Possibly. But what Ididknow after a quick glance over my shoulder was that the wolves were still descending and nearing the base of the ridge; once they hit level ground, we’d have seconds before they were on us again. “If we can steal a plane, we can break into a house,” I told him, and we raced faster toward the first cabin.
It was very small: four walls, a chimney, and a door. A single dirty window flanked the door, but it had been shuttered from the inside. We came to a sliding stop, and Huck banged on the door. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
Most definitely empty.
“Pick the lock, Huck!”
“What lock? You see a bleedin’ keyhole?”
That was strange. I rammed against the door with my shoulder. It gave a little, but so did my arm. “Ow!”
“Move,” Huck said.
He rammed the door with gritted teeth. Once. Twice. Three times.
On the fourth attempt, he bellowed out a battle cry and threw his weight hard against the door. Wood splintered, and the door flew inward.
I tossed a glance over my shoulder to see Lupu’s white body alongside her new packmates, all of them bounding across the snow. She turned her head in our direction. In a flash, the three animals were speeding toward us, heads down, eyes reflecting moonlight off the river.
“Inside!” I shouted to Huck.
We lunged into darkness and slammed the door behind us.
“Help me hold it,” Huck shouted.
As soon as I braced the door alongside him, wood rattled against my arm, and I yelped.
The wolves were trying to get through!
“Keep holding it,” Huck said, struggling for breath. “No way they can bust the door down. It’s as thick as my arm. Only reason we were able to get inside is because I broke a plank barring the door.”
The heavy wood door shuddered again. I wasn’t sure if Lupu and her new wolf pack agreed with Huck’s assessment.
“Lupu!” I called out against the wooden door. “Go home. Go back to Lovena.”
“Doubt she’s going to pay attention to that,” Huck muttered.
Well? That was what Lovena told me to tell the dog if we ever saw it again. Couldn’t hurt, could it? I called out again in Romanian, just for good measure, as we used our combined weight to keep the door shut. My chest rose and fell as I counted seconds, bracing for the next attack. Ten seconds. Thirty. A minute.
Nothing. No attack. No sound of paws in the snow. Silence.
“Are they gone?” I whispered to Huck.
“No idea,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what; I’m not going back out there to find out, that’s for damn sure.”
That made two of us. I shifted my arm to shove a hand into my coat pocket and felt around until the tips of my fingers grazed Lovena’s wooden talisman. Safe. Like us.Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Dust tickled my nose. The cabin smelled old and dirty. As I switched shoulders on the door, I kicked something with my foot. Toeing it, I realized it was Huck’s broken plank. I felt around until I had it in hand. One end was splintered, but what remained of the board was still a good length. And when we shuffled it around between us, testing, we found that it wasjustlong enough to slide back into both brackets and bar the door.
“We need something else to barricade it,” Huck said, and after a moment he shoved a heavy table my way. I helped him pull it into place, wedging it against the door.
“That’s better,” he said in the dark. “Hopefully. Do you hear them out there?”
“I hear the river,” I said. “How is Lupu here? How, Huck?”
“She couldn’t have been with Sarkany. It’s not possible for them to have made it here this fast.”
“Unless she wasn’t with him. Maybe she escaped. We never saw her in the citadel.”
