Free House of Mercy by Erin Healy Page B

encounter made sense. Not even her decision to stop running, which wasn’t a decision so much as a reflex. She halted and turned to face her hunter. She had no wisdom that might keep her alive for a minute longer, but she was no longer afraid.
    The wolf ran up to her and then stopped and sniffed the ground at her feet, eyes upward on her face. Seconds passed loudly in Beth’s ears like a roaring prairie wind that might be followed with equal chances by a sudden calm or a life-threatening tornado. He circled her, and she remained as still as the eye of a storm, taking deep, sweet breaths, watching him. Behind his shoulders, his lightweight fur coat stood on end and revealed long scars that ran the length of his back, four parallel stripes running all the way to his hindquarters, as if he’d narrowly escaped a predator of his own.
    His orbit finished, he stopped sniffing but remained in a hostile posture, the fur on his back electrified, his muzzle low, his eyes high. And then the wolf bared his teeth and growled.
    Beth scrabbled backward. Her heel met a stone and took her legs out from under her. She landed on her seat in the stream. Water soaked through her jeans in the two or three seconds it took her to get vertical again. The wolf didn’t attack but continued to press in, the way Herriot might goad a stubborn cow.
    Now the ears flattened back against his head; his nose dropped another inch and his head leveled out with his neck; the lip riding high on his teeth flickered.
    They understood each other then, wolf and woman. Silently, Beth agreed to follow the canine’s direction. Yielding to his push, she began a cautious backward walk in a weaving line along the bank of the creek. The sun was west of her, glaring on the ridgeline in a way that made it difficult to see. She strained her eyes to their limits, demanding they include the wolf and stumbling hazards at all times.
    A scrubby stand of thinleaf alder trees had taken root near the stream. Beth reached out for one when she was close enough to touch it. The growth was sprawling and might provide a place for predator and prey to circle until she could make a plan.
    She lifted her left arm behind her, into her blind spot, reaching out for leaves and branches. Her hand hit the shrub, and the foliage rustled. At the same moment, the wolf stopped. Beth froze too, and waited to see what he would do.
    The air was still and the earth, dampened by the moving water, smelled like it was less than a day old.
    A panting reached Beth’s ears, the quick and short breaths of someone in pain. It was the sound of her ten-year-old self the time she slipped off a boulder and caught her ankle in the marmot hole beneath it. The hurt had been so bad that long minutes passed before her body remembered where to find its tears.
    But this sound wasn’t coming out of her memory. The sound wasn’t even human, and it was rising from the backside of the alder. Beth took her eyes off the wolf and looked for the source of the heaving lungs.
    She immediately realized her mistake and whipped her head back around, expecting claws and snarling teeth bared under a bloody gray muzzle.
    The wolf was gone.
    Beth spun, searching and backing into the protection of the tree’s shelter at the same time. The slender branches of the tree-shrub snagged her hair. She had never imagined a wolf could vanish like that. The only thing worse than a wolf on the hunt, she thought, was an invisible wolf on the hunt.
    Branches scratched at her cheeks and neck and hands as she circled, watchful.
    At the place where the alder roots reached for the water, she stumbled over an animal lying at her feet, and the shock of the encounter pulled a yelp out of her throat. It wasn’t the wolf, though. The heaving shape of its rounded belly was smooth and shorthaired, the golden color of winter grass. Its pure white underside and matching short tail looked soft as angora, and three matching stripes circled the creature’s throat