desperation as if they were her own. The intensity of it made her close her eyes to gather her control and her courage.

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