chapter SEVENTY
• COLE •
It was working.
The moment I started to follow in the Volkswagen, though, they scattered and it took them a long moment to regroup. It was almost dawn; we didn’t have the time for them to get used to the car. So I got out, tossing images as best I could — I was getting better, though I had to be close — and I ran on foot. Not stupidly close to them; I stayed on the shoulder of the road mostly, to keep my bearings, and they were dozens of yards away. I just tried to stay close enough to keep tabs on their direction. I couldn’t believe I’d cursed their slowness before. If they’d been more focused, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up. Instead, here I was, running with them, almost part of the pack again, as they coursed along under the waning moonlight. I wasn’t sure what would happen when I got tired. Right now, fueled by adrenaline, I couldn’t imagine it.
And I had to say, even as a cynic, it was something to see the wolves, leaping and jumping and ducking and surging with each other. And it was something else again to see Sam and Grace.
I was able to send images to Sam, sure, but it obviously took an effort for him to understand. Sam and Grace, on the other hand, both wolves, with their connection — Sam would barely turn his head and Grace would fall back to encourage a wolf that had stopped to investigate a fascinating smell. Or Grace would intercept one of my images and translate it for Sam with a flick of her tail, and suddenly they would have changed directions as I wanted them to. And always, as they ran, though there was an urgency to the pack, Sam and Grace were touching, nosing, bumping against each other. Everything they had as humans translated.
Here was the problem, though: North of Boundary Wood, there was a large, flat tract of land covered only with scrub trees. As long as the wolves were crossing it to the next stretch of woods, they were easy targets. I’d driven past it before, and it hadn’t seemed like too wide of an area. But that was me in a car going fifty-eight miles an hour. Now we were on foot going maybe six, eight miles an hour. And the edge of the horizon was pinking as the sun contemplated coming up.
Too soon. Or maybe we were too late. The scrub stretched out for miles ahead of us. There was no way that the wolves would be across it by the time the sun came up. The only thing I could hope for was that the helicopter was slow to get started. That it started on the far side of Boundary Wood and was more concerned with why there didn’t seem to be any wolves in it anymore. If we were lucky, that would be how it worked. If the world were fair.