Wolves of the Beyond 02 - Shadow Wolf

luxuriant silver tail, like a furry comet across the night, flag out behind Faolan. Heep felt the phantom pain where his own tail should have grown. You’ll be done for by dawn , he thought.
    Heep raced some distance off in the opposite direction. There was a lone spot where three birch trees had grown together. Their trunks entwined, their roots entangled. The place where such trees grew was considered unlucky. Some said the seeds of the trees had been sown during moon rot, the time when the shadow of a previous night’s moon hung in the sky the next day. But Heep did not care. It was perfect for hiding his bone, the real bone that he had begun to carve, telling the story of the murder of a malcadh by a wolf. Not just any wolf but agnaw wolf! He had another bone as well. A bone of evidence.
     
    “Wake up, Dearlea, wake up!” Mhairie nudged her sister’s shoulder, then gave a good hard shove to her jaw.
    “What? What are you waking me up for? Get your face out of mine.”
    “It’s about Faolan.”
    “What about him?” Dearlea said wearily. “Did he carve another profane bone? I wish you’d stop worrying. The MacDuffs have always been suspicious of him. They’re suspicious of everyone.”
    “It’s not about any bone.”
    “What is it, then?”
    “Faolan’s gone off in the middle of the night!”
    “He has a right to. As long as he shows up for all the gaddergnaw activities, he can do whatever he pleases anytime.”
    “In the middle of the night? It’s strange, you have to admit it.”
    “Great Lupus, you’re getting to be a MacDuff!”
    “No! I just worry. He’s tracking on thin ice with all these rumors. And he did it before when we were over at the Yellow Springs and I was running as outflanker.”
    “You saw him go?”
    Dearlea was now sitting up. She shook her head violently as if to clear her brain, and yawned, but not in boredom. She stared down at her paws. Then, in a gesture Mhairie knew well, Dearlea put one paw over the other and scratched. It was a habit of hers when she was thinking hard about something.
    “I know what you mean,” Dearlea said. “I guess I worry, too. What is it about him that…that—”
    “That makes us want to protect him?” Mhairie asked.
    “Yes, I guess that’s it. For all his extraordinary strength, he seems…well, not weak, but vulnerable.”
    “I know. And when he goes off like this, I just think he could get in trouble somehow.” She paused a moment. “He goes far, too.”
    “How do you know?”
    “I tried to follow him once. But I saw how far he was going, and I knew I couldn’t make it back in time to help you and mum with the pups by daybreak.”
    “But he makes it!”
    “Yes. He’s fast. I’ve seen him come back, and he’s pretty tired when he does. But tonight I thought I saw the shadow of a wolf off in the trees when he left.”
    “Someone we know?”
    “I couldn’t tell. It was only a shadow. That’s what really got me worried. If one wolf saw him and knows something and with all these rumors flying around…It’s kind of scary. Some wolves are just waiting for him to fail.”
    “Or setting him up to fail,” Dearlea said.

 
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
T ESTIMONY
    FAOLAN STARED DOWN AT THE TINY rib bone, and then at the fragment of jaw he had found. He crouched down, blinked several times, then tipped his head one way and another. He looked for the landscape of this bone, but it seemed to have been obliterated by the frenzy of teeth marks. He knew that every bone told a story, even the bone of such a young pup. But there seemed to be only one story here—that of violence, of murder. Parts of the bone had been crushed and the marrow had leaked out, leaving the rib as hollow as an owl’s. He looked at one of the pulverized edges and worked backward with his eyes toward the solid midsection of bone. Beneath the blizzard of marks, he saw something that froze his marrow. It was the first word of the uncompleted story—a nick. Not any nick, but the nick! The mark made by that broken tooth he had seen when Heepopened his mouth wide just before the kill rush began. Once again, the splinterish sounds crackled in Faolan’s brain.
    “Why? Why have I never seen this before?” He gasped. His marrow boiled. Heep murdered that pup!
    Every time Faolan had come to retrieve bones, he had been staring at the evidence, yet never realized it! Now dozens of nicks seemed to storm to the surface of the bone, as if to mock him in his