Chapter 21: Bound

"Is Josie with Dad?" I said.

"She's asleep on his chest in the rocking chair," Dagny said. "I'm looking at her. Come home."

I was dressed and in the truck in four minutes.

Emmett drove. He'd called his pack before we hit the bridge.

By noon there were Cold Spring wolves lying in the snow along our fence line, every fifty yards.

By two, the old woman from the Blackfen elders' bench had sent twenty of her own.

She'd been voted Alpha the week before, until they found someone younger who wanted it.

By dark, the mountain pack had come down from the pass.

Three packs ringed a hunter's farm in the snow. Nobody in the valley had ever seen that.

Two Council members sat at our kitchen table drinking my father's coffee and looking embarrassed.

"She had something in her shawl," one said. "The guards smelled licorice and woke up on the floor."

For two days, everybody searched.

The hunters searched the river.

The packs searched the hills.

Dagny walked the north draw with her nose almost on the snow and came back with nothing.

On the third evening I gave Josie her bath in the kitchen sink.

My father was on the porch with two hunters.

Dagny was at the table with her notebook.

Emmett was out at the fence line with his wolves.

Rue lifted her head.

Behind my ribs she went still, the way she does when she hears something before I do.

Then I smelled it.

Candle smoke.

And under it, faint and sweet, peaches.

The pantry door was behind me.

In the pantry floor is the trapdoor to our root cellar.

My father has been meaning to fix the latch on its outside hatch for eleven years.

I heard the trapdoor creak.

I didn't turn around. I lifted Josie out of the water with one hand under her bottom and one behind her head.

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