No. This song that he had been working on did not have Pachelbel’s chord progression at all. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so certain that it had. Her hands moved, as if she were trying to play on her cello, though she wasn’t certain if she wanted to play a harmony to his song—or Pachelbel.

Bereft of cello, she hummed its part in Pachelbel’s Canon—which was boring. She had done it so often that she felt as though the notes were engraved on her bones. People liked to listen to songs they knew, her orchestra teacher used to say. We’ll give our audience a few favorites among the unfamiliar pieces.

Everyone knew Pachelbel.

Zander stopped singing. “Anna, that’s rude,” he chided her. “Don’t sing something else while someone is singing.”

The tone of his voice set her back up. She had to remind herself that he was right. She pressed her hand on the glass as they drove past a hotel/campground on the river, and felt a sharp longing. She wished that she were sitting on a rock watching the river rush by instead of encased in this car heading into the darkness. It felt suffocatingly like the blackness was going to reach out and consume her.

She wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore, she reminded herself. I’ve met plenty of scary things in the light. She heard that last part ringing in her ears in her own voice. As if she’d said it more than once.

But she had been afraid of the dark when she was seventeen. She was seventeen now, right? She couldn’t remember when she’d learned to love the night.

Zander was singing again, and this time she politely hummed along with him. She preferred Pachelbel to the new tune, which was weird. There was nothing wrong with Zander’s song, and, like many cellists, she was really very tired of Pachelbel.

But the music was soothing, and humming it made her feel better. When Zander quit singing, he asked, “So, what is your favorite subject in school?”

As she answered, she forgot that she couldn’t remember how she happened to be traveling in the dark with a stranger who didn’t feel like a stranger. Or maybe with someone familiar who felt like a stranger.

She was seventeen and headed to Northwestern in the fall, the daughter of a lawyer. Other than her mother’s death, nothing bad had ever happened to her.

That was an odd thought, too. Why did she think something bad was going to happen to her quite soon?

“Tell me about your favorite family vacation,” Zander asked. Before she could answer, he muttered, “You are obstinate, aren’t you? I’ve never had this much trouble, especially not with someone my father has already caught. It’s like everything just wants to flow off the top.”

“Like an iceberg,” agreed Anna. “There’s a lot more under the surface that you can’t see.”

“Like what?” he asked.

But she couldn’t answer him. It was a gut feeling. As if his music should slide off her. She had a big hollowness inside her head that felt denser than hollowness should feel. Something important was hidden there, something with fur and sharp teeth. She felt herself reaching toward that—

“You were going to tell me about your favorite family vacation,” Zander prompted, putting a hand on her thigh. Warmth seeped into her flesh from that hand.

“Yes,” she said hesitantly. “Um, I was about six and my brother was eight—”

And as the SUV turned off the paved road and onto a dirt track, she was lost in the feeling of lake water on bare feet and how her brother had tried and failed to teach her to skip rocks on the last vacation they’d taken as a family of four.

“That’s it,” Zander murmured. “Remember.”

Something pulled Anna’s attention away from the memory. A tug in her chest. She brought a hand up to rub at the spot, but the pressure didn’t go away.

The SUV bounced and jostled over the ground, sides and underside scraping in such a way that she was glad it was this SUV and not . . . not some other beloved vehicle. Some thoughts just slid away from her in a way that was distracting.

She caught the reflection of a wild animal’s eyes just past Zander’s shoulder. She lost track of her family’s vacation entirely and focused her attention on the darkness of the forest.

“Wolf,” she said.

Zander glanced quickly in the direction she was looking in, but he had to return his attention to the road. They had already passed the place where the wolf had been standing anyway.

“I don’t think so, not here,” he said with assurance. “There is a pack a fair bit south of here, and there are some in southern Oregon. But not here. You probably saw a coyote. Size can be deceptive in the dark.”

The wolf was gone from view, but Anna could feel her presence. She pressed a hand to her chest where that certainty lived. There was a wolf out there—and she was following them. It should have frightened her, but like the flannel shirt she wore, it gave her an obscure sense of comfort.

Pack.

The whispered word echoed out of that inaccessible hollowness. But she didn’t know its import. Pack what? Her carry gun was in its usual holster. Was that what that inner voice had meant?

She didn’t know how to shoot a gun.

“Anna,” Zander’s voice called her attention away from thoughts that made her worry.

“Are we there yet?” she asked cheerfully, in an effort to thank him for making her feel better.

* * *

*

LEAH WAS TIRED. It had dawned on her, not two hours after she’d started out for Wild Sign, that she should have taken the car. No one would have thought it unusual if she’d gone for a drive—and she’d have gotten here a lot easier.

But the need to move, the sheer strength of the summoning, had been so overwhelming. One moment she had been out running down the trail of a rabbit, and the next she’d changed direction and loped toward Wild Sign. That wasn’t the name she’d known that place by, of course. And it wasn’t exactly in the same location, either—though the amphitheater had been familiar. But she couldn’t remember what it had been, so she held on to the designations she was given.

She was hungry, too. She’d eaten such things as had come her way on her run, mostly squirrels and rabbits, though she’d driven a coyote off of a deer and feasted for a half hour, letting her body recoup its strength. Most of the time, aided by the supernatural nature of werewolf endurance and speed, and her ability to draw upon the pack energies, she’d spent running flat out.

She knew that she could not, should not, arrive this tired. She needed to find a safe place to rest for a few hours, some food to eat, before she got any closer. She paused next to a fallen tree with a hollow under it.

She had started to burrow into the space when she became aware of the sound of an engine. Abruptly reversing direction, she shook off the dirt and looked toward the noise.

She watched the headlights bounce off trees and rocks, lighting a rough track she hadn’t noticed. The engine sounded familiar, one of the pack vehicles. Charles had taken that Suburban.

She started off toward where her trail and the track the SUV was taking would intersect. As she approached her chosen vantage point, she was still debating whether or not to approach Charles. She closed her eyes as the SUV came over a rise, shining bright lights that would ruin her night vision. But the track dropped right afterward.

As soon as the lights dimmed, she opened her eyes in time to get a good look inside the cab.

She’d expected to see Charles driving, because Tag would already have wrecked on that track, and Anna would be creeping along at a quarter of the speed the SUV was making. But the face that the dash lights illuminated behind the wheel belonged to none of them.

She froze in her tracks, her eyes briefly meeting Anna’s before the SUV’s direction made it impossible to see anything inside the vehicle.

She heard herself whine, though it wasn’t an intentional sound.

She had seen the face of the driver—and she knew that the man it belonged to was nearly two hundred years dead. There was something scratching in the memories she no longer had.

She took a deep breath and cut across country to the location that she could not have pinpointed on a map but her wolf had no trouble pointing her nose toward. That would be where he was taking her.

Where her father had taken her.

Where she had been summoned to return to. Where he waited. This chapter in her life would finally have a proper ending. She wasn’t sure if the thought terrified her or left her exulted.

* * *

*

    TAG WOKE FOR what felt like the hundredth time that night. He had slept fine out in the woods, but it had been a long, long while since he’d tried to sleep in a hotel next to a highway. Or anywhere the sound of a car was more than an occasional irritant, for that matter.

He rearranged his pillow in preparation to go back to sleep, but unease raised the hairs on the back of his neck and he reconsidered.