When the Wolf Prowls

by Vanessa Prelatte

  “You got a good grip?” Danny said.

  “Yes, I’ve got a firm grip on her now,” Kit responded.

  “I’m going to swing her toward you.”

  He swung his little sister toward Kit, and then suddenly Sherri was safe in Kit’s arms.

  Sherri was trembling, so Kit stroked her hair and said repeatedly, “It’s okay, honey. It’s okay.”

  Danny leaned back and evaluated the situation. The portion of the path where Sherri had been standing was completely gone, leave a gap about a foot and a half wide.

  “We need to move on, Kit. Can you hand Sherri over to me?”

  “I think so.”

  Danny pointed to a rock that protruded just over Kit’s head.

  “Hold on to that rock there and pass her over, if you can,” he instructed.

  Kit stood up. Grabbing the rock with her left hand, she said gently, “Sherri, you have to go to Danny. Can you do that?”

  Sherri had a death grip around Kit’s neck, and her head was buried into Kit’s shoulder, but she lifted her head and nodded. Unwinding her arms from around Kit’s neck, she glanced at her brother.

  Danny had found his own handhold on the cliff. He reached out with his free hand and said, “Come on, Sherri. Don’t be afraid. Reach out and grab on to me.”

  Kit swung Sherri onto her right hip and inclined her body as far as she could. Sherri reached out and just managed to grab hold of Danny on the other side. He swung her up with his left arm. “I’ve got her,” he told Kit. “Come on. It’s your turn now.”

  But reaction had settled in now, and Kit sat down on the path, shaking all over. “I can’t,” she told Danny. “You’ll have to go on without me.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can. Look, I’m letting go and moving back a little. Turn around so that you’re facing the cliff. Keep your left hand on that rock, reach over for this one with your right, and swing yourself over.”

  “I can’t, I tell you! You’ll have to go on without me!”

  “No. We go together or not at all. Come on, Kit – you can do it. Trust me.”

  At Danny’s words, Kit’s weakened resolve hardened once again. He was only twelve years old. If a twelve-year-old could do it, so could she.

  Following his instructions, she stood up, got her hands onto the handholds, took a deep breath, and swung her legs. The next thing she knew, she was on the other side of the gap, but teetering dangerously toward the edge of the path. Before she lost her balance completely and tumbled over the edge, Danny grabbed her and steadied her. She managed a weak smile for him.

  “Thanks,” Kit said simply. She took a deep breath, and to cover her own jittering emotions, she crouched down to speak with Sherri, who was standing behind Danny, her arms circled in an iron grip around Danny’s knees.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Sherri let go of Danny and nodded. Then, a question in her eyes, she looked up at her brother.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Danny said in response. “We need to find some shelter and wait for it to stop raining. It’s too dangerous for us to continue on the path the way things are.” Turning around, he led the way again, hugging the cliff side. Sherri followed him, with Kit once again bringing up the rear.

  Presently, they came to a spot where an overhang protruded over the path, and the path itself widened a little. Danny stopped and looked around.

  “I can do something with this,” he pronounced.

  Kit’s eye’s widened with relief when Danny pulled a couple of lightweight tarps out of his pack. He spread one on the ground so that they would have a dry place to sit. Groping in the pack once again, Danny brought forth a small hammer and a fistful of odd-looking metal spikes.

  Noticing Kit’s look of surprise, he held out the spikes and said, “Climbers’ pitons. My Uncle Luke always keeps some in his pack. He says you never know when they’ll come in handy. I can use them to tack up the second tarp from the overhang. It should keep most of the rain out.”

  When Danny had finished his task, they had a dry space of approximately seven by seven feet in which to maneuver.

  “Might as well get comfortable,” Danny said. “Let’s spread out the sleeping bags and get something to eat.”

  After they had made themselves comfortable on the sleeping bags, they dined on beef jerky, dried fruit, fig bars, and nuts. After a while, Sherri’s head started to droop. Resting against Danny’s shoulder, she dropped off to sleep.

  “I’m glad she’s getting some rest,” Kit said. “It’s amazing that she was able to keep up with us today.”

  “She’s a Coalbank,” Danny replied, embers of pride gleaming out of his eyes. “Coalbanks are tough. We know how to endure.”

  He glanced down at his sleeping sister. “If I can just get her to safety, she’ll be her old self again soon.”

  Kit hesitated before asking, “Do you think we’ll be able to push on any farther today?”

  Danny shook his head. “I doubt it,” he confessed. “Even if the rain stops, the path needs a chance to dry. We can’t navigate it safely until it does. Don’t worry, though. Even if Marc is following us, he’ll have a tough time tracking us in this weather. We’re safe enough here for the present.”

  “What about your uncle?” Kit asked. “Is there any way you can contact him, see if he can help?”

  “Not now. Uncle Luke is military, and he’s deployed right now. He didn’t even make it home for my dad’s funeral.”

  At the look in Kit’s eyes, Danny said defensively, “He was out in the field. By the time he got the news, we’d already had the funeral and buried my dad. Uncle Luke was going to come home anyway, but my mom talked him out of it. His term of enlistment is up in August, and he’s not planning on re-upping. He’s going to turn in his papers and come home to help us run the business. Mom told him that was good enough and that he shouldn’t worry about making two trips. All of that was decided before Marc took over, of course.”

  “You said that your family doesn’t run cattle on the ranch anymore. What sort of business do you have?”

  “Like I told you before, my dad was a wilderness guide. He used to take parties out on hunting and fishing trips. We got some hiking and rock-climbing business, too.”

  “And your mother handled all of that after your dad died? How on earth did she manage?”

  “She didn’t really have to. We didn’t take on any clients during the months after my dad died. We could afford to wait for Uncle Luke to come home, because we had a little cushion to tide us over.”

  “A cushion?”

  “Yeah.” He grinned at Kit. “Ever hear of the Cripple Creek Gold Rush?”

  “The Cripple Creek Gold Rush?” Kit repeated. “Does that have something to do with the Forty-Niners?”

  “No – that all happened in California, not Colorado. The Cripple Creek Gold Rush happened about fifty years later, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. My great-grandfather was one of the miners, and he made a strike. It earned him enough money to buy the ranch with enough left over for some investments. That’s what we’ve been living on for the last few months – the income from the investments.”

  A scowl formed on Danny’s young face.

  “Marc found out about the investment account and wanted my mother to cash it out. Boy, was he mad when he found that my grandfather had put it all in a trust! Mom only has access to half of the income from the trust, and the trust itself can’t be broken until Sherri and I are both adults, and then only if Sherri, Uncle Luke and I all agree. That fixed Marc’s wagon, but good.”

  Kit let a few minutes tick by before asking her next question.

  “Danny? Why doesn’t Sherri ever speak?”

  Danny sighed. “It’s partly my fault. You see, I tried to get away once before. I climbed out of my window at night, after Marc had gone to sleep. I made it almost the whole way to our nearest neighbor’s house, but Marc caught me before I got there. When we got back home, I exp
ected that he’d give me a beating, but what happened next was much worse.”

  “What did he do?” Kit probed gently.

  “First, he locked Mom in her room upstairs. Then he tied me up, put a gag in my mouth, and forced me to watch as he’d laid into Sherri. After he’d finished beating her, he’d put a pan on the stove, filled it with oil, and then turned the flames on. After it started sizzling, he took Sherri’s little hand and held it down on the hot pan. Sherri screamed and twisted, begging me to help her, but I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t do anything but watch.

  “When he’d finished, he held Sherri at arm’s length and told her to stop crying, or he’d burn her other hand too. Once she’d stopped, he’d told her that from then on, she wasn’t to make a sound without his permission.”

  Danny took a deep breath before finishing his story. “Except for the night I asked her about what had happened to Mom, Sherri has hardly spoken a word ever since.”

  Silence fell between them. Presently, Danny said, “Look, maybe we should get some sleep. We’ll need to be as fresh as possible in the morning.”

  He maneuvered Sherri off his shoulder and placed her prone on her back. Then he lay down beside her. Kit stretched out on Sherri’s other side.

  Danny dozed for a while, but then he heard a sound that made him sit up and pay close attention. After a few tense moments, he relaxed. It was the screech of a distant coyote that had awakened him, not the sound that he had feared it might be at first: the howling of a pack of wolves.

  He’d seen a pack of gray wolves once, when he was out hunting with his dad and his uncle. The three of them had been up at the cabin, just getting ready to sit down and eat supper after a long day out. Suddenly, Uncle Luke had stiffened and gone to the window. Danny and his father had joined him. There, at the edge of the clearing in front of the cabin, they saw the pack.

  It was a relatively small pack, consisting of six wolves. As they watched, one of them moved in front of the others, sniffing the wind and looking around. It was a big male, and Dad had later commented that it must have weighed over a hundred pounds.

  As it approached the cabin, the rest of the pack at its heels, Danny could see every detail. Its gray coat was flecked with black and yellow patches. It bared its teeth, revealing one-inch fangs. In the fading daylight, its eyes glittered malevolently. A wolf on the prowl, a keystone predator, seeking out prey to devour.

  Marc was like that, Danny thought. Not as scary-looking, and able to cover over his predatory nature upon occasion with a degree of surface charm. But scratch the surface, and the wolf emerged – as his family had discovered to their sorrow.

  Danny settled down again. Closing his eyes, he remembered how his father and his uncle had handled the situation when the wolf pack had closed in on the cabin.

  Dad and Uncle Luke had gotten their rifles and let off a couple of shots over the wolves’ heads. The pack had immediately turned tail and scattered.

  Afterward, Danny had asked his father what he would have done if the wolves had continued advancing on the cabin.

  “If I had determined that they posed a real threat to us, I’d have taken out the pack leader,” Ben Coalbank had answered him calmly.

  “Really?” Danny had exclaimed. “Even though gray wolves are a protected species here, and it’s illegal to kill them?”

  “Yes, really,” Dad had replied. “A man has a right to protect his family, son, by whatever means necessary. That trumps any law out there, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Tomorrow, they would be at the cabin, Danny reminded himself. And if the wolf threatened them there?

  He was Ben Coalbank’s son.

  He would take out the wolf.

  Chapter 32

  As he neared the house he had once shared with Hannah, Marc was grateful to his father. He would never have made it if he hadn’t been so physically fit. And that was thanks to his dad.

  When he was a kid, before the police had descended on the Colony and shattered his childhood, his dad would routinely wake him up early in the morning for a five-mile run before breakfast. It was important to stay hard and fit, his father had insisted. No real man ever allowed himself to get fat and lazy.

  After their run, they’d return home, where Serenity would have a hot cooked breakfast waiting for them.

  He approved of the name his father had chosen for his stepmother. So much better than her original name, Rhonda.

  After breakfast, Serenity and her daughter would take care of the dishes, and he and dad would set out with the other men to forage for food.

  He didn’t remember his own mother. She’d died when he was a baby. But Serenity had been all the mother he’d needed. So warm, so loving, so meek and obedient. She was everything that a proper woman should be.

  While he and Dad were out hunting, Serenity and her daughter would tend to the house and the garden, the cooking and the cleaning. That was just as it was meant to be. It had been an Eden he had lived in, a paradise. But there had been a snake in his Garden of Eden – a snake named Samantha. And that snake had destroyed his world.

  Now he was trying to recreate it. But it was hard to find the right woman, a woman who would work with him to fashion a new Eden. For a while, he had thought that Hannah was the one, but she had disappointed him. He would have to start looking again, find the one who was right for him. The perfect woman. Just like Serenity.

  He scowled as he thought of Kayla Nyequist, the opposite of the kind of woman he desired. She had dared, dared, to defy him and attack him physically. He had killed women for less, he reminded himself.

  But he wasn’t going to think about that. He was almost home, after having been forced to traverse the last miles on foot once again. He’d get some food, get himself cleaned up, and let the kids out of the cellar.

  Then he would check on the woman he had left tied up in the spare bedroom, see if she had survived…

  Finally, the house was within sight. But he sensed immediately that something was wrong. Before entering, he circled the house cautiously. It was then that he saw the hole in the ground near the cellar door.

  Danny, he knew immediately. He was out and on the loose again.

  An hour later, Marc sat at the kitchen table in the ranch house, sipping a cup of coffee and assessing the situation.

  Danny was gone, and so were Sherri and the woman he had left tied up in the upstairs guest room. He couldn’t track them tonight – not in the rain, after dark. Now he had to ask himself a question: was it safe to stay here tonight?

  After giving the matter some thought, he decided that the answer was yes. If Danny and the others had already made it to safety, the place would be swarming with cops. The fact that it wasn’t meant that the trio was still out there, holed up for the night some place in the wilderness.

  He would start tracking them first thing in the morning, he decided. As soon as the first rays of dawn peeked over the horizon, he would start looking for their trail.

  He started making a mental list of what he would need. Food. Water. Camping supplies. Weapons. He might have lost his pistol, but he had access to another. Before he had made his move to subdue Hannah and her children and bend them to his will, he had taken the precaution of removing all the weapons he had found in the house and secreting them in a hidden location. He would pick up a rifle and another pistol from his cache before setting out in pursuit of the others.

  His mind made up, he finished his coffee and set about cleaning up the remnants of the simple meal he had made for himself. As he carried the dishes to the sink, he glanced around the kitchen, his mind flashing back to the scene that had played out the last time he had been in this room.

  He and Danny had eaten together early that evening. Then he had taken Danny upstairs and locked him in his bedroom. He had taken the blonde woman down next and had Hannah make her some dinner. After she had finished her meal, he had taken the blonde back upstairs, secured her once again, and taken the redhead out.

&nb
sp; Former redhead, he reminded himself. She had spoken without permission the previous day, and he had taught her a lesson by sitting her down, grabbing a pair of scissors, cutting all that glorious red hair off her head.

  Another thing he learned from his father, he thought. For minor offenses, physical discipline was not always necessary. Striking at a woman’s vanity was often just as effective. So after he had finished with the scissors, he had shaved her bald.

  She had learned her lesson about being quiet and obedient after that. Or so he had thought.

  Once she had finished her dinner and was helping Hannah clean up the kitchen, he had bestowed a great honor on the girl. He told her he had decided on a new name for her – Esther.

  Her response had shocked him. Whirling around and staring at him in astonishment, she had begun laughing hysterically. Then she had shouted, “You’re crazy! My name is Zoe. Zoe, do you hear me?”

  Being laughed at had always made his blood boil. He had gone up to her to give her a good shake and slap her until she couldn’t laugh any more. She had been standing near the stove at the time. They had had fried fish that night for supper, fish he had caught himself. When he had slapped her, she had reached back, whipped the frying pan off the stove, and flung the hot cooking grease at him.

  She had been aiming at his face, but typical girl, she’d missed and hit him in the arm instead. His heavy jacket had protected him.

  He had wrested the skillet away from her and crashed the heavy iron pan down on her head, raining blows on her, over and over. Dimly, in the background, he heard Hannah screaming.

  “Stop it Marc! Stop it! You’ll kill her!”

  When he had ignored Hannah, she charged him, using the broom she had been using to sweep the floor as a weapon. However, instead of thrusting it at him straight out like a man would have, she had wound up like a pitcher going through his windup. He’d had plenty of time to wrest the broom out of her hand before she’d had a chance to connect with a blow. Then he had reversed it and struck out at her with the heavy wooden handle.