smiled at it, a faraway smile that had nothing to do with joy. Her gaze shifted in my direction though she didn’t turn her head.
I stood there, my heart racing as if I was the one who’d been attacked. My breath came in uneven, sick jerks. Looking at Shelby and the starling, black and white and red, it was hard to remember what happiness felt like.
I had never told Beck.
Shame made me a prisoner. I hadn’t stopped her. It had been my pencil. And in penance, I never forgot that image. I carried it with me, and it was a thousand times heavier than the weight of that little bird’s body.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
I wished Shelby was dead. I wished that this scent, the one that both Cole and I were following, was just a phantom of her, a relic instead of a promise. Once upon a time, it would have been good enough for her to just leave the woods in search of another pack, but I was not that Sam anymore. Now, I hoped she was someplace she could never return from.
But the scent of her, lingering in the damp underbrush, was too strong. She was alive. She’d been here. Recently.
I stopped then, listening.
“Cole,” I said.
He stopped immediately, something in my voice warning him. For a moment, there was nothing. Just the grumbling, alive smell of the woods waking up as they warmed. Birds shouting from tree to tree. Far away, outside the woods, a dog barking, sounding like a yodel. And then — a distant, faint, anxious sound. If we hadn’t stopped, the noise of our feet would’ve obliterated it. But now, clearly, I heard the whistling, whimpering sound of a wolf in distress.
“One of your traps?” I asked Cole softly.
He shook his head.
The sound came again. Something like misgiving tugged in my stomach. I didn’t think it was Shelby.
I held my finger to my lips and he jerked his chin to show he understood. If there was an injured animal, I didn’t want to drive it away before we could help.
We were suddenly wolves ourselves, in human skins — soundless and watchful. As when I had hunted, my strides were long and low, my feet barely clearing the forest floor. My stealth wasn’t something I had to consciously recollect. I just pulled away my humanness, and there it was, just underneath, waiting for me to recall it back to the surface.
Beneath my feet, the ground was slick and slimy with the wet clay and sand. As I descended into a shallow ravine, arms outstretched for balance, my shoes slid, leaving behind misshapen prints. I stopped. Listened. I heard Cole hiss as he struggled to keep his balance behind me. The sound of the wolf’s whimper came again. The distress in it plucked something deep inside me. I crept closer.
My heart was loud in my ears.
The closer I got, the more wrong it felt. I could hear the whistling of the wolf, but I also heard the sound of water, which didn’t make sense. No river ran through the bottom of this ravine, and we were nowhere near the lake. Still: splashing.
A bird sang over us, loud, and a breeze lifted the leaves around me, showing their pale undersides. Cole was looking at me but not quite at me, listening. His hair was longer than when we’d first met, his color better. He looked, strangely, like he belonged here, aware and tense in these woods. The breeze was sending petals around us, though there was no flowering tree in sight. It was an ordinary, beautiful spring day in these woods, but my breath was coming unevenly and all I could think was I will remember this moment for the rest of my life.
Suddenly, I had a clear, perfect sensation of drowning. Of water, cold and slimy, closing over the hair on the top of my head, of water burning my nostrils, of my lungs held tight in its grip.
It was a fragmented memory, entirely out of place. How wolves communicated.
And then I knew where the wolf was. I abandoned my stealth and scrambled the last few yards.
“Sam!” snapped Cole.
I barely stopped in time. Beneath my right foot, the ground sloughed away, falling with a splash. I pulled back to a safer distance and peered down.
Below me, the clay was shockingly yellow, a scratch of unreal color below the dark leaves. It was a sinkhole, freshly made,