Raised by Wolves

Chapter 21

CHAPTER 21

HOLO’S WATCHING A raven preen itself when Lacey pulls up in her hatchback. The old Volkswagen belches a cloud of exhaust. Holo chokes on it. He’s not used to machine and engine smells. He hates them. They sear his nose and burn his throat.

“Hey, you, how was school?” Lacey asks, beaming.

Holo blinks. How’s he supposed to answer that? He’d felt trapped. Scared. Confused. The food was weird and soft—though he ate it, whatever it was (some kind of meat, sitting in a salty, brown puddle)—and he’d had to take something called a quiz. He’d gotten yelled at for growling. And then he’d met another Hardy, younger than the big one but just as mean. Logan Hardy had said that all wolves should be shot on sight, and that anyone who thought otherwise deserved to get their freaky asses kicked.

“Ummm… It was okay,” Holo tells Lacey.

“Good! Where’s Kai?”

Holo glances back toward the school. He hasn’t seen his sister since Mrs. Simon led him away from her after lunch. But the bell rang twenty minutes ago, and he watched all the other kids go home. He can’t help the thought he has next: What if she ran?

But she wouldn’t, not without him.

Would she?

The raven rasps from the tree branch. Holo looks up to watch it flap away and disappear into the blue sky.

“Should I go in and look around?” Lacey asks.

Holo shakes his head. She wouldn’t be able to find Kai unless Kai wanted to be found. And he doubts that she does. “We have to wait,” he says.

Lacey says, “All right, we’ve got time. Hop in, why don’t you?”

“No thanks.” He doesn’t want to breathe car air. He doesn’t want to hear the car radio. He stands there, fists clenched. Kai, where are you?

Lacey sings along to the radio. Something about a guy named Bruno and how no one’s supposed to talk about him.

Kai, you didn’t leave me, did you?

Did you?

Ten terrible minutes later, his sister finally appears. Relief floods Holo’s body. She didn’t run . But when she gets close, Holo sees that she has thunder in her eyes. Kai’s scary when she looks like that, so he doesn’t tell her how worried he was. He just presses his shoulder tight against hers.

She doesn’t speak the whole car ride back to Chester and Lacey’s house. She stares out the window. But that’s okay, Holo tells himself. They’ve gone days without talking before. Nature doesn’t care about words.

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.