Silver Fox (Silver Shifters 2)

“Can I look?” Doris asked.

Lon moved back, and Doris duck-waddled to the wall and pressed her eye to the dime-sized hole. She made out the dimples of prints on the snowy slope. As she squinted at those, a long canine shape trotted into view, tail up and curled.

That was no dog. Nor was it a coyote. From ears to tail, it was a wolf.

Impossible! There were no wolves in these mountains. At least not for a century or more.

But there it was. It lifted its snout, looked around, and then its shape smeared.

Doris blinked, blaming the tiny knothole for blurring her vision—but when she looked again, in the place of the wolf stood a woman, her skin pale in the moonlight. Naked to her bare feet. Blond curls bounced on her back as she ran a few steps toward the house, then vanished from view.

Vanessa?

That was totally impossible. Doris froze, peering downward. Her nose and cheekbone ground against the plank as she tried to see below her, but a moment later Vanessa appeared again, now wearing jeans and boots, and yanking a sweater over her head. Then she walked out of view.

Doris turned around and sat against the wall, her heart thundering against her ribs. Hallucination? The most important thing was to calm Lon.

She forced a smile. “The wolf is gone now, Lon. Everything is quiet out there. How about you climb into your tent, and I’ll stay right here, like I promised.”

“Okay,” the boy said, and hopped across the room. He scurried into the tent, from which brief rustling noises were heard, and then quiet. Doris sat where she was, half-aware that she was shivering, though she didn’t feel cold. Except her feet. She wriggled her toes. Surely she wouldn’t be aware of cold toes if she were still dreaming, right?

She pressed her eye back to the knothole—in time to see a wolf go trotting up the slope. This one had different markings than the one that—

A tiny voice finished, the Vanessa-wolf.

The cold air coming in through the knothole chilled her eye, and she turned around again, this time pulling her knees up inside her nightgown. She tucked her robe around her feet to warm them again, remembering how she’d sat right here as a girl, reading and rereading the battered books in the bookcase next to her elbow, books she hadn’t thought about in years. A Wrinkle in Time. A Walk Out of the World. Andre Norton’s Witch World books. They were all stories about anything being possible. But she’d slowly lost that assurance that magic might happen to her, and so she’d turned to the make-believe of the stage. There, at least, everyone around you cooperated in making the magic real for the length of the play.

She had to look once more.

Once again she turned, and peered. Nothing, this time.

Three more times she did that, seeing nothing each time, until her cold toes and burning eyes drove her away from the uncomfortable spot that had seemed so cozy when she was a skinny twig of ten.

Lon’s breathing had slowed into sleep.

Slowly Doris felt her way back down the stairs, keeping the attic door open. She also left her bedroom door open, in case either of the children woke and cried out.

She dropped her robe over the chair and climbed shivering into bed. She pulled the covers up to her chin and tried to compose herself for sleep, but her mind raced and raced, keeping her up till dawn.

Eyes burning, she got up, wrapped her robe firmly around her, and found her slippers. Then she moved out, and crept down the stairs. Avoiding the kitchen (she saw light under the door), she slipped into the mud room, and eased the back door open.

Then she walked carefully out, her slippers sinking in the snow. Bits of it dropped inside her slipper, cold against her skin. But she ventured farther, until she rounded the corner to the blind wall, where the knothole lay up between the slants of the roof.

She turned around to survey the snow. At first she saw nothing out of the ordinary. But when she bent, she noticed irregularities, like the patterns sand made when wind blew it. But elsewhere the snow was a smooth blanket. Had someone wiped out the footprints?

She withdrew, noticing that hers were the only clear prints, and slipped back into the mud room, shivering. She looked in the corner where the broom and rake were kept, and bent down.

Under the broom, drops of water had pooled, as if snow clinging to the bristles had melted. As if someone had used that broom to smear out prints in the snow.

She heard Xi Yong’s and Isidor’s voices from the kitchen. Joey’s was not among them.

Unable to face anyone with what she’d seen—what she thought she’d seen—while in nightie and bathrobe, she fled back upstairs, kicked off her wet slippers, started to climb into bed … and then stopped herself.

No.

There was no way she could sleep after what she’d seen. She needed to know what was going on. She needed to know now. And that meant finding Joey, if he was in the house.

She got up, put on her clammy slippers and padded back downstairs.