The muscles on the inside of her thighs began to burn as she held her weight off the saddle. She took back the reins, but Joe did not respond to them. Her fingers, entwined in the leather, found the saddle horn. Her eyes, squinting and dry and unexpectedly disoriented, looked for the light of the stables. She thought they might be behind her.
Joe changed course again, zigging to the previous zag. Beth slipped an inch before she recovered her center.
“Whoa,” she instructed. She didn’t share his fear yet. He might respond to her steady calm. “Settle down, boy.”
She attuned her own ears to the surroundings, trying to get a clue for what had upset Joe. Excitement no longer energized the horse. It was replaced by panic, frantic and panting. Beth couldn’t imagine what, on this secure and sheltered land, would be so terrifying. She uttered the soothing tongue clicks and hums that Hastings liked. The sounds were trampled by the pummeling of hooves tearing up the ground, thumping like helicopter blades. Wind whistling over her ears.
A ghost-gray form floated into the periphery of Beth’s vision. She glanced twice, and then a third time. The hulking spirit hovered just above the ground, gliding with a swift and otherworldly intention toward Joe’s flank.
That rooftop of fear crashed back down on Beth’s mind, knocking the breath out of her. She felt Joe’s terror as if it were her own. His foaming sweat flew off his neck and spattered her arms, and into the vacancy of her imagination rushed Wally’s wolf.
It can’t be a wolf, she told herself.
Whatever it was dashed behind Joe, there and gone like the memory of a dream.
She tried to twist in the saddle, wanting to see what it really was and where it was going, but the power of the horse’s speed forced her to stay forward, low above the Thoroughbred’s back. All she could do was hold on, with weakening thighs and floppy ankles and fingers soft as cooked spaghetti.
Joe’s desperate footwork jerked Beth awry again. Clods of dirt were flying up from behind his hooves, smacking her in the back.
Then the ghost she had lost sight of snarled, and the noise pierced all the other sounds bouncing around her ears. This sound, this primal shriek, declared that this wild dog was neither a phantom nor a fiction dreamed up by a Blazing B associate. It was physical, and it was robust, and it had performed the astonishing feat of predicting how the horse would move to evade the hunt.
The wolf had overtaken them and now came from the front, head-on. It was lunging for Joe’s neck, taking an impossible leap.
The wolf’s weight struck her in the face. One second Joe was solid under Beth and the next she was plunging, gasping, choking on a mouthful of fur. The leather rein caught hold of her wrist and snapped taut, shocked by the weight of her falling body as she left Joe’s back. She felt the joints in her arm and wrist popping as her insignificant mass yanked against Joe’s, which was a bullet train moving in the opposite direction.
She stayed connected to him by that stubborn strap. And the wild animal stayed connected to her, its claws curled into her collarbone.
Beth and beast hit the ground and bounced. She heard rocks connecting with the helmet Phil had insisted she wear. Her body flipped over onto the dog as they rolled, her distended arm still tangled in the reins, and then the animal emerged on top, teeth snapping so close to her face.
Joe might have dragged her to her death if the sudden impact hadn’t jerked his neck sideways and led his hooves into a terrible misstep.
His mountainous body toppled inches from hers, but by now she was deafened by firecrackers in her skull, and she didn’t hear Joe’s collapse. Instead she felt the vibrations of his fall, and his heaving body pulsed atop her forearm, the one roped and pinned under Joe’s shoulder like a calf tossed by a cowboy.
Beth’s mind piled up sandbags against the rising flood of pain. She couldn’t move.
She expected the wolf to tear into her, to finish her off. And it was a wolf. The weight, the coat, the claws—it could be nothing else. It stood on her chest, its padded feet the size of her own hands, but the animal didn’t rip into her jugular or try to dig out her heart, if that