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Cynthia was barking?

  Trying to stop herself, Nessa almost passed by a skinny but large German shepherd standing at attention on the side of the trail.

  Except it wasn’t a German shepherd. This animal’s fur was lighter—a tawny brown touched with gray, with white markings along the ears and the oversized snout. The highlights caught the light and appeared almost blue. The animal looked at Nessa but she knew enough from working with dogs to avoid looking directly in its eyes. Instead, she focused on the erect ears, how skinny the animal was at the hips, the length of the legs.

  It was the tallest husky Nessa had ever seen. The skinniest too. The most wild looking. With the longest snout.

  This was not a husky.

  This was not a dog.

  Nessa felt her insides burning hot, as though her lungs had been transformed into molten lead, formless but also on fire. The animal barked and she jumped back, her mind desperately scanning her options. Stand still? Run? Call for help?

  It was a wolf.

  Where was Cynthia and why hadn’t she stopped? Was the wolf there when Cynthia ran by?

  Why was the wolf so still?

  The wolf barked again, as if in frustration, then took a step back, turning. Nessa saw that his front left paw was caught in a trap.

  “Oh!” she said out loud, a hand coming to her mouth. Maybe the farmer had set it? Would he come check the trap soon? A wolf could starve to death in a trap this way.

  “You poor thing,” Nessa said, kneeling a bit, but then the wolf lunged at her, and Nessa cried out and reeled back. She knew that if the trap had not pulled back on his foot, he would have jumped her. At the thought, her insides turned over. The wolf looked to weigh at least 200 pounds.

  She knew what Vivian would say. He’s more scared of you than you are of him. But the wolf did not look scared of Nessa. The wolf looked angry. He started to moan and then deepened the moan into a growl. His eyes were red, his fur dirty and matted on the side. His very large teeth, which he was showing her—a bad sign—were yellowed near the gum line, saliva dripping from his jet-black lips. His teeth looked so sharp that for a second Nessa wondered whether they might have been filed into points.

  But then the wolf stepped backward, whined, lay down, and started to gnaw on his foot. “No,” Nessa said. She had heard stories of animals biting off their own paws in order to escape a farmer’s trap. “No,” she said to the wolf in her firmest voice. He stood up again, lunged for her, got pulled back by the chain, growled. When he moved, for a split second Nessa thought she saw an incision on his belly. She must be seeing things.

  “Cynthia!” Nessa cried, hoping that the other girl might hear her and come back. She listened. There was nothing. “Come back, Cynthia. I need your help!” she called.

  Still nothing.

  Maybe Nessa should run after Cynthia? Or maybe Nessa should run like Cynthia. Cynthia had run past the wolf in the trap and ignored him. Hadn’t she? Had she just split-second decided it wasn’t her problem and run on?

  Maybe this was the line between human beings that Nessa could draw in the sand: some people would stay and help an animal and others would only help themselves.

  The wolf was agitated now, growling, tugging on its foot, so it was hard to get a look at the trap, but she saw something. “Hold on, buddy, I’m working on it,” Nessa said. She used the voice that usually brought comfort to animals, but was doing nothing for this wolf, who only glanced in her direction. There was something so wild, so cut off about this wolf. Nessa shuddered. From what she knew about wolves, she’d be safe as soon as she sprung the wolf from the trap. The wolf would probably run for its life. It was probably desperate to get back to its pack.

  Nessa looked around for a sturdy stick and found one just off the trail. She moved slowly and carefully toward the wolf, talking in a low voice.

  She knew wolves were smart. Maybe this one could pick up on nonthreatening cues in her voice if she tried to express them.

  “Good wolf,” she said. “I know how you feel. You just want to run free. Me too.” She pushed the stick gently toward the trap. “I’m just out here for a little jog through the woods, like you. I don’t want to hurt you.” She pushed the stick further. “See this stick? I’m just going to pop open the trap with it and get you out of here.” She looked at the spring coil of the trap. It seemed that if she hit it just right, it would release.

  The wolf regarded Nessa suspiciously, growling, turning his head to view her out of the corner of one eye. “Oh, boy,” Nessa said.

  And then she couldn’t believe it but she actually managed to make contact with the trap. She could feel it through the tip of the stick for a brief second before the wolf moved and the stick dislodged. Nessa was so startled that she jumped back. Nessa took a deep breath and tried again. The wolf took small steps forward and back, whining, giving little tugs at his foot as if he knew. Nessa felt proud of herself. They were on the same page now. This was all going to be fine.

  But just as she managed to make contact with the trap again, she heard a noise in the brush behind her. Thinking it had to be Cynthia, she turned. But it wasn’t Cynthia. It was another wolf, this one white with yellow markings and black eyes. All Nessa could really see were the animal’s teeth because this new wolf was coming at her with a wide-open mouth, seemingly frozen in mid-leap—or at least that’s how Nessa would remember it.

  It all happened so fast, Nessa didn’t have a second to feel scared. She just hit the ground, feeling the full force of the impact on her back even as she felt a sharper sensation in her hip that registered more as heat than pain. Within seconds, the heat grew to a burn so excruciating she could hear herself calling out, but the noises she was making were separated from her own body, like someone else was screaming. Nessa didn’t know why she was screaming, but she had a terrible feeling that she was begging for her life.

  After that, she blacked out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  When Nessa woke up, she found herself looking straight up into the eyes of Dr. Kalish, her old pediatrician. They were in an exam room at the local clinic, the far end of the building she came to with Nate for his appointments.

  She moved her head slightly to the left, and there was her mom, looking grim and pale. Nessa wondered what was wrong.

  “Is Nate okay?” she said. “You look worried.”

  Nessa was surprised at how faint her voice sounded. She was still trying to puzzle out what she and Dr. Kalish and her mom were doing down here at the health clinic. It was like one of those weird dreams when you’re back in first grade but your dog’s in the classroom with you and everyone is riding bikes and Bree is the teacher and she’s annoyed because no one is listening…and…

  This wasn’t a dream. She was awake. Her mom was saying, “Nate’s fine, sweetheart, but you had a close call,” and that was weird because Nessa felt fine, except maybe a little fuzzy. The last thing she could remember was saying goodbye to her mom in the kitchen and heading out for a run, and then…Cynthia…and then the woods…and then suddenly Nessa felt the pain again. Her hip.

  She must have stiffened, because Dr. Kalish had a hand on her shoulder and was saying, “Easy now,” and “Sorry if that pinched.” Vivian leaned forward, her expression serious. “It’s really important for you to lie still right now, Ness; the doctor’s just finishing up with a stitch or two.”

  “Stitches?” Nessa said. “What…what happened?”

  “That’s the question we were about to ask you,” Dr. Kalish said in his raspy tone. Nessa smiled. She’d forgotten how much she liked Dr. Kalish and his curly white hair and strong, tanned hands. When she was little, he had a private practice in the front rooms of the house where he lived with his family, and she always felt like he was a dad from a show on TV.

  Dr. Kalish had retired when the clinic opened. As part of the Dutch Chem settlement with the town, everyone in Tether had free health care there for ten years. The children most at risk from chemical exposure were monitored as a pree
mptive measure, including Nate. Dr. Kalish now worked at the clinic on alternate weekends and was sometimes the doctor on call.

  Nessa sat up a bit, trying to get her bearings. She noticed she was wearing a cotton robe and terry cloth slippers on her feet. Where were her clothes? Scanning the room, she saw her running shoes on the floor near the wall, placed on top of a couple of sheets of newspaper. There was something wrong with them. Were they muddy? That wasn’t quite the right color. Nessa sat back as she recognized that they were stained with blood. A lot of blood. She looked at her leg and saw there was caked mud and blood all down her calves, stopping in a line where her socks would be, like the farmer’s tan she got from running in the summer.

  She searched out her mom’s eyes. “How…?” she said. She wasn’t even sure what question she should be asking.

  “Joe Bent found you in the woods near his house.”

  Nessa nodded. The running trail cut into his farmland near where she’d seen the wolf.

  “His dogs were going crazy behind his field and he found you there, just off the trail, bleeding,” Vivian added.

  Suddenly Nessa remembered. The wolf frozen in midair, bearing down on her.

  “Nessa, were you…?” Vivian began. “Do you remember an animal?”

  Nessa let her head fall back on the pillow. It suddenly felt heavy. She was glad to be lying down. “There were two,” she said. “Wolves.”

  Dr. Kalish caught his breath.

  “Did they bite you?” Vivian asked.

  Nessa nodded. “One of them did. The other was trapped.” She thought for a minute. “I was trying to free it. Didn’t Mr. Bent see him?”

  “No,” Vivian said. “You were talking about them when they found you. Maybe you don’t remember. Joe looked around but couldn’t find a thing. And then after the ambulance came, he went back to make sure. He just called to say he searched all over, and let his dogs out to see if they could find an injured animal somewhere. There was nothing.”

  “That’s nice of him,” Nessa said.

  “Nice has nothing to do with it,” said Dr. Kalish. “We have to find out if the wolf is rabid. Most cases of wolf bite are accounted for that way. Not that you see much of it—or any wolf bite these days. I mostly remember it from my residency.”

  “What would a rabid wolf have looked like? Would it have been foaming at the mouth?” Nessa asked. She felt sure that the white wolf hadn’t been. She shuddered at the instant image of the wolf coming for her, teeth bared, all four paws in the air, how he had knocked her down. Her hip began to throb.

  “The fact that he didn’t go for your head and neck area is lucky,” said Dr. Kalish. “I’ve given you the medication regardless. And then there’s this.”

  Reaching around to a small steel table on wheels, Dr. Kalish soaked some surgical gauze in rubbing alcohol—the smell stung Nessa’s nose. He pinched something up in a piece of gauze from a stainless steel dish. The object was white and shiny.

  “Is that a tooth?” Vivian said, leaning over.

  “Yes. It was embedded in the wound, which is unusual,” Dr. Kalish replied. “It’s also unusual that you didn’t sustain more damage than this. A full-grown wolf can bite through bone, and certainly tear muscle fiber. You seem pretty intact—this is mostly surface and the muscle damage is largely bruising. You’ll feel it. But you don’t need surgery.”

  Nessa could not take her eyes off the tooth in Dr. Kalish’s palm. “That tooth sure is big,” she said.

  “You want to keep it?” Dr. Kalish asked.

  Nessa nodded and held out her palm. She looked at the tooth, then over at her mom.

  Vivian folded Nessa’s hand around the wolf tooth into a fist. And then she wrapped her own weathered, larger hand around Nessa’s. “Please,” she said. “Worry about yourself, not the wolf. No more running in the woods after dark, okay?”

  Nessa nodded. She could see how worried her mom was. She herself wasn’t much looking forward to standing and putting weight on her sutured hip.

  Then Dr. Kalish sat down on a stool, looked at her mom, and looked at Nessa. “No more running, period,” he said. “Not ’til you’re fully healed.”

  “What?” Nessa said. “That’s impossible. I have a meet in two weeks. I can’t not run. I’ll lose my conditioning.”

  “You’ll lose a lot more than that if you tear out these stitches or run on torn muscles.”

  “For how long?” Nessa said. She could feel a pit of panic form in her stomach.

  “A month at a minimum.”

  “But that’s almost the full season!”

  Dr. Kalish shook his head. “I’m sorry, Nessa. A month,” he repeated firmly.

  It was tricky getting home from the clinic. It hurt like a mother to bend at the waist to sit in the front seat of Vivian’s car, and then stand up again and take the few steps into the house. But the pain was nothing compared to the inner bleakness that descended on her the second Dr. Kalish had finished delivering the terrible news.

  It didn’t seem real. Running, to Nessa, came as naturally as breathing or eating. She thought about it when she was falling asleep at night, when she was in the shower, when her attention was wandering during class. How could she go on without it, without something she wanted so badly?

  For two nights Nessa slept on the couch because it hurt too much to climb the stairs. She also stayed home from school. It hurt just to get up and go to the bathroom. It hurt to roll over in her sleep. She kept forgetting what Dr. Kalish had said and then remembering and then feeling the weight descend on her all over again.

  It felt like a guilty verdict without the benefit of a defense. No cross-country meant no cross-country scholarship. Her mom kept telling her that one month was not the end of the world, that she could recover quickly. But Vivian didn’t understand. Nessa had been working for six months to get to where she was now. In a month, all of it would be gone.

  On top of that, she was having nightmares. Three nights in a row, she woke in a sweat and had to remember that she was safe. She might be shaking, alone, and miserable. But she wasn’t out in the woods. There were no wolves here.

  Bree got everyone in school to sign a get-well card. She came by every day with candy and gum and homework so Nessa could keep up with her classes.

  Coach Hoffman called and told her he was sorry. Afterward, Nessa hung up the phone and cried, but she never cried in front of anyone.

  Her mom had enough on her mind.

  Three days after the bite, Nessa woke up early from pain. Sometimes it helped to put a clean dressing on the wound, so she hobbled into the bathroom to change it.

  She carefully assembled the materials she’d need—gauze, alcohol pads, tape. To reach the site of the stitches, she had to twist at the waist, moving the skin on her hip with her hands to try to make it come into view. The movement hurt, and feeling the pain again, her stomach swelled with nausea.

  Nessa felt sick and light-headed every time she looked at the wound. There was seepage, discharge. Suddenly she saw the white wolf coming toward her. The image was so real that she actually gasped. She remembered the wolf’s open jaws and its dark eyes. Nessa put her hands on the sink to steady herself and looked at her face in the mirror. She remembered the wolf in the trap too, the black lips over red, rotten-looking gums, the teeth that were so sharp they could have been filed.

  Why hadn’t the wolves been there when Joe Bent came upon her with his dogs?

  Where had they gone?

  CHAPTER SIX

  Spending days alone in the house was the worst. Nessa kept seeing the wolf in her dreams. So when it was time for Nate’s clinic visit the following Monday, Nessa insisted that she and Bree could still bring him, even though Vivian offered to take off work.

  Bree picked up Nessa and Nate after the school bus dropped Nate at home. As Nessa got into the passenger seat and stowed her crutches, Bree said, “You’re wearing that?” looking pointedly at Nessa’s track pants, slides, and bright blue hoodie.
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br />   “Cassian will have to deal,” Nessa said, rolling down her window of the enormous clunker of an old Buick that Bree called the Monster.

  “The crutches are good,” Bree said. “Conversation starter?”

  Nessa laughed. It felt good to be back riding in the Monster. Bree hit the gas, and the car’s ancient V8 engine sent them flying out of the lot. Nessa loved this car.

  The familiar (if loud) churn of the engine made it hard to talk, especially with the windows open (the air-conditioning didn’t work), but the day was warm and they blasted the music and sang along. Nessa loved singing at full volume. She couldn’t carry a tune, but with Bree it didn’t matter. For a few moments she forgot all about the bite and running and scholarships and Cassian.

  The health clinic was on the edge of downtown, its boxy industrial design disguised by yellow siding, blue shutters, and a gabled roof that made it look like a house. In the parking lot, Nessa felt her heart skip a beat. Cassian was right there by Bree’s car. He was getting out of his pickup with his sister, Sierra, sliding out next to him. Nessa felt a rush of happiness.

  Sierra had blonde pigtails and little purple moccasins. Cassian was wearing shorts that hung down low on his narrow hips and indoor soccer shoes without socks. His hair was tousled and Nessa could see the many different shades of blond. He looked up and over at Bree and Nessa and Nate. And then the most amazing thing in the world happened. He smiled.

  At them.

  Nessa could feel Bree pretty much melting into the earth next to her. Nessa felt pretty melty herself. She got even meltier when Cassian took a step closer to them. And then another. Just the way he walked was amazing. He rocked on his feet with the rhythm and confidence of a cat, his gray eyes crinkling into a smile, his jaw tightening as he held up a hand in recognition. Bree actually did collapse at that point, landing on the Monster’s rear bumper, then quickly masking the movement by pretending she had to check the straps on her lace-up sandals. Nessa reached a hand back to signal Bree to stop being so obvious. She couldn’t look back because her eyes were glued on Cassian’s face. She could feel herself smiling at him hesitantly. Was he coming to talk to her? To Bree? He was definitely headed their way.