Page 35 of A Wolf's Revenge

Then we came to the place where the highway necks down.

I smelled it before Jeff said anything — that high, tight pack-scent on the night air, coming through the vents, wrong, close. My wolf came up so fast and so hard, I had Noah behind me and my back to the door before my mind had finished the thought.

“Don’t,” Jeff said. Low, even, his eyes on a point ahead where the road pinched between a rock cut and a guardrail. “Don’t shift, don’t move, don’t do anything. There’s a car parked dark at the neck. They’re ahead of us, which means somebody guessed the direction, which means I made a mistake somewhere and I’m sorry.” He was already slowing, casual, a man with nowhere to be. “Listen to me, Amy. There’s a fire road two hundred yards back on the right. I’m going to take it. There’s a second car at the end of it — I stage backups, it’s a habit, it’s the only good habit I’ve got. Keys are in the wheel well, driver’s side.”

“Jeff—“

“You’re going to take Noah, you’re going to go to ground in the trees, and you are not going to come out for anything you hear.” He swung the wheel, unhurried, and the sedan slid off onto a dirt track between black trees, and behind us, I heard the other engine turn over. “Because they’ll follow the car, not the trees. They’re hunting a vehicle on a highway. If I’m in it and you’re not, they follow me.”

The wolf in me understood what he was saying before I let myself understand it. “No.”

“Amy.” He stopped the car at the end of the fire road, where a second car sat nosed into the brush.He turned around in his seat and looked at me, and the guilt I’d smelled on him for ninety minutes had become something else, something almost like peace. “I’m dying. Six months, and they’ve been generous about it. I have spent thirty-four years being the man who decided what other people could afford to lose, and I got it wrong every single time. I have exactly one move left where I get it right. Let me get it right. Take his son into the trees and let me lead them away. That’s the whole play. That’s all of it.”

I had Noah’s hand in mine. I had a clear path to a second car. I had a wolf screaming at me to put myself between my son and the thing in the dark. I had a six-year-old who could not reliably shift, could not run, and could not fight. I did the math the way Zimife does the math, fast, cold, and hating every number in it, and the math said: if I fight, Noah is alone in a car. If I run, a dying man buys us the gap.

“What do I tell him?” I said. My voice came out flat. The voice I use when I’m frightened and I won’t let it win. “Zimife. When he asks me why I let you.”

“Tell him I prayed it with my hands.” Jeff almost smiled. “He’ll know what it means. Now go, Amy — go, get in the trees, and when you hear me on the highway you take the boy,you drive the other way, and you do not look back.”

I went.

I am not proud of how fast I went, or how completely the wolf-mother in me overrode every other part of me the second the choice was made — Noah up over my shoulder, into the black trees; low, fast, and silent, the way our kind moves when there’s a pup to move, my whole body one held breath. I found a fold in the ground behind a fallen trunk. I put Noah down into it, I put myself over him, and I put my nose on the entire world.

I heard the sedan reverse down the fire road. I heard it hit the highway, hard, tires screaming, deliberate, loud — a man making absolutely certain he was the most interesting thing on that road. I heard the second engine, the hunters’, surge after it. I heard them open up the distance, both engines climbing, west, away from the trees, away from my son.

And then, maybe a mile off, where the road necked down again on the far side, I heard the sound a car makes when a man points it at something on purpose and doesn’t lift his foot.

Then I didn’t hear the sedan anymore.

Noah was shaking under me. I put my mouth against his hair, I held him, and I kept my nose on the world. The world said: two engines became one, and the one was idling, confused, a mile west. and thereThere was no third engine and no fourth. theThe gap Jeff had bought was real, it was opening, and it was the most expensive thing anyone had ever given me.

“Is the man okay?” Noah whispered.

“He’s okay, baby,” I said, because he was six, and because in the only way that had ever mattered to Jeff Alli, it was even true. “He made it so we could go home. Come on. Quiet now. Quiet like before.”

I carried my son to the second car. I found the keys in the wheel well, driver’s side, exactly where the dead man said they’d be — his one good habit, the last thing his carefulness ever did, and it kept my child alive.

I drove east, away, the way he told me to, and I did not look back, the way he told me not to.

When we were far enough that the wolf finally let me think, instead of only run, I pulled over on a black shoulder with my son asleep again from sheer exhaustion in the back, I took out the phone, and I called my husband to tell him that the man who sold him had just bought us back.

27

I was an hour north of the city, on my own road toward Marr, when the burner rang. It was Amy, and her voice was wrong.

There’s a particular flatness she gets. Scraped clean of everything but function. I knew before she said a word that something had happened that she was holding upright by force.

“We’re okay.” First. She led with it because she knew what the wrong-ness in her voice would do to me. “Noah and I are okay. We’re moving, we’re clear, nobody’s behind us. I need you to hold onto that part before I say the rest.”

I had the car stopped on the shoulder. I don’t remember deciding to stop it. The wolf was up and roaring and there was nowhere to send it — no door to kick, no man to put against a wall, nothing but a dark highway and a voice on a phone an hour out of reach.

“Say the rest,” I said.

She said the rest. The neck in the road. The car waiting dark. Jeff making them, the fire road, the second car he’d staged because staging backups was the only good habit he had left. He told me to take Noah into the trees and let him lead them away. The sedan screaming back onto the highway, loud, deliberate, a man making himself the only thing worth chasing. The engines climbing west. And then, a mile off, the sound a car makes when a man points it at something and doesn’t lift his foot.

“He’s not coming back from it,” Amy said. “He knew that when he did it. He looked at me and said tell Z I prayed it with my hands, and then he drove straight at them so your son wouldn’t burn.” Her voice cracked, once, the only time, and steadied. “He saved us, Zimife. The man who sold you saved us, and he’s gone, and I don’t know what to do with that. I’ve got about four hours before I do, because right now, I have to drive, keep Noah asleep, and get us to ground.”

I sat on the shoulder of a highway in the dark with both hands on a wheel I wasn’t turning and I understood that it had happened again.