Black Wolf by Steph Shangraw Read Free Book Online

home, and houses were
harder to get out of than a tent was. There was no way anyone was
seriously going to be willing to drive a hundred miles each way
just to take him home.
     
    He had to get
back to the city, back to Shaine, back to where he had some control
instead of being forced to depend on the kindness of strangers.
Trust was a stupid risk to take and the consequences of losing the
gamble were just too high. He'd learned that lesson well, too many
times—even the people you should be able to trust, like foster
parents, might be nice ones who treated you well, or might be… just
the opposite. And even the ones who treated you well and seemed to
care… they could leave, go away and leave you behind without a
second thought, just when it seemed safe to relax.
     
    A hundred
miles was a long way, and it was going to be easier to do with a
little extra money.
     
    Sorry, guys. I
do appreciate the generosity, like you'll ever believe that. But I
can only count on me, and this has gone too far already.
     
    Stealthily, he
got up, picked up his shoes and his leather jacket. He slipped out
of the tent silently, zipped it closed again behind him. He had
some idea by now where to look for money; he found about seventy
dollars. He hesitated briefly, then grabbed Flynn's canvas backpack
and tossed in a mixture of Gatorade and granola bars.
     
    There was
supposed to be a village, that way. It had to be on a highway or at
least have a road linking to it. He could get oriented from there,
and it couldn't be a big trick to keep the bright moon in always
the same place.
     
    Nor was it. It
was simplicity itself.
     
    So why was he
suddenly back at the clearing?
     
    No big deal,
he'd just gotten off-track somehow. He found a distinctive
star-pattern—there were so many stars, out here in the country!—and
oriented himself by that.
     
    He was back at
the clearing again, in short order.
     
    Three more
times he tried, with the same results.
     
    He stared at
the tent a moment. Had he been imagining the shimmering, as if the
nylon had its own light, that he'd caught just out of the corner of
his eye? When he looked straight at it, there was nothing special,
but his peripheral vision always got that eerie glow. This was
getting spooky.
     
    Belatedly, he
noticed a similar glow, gold and white and the red of sunset, on
the ground around the clearing's edge.
     
    He shivered. Real spooky. This would be a frighteningly easy time to
start believing in a lot of things. Like God and Satan and people
who seemed like angels...
     
    Ridiculous.
     
    But
still...
     
    Trying to
quell rising panic, he tried different directions, away from the
moon, angles to either side. No direction worked any better. He was
completely trapped.
     
    He wanted to
scream, to have something solid that he could actually fight,
instead of this unreasoning, unreasonable whatever-it-was confining
him. Something he could hit back at. This was too bizarre, he was
trapped inside a clearing in the middle of nowhere by something he
couldn't even see...
     
    The sky was
beginning to grey, the quartet still sleeping in the tent could
wake at any time—Kevin especially, since he was always up with the
sun. If they found him up already, red-handed even, there was going
to be trouble. Some small, still rational part of his mind
counselled him to go back to bed and think about it later. Relieved
to have some course of action, he decided to take it.
     
    He returned
everything to its place, and dug himself back in under his
blankets.
     
    Sleep took a
long time to come, and he dreamed of invisible fences that kept him
away from something he wanted more than anything.
     
    * * *
     
    Kevin smiled
to himself, listening to Jesse's breathing slow as he attempted to
get back to sleep. Thank Brigid he'd set those wards to work from
either direction at night, and that he'd had enough warning from
Jesse's thoughts to make sure Bane slept through it all. Deanna,
beside him, had never