And so I looked for them.
Every day that Grace was at school, I searched for them, the two wolves I didn’t trust, the ones who were supposed to be dead. Mercy Falls was small.
Boundary Wood was — not as small, but more familiar, and maybe more willing to give up its secrets to me.
I would find Shelby and Jack and I’d confront them on my own terms.
But Shelby had left no trail off the deck, so maybe she really was gone.
And Jack, too, was nowhere — a dead, cold trail. A ghost that left no corpse behind. I felt like I had combed the entire county for signs of him.
I thought — vaguely hoped — that he’d died, too, and ceased to be a problem. Been hit by some Department of Transportation vehicle and scooped into a dump somewhere. But there were no tracks leading to roads, no trees marked, no scent of a new-made wolf lingering at the school parking lot. He had disappeared as completely as snow in summer.
I should’ve been glad. Disappearing meant discreet. Disappearing meant he wasn’t my problem anymore.
But I just couldn’t accept it. We wolves did many things: change, hide, sing underneath a pale, lonely moon — but we never disappeared entirely.
Humans disappeared. Humans made monsters out of us.
