Charlie Morrison's Arc

Chapter 13 of 14

Charlie kept her back to the path and listened. The footsteps stopped a dozen paces behind her. Boots, not paws. Heavy, but careful. She tightened her arm around the wooden box under the cloak and thought through what she had at hand. No phone would reach out here. No neighbor would hear a shout. The wolf could fight, but a fight before the barrier meant blood on the ground, and blood on the ground meant a home marked unclean before she ever reached the court. She needed a signal she could send fast, and she had none. No horn. No flare. No word Fern had given her for danger on the path. Her guardian pressed against her left leg. Its shoulder came up past her hip, warm through the sundress. Its ears were flat. Green eyes fixed on the trees behind her. She felt her own pulse in the pad of her thumb where it braced the box. She made herself count. Three breaths. Then she would turn, cloak first, and see who had come. Before she reached the third breath, something moved on her right. She flinched and looked. A second wolf stood at her elbow, close enough to touch. Bigger than her guardian. Dense gray fur, dark down the spine, pale at the throat. Green eyes, sharper than the first pair. He had come out of the brush without a sound. No branch had cracked. No leaf had turned. She knew him before her mind caught up. David. Not the man in the button-down shirt now. The wolf shape he wore when he wanted to move unseen. He did not look at her. He looked past her, at the path, at whatever had followed. His lip lifted once, then settled. He stepped forward half a pace, so his shoulder was ahead of hers, and stopped there. Charlie waited for the debt to show in him. The old debt to her grandmother. The reason he gave for everything. She watched his ribs move. She watched the set of his head. There was no ledger in it. He had not come because she called. She had not called. He had not come to pay anyone. He had come because he had decided, alone, that she should not walk to the barrier without a second body between her and the trees. She felt it land in her chest, quiet and certain. He was hers to trust. Behind her, the footsteps started again, moving off. Whoever had followed had counted the wolves and chosen not to try two. Charlie let out the breath she had been holding. She did not need a signal now. She had two guardians at her sides and a barrier ten steps ahead. She shifted the box under the cloak, set her hand lightly on the gray wolf's shoulder, and walked on.