Part 3
By seven, Eli had made his decision badly and completely.
Lily needed more than honey water and old crackers. She needed broth, soft food, clean clothes, antibiotics if infection showed, a pediatric exam, a social worker from outside the county, and a police department that did not answer Grant Whitaker’s calls before it answered 911. Eli could not get all of that before noon, but he could get some of it from Miller’s Market if he kept his mouth shut and his hands steady.
He knelt beside the couch. The child’s eyes opened at once.
“I have to go into town,” he said. “Not far. Ash is staying with you.”
Her fingers tightened in the wolf’s fur.
“I’ll come back,” Eli added, because he realized no one may have said that to her and meant it in a very long time. “You hear me? I’ll come back.”
Ash lifted his head and looked at him with a stillness that felt almost like judgment. Eli scratched the place between the wolf’s ears. “Watch her,” he said. “No heroes unless you have to.”
He locked the door from the outside so the cabin looked empty and took the old logging path on his snowmobile, keeping to the tree line where he could. Mill Creek sat twelve miles south, a town of brick storefronts, church steeples, frozen gutters, and people who knew your business before you decided whether it was business at all.
Miller’s Market smelled like coffee, floor cleaner, and warm bread. Two retired teachers stood near the produce bin arguing over oranges. A plow driver leaned by the lottery machine. Behind the counter, Sharon Miller looked up from a stack of receipts.
“Eli Mason,” she said. “You lose a bet? Haven’t seen you this early since Ruth was alive.”
“Morning, Sharon.”
He grabbed a basket and moved too quickly. Applesauce. Instant oatmeal. Whole milk. Chicken broth. Children’s vitamins. Clean washcloths. A pack of little girls’ thermal socks with pink stripes. Baby food, because a starved child’s stomach needed careful steps back toward eating.
By the time he reached the register, Sharon’s eyebrows had climbed halfway to her hairline.
“Planning to open a daycare out there?”
“Stomach’s been bad,” Eli said, setting the jars down. “Dentist says I chew like a wood chipper full of rocks.”
The plow driver laughed. Sharon did not. Her eyes flicked from the baby food to the socks.
Before she could ask more, the bell above the door rang behind him.
The air in the store changed.
Wade Brackett stepped in wearing a black parka with Whitaker Security stitched over the chest. He had the thick neck and flat eyes of a man who enjoyed standing too close. In high school, he had broken another boy’s jaw behind the gym and claimed the boy had slipped on ice. As an adult, he had found more official ways to make people afraid.
“Eli,” Wade said.
“Wade.”
“Cold morning to be shopping for a family.”
Eli kept his face bored. “Cold morning to be wearing a logo indoors.”
Sharon pretended to scan the jars.
Wade smiled without moving anything above his mouth. “Heard you were out by Hollow Creek last night.”
Eli felt his heart hit once, hard.
“Must’ve been somebody else.”
“Maybe.” Wade picked up one of the pink socks from the counter, turned the package over, and set it down again. “Dangerous area. Old wells. Rotten floors. People get hurt out there, nobody hears them.”
“I was a paramedic. I’ve heard that speech.”
“Then you know to be careful.”
Wade leaned close enough that Eli smelled peppermint gum under the coffee on his breath.
“At your age,” Wade said softly, “accidents don’t have to look complicated.”
Eli took his bags, nodded once to Sharon, and walked out without giving Wade the satisfaction of seeing him hurry.
Then he hurried.
The logging road blurred under the snowmobile. Branches whipped his shoulders. He had lived too long to believe panic helped, but it rose anyway, hot and useless in his throat. Half a mile from the cabin, he cut the engine and coasted in.
The gate was open.
So was the front door.
Eli came off the snowmobile with the shotgun in his hands and the shopping bags forgotten in the sled. “Ash!”
No answer. No bark. No scrape of claws.
Inside, the cabin had been torn apart. The couch was flipped onto its back. Ruth’s blue spoon jar lay shattered against the wall. The kitchen table had been kicked sideways, and the braided rug was bunched near the stove. On the floorboards by the cellar door was a dark smear of blood.
Eli raised the shotgun, breathing through his teeth.
A low growl rose from beneath the floor.
He moved to the root cellar hatch and lifted it.
Ash stood in the potato cellar, one shoulder low, his body blocking the back corner. His muzzle was wet with blood. Behind him, wedged between two sacks of kindling, Lily sat with her knees against her chest. Her face was white, but she was alive.
“Good boy,” Eli whispered. “Lord above, good boy.”
Ash let him climb down. Only then did Eli see the slice along the wolf’s front leg, shallow but bleeding. There was more blood upstairs than that wound could explain.
“You bit one of them,” Eli said.
Ash blinked slowly, as if the fact did not interest him.
Lily reached for Eli then, not fully, but enough that her fingers touched his sleeve. He crouched in front of her and kept his voice level. “You did good. Both of you.”
Upstairs, while he cleaned Ash’s wound, Lily watched every dab of antiseptic and every turn of gauze. When Ash flinched, she slid off the couch, touched the bandage, and made a sound so small Eli nearly missed it.
“Ash,” she breathed.
Eli looked up.
The child swallowed. Her scar tugged when she tried again. “Ash… hurt.”
Not help me. Not I’m scared.
Ash hurt.
Eli turned away long enough to steady himself. “He’ll heal,” he said. “We’re going to make sure of it.”
The radio crackled before he could unplug it. A news bulletin cut through the static, bright and urgent.
“Authorities are asking for help in the search for a missing five-year-old girl last seen near Lake Alder, forty miles east of Mill Creek. County Executive Grant Whitaker has announced a reward and says he will personally join volunteers at the search command post—”
Eli stared at the radio.
Lake Alder was in the opposite direction. There was no missing girl there. Grant Whitaker had just filled the roads with deputies, volunteers, cameras, and good citizens searching for a child who did not exist, far away from the child who did.
The bulletin continued, but Eli no longer heard the words.
Lily had begun rocking again, both hands over her ears.
Eli crossed the room and unplugged the radio so hard the plug cracked against the wall. “He’s moving people away,” he said. “That’s what this is.”
Ash lifted his head.
A thin buzzing sound came from outside.
At first Eli thought it was a snowmobile far off. Then the sound settled directly above the cabin, steady and insect-like. He went to the window and moved the curtain less than an inch. A black drone hovered over the yard, a red light blinking beneath it like a watchful eye. Eli let the curtain fall. “They’ve found us,” he said…
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