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PROLOGUE
Alone,never married, and sixty-three years old, Winston Hale sat on his bed. The coils in his mail-order mattress announced his slow and aching progress as he removed his boots. Lifting his right foot to strip off its sock, the arthritis in his knee echoed the creaky protests from his bed that announced the close of each evening.
He considered leaving the socks on, but there was a tender spot on one heel threatening to become an ulcer. He finally hooked the bottom right hem of his jeans, the denim soiled from a long day of working his ranch. He tugged upward, forcing the knee to bend. A hard groan vibrated past his lips. A scream from one of the sheep in his herd immediately drowned out the sound. Another scream followed, and another, until a chorus of terrified bleats rattled the thin walls of his home.
"Damn wolves!” Winston shouted. Ignoring the pain stabbing through his knee and twisted spine, he roughly shoved his boots on. Rising too quickly, he flailed backwards onto the bed as his right knee locked.
The screaming outside intensified.
It was a bone-chilling sound. The kind of sound that often foretold death. Like the deer and elk in the woods, his herd could scent a predator long before it came within kill distance. He’d lost two kids over the last few months. The murders turned one ewe mad from grief and the constant threat that haunted the edges of the ranch, especially at night.
“You’re not taking another one!” Winston railed, rolling onto his stomach and pushing up from the mattress. Face contorting with pain, he grabbed the bedside rifle. From the threshold of his room to the front door was less than fifteen feet. Reaching it, he eased into the shadows that surrounded his home.
If he shot the rifle at the ground, the wolf would flee, but only for a while. Hunger would force its return. It wouldn’t be anywhere near the ranch if it wasn’t already desperate. Winston didn’t need to see the animal to know it was mad or starving, maybe both. The state’s wildlife agency had put out fliers all across the county with a warning that most game in the area wasn’t safe to consume. Some kind of outbreak was making every kind of creature sick enough to die once they were exposed.
Nightmares of the illness spreading to his sheep already left him exhausted each morning. Now he had to worry about it driving predators to his door.
His shouting didn’t scare the wolf away. He knew because the screaming hadn’t stopped. Or maybe the beast was gone but had taken a lamb with it. With the rifle’s butt jammed tight against his shoulder, he rotated at the waist, the barrel’s tip moving in a wide arc as he tried to spot anything moving outside of the pens.
A vicious snarl nearly caused Winston to piss himself, the muscles girding his perineum pulling tight to stop the embarrassment before it could happen. Running on pure reflex, he swung the rifle hard right just as the terrifying jaws of a wolf as black as night clamped around the neck of a small ewe. The beast caught his gaze upon it. It didn’t run, just ground its jaws around the ewe’s neck until the animal’s screams of terror and wild flailing stopped.
Damn wolf should have run, he thought.It’s desperate.
Desperate meant deadly—the threat now extending beyond Winston’s herd to his own safety.
In reflex, he pulled the trigger. The recoil knocked him back a step, but the shot got off clean. The wolf howled around the flesh its jaws refused to release.
And then it was gone in a dark streak toward the woods, wounded but not dead and with no way in the dark for Winston to tell if he and his rifle had delivered what would ultimately be a kill shot.
He tried to sprint for the quad runner. His knee rebelled. He hobbled forward, biting down on his bottom lip as he swung the lame leg over the seat, then shouldered his gun. With the vehicle’s LED lights on, he rode to where the blood trail started and followed the drops and splashes that looked like black ink stains on the dying grass.
The trail dwindled to nothing once he reached the tree line half a mile out from the house and pens. Winston sat on the quad runner, glaring at everything around him as the four-stroke engine rumbled and coughed.
Turning the engine off, he listened, ears straining for some hint of where the wolf had gone.
A series of mournful howls bleeding one into the other vibrated through the trees.
Was it the wolf’s death keen or was the animal sadistically mocking him? Whatever the sound foretold, it was nearby.
Leaving the quad runner, Winston shouldered his gun, the pain in his knee forgotten as adrenaline flooded his aging body. He had to make sure the wolf was dead, had to be certain it wouldn’t come back and take another ewe and then another.
The howl died out as he walked.
Another sound took its place.
A baby wailed.
Hunger?
Horror?
His own hallucination?
Tears slid down Winston’s cheek as he walked toward the desolate sound.
Instead of a wolf, he found a woman—naked, dead, and covered in blood. In arms still pliant, her corpse sheltered a swaddled infant.
Putting the gun down, he picked up the baby and held it tight against his chest. It quieted almost instantly. Holding it with one arm, he made a quick search of the area. He found very little. Someone, probably the woman, had dug out a small shelter, almost like an animal’s den but big enough he could easily imagine both her and the infant fitting inside. A backpack held a change of clothes and baby sling, but no identification or money. At the bottom of the bag, he caught a flash of silver and pulled it out. A pendant and its chain. The three swirling wolf heads reminded him of the little plastic disks that went in his old 45 rpm records so they would fit on the turntable.
