Raised by Wolves

Chapter 80

CHAPTER 80

THE PILOT brINGS the helicopter down with a jolt on a flat patch of dusty ground. The rotors slowly wind to a stop. I climb out of the helicopter into the middle of nowhere. My legs are shaking. My stomach’s in knots. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what just happened.

Holo jumps down to the dirt beside me. Wendy follows, and then Dunham emerges from the cockpit. The sun’s all the way up now, but it’s still cold. The wolves are long gone.

“This way,” Wendy says, cocking her head, and starts to set off in the direction they went.

Dunham tries to come with us, but Wendy says, “Please. Stay here.”

He looks like he wants to protest.

“We won’t find them if you come with us,” she says.

Dunham’s shoulders drop. He nods. Turns back to the helicopter.

“Thank you,” she calls after him, and he lifts his hand in a wave without looking back.

The three of us break into a trot.

“What was that all about?” I ask. “The helicopters, Hardy, everything!”

Wendy lopes along, as surefooted as a wolf. It’s going to be hard to keep up with her. “Lacey overheard Hardy at the diner. He said he’d found a pilot who’d help him hunt wolves.”

“You can do that?” I gasp.

“Yes and no,” Wendy says. “Hardy can’t legally kill a wolf from a helicopter, but who’s going to stop him?”

“We did!” Holo says proudly.

We run another two hundred yards before Wendy answers.

“Thanks to Agent Dunham, we did,” she says.

I push up my sleeves. It turns out that it’s not cold, not if you’re chasing after wolves. “How’d you get that jerk to do it?”

“Dunham’s got a good heart,” Wendy says.

“Could’ve fooled me,” I say.

Wendy smiles grimly. “I think he feels sorry for me. I was the lost child. For decades. And that haunts him. Anyway, he’s a good man, Kai.”

I grunt. I’m going to need more proof.

Wendy slows down, then stops. She bends down to examine the ground. I try to catch my breath in this short pause.

“We’re on the right track,” she says, straightening.

So we start up again, slow and steady. If we have to, we’ll go all day.

“If Hardy had illegally shot any wolves today,” Wendy goes on, “he probably wouldn’t have faced any consequences. For all I know, he’d get a bounty for their heads.”

I’ll never understand how someone could kill an animal so wild and beautiful. And how someone else could pay them to do it. “One wolf is worth a million Hardys,” I pant.

Holo sweeps his arm across the whole vista. The distant, snowcapped mountains look a million miles away. “There’s enough room for all of us,” he insists. “Wolves and people.”

“Unfortunately that’s not how most folks see it,” Wendy says.

I know she’s right, but it’s another thing I’ll never understand: how humans think that they’re the only animal that matters.

We keep on going, not talking anymore. The minutes and the miles pass. Finally Wendy stops as we near the edge of the forested foothills. She’s not out of breath in the slightest. She gives me the briefest, smallest of smiles. Then she lifts her chin and opens her mouth. A haunting, lonely howl rises from her throat, starting quietly and then building in strength. The sound is familiar and strange at the same time—part of language I know but somehow barely understand.

Holo and I join in. Goosebumps rise on my skin as we howl in harmony.

In the distance, I hear a faint answering call. Then another. Holo turns to me, eyes shining.

“They heard us,” he says.

We sit down and wait. It feels like forever until I hear them, padding their way back to us. And I start sobbing the minute they come into view, tails wagging, tongues lolling. They’re alive. They’re safe .

Harriet crashes into Holo. Bim covers Wendy’s face in kisses. The pups skitter around, biting everyone, and Ben circles us, yipping greetings. I approach Beast, who’s standing nervously off to the side.

I sink to my knees in front of her. She steps toward me. Blinks. Whines.

I remember when I was younger, I would look deep into her golden eyes, and I could swear she understood everything about me. She loved me and made no judgments about me; I was in her pack, and that was all that mattered.

A human rarely looks at another human like that.

“I love you,” I whisper.

Beast whines and her ears pitch forward. I reach out and touch her ruff. She smells like grass, like blood, like warm wet fur.

Wendy turns to me. Her face, like mine, is streaked with tears. “They have to go now,” she says in a choked voice. “They have to go far away.”

“How are you going to tell them that?” I ask. Knives of grief pierce my throat.

Wendy doesn’t answer. I suppose she doesn’t know how to explain it. But I know her bond with the wolves is deep—as deep as her bond is with us. She’s known them since they were born. She knew their mothers and their fathers and their sisters and their brothers. There is a language, somewhere between human and wolf, that they alone speak.

Wendy flicks her hand and the wolves gather around her. She crouches down among them. Holo and I watch as their tails stop wagging. They hold themselves at complete attention. Listening. Understanding.

Finally Wendy stands. She gives three harsh claps that echo through the silent morning. “Go,” she screams. “Go!”

There’s just a single, tiny moment of hesitation. And then the wolves turn as one, slipping away into the brush like shadows.

Vanishing. Forever.

And I howl my sadness to the sky.