Vivyan
The headlights crept up through the trees at a quarter to one.
I had been sitting on that logging road for two hours with the engine cold and the lights off, listening to the pines scrape against one another in the wind. Far off, at the end of a mile of black woods, one window had burned yellow all evening, and then, a little before midnight, it had gone out. I'd watched it go. I'd told myself it was only a lamp.
Garrick came out of the dark with something heavy slung across his shoulders, and my whole body locked.
For one terrible second I couldn't breathe. Then I saw the boots, dragging. The loose swing of an arm. The head hanging at a trusting angle against the younger wolf's back.
Lowen.
He was breathing. I could hear it from where I stood, slow and shallow, a thin, labore
