She didn't know why she said it. All she knew was that the sound of the doorbell had sent chills running through her and that right now her heart was pounding and her hands and feet were tingling.
Paul looked briefly startled, then he gave her a
gentle reassuring smile. "I don't think it's the apocalypse at the door, Hannah. We'll talk about these feelings of apprehension when I get back." He touched her shoulder lightly as he left the room.
Hannah sat listening. He was right, of course. There was nothing at all menacing about a doorbell. It was her own craziness.
She leaned back in the soft contoured chair and looked around the room again, trying to relax.
It's all in my head. The psychologist is going to help me. . . .
At that instant the window across the room exploded.
Hannah found herself on her feet. Her awareness was fragmented and understanding came to her in pieces because she simply couldn't take in the whole situation at once. It was too bizarre.
At first she simply thought of a bomb. The explosion was that loud. Then she realized that something had come in the window, that it had come flying through the glass. And that it was in the room with her now, crouching among the broken shards of windowpane.
Even then, she couldn't identify it. It was too incongruous; her mind refused to recognize the shape immediately. Something pretty big-something dark, it offered. A body like a dog's but set higher, with longer legs. Yellow eyes.
And then, as if the right lens had suddenly clicked in front of her eyes, she saw it clearly.
A wolf. There was a big black wolf in the room with her.
It was a gorgeous animal, rangy and muscular, with ebony-colored fur and a white streak on its throat like a bolt of lightning. It was looking at her fixedly, with an almost human expression.
Escaped from Yellowstone, Hannah thought dazedly. The naturalists were reintroducing wolves to the park, weren't they? It couldn't be wild; Ryan Harden's great-grandpa had bragged for years about killing the last wolf in Amador county when he was a boy.
Anyway, she told herself, wolves don't attack people. They never attack people. A single wolf would never attack a full-grown teenager.
And all the time her conscious mind was thinking this, something deeper was making her move.