Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“Oh, this is going to be an adventure!” Mom said as we passed the road sign that read 20 Miles to America’s Best Small Town! We’d spent ten hours in the car today, and it was getting dark. Even after ten hours, Mom was still buzzing with excitement. Her energy made me, thirty years younger than her, jealous. I was tired. For the last three days my parents and I had been driving, only stopping for the occasional bathroom break—in which Mom timed us, threatening to leave us at the shady rest stops with the long-haul truckers if we didn’t make it back to the car in time.

Now I was in the car, in the back seat, sitting next to our family cat like I was seven years old. Only twenty more miles. We had driven from a small town along the Atlantic Ocean to the northernmost part of Minnesota, almost in Canada. The trees up here grew thicker and taller. The roads winded through thickets and along the edges of lakes. After all the sing-alongs and ridiculous road trip games my mother came up with to pass the time, we were twenty miles away from dropping off my parents in their new house in the small town of Fenrirton and one hundred miles away from my new house, which was a research cabin nestled deep in the woods along the Canadian border that I would share with two other graduate students.

The thought of living in such close quarters with these new people still made my heart pound. Even as a kid, I’d preferred wandering wooded trails alone to playdates or a quiet spot in the library to a Friday-night football game. My interests usually meant I was never up on the latest gossip or fashion. It had been lonely being the outcast throughout secondary school dressed in what my mom considered “cute” clothes. Usually I’d been stuck with overalls, complete with homemade patches sewn to the knees. I had hoped that after I’d left high school and majored in ecology, I would be surrounded by like-minded people. And I had been. There’d been a few girls from class that I’d spent a lot of time studying with and completing capstone projects. But as our fourth year had approached, one had gotten engaged and the others had found jobs and moved away.

Now I felt like I had at the end of high school. Lonely but hopeful that I would find my people. This summer was my best bet. Maybe I would make good friends? Ones who stuck around. Ones who didn’t think my interests were weird. The people that the university had accepted for this graduate program had had to submit previous research and write several essays to get an invitation to the cabin. Someone who was looking for a vacation here wouldn’t bother to do all that.

I hoped my new roommates would be like me in the sense that they loved what they were studying, experienced the same rush when they discovered something unexpected. We were going to be out in the woods without cell service for the entire summer. They had to be similar. No one who wasn’t passionate about their research would subject themselves to an entire summer so secluded.

“I’m so excited to see the house your uncle left us,” Mom said, drawing me from my thoughts. “I’m sure it’s going to be just as charming as I hear the town is. Let’s just hope it has some studio space.”

I could sense my dad rolling his eyes even from my vantage point in the back seat. Mom would make room for her sculpting anywhere. I grew up with her work strewn throughout the house.

“I’m sure it’s nothing fancy, Deb. If it has a kitchen and a bathroom, we’ll make it work. We don’t have much of a choice.” Though he was always the quiet to my mom’s loud, opposites in every way, today my father sounded more exhausted and subdued than usual. I chewed on my lip to keep from asking if he needed anything, since he’d been asked that plenty already by Mom on this entire trip.

“Oh, Roger.” Mom sighed. “Let’s look at this as a fresh start. We have each other and dear Bessie.” A loud “meow” came from the beige plastic kennel sitting in the seat next to me. “Elise won’t be too far away either, right, dear?”

“Just over two hours away,” I said from the back seat.

“See—closer than before. I’m sure she’ll visit on weekends?” she asked, looking expectantly in the rearview mirror at me.

“I’m going to be busy, Mom. I have a thesis to start, and I need to explore the forest. I can try to be back to visit, but I also have to work.” Though if everything went according to plan, I wouldn’t have to resort to visiting my parents at all this summer. My research would keep me busy, and if my roommates were as awesome as I hoped they’d be, I’d spend the weekends with them.

Mom just looked forward and hummed the song on the radio. I leaned back against the cloth headrest of our old Subaru. It would soon be mine to use. The town my parents were moving to claimed to be “America’s Best Small Town” because of the ability to walk to everything you needed. The grocery store was a couple blocks away, as were the pharmacy and movie theater. Mom and Dad would have no need for a car, and they wanted to make sure I could make it back to see them and help if necessary.

The car swayed as the wind hit the side, the small trailer we pulled behind exaggerating the movement. The sky was getting dark, and there were visible stars here, unlike the bigger city where we’d come from. I closed my eyes and tried to zone out for the next fifteen minutes until we arrived. During this three-day trip, I had been constantly alternating between road sickness and boredom. I couldn’t listen to music on my headphones during the entire ride because of my mom’s constant need for conversation. My dad, in the front seat, was a good listening ear but rarely added much to the dialogue.

“I’ve got you, Roger,” my mom said between song verses as she grabbed on to his jacket to keep him upright as we curved right on the road. My dad grumbled that he was fine, even though I saw the way he clung to her arm to hold himself up.

I was about to finally let myself ask how Dad was doing when I noticed something standing twenty feet in front of us in the middle of the road.

“ Mom! ”

The smell of rubber entered my nose as the tires skidded on the dry pavement. I could hear my mother let out a litany of curse words as she white-knuckled the steering wheel, willing the car to stop. From the back seat, my eyes locked with the animal’s. It had come out of nowhere. Our headlights illuminated the two irises that looked as if depthless golden pools dwelled within them.

As our car slid toward the creature, our eye contact never wavered. I couldn’t look away, and it seemed as if the being couldn’t either. It didn’t seem scared by a ton of metal barreling toward it. It stood calm and collected, just staring into my eyes.

I froze, pitching forward as the car finally came to a stop. We were ten feet away from the animal. It looked like a wolf, but it was much larger than any wolf that I had seen in captivity. Maybe the wolves ate well out here. The wolf had the darkest black coat, almost iridescent in the headlights of our car. I broke eye contact as my gaze traveled down the wolf’s body to its giant paws. Fluffy mounds of fur covered its toes, and shiny black claws gripped the ground, ready to run at a moment’s notice.

As my head lifted back up to make eye contact once again, the wolf blinked. It turned and ran, disappearing as fast as it had appeared in front of our car. That was the biggest wolf I had ever seen in my life. I shook my head, trying to get out the image of its golden eyes that had sucked me in—whirlpools of glittering gold that I couldn’t stop seeing in my mind. Having read about the wildlife and foliage in this area, I’d known there were wolves and other wild predators like bears that lived up here. I just hadn’t thought I would see one so soon—and up so close and personal. I also hadn’t known that wolves had eyes like that. Eyes which seemed all too easy to fall into.

“Are you okay back there, Elise? How about Bessie? Is Bessie okay?” Of course Mom would confirm the cat was okay in the same breath as her own daughter.

“Yep, we’re fine,” I said, peeking in on Bessie, our orange elderly cat. Rearranging myself in the back seat behind my father, I nodded at my mom as she locked eyes with me, getting permission to continue. Dad’s seat belt had prevented him from flying through the windshield, but his body lay in the seat at an odd angle, his head resting against the passenger window. Mom re-situated him in his seat the best she could.

“Let’s keep going! Hopefully no more wild animals will run into the road before we get to our new lives.”

I rolled my eyes at my mom’s characterization of what had just happened. She hadn’t stopped talking about our “new lives” since we’d left my childhood home. It seemed like a coping mechanism, to always be looking forward, purposefully forgetting the past.

We weren’t strangers to a scare. The last weeks had been full of hardship, one thing after another falling apart. A car wreck would have been a cherry on top of an already disastrous month.

I looked around the car, watching my family pick themselves up and brush themselves off like we always did, well-practiced in taking whatever hits life decided to throw at us.