Snowbound

SEVENTY-NINE

It was a cold night, windless, starry. The gravel crunched under Will’s boots.

The woodpile stood against the stone chimney at the side of the house. He filled his arms with logs and carried them to the front porch, dropped the first load at the foot of the steps. On the way back to the woodpile, he stopped. He could see the pasture in the distance, glowing under the full moon. There were shadows moving across it.

He froze. The thudding of his heart seemed to pluck at the silence like a guitar string as he counted half a dozen deer sauntering over the turned earth, working their way toward the river for an evening drink. They looked albino in the moonlight, so bright out there, he could see their breath clouds.

Will exhaled slowly as the fear receded, and he wondered if it would always be this way—that breathless anxiety as he rounded corners, listening for clandestine footsteps in the silence, looking for movement where none should be. He could tell himself a thousand times that the Alphas would never come for them, but that didn’t mean it would or wouldn’t happen. Messing had been right. These things, he couldn’t control.

Live your life, Mr. Innis.

Fuck the fear.

Will reached into his pocket, pulled out Javier’s BlackBerry, which he’d taken from Kalyn’s pack two months ago, before they’d flown out of the Wolverine Hills.

He kept it charged and always with him like a pocket time bomb, waiting for a call—from whom, he did not know. Maybe Jav’s wife or an Alpha compadre.

He turned it on, stared at the glowing screen. There had been no calls. The BlackBerry wasn’t going to vibrate. He’d been holding on to this device as an obsessive-compulsive talisman—he checked for messages every hour—as if before the Alphas came for them, they would call first, as if nothing could happen to his family without advance warning, as long as he religiously checked for incoming communication.

“I should throw this piece of shit at the chimney,” he said aloud, his grip tightening around the BlackBerry, his finger inadvertently pressing a button on the side.

The screen changed to show a list of folders, SMS OUTBOX drawing his attention, and he clicked the icon to open the folder containing sent text messages, wondering why this hadn’t occurred to him before. Maybe he could find some phone numbers and addresses of Javier’s associates, forward them on to Agent Messing.

The last two text messages had been sent to the same phone number, Phoenix area code:

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2007 • 10:41 A.M. AKDT

J—Arctic Skies, Buck Young. We leave at 1:00 P.M. today

for the Wolverine Hills: 200 miles west of Fairbanks. K.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2007 • 11:03 P.M. AKDT

J—Fairbanks, Alaska. Here in one piece, but barely. K.

He opened a calendar on the BlackBerry, his heart accelerating, mouth running dry. Eleven P.M., on October 18, would have been the night he, Devlin, and Kayln spent in Fairbanks at the Best Western. October 19, the day they’d flown to the Wolverine Hills. The BlackBerry had been in Kalyn’s possession both days.

What the hell? You told him where to find us?

And a barrage of pieces that had been needling Will ever since he’d met Kalyn started to fall out of orbit and assemble themselves—things that had bothered him subconsciously, that had set up shop under his skin while he’d been too distracted, or unwilling, to pay them credence.

So you wanted out, he thought. You and Jav. And you brought us along for what? He smiled as it hit him. Because just disappearing wasn’t enough. You needed witnesses to your deaths to get the Alphas and the FBI off your backs.

He stood in the shadow of his house, trying to fit it all together, his mind passing through bewilderment, anger, then coming to rest in a state of awe as everything at last made perfect sense. What performances.

They’d put his life, and his daughter’s, in danger, but he’d gotten Rachael back, returned twenty-two women to their families, and for that, perhaps, he could play along.

Will hurled Javier’s BlackBerry into the stone chimney, the device exploding on impact.

He walked into the backyard, stood looking through the windbreak of spruce trees into the pasture, spotted the herd of deer still scrounging the banks of the Mancos River.

He looked up at the stars in the navy December sky and wondered where Kalyn was tonight, trying to make some kind of sense of her, but like a prism, each memory gleamed from a different facet, and all he arrived at was, Who are you?

The FBI agent who showed up at my house, all business, on a crisp October night?

The femme fatale who kidnapped a family and interrogated an Alpha at gunpoint?

The woman who showed kindness and warmth to my motherless daughter, and sacrificed herself in the back of a semi to find her sister?

The deer had caught wind of him, six heads raised, two of them antlered, the racks the color of the moon where the moonlight struck them.

The broken woman with scarred wrists I almost made love to in a Fairbanks hotel?

Will sat down slowly in the dead grass and watched the deer evaluate his scent, lose interest, and go back to their nighttime wandering.

May you find your peace, Kalyn.

Looking over his shoulder, he could see the adobe glow of firelight on the walls inside his house and the strands of white lights that Devlin was wrapping around their pitiful spruce. It was filling him up now, this sense he’d come to the end of something, that he was turning out of a bad corridor, though into what, he didn’t know. Just that it was someplace new, and he had his family with him.

That was more than enough.