off through the trees, sure-footed as always. “Don’t forget to check yourself for ticks when we’re all through.”
I trailed after, content to let Grace look at the concrete details of life while I walked through the forest and tried to imagine the pack here. These woods were dense and difficult to walk through; the ground was covered with ferns that hid dips and rocks. The fence was enough to keep out large animals, so unlike Boundary Wood, there were no natural paths worn through the underbrush. The wolves would have no competition here. No danger. Koenig was right; if the wolves were to be moved, you couldn’t ask for a better place.
Grace squeezed my elbow, making so much noise on the way to me that I realized I had been left far behind. “Sam,” she said, and she was breathless, as if she might have been thinking the same thing I was. “Did you see the lodge?”
“I was looking at the ferns,” I said.
She grabbed hold of my arm and laughed, a clear, happy laugh that I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Ferns,” she repeated, and hugged my arm. “Crazy boy. Come over here.”
Holding hands felt strangely fanciful when done in the presence of Koenig, possibly because it was the first thing he looked at when we emerged in the clearing that held the lodge. He had put a baseball cap on his head to ward off deer flies in the open area — which somehow managed to make him look more formal, not less — and stood in front of a faded wooden cabin that seemed enormous to me. It was all windows and rough-hewn timber and looked like something tourists imagined Minnesota looked like.
“That’s the lodge?”
Koenig led the way, kicking debris off the concrete pad in front of the building. “Yeah. It used to be a lot nicer.”
I had been expecting — no, not even expecting, merely hoping for — a tiny cabin, some remnant of the resort’s former life that members of the pack could shelter in when they became human. Somehow, when Koenig had said resort, I hadn’t thought he’d really meant it. I’d thought it was a slightly aggrandized retelling of a failed family business. This must have been something to look at when it was first built.
Grace pulled her hand away from me so she could investigate better. She peered in a dusty window, cupping her hands against the glass. A vine rested on top of her head; the rest of it crawled up the side of the lodge. She stood in ankle-deep weeds that had sprung up in the crack between the concrete pad and the foundation. She looked very tidy in comparison, clean jeans, one of my windbreakers, her blond hair spread over her shoulders. “Seems pretty nice to me,” Grace said, forever endearing her to me.
It seemed to endear her to Koenig, too. Once he realized she wasn’t being sarcastic, he said, “I suppose so. There’s no power here, though, not anymore. I guess you could get it put back on, but you’d have to have meter guys come out here then, once a month.”
Grace, her face still smushed against the glass, said, “Oh, that sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. That’s a big fireplace in there, though, isn’t it? You could make it livable without power, if you were clever.” I stood next to her and pressed my face against the window. Inside, I saw a dim great room dominated by a massive fireplace. Everything looked gray and abandoned: rugs made colorless by dust, a dead potted plant, a mounted animal head rendered unidentifiable by age. It was an abandoned hotel lobby, a snapshot of the Titanic under the ocean. A small cabin seemed more manageable all of a sudden.
“Can I go look at the rest of the land?” I asked, drawing back from the glass. I pulled Grace gently away from the climbing vine; it was poison ivy.
“Be my guest,” Koenig said. Then, after a pause, he said, “Sam?” There was a cautious note to the way he said it that made me think I wasn’t going to like what he said next.
“Yes, sir?” I asked. The sir slipped out before I even thought about it, and Grace didn’t even glance over in my direction at it, just looked at Koenig herself. It was that sort of way that he’d said, Sam?
“Geoffrey Beck is your legal adoptive father, correct?”