Chapter 6: The Gap

Ewan broke his own first rule at dawn on the fifth day.

He unlocked the door without a word, threw a wool coat on the bed, and said, "Get dressed. You're coming out."

"Out where?"

"Where you'd least like to go."

They drove for two hours up a logging road with the heater roaring and the sky going from black to pewter.

Kit knew where they were headed long before the road ended.

He knew it in his teeth.

The truck stopped at a turnout, and Ewan killed the engine.

Below them, down a slope of black pines, lay a long white clearing with a stream frozen along one edge.

The Spruce Gap.

Snow lay smooth and clean across it, and not a mark showed anywhere that a wolf had ever bled there.

"Three years," Ewan said. "I come up here every month."

"I'm sorry for your loss."

"Don't."

"I mean it."

"Then you're a liar or a monster, and I haven't decided which."

They climbed out into the cold and walked down together.

At the middle of the clearing Ewan stopped.

"Here," he said. "He was lying on his back, looking at the sky."

Kit stood where he was told, and did not look at the place.

He could see every inch of it anyway.

A man's hand in the snow, curled open.

A man's voice saying, kindly, as if from far off, "Good. That's clean. That's all I wanted."

"Show me how you did it," Ewan said.

"No."

"Then show me how fast you are."

He pulled his sweater off over his head, kicked off his boots and stripped to the skin in the freezing air.

Kit's mouth went dry.

The change took Ewan.

His spine bowed and his shoulders rolled.

A huge black wolf stood in the snow where the man had been, as tall as Kit's chest, with gold eyes.

It looked at Kit, and bared its teeth.

Run, the look said.

Kit's wolf had been straining at the leash for five days.

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