Two other males had auditioned themselves that spring but were treated with similar disdain. They were both physically ideal candidates, more than capable of leading a pack. My only theory was that now that Widow had her crown, she didn’t want to give it up. I didn’t blame her. Being a wolf was kind of a man’s game.
Then a week after my birthday, Dorian returned. He obviously harbored some resentment and wasn’t about to take no for an answer twice. Widow snarled like a hellhound, but Dorian didn’t back down. She lunged at him, but he was too quick. He whipped around and sank his teeth into the back of her neck. Widow yelped and twisted out of his grasp. The rest of the pack chased her attacker into the woods while Widow caught her breath. I could see her wound from where I was standing. It was deep and probably needed sutures. I had to get closer to know for sure.
I took a step toward her. She watched me evenly, like she’d been expecting me. I inched forward carefully so as not to spook her. The closer I got, the bigger and fiercer she looked. I got so close I could smell her breath, dank and musty like air inside a tomb, and her eyes the color of polished brass locked on to mine. My heart drummed against my ribs so hard I thought they would break. I unsheathed my trembling left hand from my glove and reached toward her neck slowly. The noise that escaped Widow then was no junkyard dog growl. It was the grinding of tectonic plates. I had barely brushed the hair of her coat when I felt the pressure of her jaw on my forearm. I staggered back, more out of shock than pain, and edged away, keeping a wary eye on her. She didn’t follow.
When I was safely out of her sight, I pulled back my coat sleeve to examine my arm. I had ten puncture wounds. Luckily, they all missed major arteries and looked to be only a quarter of an inch deep. I suddenly felt ridiculous. I had touched a highly aggressive wolf without tranquilizers. This was a warning bite. Next time, she’d take my whole arm.
I wrapped it in the gauze from my pack and headed back toward camp. It was still early in the afternoon, but I needed to tend to my wound, and I had an hour’s hike ahead of me. I pulled the hood of my parka tight, ripped open a pack of hand warmers, and shoved them into the toes of my boots.
I had only walked a mile or so when I began to feel light-headed. Brown spots swarmed my vision, and I stumbled into a snowbank. Blind and scared, I remained on my knees, waiting for the dizzy spell to pass. My arm throbbed as my heart pumped more and more blood to it, robbing the rest of my body of much-needed heat. As I raised it above my heart to slow down the flow of blood, I lost consciousness.
43
DUANE FORDHAM
For four straight days, we plowed through that same damn hill, yarding nearly twice our average load size. We were raking it in, for sure, but every morning we’d wake to find the hill even thicker than the day before. The trees shot up like weeds, their branches twisting around each other until the canopy was so rank, you could barely see the sun. Wes Garrity even swore he saw a branch grow two inches in two minutes. He didn’t come into work the next day.
By the fifth day, the trees were so densely packed it was hard to get a full swing of the ax, and even if you got a tree to fall, it would just end up leaning against the tree next to it. It was like playing the world’s most dangerous game of dominoes.
The longer this went on, the slower we moved and the tenser the crew got. “They keep gettin’ hung up!” Gus threw down his hard hat, exasperated, as the carriage struggled to pull his load through a snarled thicket. “It’s like the goddamn Amazon down there!”
“Who you hollerin’ at, Gus?” I said, too exhausted to raise my voice.
“Those asshole trees! That’s who!”
“They’re just trees,” I said unconvincingly.
“No, they ain’t! They’re goddamn demon trees.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” I shouted back, exasperated.
“What you should have done weeks ago!” he spat back. “It’s him or me, Duane. You choose.”
I heard a snapping sound as the carriage yanked the load free and started sliding back up the hill. “Get back to work,” I ordered Gus, who glared at me, then stormed off to receive the new logs and unbale the chokers.
I spotted Weylyn watching from the edge of the forest. When he caught me looking at him, he quickly went back to working on freeing a line that had gotten tangled in some gnarled branches. I headed down the hill toward him. When he saw me coming, he froze.
“All right, Weylyn, if there’s anything you want to tell me, now would be the time,” I said frankly.
He didn’t look up from the knot he was untying. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
I wanted him to say he had nothing to do with it—that we were all crazy and we could go screw ourselves—but he didn’t. He hadn’t even batted an eye when that first crop of trees had shown up, and even today, when the rest of the crew were losing their goddamn minds, he was strangely calm. Is he doing this just to mess with us? I wondered. Did he think it was funny? I found myself getting angrier the longer I watched him. Rather than say something I might later regret, I turned and walked back up the hill to think.
* * *
I didn’t see it happen, but I heard it: a loud crack followed by the unmistakable groan of falling timber and a series of consecutive thuds. Six. That’s how many trees were felled at once. The only safe number is one. I marched down the hill to see what had happened and found Weylyn standing over one of the trees, his left arm wagging slowly like an angry dog. “What happened here, Weylyn?”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” Gus cut in. “Greenhorn here was trying to be a hero.” A crowd had gathered. Weylyn squirmed under the heat of their stares.
“That true, Weylyn?” I asked.
“No, it’s not,” he said, indignant. “I didn’t touch them.”
“That’s not what I saw,” Gus countered. “You coulda killed someone with that slipshod shit.”
Then one-eyed Vince threw his hat in the ring. “I saw him, too!”
“You both saw him?”
They nodded.
“That’s not true! I was over there.” Weylyn pointed downhill. “I ran up here as soon as I heard the noise. Same as the rest of you.”
“Liar!” Gus shouted.
“Gus! For once in your goddamn life, shut up and let me handle it,” I barked. Nonplussed, he set his jaw and crossed his arms in front of his chest.
I turned back to Weylyn. “Why are people saying they saw you fell those trees?”
“I don’t know what they saw, but it wasn’t me!” he shouted. A brisk wind caused the trees above to sway and groan. Then, through a small hole in the canopy, snow began to fall, creating a swirling, white column around Weylyn that was somehow both angelic and frightening all at once. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a few of the other crew members nervously take a step back.
The truth is, I believed Weylyn. He was careful and smart, which was more than I could say for half the guys I worked with. He hadn’t felled those trees. He had grown them and the thousands of others that strangled the hillside. I didn’t know how he did it or why, but I knew what I had to do next. “Sorry, kid. You haven’t left me much of a choice. I’m suspending you for a week without pay until we can get to the bottom of this.”
Weylyn looked like he’d just been punched in the stomach. “I thought we were friends,” he said bitterly, stepping out of the mound of snow that had gathered at his feet and handing me his ax.
I thought we were, too, I thought.
Weylyn started his lonely trek up the hillside. By the time he reached the top, the snow was so heavy that he disappeared from my sight altogether.
* * *
The snow was heavy enough that we had to suspend work for the day. It had to be some kind of world record: nine inches in an hour. On my way home, I had to pull to the side of the road because all I could see was white. Between each swipe of my wiper blades, snow piled so quickly you’d think it had been there all night. I even had to dig out my tir
es after only having been stopped for five minutes. By the time I got home, the snow had stopped and the sky was clear and blue like Ellen’s eyes. There were a few hours of daylight left, so I grabbed my rifle and headed into the woods to clear my head.
As I wandered, so did my brain. I couldn’t stop thinking about the expression on Weylyn’s face when I had told him to leave. It wasn’t the look of someone who had been caught playing an elaborate prank. It was the look of someone who had been betrayed. I suddenly felt stupid. I had let Gus convince me that the kid was some kind of evil magician who went around sprouting forests when no one was looking. Like White Fang, I had cast him out, only it wasn’t for his own good. It was for mine.
It was three o’clock, and the light was sideways and orange. I hadn’t seen a single animal worth a bullet, so I started my walk back. Then suddenly, I froze in my tracks and shouldered my rifle.
About a hundred yards away, a beautiful wolf with dark-gray coloring around its eyes watched me intently. The wolf, unfazed, took a step toward me. I took aim. Here I was, staring at a vicious predator who had probably killed calves just like Maisy, but something kept me from pulling the trigger.
The wolf turned sharply to the right and started walking. I followed it with my scope down into a ravine where it stopped by what looked like a parka buried in the snow. I lowered my gun and walked to the edge of the embankment to get a better look. Then I saw the blood. It had stained a small patch of snow next to the parka like syrup on a snow cone. The wolf looked back at me, then disappeared into the forest.
I scrambled down the embankment, dug the parka out of the snow, and flipped it over. Inside was a woman, no older than thirty with teacup skin and tiny fingers. Her eyes were closed, but I guessed they were green. She was unconscious, and her left hand was shiny with blood. I lifted her like a doll and carried her toward the road as fast as I could.
* * *
When I got back to the truck, I called an ambulance, but the operator said response time was slow because the roads weren’t yet plowed from the storm. The girl had a pulse, but her breathing was shallow. I pulled up her sleeve to look at her arm. The bleeding had stopped, but her bandage was soaked through. I removed the old bandage and washed the wound with a bottle of vodka I’d been saving for later. Once I’d wiped away the excess blood, I saw what clearly looked like a bite mark. It was big, nearly the full length of her forearm. If we were in Florida, I would’ve said she’d crossed the wrong alligator. I redressed the wound with a clean bandage I found in my glove compartment and tucked her arm back inside her parka.
An hour and a half later, the girl was admitted into the ER with mild hypothermia. The doctors wrapped her in blankets and started her on a round of antibiotics for her bite wound while I hovered in the corner of the room, trying to stay out of everyone’s way. Not long after the nurses and doctors had cleared the room, her eyes fluttered open. I was right about them. They were leaf green, and they looked at me with guarded relief.
“Hi … Who are you?”
I jumped up from my chair. “My name’s Duane. I found you passed out in the snow,” I answered.
“I’m Mary,” she said, taking in her surroundings. “How did they let you in here?”
“I told them I was your husband.”
The girl—Mary—raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I appreciate that,” she said, smiling wearily.
“So, what were you doing out in the woods?”
Mary sat up slowly. “I’m a researcher. I study wolves.” She caught me staring at her newly bandaged arm and frowned. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It looks pretty bad to me. What happened?”
“I don’t really feel like talking about it.”
“You should be more careful.”
Mary narrowed her eyes at me. “Excuse me?”
“Around wolves. They’re vicious predators.”
“I know what they are,” she said, indignant. “And they’re not always vicious. They can be very loving, too.”
“Let me guess. You think it was your fault you got bit?”
“Yes.”
And I guess it’s Maisy’s fault she got attacked, too, I thought, fuming. “Well, you obviously know what you’re doing,” I said patronizingly.
“You’re right. I do,” she said, defiantly.
Then it hit me just how awful my behavior was. I was in a hospital yelling at a patient for getting hurt. She deserved an apology. “I’m sorry. That was totally out of line,” I said, shaking my head ruefully. “It’s been a long day.”
Mary considered my apology, then said, “It’s okay. Thanks for helping me. I could have died out there.”
“Yeah. I could barely see you under all that snow.”
“What do you mean ‘under’?”
“There was a sudden blizzard this afternoon. You must have already been passed out.”
“How sudden?”
“I mean it literally came out of nowhere. Dropped a record-setting amount of snow.”
Mary’s face contorted with worry, and she sucked in a short breath. “I hate to do this, but I need your help again.”
* * *
So, this was Mary, Weylyn’s Mary, and now she was asking me to give him a ride to the hospital. “We share a car,” she said. “It’s still parked at my work.” I agreed, leaving out the part where he worked for me, and also the part where I’d effectively fired him several hours earlier.
When I pulled into the gravel drive in front of Mary’s cabin, Weylyn—who had been waiting by the window—ran out the front door. His face dropped when he saw it was me. “Oh. I thought you were Mary,” he muttered, then turned back toward the cabin.
“Mary asked me to come get you,” I said. “She’s at the hospital.”
He spun around to face me, his eyes wide with fear. “What happened?”
Mary had asked me not to tell Weylyn what happened because she wanted to tell him herself, but I couldn’t lie to him, not after the way I’d treated him earlier. “She got caught in that freak blizzard. I found her in the snow.”
“This is exactly what I was afraid of,” Weylyn said solemnly and tilted his head back. I followed his gaze into the night sky and saw snow falling for the second time that day, beautiful, silent, dangerous snow.
“What do you mean?” I said. Weylyn didn’t answer, and I didn’t need him to. Before I left the hospital, Mary told me something about Weylyn that a few weeks ago, I would have said was impossible, but after what happened with the trees, I’m not sure I believed anything was impossible anymore. When Weylyn lowered his gaze to me, he was no longer the goofy kid I had met weeks before. He looked small and frightened, like an animal cowering at the back of a cage after it knows it’s done something wrong. “We’d better leave now,” he said. “Before it gets worse.”
Weylyn and I piled into my truck and sped off into the smothering snow.
* * *
The second blizzard was even worse than the first. The fir trees lining the highway were my only guide as I drove blindly through the unrelenting snow. I even blew through several intersections for fear that I wouldn’t have enough traction to get my truck going again if I stopped. Weylyn’s jaw was clenched, and his fingers bit into the armrests so hard they turned white at the tips. “You all right?” I asked him.
“I hate snow,” he said through gritted teeth, which was ironic if he was in fact somehow responsible for it falling to begin with.
“I owe you an apology for today,” I said after he had relaxed a little. “I was freaked out by everything that was going on, and I took it out on you.”
“It’s okay,” he said, staring blankly out into the white abyss. “You did what you had to do.”
“I know you didn’t cut down those trees.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
I nodded. I guess Gus had been right about Weylyn, or about the trees, anyway. “So
,” I began awkwardly. “Does stuff like this happen a lot?”
“The trees or the weather?”
“Weather, I guess.”
“Usually not snow. Mostly rain. Sometimes, heavier storms. Once it was a tornado.”
“Holy shit.” Surprised, I tapped the brake a little too hard, and the truck fishtailed. Weylyn cringed and clamped his eyes shut. “Sorry,” I said, straightening us out.
Weylyn opened one eye and then the other. “Don’t worry. I stopped it before anyone got hurt.”
I pointed out the window at the snow whipping past us. “If you can stop it, then why are we driving through a blizzard right now?”
“I don’t know,” Weylyn said, agitated. “Before I came here, a hurricane hit the town I was living in. I tried to stop it and ended up in the hospital. I think it made me … tired.”
“Tired?”
“I feel less in control. Getting it going is easy. Stopping it takes more effort, especially with snow,” he said, distant. Then he closed his eyes, shutting out me, the snow, and the rest of the world. “I really hate snow.”
44
MARY PENLORE
I pulled my hospital blanket tight around my shoulders as I watched snow plummeting past my window in heavy, wet clumps. I had asked Duane—the man with the face like knotty pine who had found me in the snow—not to say anything, but he must have ratted me out. I guess I couldn’t blame him. I’m sure Weylyn was worried sick, and he was probably just trying to reassure him that I was okay. I closed my eyes and hoped that they got here safely.
Forty minutes later, I woke to a soft knocking at my door. I looked up and saw Weylyn walk into the room, his hair and clothes slightly damp, face drawn. My ghoulishly blue lips smiled at him. “Hey.”
Weylyn stopped at the foot of my bed. “Hey,” he said, avoiding my gaze. “How are you feeling?” His voice sounded strained.
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