“H-huck,” I whispered.
“Yes?”
“What kind of haunted things are supposed to be in these woods? Ghosts?”
His head turned ever so slowly toward the approaching shape. It was moving with care.
Stalking us.
“That’s no ghost,” he whispered. “Ghosts don’t growl.”
No, but wolves did.
17
THE WOLF’S SHAGGY HEAD CAMEinto sight inside a shaft of moonlight. His body followed. His gray fur was filthy and patchy, and I could count his ribs. He was starved. Possibly sick. And as he prowled closer, two others appeared behind him, one tawny, the other white.
White. Not skinny or starved, this one. Not quite a wolf even.
And she had only one eye.
“Jaysus,” Huck whispered, releasing one of my hands. “That’s...”
Yes. Yes, it was. Lovena’s stolen wolf dog.
The two animals with Lupu were clearly wild. Had she escaped Sarkany and joined a pack, or had Sarkany sent her here to attack us? How was that even possible? If Sarkany indeed had stolen the ring in the Sighi?oara museum as we’d assumed, and Lupu was with him then? There was absolutely no way he could have made it here by car in the same short time it had taken us to fly here.
Impossible!
Logically, that meant she might have broken away from him since the last time we’d seen her. Her collar with its strange symbols was missing too. Perhaps that was the spell holding her hostage.
Or maybe I was wrong on all accounts. All I really knew was that wild animals were closing in, predators bigger and stronger than me—ones with teeth that could rip skin and break bone—and there was nothing to protect us. No weapon. No shelter to run to or gate to close.
Nothing between them and our throats.
I’d never been so afraid in my entire life.
“Nice wolfies,” Huck said softly. “If we had any meat to give ya, I promise we would share. But we, uh...”
We were the meat.
“Run across the stream on three,” Huck whispered to me, more firmly grasping the hand he still held. “One, two—”
Three!
Racing away from the wolves, we crashed through the stream’s icy water—Huck in one stride and me in two. Cold lashed around my ankles, but I scrambled up the snowy riverbank, hearing the wolves behind us.
Huck and I sprinted through the trees. Blindly. Instinctually. All I smelled were spruce needles and rotting leaves beneath the snow. All I heard was the steady lope of wild predators on our tail.
Branches whipped my face. Thorns snagged my coat. We couldn’t outrun them. They were fanning out behind us, two flanking and one behind. I caught snatches of the tawny wolf weaving past trees on my right. Pointed ears. Tilted eyes. Fangs. He was closing in.
Desperate, I made one final push to outrun him. My boots pounded the snowy ground. My lungs were close to bursting. But right ahead of us there was light—silvery moonlight. Another clearing? The end of the forest?
Cliff!
I couldn’t have stopped myself if I’d tried.
My foot slipped. I went airborne. Then my back hit solid earth.
