The sound was so faint that for a moment I thought it had come from the film. But then the doorbell rang again, and my heart flung itself against the wall of my chest.
Someone was coming.
In a panic, I bolted for the stairs, then realized I had left the movie playing, and dashed back to the projector to hit the POWER button.
I was three steps from the top of the stairs when I heard the front door open. I crept the rest of the way, flinching at every creak, and peeked through the doorway to see if the coast was clear. There was no one in sight, but I could hear a low voice from the front entryway. I couldn’t tell who was speaking, or what was being said, but I assumed Porter was attempting to stall while I found my way out. I edged out of the basement and into the hallway, praying the house’s floorboards wouldn’t make a sound as I stole toward the kitchen at the back of the house, where I’d seen a back door. I held my breath as I eased the door open and slipped through into the biting October air.
Throbbing with adrenaline, I shot for the tree cover behind the house and disappeared into its safety. When I was sure I was hidden from sight, I stopped and bent over to catch my breath, slow my racing heart. I looked back toward the house and saw Porter on the front porch, talking to someone in the doorway, but I couldn’t see who. The other person was already in the house. Then Porter stepped inside. I took out my phone to text him, tell him I had made it out, and then remembered that I had no cell service out here. So I stayed where I was. I would signal him and catch his eye once he emerged again.
A minute passed, and then two. After five minutes of waiting for Porter to reappear, I began to worry. Was he in there alone with Niklas? Did Niklas suspect someone had been in his house? I started toward the house, not sure what I was going to do. But I had to do something. I was about to emerge from the trees when movement from an upstairs window caught my eye. A white curtain twitched aside, revealing a face peering through the glass. Something disproportionate about the head. It was too large at the top. The nose too long. The skin too pale. A black square with a red light shining from one corner held in front of one eye. My breath stopped in my throat, and for a split second I felt a sense of…not unreality, but hyper-reality, a jarring pivot toward understanding, like the moment you remember something—a word, a name—you’ve been struggling to recall. But the curtain closed before I could get a decent look at the face in the window, and the moment ended with the abruptness of a balloon popping, before I could determine whether what I thought I saw was what I had actually seen.
Before I could be certain the face peering out at me had not been human, but the face of a wolf. A white wolf holding a video camera.
Niklas. Had he been upstairs the entire time I was in the house? He must have heard me prowling around.
A door slammed, nearly startling a yelp from my throat. Then I saw Porter on the porch steps, a hand raised to wave goodbye to someone. My chest eased. He was out. He was safe. He started down the gravel road toward the sanctuary office, glancing around furtively, trying to spot me. I didn’t dare come out of the woods until I was out of sight of whoever was in the house besides the masked figure in the upstairs window. I cut through the trees, figuring I could catch up with him on the dirt path that led past the animal enclosures.
But when I emerged from the trees, it was not Porter I found. It was Niklas.
When he saw me, he stopped as abruptly as if he’d hit an invisible wall, momentarily too surprised to hide his face behind his shaggy hair. I got my first good look at him, and realized that his disfigurement was not as severe as I had first thought. The skin on the right side of his face was taut and shiny, as though it were stretched beyond its limit, and the shape of his nose, eye, and lip didn’t match up with the unmarred left hemisphere, but he was not the mutilated comic-book villain I’d first taken him for. Nor was he the man in the wolf mask filming from the upstairs window of his house. He could not be here and there at the same time.
So who was in the house?
“Hi, Niklas.” I took a step closer to him, but stopped when he tensed. I held up my hands to show I wasn’t dangerous. The gesture was symbolic. Just having someone look at him and talk to him was clearly painful for Niklas, and I was already doing that.
“Not supposed to talk to you,” Niklas mumbled, his voice more heavily accented than either of his parents’, as though his avoidance of speaking had preserved it.
“Do you want to talk to me?” I asked.
He turned his head slightly to the side, so I could only see the unmarked half of his face, but he didn’t respond.
“Do you know why I’m here?” I tried again.
“You want to find the missing women,” he said.
I nodded. “My sister is one of them now. Can you help me, Niklas? Can you help me find her?” He didn’t say anything, but his shoulders hunched, his posture defensive. “Maybe if we find her, we’ll find Annika, too. She was your friend, wasn’t she?”
He hesitated a few seconds, and then nodded. “She was nice. Not to everyone, but to me.”
“Niklas, was she in the woods with you the night of the fire? Is that how she burned her hands?”
He was quiet so long I thought he had decided to ignore me until I went away.
“She needed to see the wolf,” he said finally.
“One of the wolves here at the sanctuary?”
He shook his head. “Not one of ours. The one in the woods.”
I blinked at him, struggling to maintain a neutral expression. “Are you talking about the Ulv Konge?”
He tilted his head in a minute nod.
“Why did she want to see it?”
He met my eyes, but still his gaze somehow remained disconnected. He was looking at me, but not seeing me. “She wanted to make it stop. She wanted it to leave her alone.”
“How do you make it stop?” I asked, but the answer was obvious. “The fire,” I said. “That’s why you started the fire.”
“Not me,” he said. “Annika…she started it. I tried to stop her, but she wouldn’t listen.”
My eyebrows rose. He might very well be lying, but I needed him to think I was on his side, that I believed him completely. It was the only way to keep him talking. “Why did you take the blame?” I asked.
He shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, lowering his eyes to the ground. “People wouldn’t understand. She’d get in trouble.”
“But not you.”
“I’m different,” Niklas said, his voice barely above a whisper. “Everyone knows there’s something wrong with me.”
“Are you the Ulv Konge, Niklas?” I asked gently.
He shook his head vehemently, eyes still glued to the ground. “No,” he said sharply. “The Ulv Konge wanted to hurt her. I would never hurt her. Jeg elsket henne.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Please, Nik. I need to know what happened that night. It has something to do with why Annika went missing. I know it, but I can’t prove it without your help. I can’t find her unless you tell me—”
A sudden hiss interrupted my words. I looked to my left and saw Tocsin slinking out of her den, her head low and hackles raised. She hissed again and her lips pulled back to reveal the yellow knives of her teeth.
“What are you doing here?”
The woman’s voice startled me more than the sudden appearance of the two-hundred-pound cat, and I turned to see Helene jogging down the trail toward her son and me, her eyes blazing with anger.
“Nik,” she said, “I told you not to talk to her. Ga hjem!”
Niklas said nothing, merely turned and started walking quickly up the trail, almost running. He glanced back at me once, and I thought I saw regret on his face. He wanted to tell me the rest, unburden himself of the truth he’d hidden for so many years. If Helene hadn’t shown up, he would have.
Helene folded her arms over her chest, her jaw clenched. “Why are you talking to my son?”
I considered telling her the truth, that Nik was my main suspect, that all evidence pointed to him as the one who’d made my sister and four other women disappear. But that was a terrible idea. This woman was fiercely protective of her son. If she knew I suspected him, she would try even harder to shield him from me.
“I got separated from the search party and ended up here again. I was just asking Nik if he’d seen—”
“There you are!”
Porter came around the bend in the trail, and I exhaled in relief.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” he said when he reached us. “I thought you were going to wait for me at the office.”
“You’re with her?” Helene asked, sounding skeptical. “You didn’t mention that.”
I assumed she was referring to whatever Porter had told her at the house. So it must have been Helene who showed up and forced Porter to ring the doorbell.
Porter nodded and looked at his watch. “We’d better get back to the checkpoint. It was nice to see you, Helene. Thank you again for letting me use your landline. Things are getting hectic at the inn.”
Porter started away, but I didn’t move. “Helene, did Anders come back here with you?”
She nodded, eyes dipping guiltily toward the ground. “Yes, I’m sorry. I wish we could have stayed and searched longer, but we had to get back to work. We have several tours scheduled for today.”
“I understand,” I told her, but I didn’t. Neither Niklas nor Helene could have been upstairs. Niklas hadn’t been in the house at all, and Helene had been downstairs talking to Porter.
That left Anders.