Page 29 of Raised By Wolves

When they turn onto the gravel road, Kai starts whistling. Yellow-rumped warbler. Then song sparrow. House finch. Holo takes this as a good sign. He thinks her mood’s improving.

Which is why he doesn’t react quickly enough when Lacey stops in front of the cabin and Kai flings open the car door and starts running. He just stands there, his mouth hanging open. Shocked.

“Kai?” he calls, stupefied. “Kai?”

She’s heading for the woods. In the underbrush he sees a flash of gray. A pair of golden eyes.

“Kai!”

By the time he gets his feet moving, his sister and the wolf have vanished into the trees.

CHAPTER 22

RUN.

It’s my first instinct. I leave my brother behind and race toward the two silvery shadows already fading into the woods. Try to touch the tails as they disappear into the underbrush.

I run even faster than I did on the track. They’re only fifty yards ahead of me. They flow through the trees, graceful as wind. They could let me catch up to them if they wanted to.

But they don’t want to. They speed away from me like I’m just another human. A stranger—or an enemy.

“Come back!” I cry. “It’s me! Wait!”

But wolves aren’t dogs. They don’t come when you call them.

They get smaller and smaller and soon I can’t see them at all. I stop and bend over, gasping for breath. My lungs scream. My heart aches.

They left me, I think,they left me.

When I stand upright again, the forest is quiet.

I’m utterly alone.

But I can feel how the woods welcome me. How the ground knows my footsteps. I feel a weight lift from my shoulders.

There’s no school here in the woods. No Hardys. No Chief “You Might Still Face Criminal Charges” Greene. I’m just another animal in the wilderness. A creature without paws or fangs or fur, but an animal all the same.

What if I keep on walking? What if I don’t go back? Will Holo know to come find me? Can we—shouldwe—pretend that all this never happened?

The piercing cry of a red-tailed hawk interrupts my thoughts. Of course I have to go back. If I’m going to give up now, then we shouldn’t have come out of the woods in the first place. We should’ve stayed lost forever.

Maybe that would have been easier.

Just walk, Kai. Put one foot in front of the other. You know where you have to go.

By the time I get back to the cabin, Lacey’s making dinner. Holo, sitting at the kitchen table, looks at me accusingly. “Where’d you go?”

Lacey says, “And why’d you go there so damnfast?”

I dump an armload of roots and leaves on the table. “I went foraging,” I tell them. “I just suddenly had a craving for wild greens.”

“Oh,” Lacey says, as if this is perfectly reasonable.

Holo can tell that I’m lying. But he doesn’t say anything. We know how to keep each other’s secrets. We always have.

“What is all this?” Lacey says, picking up a long, thin root and looking at it curiously.

“Biscuit-root,” I say. “It grows by the lodgepole pines and inthe meadow. And that’s lamb’s-quarter from near the stream. And dandelions from your garden.”

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