Chapter 2: The Eyes of the Town (1)

The photo of her had been taken with a lens that didn't exist.

Iris sat on the motel bed at 5:47 a.m., the stolen photo blown up on her laptop, and she was genuinely impressed. The shot was clean in total darkness — no flash bleed, no infrared haze — from an angle that should have been inside the tree line she'd passed. Somebody had stood in Wolf Valley, behind her, and taken a photograph of her looking at a monster, and that somebody had been holding still enough that even she hadn't noticed.

Eighteen years of being professionally paranoid, and she'd missed a camera.

Her phone buzzed. Forensic lab in Portland — overnight rush, one favor called in, and a reply she did not expect: Sample doesn't match any known canine sequence. Morphology consistent with Canis lupus × something unsequenced. Whatever you're digging in, stop. -D

Iris stared at the tuft of black fur in its baggie. Canis lupus times something unsequenced. She had, technically, been right. He wasn't a wolf. He was a wolf pretending the universe had rules.

Someone knocked on her door. Three knocks. Cheerful, like the knock of a man who'd decided to be your problem.

Iris slid the laptop shut, tucked the hair baggie into her bra — a forensic scientist's second pocket — and opened the door to Jasper Cole, holding a paper cup of gas-station coffee and radiating morning-saint energy.

"Bus leaves at nine." He held out the cup. "I got you the good stuff. Cream, two sugars, the way you used to."

"I drank black in high school, Jasper. We both know you don't remember how I take my coffee." Iris took the cup anyway, because it was free, and took a sip that she immediately regretted. "You also know I'm not leaving."

The saintly smile didn't waver. "Nothing in Black Pine for you to find, Iris. There's no case here. Huff died of a heart attack. County's closing it today."

"Interesting." Iris leaned against the doorframe. "Because I sent Huff's slides to a cardiologist friend, and he said the rupture pattern was 'wrong.' Not a heart attack. Something else. Something loud. Like his heart heard a sound it couldn't process." She watched Jasper's face for the tell. "You know what makes a heart do that, Jasper? When the body thinks it's about to be eaten."

Jasper's smile stayed on his face like a sticker. But behind it, something moved. "You always were too smart for this town."

"Is that a compliment or a threat? It's hard to tell with you, it's been so long." Iris stepped back into her room. "I'm staying the week, Sheriff. I'm going to visit the church, the library, and the diner, and I'm going to drink a truly unreasonable amount of coffee. I'll be a model citizen."

"The valley is off-limits." His voice dropped the warmth for exactly one syllable, then found it again. "For your own good, Iris. Stay out of the fog."

"You're not my dad." She smiled. "And my dad is missing. Funny how that works."

Jasper stood in the doorway for a long moment, holding his coffee, holding his smile. Then he nodded once and left. Iris watched him all the way down the block. He did not look back. The man across the street in the baseball cap did, though.

She'd already decided he'd be there. What she hadn't decided: why they all want me to leave so badly that they'd watch me instead of making me.

Black Pine didn't have a real library. It had a church, a diner, a general store, and a funeral home that doubled as the town records office, because in Black Pine the dead were the primary industry. Iris bought a terrible biscuit at the diner and made her way to the records office, where a woman named Mabel sat behind a desk that had probably been there since before electricity.

"Can I help you, dear?" Mabel's smile was pure. Her eyes were not.

"I'm looking for records on the Voss family. My parents. They lived here eighteen years ago." Iris laid her cards on the table, because the town already knew exactly who she was and why she'd come. "Evelyn and Marcus Voss."

Mabel's smile didn't change. But her hand, resting on the desk, tightened by a millimeter. "We don't keep many records that old, dear. County purges them."

"I figured." Iris slid a folded fifty across the desk. "But I also figured the church keeps its own records. Baptisms, marriages, deaths. And you're the church secretary, aren't you, Mabel?"

The hand hovered. The eyes did the accountant thing. Then Mabel took the fifty with the speed of a striking snake, and she said, quietly, "The church has a basement. Water got in years ago. Some boxes got ruined. Some didn't." She wrote an address on the back of a receipt. "Pastor's on vacation. The door sticks. Bring a flashlight."

Iris walked out into the August heat with the address burning in her pocket, and she could feel every window on the street follow her down the block.

The church basement smelled like a hundred years of candle wax and rot. Iris's flashlight swept across ruined hymnals, water-stained pews, and a pile of boxes against the far wall that looked exactly as abandoned as the town wanted it to look. She worked her way through three boxes of mildew before she found it: a manila envelope, wrapped in two layers of plastic, addressed in her mother's handwriting.

For Iris. If you're reading this, you found your way back.

Iris sat down on the floor of the basement and read her mother's letter three times.

Black Pine isn't a town, sweetheart. It's a seal. Wolf Valley isn't a valley. It's a cage — the oldest one on this continent, and it's holding something that was never meant to be free. Your father and I were never going to come back from that walk. We knew. We went anyway, because someone had to keep the seal from cracking, and because you were the only thing we'd ever do that for.