Wolf Rampant: Hiding from the Alpha

"No, that's just rude and inappropriate." The soft male voice insinuated its way into my reading. A pause, then he continued his one-sided conversation. "Stop for one minute and imagine you're a woman alone in the city and two guys walk up to you. You probably wouldn't feel very safe, would you?" Pause. "Okay, one guy and his dog."

At first, I didn't realize they were talking about me. I was happily curled up in a comfy armchair with a copy of Patricia Briggs' newest book open on my lap, already enveloped by the satisfying welcome of a werewolf pack, albeit a fictional one. Yes, this is what my life had come to—it had been ten years since I'd last seen a werewolf anywhere other than in a mirror, so I relied on books to get my pack fix. Depressing, but true.

Momentary pleasure aside, the whole day had been one long mistake. I usually tried to stay away from the big city, but when I woke this morning, my inner wolf had felt like it was gnawing at my bones and my stomach ached with the absence of pack. Filling the gaping cavity in my soul with an imaginary wolf pack seemed worth lying to my boss, putting my good sense on hold, and playing hooky for the day.

Only after I'd settled in a chair by the bookstore's front window, paranormal fantasy in hand, did I see the error of my ways. Or rather, hear it. At first, I'd merely blocked out the man's words as they drifted over to insinuate their way into my reading, but now I noticed the frustrated, yet loving, twist to the man's tone. Despite my better sense, curiosity made me peer up from my page and crane my head around to seek out the source of the conversation.

The speaker was about my age, and he did have a canine with him, but the slight smile on my lips leftover from overhearing his words was quickly stifled as I realized that the monstrosity was no dog. It was a wolf, and not just any wolf—the man's companion was a werewolf like me.

While you might think that would be a good thing given the yearning in my stomach, I had kept my distance from other werewolves for a very good reason. Now was not the time to go back. I could feel my cheeks heating up, and the man's voice became distant as terror stole blood away from my ears, sending the nutrition to my tensed muscles instead. I had to get out of there fast.

This danger was the precise reason I rarely came to the city. Even though the area was out-territory, not owned by any wolf pack, who was to say I wouldn't bump into another werewolf drifting through? As much as I hated my history, my father was an alpha and I was aware that I smelled like the best kind of mate material to male werewolves. The alphas, especially, were used to taking what they wanted, and one glance into this wolf's eyes was all it took to prove he was as alpha as they came.

The reality was that I had fled my home pack a decade ago to prevent a forced mating. And even though the packless ache in my stomach was a constant reminder of what I'd lost, in the light of day, that pain still seemed like a good trade for my independence. No way was I going to let a momentary slip rope me back into being an alpha werewolf's pawn—I needed to get out of this wolf's sight immediately.

Even though I hadn't paid for my book yet, I figured it was a worthy casualty to save me from being drawn back into the werewolf world. So I dropped the text onto the couch cushions, sprang to my feet, and speed walked out the door, back into the seeming safety of the street. My car—and freedom—were only two blocks away, and I could almost taste how good it would feel to slam the door, pop the locks, and hit the accelerator. I could be back in my empty cabin in half an hour, this close call forgotten.

But my car was still out of sight when I heard the bookstore's door open and close behind me. No longer concerned with appearances, I broke into a run, Stupid, stupid, stupid echoing through my mind in time to the beat of my shoes on the pavement. I couldn't let myself believe that this is how I would be sucked back into a pack, due to a chance meeting in a bookstore while reading about fictional shifters. If I'd picked up Twilight instead, would I have been treated to a sparkly vampire?

Even as that thought drifted through my adrenaline-charged mind, I realized that no one's footsteps pounded after me. I would be able to see my car as soon as I rounded the corner, and for a moment, I thought I might be safe. Maybe I'd misread the acquisitive gleam in the alpha's eyes; maybe a random customer had left the store soon after I did, not a hunting werewolf.

But I knew better. With one short bark, the wolf stilled my flight, then the man's voice came a beat behind, asking me to wait. But it was the alpha's command, not his partner's words, that had stopped me in my tracks. Just like my father's orders had been impossible to disobey, now another alpha had taken away my free will with one bark.

I was so angry and terrified, I almost expected to feel my wolf rising up through my skin the way it used to in the Chief's presence. And for the first time in a decade, I would have welcomed her strong protection rather than being afraid of the wolf's wild nature and sharp teeth. Instead, I heard only my human mind, which reminded me that there was no sense in running now that I'd been snared in the alpha's net. Taking a deep breath, I let my shoulders slump as I succumbed to the inevitable.

***

As much as I wanted to stay in place and ignore the approaching alpha, I couldn't let danger creep up behind me unseen, so I turned and waited for the duo to catch up. As they advanced, I focused on the man instead of the wolf for the first time and noticed that he was clearly a werewolf just like his partner. He was also apologizing profusely even before he reached me. "I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry!" he exclaimed, switching the leash he held into his left hand so he could reach out to shake mine. "I'm Chase, and my very rude friend is Wolfie."

Although I was both terrified and angry, I liked Chase on sight. He was the kind of male werewolf who didn't have an alpha bone in his body—the golden retriever of the lupine world. He was also handsome, but not full of himself, and I could tell that this one werewolf was friend material. In fact, if there had been more Chases and fewer Wolfies in the world, I might have tried to join another pack after fleeing mine, but werewolf packs were inevitably run by alphas, and every alpha was like Wolfie...or like my father.

Okay, maybe not just like Wolfie. As ebbing adrenaline let rational thought once again fill my mind, I realized that it was decidedly odd for the alpha in question to be walked around in wolf form on a leash. But for all I knew, the two were tracking something that required the wolf's superior senses. In human form, we could sometimes use our wolf brain to boost our sniffing power, but the effect was nothing compared to how in tune we were with the world when entirely wolf.

Fur aside, Wolfie had the arrogance of every other alpha I'd ever met. After forcing me to stop running against my will, he was now sitting at Chase's feet and looking up at me with his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth in a doggie laugh. Once he was sure he had my attention, Wolfie reached up one paw as if to shake...then winked.

"I don't think she thinks you're as cute as you think you are," Chase warned his friend when I looked pointedly away from the raised paw. Despite myself, I smiled at the beta's words, amused that a lower-ranking wolf could yank the alpha's chain, even metaphorically. "Like I said, I'm really sorry," Chase continued his earlier apology to me. "But Wolfie is pig-headed and I'm afraid he's not going to give either of us any peace unless you agree to talk to us, just for a few minutes. Maybe you'd let me buy you a coffee?"

As I said, I liked Chase, and his words were perfectly polite, but I was 100% sure that spending another minute in the alpha's presence was the last thing I wanted to do. I closed my eyes in an effort to collect myself, hoping this was just a hallucination brought on by my pack craving. But when I looked back down the street, Chase and Wolfie were still waiting expectantly in front of me...along with a kindergarten-aged kid who was pulling away from his mother's hand in hopes of petting the huge, terrifying beast sitting beside me.

"Don't worry, he doesn't bite," Chase said to the mother, who had taken in the situation just as the boy's hand landed squarely in Wolfie's eye. She had more sense than her son and seemed poised to yank her offspring to safety, but to my surprise, the alpha wolf put up with the mauling good-naturedly before offering the child the same paw trick he'd pulled on me. With the complete lack of self-preservation instinct typical of a human child, the kid took Wolfie's paw and shook it adamantly, before being pulled away by his mother.

Greetings complete, Wolfie looked back up at me and tilted his head to one side, the meaning clear—he wasn't a monster who ate small children. But I didn't allow myself to be impressed. So what if an alpha wolf had let a human child manhandle him? That didn't counteract the same alpha's freeze-in-your-tracks command just minutes earlier. On the other hand, I hadn't come up with any way of wiggling out of a meeting during the unusual interlude, so I shrugged my acceptance and allowed Chase to lead us across the street to a sidewalk cafe.

"Coffee?" the beta asked, handing the wolf's leash over to me as I stood beside an empty table outside the door. I nearly dropped the tether in surprise, the rough fabric feeling like a poisonous snake in my hands as I considered the repercussions of my situation. No way did I want to be in charge of an alpha's leash if the wolf suddenly decided that the restraint was beneath his dignity, but I realized we had to keep up appearances for the sake of the humans around us, so I kept my eyes averted from the alpha on the other end of the line and nodded stiffly. In light of the leash issue (and being dragged to the cafe against my will), it seemed like a small matter that I didn't drink coffee, having found that stimulants were one of the danger points for a female werewolf struggling to control her shifts. But no one said I had to consume the beverage Chase would put in front of me. I probably would have choked on any drink given my current state of mind, so the flavor was irrelevant.

But the wolf disagreed with my unwillingness to state my preferences. Before his beta could leave to collect our drinks, Wolfie nudged Chase's hand to attract his attention, then firmly shook his head. "You're hungry?" Chase asked the wolf, surprised, but Wolfie only huffed in disgust. Then, just as I realized what the alpha was communicating, understanding came into Chase's eyes as well. "You'd prefer hot chocolate?" the man tried again, returning his gaze to me, and I nodded despite myself.

And that's how I ended up in such a ludicrous situation. After spending half my energy over the last ten years hiding from the merest hint of werewolf presence, I was sitting at a cast-iron table of a sidewalk cafe, clinging to the leash of an alpha werewolf while his beta headed inside to buy me a hot chocolate. I wasn't even surprised when the wolf rested his chin on my thigh in search of an ear scratch, but I was surprised that I allowed my hand to drift over his soft ears. The fur was every bit as silky as it looked.

***

"You know, if you'd just put these on, you could ask her yourself," Chase told Wolfie, exasperated as he shook a backpack full of men's clothing under the wolf's nose. Despite myself, the two were growing on me as I sipped my hot chocolate and watched them carry out a seemingly coherent conversation...despite the fact that one was a wolf. After the bark that froze me on the street, Wolfie hadn't said another word, but he was quite adept at making his meaning clear, to Chase at least. While taking in the show, I had even started drifting into wolf brain, where Wolfie's nonverbal language was more understandable, but I had quickly pulled myself back to the safety of the human world. The middle of a city was no place to turn my wolf loose, even if we had been on speaking terms.

"What does he want to know?" I asked, when a stalemate appeared to have been reached by the opposing forces across the table from me. Wolfie, for some unknown reason, preferred to stay wolf, Chase was unwilling to continue being his mouthpiece, and I was starting to get curious about the alpha's question.

Only when Chase turned to me with a huge smile on his face did I realize that these were the first words I'd spoken in the pair's presence. So much for the cold shoulder. But I shrugged internally and decided there was no point in freezing out Chase anyway, since he seemed to be a nice guy. I was reserving judgment on the wolf.

"Wolfie just wants to know your name," Chase answered. "But I can tell you aren't comfortable sitting here with us, and I didn't want to pepper you with questions until you had time to see we were harmless." In contrast to his alpha's demand for information, Chase's strategy for putting me at ease seemed to involve talking until the cows came home. So, with an effort, I pretended he wasn't a male werewolf and interrupted the monologue.

"I'm Terra," I answered, looking straight into the alpha's eyes rather than at his beta. It was strange to be chatting with an alpha werewolf as if he were the guy down the street, but the wolf merely nodded his appreciation of the information then peered at Chase as if to say, I told you she wouldn't mind.

I felt okay parting with my given name since I figured neither Chase nor Wolfie would know the first name of the second daughter of an alpha from out of state, but I was careful not to offer a surname, which would have instantly linked me to a pack. Wanting to stay as anonymous as possible, I decided some misdirection was in order to turn the conversation away from a potentially tricky topic, so I shifted my eyes back to Chase. "And his name really is Wolfie?" I parried, hoping Chase would be willing to play along with my obvious attempt to talk about something other than myself.

"Well, Wolf actually," Chase answered. "But I always figured 'Wolfie' made him seem a little more human...." The alpha in question snorted, which sent a tremor of fear running through me until I realized the wolf was laughing, at which point I started breathing again with a jolt.

"That's very...literal...of his mother," I said after a minute. Once my heart rate had slowed back down from the effects of Wolfie's laugh, I could feel my brow wrinkling as I tried to imagine naming a werewolf "Wolf." We did tend to gravitate toward nature-oriented names, but this seemed more like the kind of appellation a two-year-old would give his pet.

"Well, it was my mother, actually," Chase said, turning his attention back to me. "We're milk brothers." The old-fashioned term suggested Wolfie had been nursed by Chase's mother, and probably raised like his brother. It also explained why the less-dominant wolf was able to hold his alpha on a leash, and why the two could communicate without words. Despite myself, I was becoming intrigued by the two werewolves in front of me, but Chase's next words pushed away my false sense of security.

"So, which pack are you from?" the beta asked, and my jitters returned full force. Without meaning to, I stood, my chair screeching against the pavement as it was abruptly pushed backwards by my motion.

Chase's words were enough to remind me that I was packless by choice and could easily be drawn back into this or another wolf's pack, which made my slowed breathing begin to race once again. What would prevent Wolfie from asking around about a twenty-something werewolf named Terra, and what would happen when his words inevitably reached my father's ears? I would end up right back where I started, and all because I'd been stupid enough to imagine I was simply chatting with two strange werewolves whom I'd met in a bookstore.

All of those thoughts zipped through my mind in the span of time it took to rise from the table, and by then the adrenaline had really kicked in. Fight or flight seemed to be my only options, so I fled.

But I wasn't far enough away to miss Wolfie admonishing his friend. The wolf's easy-going demeanor disappeared in an instant as the alpha bared his teeth at Chase, who quickly averted his eyes in submission. If I'd needed any proof that Wolfie was just as overbearing as every other alpha werewolf I'd ever run into, this was it. Not that I'd thought otherwise...well, not for long.

I almost expected there to be other werewolves in the wings, just waiting to rope me back into the pack life from which I'd escaped. Instead, there was just Wolfie's commanding bark, ordering me to stop. But I wasn't a member of his pack, and I didn't have to obey. I ran down the street, and this time I didn't look back.

That evening, I reached for my wolf for the first time in years. But she was gone, squashed beneath layers of iron control built during a decade of painstaking effort. So it was up to my human eyes and nose to hunt down signs of the lost toddler.

Well, it was up to my eyes...and to the eyes of a dozen other park rangers spread out across the rapidly chilling woodland. I'd returned from the city in time to put in a few hours of work at the park, and the monotony of desk-sitting abruptly ended when Mr. Carr barreled in to tell us his daughter had wandered away from the family campsite. I'd yet to meet Melony's mother—she refused to come out of the woods until the little girl was found, but Mrs. Carr did yell her position through the trees when we arrived. In response, we spread out, each taking a vector that started at the campsite and arrowed out into the unknown. And we started to search.

Since then, it had begun to rain. A gentle autumn shower at first, but now the pounding storm was pulling leaves from the trees and was muffling even the sound of my own footsteps. Water was trickling down my spine despite my hooded slicker, and I could just imagine how a two-year-old would feel, cold and scared, lost in the woods. Her father had told us Melony was wearing shorts and a thin t-shirt—she might already be experiencing symptoms of hypothermia.

The light was beginning to fade, and urgency tempted me to push myself into a trot. Instead, I slowed down, took a deep breath...and sat. I would have received a phone call if Melony had been found, which meant everyone else was probably getting these same jitters of a hunt about to be lost. They would be rushing around like crazy people, and the night would likely end with at least a sprained ankle to remind some careless ranger of the hunt. Worse, my gut said that if Melony didn't turn up soon, she wouldn't turn up alive.

But my unconventional childhood left me equipped to handle the tail end of a difficult hunt...if I could just draw upon the memories I'd been hiding from for the last ten years. The problem was that, although I desperately needed to shift forms so I could sniff out Melony's trail, the last time I'd been hunting through rain-darkened woods with my wolf rampant, the day hadn't ended well.

I was seventeen then, newly fled from my home pack and trying to eke out a living in a forest much like this one. The woods had always been my safe, secret place as a child, but after I left Haven, reality set in. Without a home to return to, life was a constant battle against the elements...and against my wolf nature.

That year, it seemed that I was always cold and hungry, and the call of my wolf was endlessly enticing. While I was shivering under my lean-to shelter made of branches and a scavenged garbage bag, the wolf begged me to shift forms so her fur could keep us dry. When I was itching for a warm meal, she whispered that we could stalk a rabbit four-footed and slake our thirst with hot blood. No one will see us here, she breathed in my ear. It's safe to be a wolf.

I knew she was wrong, but I was so miserable that one day I let the wolf have her head. As the days grew shorter, less and less wild food was available for the picking, and it had been over forty-eight hours since I'd found anything other than twigs to gnaw on. In the preceding weeks, I'd caught fish, had set snares, and had even ground acorns between rocks and pinned them in my t-shirt in the running water of a creek to leach out the bitter tannins. And, for a while, there had been enough to carry me through. But this week, no food was to be found.

The hunger gnawed at my belly, but if I was honest, it was the loneliness that really did me in. Werewolves weren't meant to spend so long away from a pack, and the simplicity of my wolf's brain made it easier for the canine to handle lack of pack mates—she missed the company but didn't dwell upon what was absent. So, at last, I gave in to the wolf's seductive promises. I shed my dripping t-shirt and jeans, then let my arms turn into legs and my wolf take control.

As soon as I shifted, my darker side went wild with the freedom, racing down a deer path that my human form had barely been able to make out amid the lush growth. She yipped and cavorted, dancing with shadows, and my human brain went along for the ride, riding the wolf's exhilaration like a roller coaster. It had been so long since I'd felt any pleasure that the wolf's simple enjoyment acted like a drug, impairing my ability to hang onto human thoughts.

After minutes or hours of headlong flight, we smelled a deer. The wolf slowed her pace and began to stalk the prey, even though we both knew that a single wolf was unlikely to take down an ungulate. We circled around behind the doe, our feet padding silently across wet leaves, and my human brain woke enough to remind the wolf of sharp deer hooves, of the necessity to chase a deer until she was heaving from lack of air and had slowed enough for us to puncture sharp teeth through her throat. This was a job for a pack, each wolf running in relay to spell her siblings until the deer collapsed from exhaustion.

So we run, the wolf responded, ignoring the reference to pack mates—to a wolf brain, there was no point in bemoaning an absence beyond our control. But before we could set out after the deer, the wolf stopped in her tracks and scented the air, her tail rising into an excited banner. Not far away was easier prey, tasty, small, and young. Together, my wolf and I salivated at the impending feast.

Human! It took me far too long to realize that in her headlong flight, the wolf had drawn us beyond our usual territory, to the edge of the forest where houses butted up against the trees. Until that moment, I'd steered clear of humanity because a teen runaway had no place in mainstream society, but now I knew we should have given the subdivision a wide berth for another reason. Even to my human brain, the child playing at the edge of the trees smelled like prey, and I was sickened by my own hunger.

As my human brain struggled to regain control of our body, it became the wolf's turn to push me down into her cage. Again, the wolf began to stalk, and now I had to reach up through the bars to fight the canine every step of the way. We sidled and slipped in the leaves as I clawed against my darker half, but with the single-minded focus of her lupine heritage, the wolf ignored all my entreaties. I could only watch, aghast, as a young child came into view, playing in a sand box just beyond the forest edge.

There was no art to the hunt, but my wolf was hungry and didn't care. She lunged out of the trees, her teeth settling around the child's plump arm, tasting sweet flesh even as the girl shrieked at the top of her lungs. Scenes flickered in front of me, blood and terrified eyes, sand turning red. I banged on the door of the cage with all my might, to no avail.

Then an adult human tore out of the house, a gun in his hands. He fired, the bullet grazing our shoulder, and the shock was enough to make the wolf pause, to relax her iron control over my human brain. I leaped upwards out of the cage, pushed the wolf out of the way, and was shifting even as we fled back into the forest. I could hear the girl crying behind us, so I knew our prey wasn't dead, and since werewolves are born not made, she would never start howling at the moon. But that knowledge did little to ease my guilt and horror. With the last of my strength, I pushed the wolf so deeply into her cage that she couldn't even speak to me, let alone run wild, then I clanged the door shut and threw away the key. And although I felt her every day afterwards, gnawing at my bones, I hadn't seen the wolf since.

***

It seemed like poetic justice that I would be forced to call upon my wolf at last in order to save another little girl alone in the cold autumn woods. I was terrified to even touch my wolf brain, let alone to bring an impulse-control-challenged wolf out to hunt a tasty toddler. I could imagine getting in touch with my wolf brain, tracking down the child, and then doing something unspeakable. But if I didn't find the toddler, would a slow descent into hypothermia be any worse for Melony?

So I closed my eyes, ignored the way the wet ground was soaking through the seat of my pants, and began to count my breaths. In and out, slowing down, until I could hear past the rain dripping off the trees. The metallic chip of a cardinal settling onto its perch punctuated the evening. The musky scent of a fox coming out of its daytime den drifted toward my nose. I heard the snort and stamp of a deer as she pounded her forefoot against the ground to determine whether a strange object was danger, or just a fallen tree.

It had been so long since I'd changed that I almost didn't recognize the first symptom: the sensation of hairs pushing out of my skin at a thousand times their normal speed. As a teenage werewolf, I remember shifting nightly to tempt the hair on my head to grow longer after a bad trim, never mind that I'd always have to shave my legs afterwards, even if the skin had felt smooth as a baby's bottom before the change. Now the tickling itch was so unfamiliar, it almost pulled me out of my meditative trance.

In and out, counting breaths, I forced my focus back onto the shift. For some werewolves, the next sign of the change was the reason they stayed in human form whenever possible. Itching gave way to shooting pains as my bones became malleable, ready to morph into wolf shape. But I had a high pain threshold, and the invisible daggers were a welcome hint that I might actually shift this time, might actually find my wolf (and Melony) before it was too late.

But hope faded as I felt the wolf brain taking over my thoughts. No, erasing my thoughts and replacing them with wordless visions and drifts of feelings. I wanted to shift so badly...but I was terrified of the loss of control. Maybe when I'd lived back in Haven, isolated in our werewolf-only community, I could have let my inner wolf loose. There, if my wolf had gone feral, a dozen stronger wolves would have taken me down. Here, I was surrounded only by weak humans, their scent already making me salivate. I could sense the two-footers all around me, the closest one no more than a hundred feet away. His nose was running and he was out of breath, but I could tell he'd eaten pizza for lunch, the tomato sauce providing a piquant addition to his already enticing odor.

I jerked myself out of the wolf brain as abruptly as I often woke from a night's sleep, but this time the reason was terror of my wolf's appetites. With the wolf brain's retreat came an absence of the extra senses my darker side had made possible, and the woods around me once again seemed muffled by the quiet fall of rain. Dropping my head into my hands, I knew I'd failed. I had hoped to find that happy middle ground between wolf and human, where I could take advantage of the wolf's intuitive understanding of the woods without risking letting a predator loose on the unsuspecting human world. Instead, I'd gone too far and lost it all. Now I was back to 100% human, no intuition, and Venus already visible in the darkening sky.

One of the few good things about being an obsessively controlled werewolf, though, is that if I told myself despair wasn't an option, I actually believed my own lie. Might as well keep stumbling around out here like everyone else, I thought. After all, my co-workers hadn't given up, and they never even had the possible backup of a sharp canine nose to aid them. In human form, I could trick myself into believing that I wasn't any further behind than I'd started, even if I had lost the one skill that might have saved Melony's life.

"The poor dear," my older co-worker Maddie had said when Melony's father showed up at the ticket-purchasing counter. Why her words came into my head now was a mystery, but if Maddie—pushing seventy if she was a day—could head out into the sodden woods with hope in her eyes, so could I.

Wait a minute. The poor dear? Or...the poor deer? The stamping hoof, the startled deer, something where it didn't belong. I could almost believe my nonlinear wolf brain was communicating with me in the best way it could from within its iron-barred prison cell deep in my subconscious. A deer would have run away from a walking adult searcher, but might stamp at a small child huddled on the ground, trying to stay warm and dry. I turned toward my memory of the sound, and could almost imagine the scent of baby shampoo wafting toward me from a bit right of my current trajectory. Leaving my designated sector to follow the imagined smell, I drifted into the near-sleeping state I sometimes enter after hiking for hours, where the world is both distant and present in a way it can't be when my human brain is entirely awake.

A tiny cry of alarm made me turn ever so slightly further to the right. I knew I should switch on my flashlight, but instead I walked gingerly, using the rods in the corners of my eyes to soak up the last dregs of daylight. And to see the dark shape of the child curled into a ball at the base of a beech tree.

That was when I realized that the wolf brain was guiding me, was winning over my human brain. I gasped, alarm freezing me in place even as Melony looked up at the sound and cooed a welcome. I was terrified the wolf would parse the toddler as easy prey and tear into her, killing the child I had come so far to save, and that fear held me in place as effectively as the iron bars I so often hid my wolf behind.

You think we could tear into her with these puny human teeth?

The words seemed to drift through my head with a silent chuckle. Whether or not my wolf brain had a sense of humor, though, the human brain had woken enough that I was able to close and lock the wolf's prison door, drop to my knees, and collect the little girl into my arms. Tucking her chilled body beneath my raincoat, I fiddled with my cell phone one-handed and pushed the device against my wet ear.

"I've found her," I said, and dropped my chin onto Melony's baby-shampoo-scented hair. Relief never smelled so sweet.