One
Theymightbeableto track her credit card. Or they might not. No way to know. Anyway it didn’t matter. She had no cash, and her little silver Honda was almost out of gas again.
Two hours out from Harmony Ridge, April filled up. Better not to use her card at her exact destination. If they could track it. Maybe they could, or maybe not. Maybe they would guess her strategy, that she had come to a wolf pack for protection from a wolf pack. Or maybe they’d expect her to avoid wolves. She hoped so.
The last clear corner of her brain could tell the rest of her was fraying and shorting out. She’d eaten nothing since yesterday, but she had decided on gas only, no restaurants. Of course she’d taken no food with her. No food, no extra clothes, nothing but her purse. She owned the car, so that was something. The only thing. Stopping at her apartment had been too risky.
An hour and a half later, April left the highway per her phone’s instruction—maybe hackable but unavoidable—and in twenty minutes hit what appeared to be the outskirts of town.
“You’ve arrived,” her phone announced.
Arrived. Wow. Good. But all her muscles stayed tight—neck, spine, legs, arms. She coasted down to thirty miles per hour. She tried to see everything on both sides of the street. She was headed up a slow incline, and on the right a stretch of open field dropped away. Foothills rose past the valley, bright green grass spangled with white and purple wildflowers. June in the South. Enthusiastic summer.
In less than a mile, the road leveled and the town appeared. What had been a lonely back road was now Main Street. A small blue sign, easily missed:welcome to harmony ridge, tennessee. population 762.
Was a resident wolf pack counted in their census?
Was a wolf pack evenhere?
Well, she’d wagered her life that it was. But she couldn’t search out their addresses on her phone. The internet had contributed what it could to her quest. Now she needed the help of…people.
Directions were best sought at gas stations. She parked beside the little quick-mart, ignoring the pumps. She tucked her hair under her beaten ball cap. Red hair was too memorable.
Right. Okay. Get out and ask.
Ready. Set. Go.
She gritted her teeth. Got out of her car. Prepared to talk to a human for the first time in forty-seven days.
The bell above the door jingled as she stepped inside. Behind the counter stood a man in his fifties—white, dark hair, paunch just edging over a classic silver belt buckle. His eyes tracked her as she stepped up to the counter.
“Need directions to the highway?” he said in an accent slightly thicker than her own—well, to her ears at least. He might disagree.
“Yes, please,” she said.
“Knew it.” His eyes were warm. “I’m set too far back for travelers to fill up here unless they’re lost. Or if they mean to stop in town, I guess, but that’s a lot less likely in our case.”
April’s glitching thoughts could hardly follow his rambling. She listened to him explain the simple route back the way she’d come, but those weren’t the directions she needed. How to ask, though? Her stomach was tense, her pulse racing. She had to calm down, or he’d notice.
“Got all that?” he said.
“Yes, thank you. But could you tell me…um, where I am exactly?” She glanced around the interior as if the answer might sit on one of the shelves, beside the snack cakes and candy bars and refrigerated sandwiches.
“Oh, this here is Harmony Ridge. You must’ve missed the sign coming in; a lot of folks do.”
“Harmony Ridge,” she said as if trying to place where she’d heard the name. Then she tried to brighten her expression. “Oh, I know what. Do y’all have a lupine community around here?”
The man’s dark eyebrows shot toward his receding hairline. “And here I thought I’d heard it all, every question a traveler could ask me. You, miss, just asked a new one.”
Well, shoot. So much for forgettable.
“Yeah, they’ve got a community out there. The town’s best kept secret, if you know what I mean. Some folks don’t believe it, and some who do have a pretty poor view of them.”
Obviously. They were wolves.
“For the most part though,” the man said, “they’re just folks, you know? Same as the rest of us, is what I say.”
He saidwhat? “I guess so.”
