“Why do they steal human children?”
Jamie’s free hand balled into a fist on his lap, but he leaned forward, waiting for an answer.
“Oh … well … it’s never good, of course … never good to steal in the first place, but to steal children … that’s the lowest of the low … Some towns have a history of … Yes … right.” Seeming to recover from the question a bit, Mr. Nate flipped through the book again and found what he was searching for. “Aha!”
He tapped the page with an enthusiastic finger, and turned the book around so that Jamie could see it right side up. “Look familiar?”
Gasping, Jamie could only motion that it was. The creature in the center of the illustration appeared to be exactly like the beasts he’d seen the night before, grayish green and ugly, larger than basketball players. The creature held the severed body of a child in its meaty hands, and its mouth dripped drool or blood. Jamie couldn’t tell quite which.
“Thought so,” Mr. Nate whispered in a terribly serious tone. “How many years have they been there? Right under my nose. And did I see them? No. No. What a fool! An ignorant fool, and with you, poor thing, right there with them.”
“Wh-what is it?” Jamie asked.
“It’s a troll.”
Jamie’s mouth moved but no words came out. He rubbed at his forehead, forgetting he was holding a carrot. It broke in half and fell to the floor, rolling into a radio. He picked it up, and then he finally managed to say, “A … a … troll … A troll?”
Mr. Nate nodded.
Jamie slammed up out of the chair and began pacing furiously, back and forth and back and forth. “You’re telling me that my grandmother is a troll?”
The side of Mr. Nate’s lips pressed together, and once again he gave only the slightest of nods.
“That’s unbelievable!” Jamie protested, but even as he said it, he knew that it truly wasn’t all that unbelievable.
“All that makes something unbelievable is the unwillingness to believe,” Mr. Nate admonished.
“Okay …” Sometimes Jamie felt like he had no idea what Mr. Nate was talking about. It didn’t matter anyway. What mattered was that Jamie had seen trolls last night on the snow. He had lived with his grandmother his whole entire life, and he knew she was mean and beastly and not at all like other grandmothers. And the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, because his dad was … Jamie swallowed hard and met Mr. Nate’s eyes. “My father? Is he … ?”
“Most likely.”
Jamie slouched back into the chair, utterly defeated. His useless, horrible life made sudden sense. He finally dropped the remaining pieces of the carrot back on the plate. Images from his whole life shuffled in front of his brain: all the times they’d made fun of him for being puny, the way they’d lock him in his room, the way they’d pinch his arms or even slap him in the head, and the way they never loved him. Jamie always thought it was his fault, that it was ridiculous to even dream of a different life because he didn’t deserve one, but maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe it wasn’t that he was unlovable. It was just that trolls weren’t capable of love.
Mr. Nate’s face loomed right in front of him. “I think you will have to leave that house.”
Jamie’s head jerked up. “What?”
“Just what I said. I think you need to leave that house. And soon.” Mr. Nate’s big hand clamped down on Jamie’s shoulder. “There is danger there.”
“There is danger everywhere,” Jamie said slowly.
“True,” Mr. Nate said, tapping his fingers against the wall. “But most of the time danger doesn’t pretend to be your relatives.”
5
Into the Wolf Pen
Annie toppled out of the trailer and into the backyard-turned-dog-kennel, yelping. The Wiegles’ two gray wolf-dogs backed away from her, momentarily too surprised to do much else. Everything in the dog run was muddy from the wolves’ pacing back and forth all day and night. Paws trampled any plant life that might have grown. A tall fence encased the entire area. The only way in or out was through the trailer door.
She stood up. Snowy mud caked her jeans and feet. Mrs. Wiegle had thrown her outside before she’d gotten a chance to put her sneakers back on. Some dirt scraped across her socks. She shivered and pulled her shirtsleeves down so that they would cover her hands. Panic found an empty room inside her heart.
She knocked on the door. No one came.
She pounded on the door. No one came.
She smashed her head against the door, denting it. Walden came.
“What?” One beady eye and half a nose peeked through the crack in the door. “You are annoying me, girl. Remember? You aren’t supposed to exist. You are a nothing girl. Be quiet and act like a good nothing.”
“I need my shoes.” She put her shaking hand on the metal door handle so that he couldn’t shut it again. Her head killed. “Walden, I really need my shoes.”
“Too bad.” Walden smirked.
Something inside Annie hardened up. Being good and following the rules was definitely not working out for her here. “My feet are freezing, Walden. Let me get my shoes. Please.”
“Tough tigers, twit,” he muttered. “You’re interrupting my TV viewing. You’re as annoying as all those boring news alerts about bats and wolves howling and crud.”
Annie stared at him. It can’t be easy being so ugly, she figured, but he’d be okay-looking if he didn’t squint his eyes so much, or spit at people. Still, he was so awful inside, all filled up with venom like some sort of nasty snake. She asked the question before she thought better of it. “Walden, why are you so mean?”
He glared at her. Then for a second he sighed and his face softened, making him seem like a regular boy … almost. It only lasted for a second.
“It’s more fun than being nice,” he roughed out. “Maybe you’ll figure that out someday. See where nice has gotten you?”
She almost thought he had a point, but she shook the thought away as he yanked the door shut, wrenching her arm. She let out an irritated roar.
Groaning, she sank down on the step with her back to the door. At least the sun was shining. And then, of course, as if on cue, a cloud came from behind the trees and covered the sun up. It grew instantly colder.
“Great,” she muttered. “Great. Great. Great.”
The two gray half wolves turned and growled. They slunk toward her, tails out straight, heads down. They bared their teeth.
Annie froze. Then her heart began beating again. Then her brain started working again.
“Oh,” she said, jumping up. “Sit, doggies. Sit. Sit! Sit?”
The two wolves did not sit. The two wolves came closer.
Annie pivoted to the trailer door and pummeled it with her fists.
“Walden! Mrs. Wiegle! Help me! I think the dogs are going to eat me! Please, please, please come to the door!” she screamed. “Please, come to the door!”
But, of course, no one came.
A massive snarling noise drew the wolves’ attention to the edge of the kennel, just beyond the enormous metal fence. A large white dog flew through the air. He launched beautifully over the enclosure and landed in front of Annie, protecting her. He growled a warning rumble that made the wolf-dogs’ fur stand up on end.
The wolf-dogs leaped. The white dog met them in the air. A snarling mass of white and gray fur snapped and tore at one another.
“NO!” Annie screamed. “Don’t hurt him.”
There was a great fury of limbs and teeth. Tufts of fur flew up into the air, and Annie hurled herself forward, trying to tug at fur, trying to pull them apart.
“Stop fighting!” she ordered. Her voice came out powerful, focused and strong, so loud that the Wiegles would definitely hear her. “I said, ‘No fighting!’ ”
Miraculously, they stopped. All three canines flopped on the ground, panting. The two gray wolves had patches of fur torn from their haunches. Blood crept down the white dog’s shoulder.
Annie yanked in her br
eath. Worry plunged forward into her heart. “Oh.”
She stood a foot away from the white dog and reached out her hand toward his injured shoulder. “Oh, you got hurt.”
Something rumbled in the forest. As they all held their breath, the wind thrust the tops of the trees into one another. Annie swayed, too, then steadied herself and closed the gap between her and the big white dog. “I’m hoping you’re nice, right? Good doggy. Good, good doggy.”
She glanced at the other two that remained almost frozen in place. Embarrassment and anger contorted their jowly faces.
“You two better not move,” she commanded.
One of the big wolves whimpered.
“I mean it. I totally hate fighting. And you forced him into it, making like you were going to attack me. That was just plain evil mean.”
The midday sun cast a glow, illuminating the savior dog as a bright, white, glowing mass. Even his ears gleamed as Annie approached. His deep fur moved in perfect, long strands as the wind smashed against him, but he ignored it. Standing motionless in the middle of the pen, chest sticking out proud, head up high and eyes opened wide, he stared right at Annie. And he kept watching as she crept slowly forward. Her feet had gone numb from the cold. Tears dripped from the dog’s eyes, but he was smiling. She was sure of it.
“What are you?” Annie breathed out. Her hand wiggled for the dog to smell. The dog came forward, gazed into her eyes with its own, brown and mysterious and still. He licked her hand, and Annie remembered what it was to be warm. She buried her other hand inside his fur. He licked her face and wagged his tail so hard that his whole body wriggled.
She searched for a collar. None. She wanted to yodel. He could be hers. They could be a team. He could keep her safe. She could hug him and play with him, and he could be her friend. She’d never been in one place long enough to make friends, but now …
“Come,” she said, leaping up and tapping her leg to make the dog understand. “You can come with me. We’ll go together, okay? I don’t actually have a place to go, really, not a home or anything.” She gestured unhappily behind her toward the trailer.
Walden’s voice echoed through the window. “I AM SO SICK OF NEWS FLASHES! I DO NOT CARE! YOU HEAR ME, NEWS LADY? I DO NOT CARE!”
Annie swallowed and turned away from the trailer. “I thought that this would be home.”
The dog nuzzled her side with his big black nose, and Annie plunked her hand on his warm back. Her heart cartwheeled inside her chest.
“You’re hurt.” She shot a glance at the hybrids and then parted the white dog’s fur, searching for the source of the blood, a long gash, probably from one of the wolves’ claws. “That’s horrible.”
She shook her finger at the other canines. “You should be ashamed of yourselves.”
The wolf-dogs whined but didn’t move.
She whipped off her sweater and pressed the white dog’s wound. “That should stop the bleeding, I hope.”
She kept the pressure on the dog’s fur as she peered around the pen. In his happiness, the dog kept trying to lick her hand and her face. She wished she could be happy, too, but she was too worried to give in to the good feeling. “The Wiegles will just lock you up and turn you mean like those poor wolf-dogs. I’ve got to get us out of here. But how?”
The wind suddenly raged louder and much more wildly, whisking Annie’s long hair across her face. She shivered and plunged her hands deeper into the white dog’s fur, her stomach aching from worry.
Annie and the dogs spent the rest of the day out in the yard. Finding no backflip progress, Mrs. Wiegle refused to let Annie inside. She barely even noticed that a third dog had appeared. Annie pounded on the door. She begged. But Walden and his mother just turned up the television so they wouldn’t hear her cries. There was no way they were letting her back in the trailer until she taught the dogs to do the impossible. To be fair, the wolf-dogs tried to flip but they were too big and too heavy to do little dogs’ circus-style tricks and kept flopping onto their backs and thudding on their sides.
Eventually, as it grew darker Annie gave up and focused instead on surviving the night. She found some dog biscuits in a coffee can in the yard and split the contents between the three dogs. It wasn’t enough but it was something. She dragged a blue tarp to a corner that seemed the most sheltered from the wind. The dogs huddled over Annie to keep her warm. The white one seemed to boss the other ones around and kept nuzzling Annie and blowing in her face to keep her skin from freezing. Still, the cold seeped into her bones.
The wind smashed harder, bending trees. Something moved in the woods just beyond the dog fence. All three dogs bolted up, standing in front of Annie, staring ahead at the woods. Shivering, she scrambled to her frozen feet, and clung to the white dog, trying to stay upright.
“We have to get inside,” she yelled. The wind swallowed her words. She struggled backward with the dog, trying to use the trailer as a wind block. Inside, Walden and his mother laughed at a television show, nice and cozy, oblivious to what was going on in the wolf kennel.
Annie glanced up at the forest. She hoped the trees wouldn’t fall on her or the dogs or the trailer. Okay, it would probably be an improvement if a tree fell on the trailer. But what is that moving toward me through the woods? Is it a man? A bear?
She pounded on the trailer door. “Mrs. Wiegle! Mrs. Wiegle, let me in!”
The laughter inside continued. They wouldn’t come. Annie was alone. She threw her arms back around the white dog, who stared at the woods expectantly, tension rippling through his muscles.
“What is it?” she whispered into the dog’s ear. “What’s out there?”
He growled. Whatever it was came closer. Annie swallowed hard. There was nowhere to run.
Horrifying noises from the woods thrust toward them. Frantically, Annie searched for a way to get out of the dog pen.
“Dogs!” she yelled and steered them toward the fence closest to the driveway. “We are going to knock this over.”
For a moment, she felt bad about breaking the fence, but she had to survive. Working together, the dogs and Annie heaved and pushed. One gray dog threw himself into the fence, over and over again. It rattled from the force of his weight, but didn’t buckle.
A nearby tree crashed to the ground.
“Hurry!” Annie kicked at the fence.
The dogs whimpered and cried, and then, as if realizing there might be a better strategy, they all began to dig in the same spot. Snow and hard clumps of mud flew up in the air behind them. Annie watched the woods, eyes wide with horror. Trees fell over as if shoved by a mighty hand. The path of destruction was coming closer and closer, headed straight for the dog pen and the Wiegles’ trailer. She froze.
Something wet wrapped around her hand. The white dog’s mouth was pulling gently but urgently on her fingers. The other wolf-dogs had already crawled through the hole and were racing down the driveway, not glancing back.
Annie slammed onto her belly and scurried through the hole. The white dog followed behind her. She tried the front door, which was unlocked, and screamed into the trailer, “Something’s coming! Something dangerous!”
The little dogs streamed outside, scattering. Annie grabbed her coat and shoes, smashing them onto her wet feet as quickly as she could. “You have to hide!”
Mrs. Wiegle appeared in the living room. “I told you to be quiet! What are you doing in here? Where are the dogs? What did you do with the little dogs?” She held the TV remote in her hand like a weapon.
Annie tried one more time. “You have to run! There’s something in the woods!”
The rumble of destruction came closer.
“Hurry!” Annie yelled and raced out the door with the white dog at her side. She rushed ahead, down the driveway and away. Behind her, metal ripped away from metal. A roof thudded to the ground. Windows shattered, spreading glass into the snow. It sounded as if the Wiegles’ trailer was being torn apart, but she didn’t dare stop to look, or even turn, beca
use whatever could do that to trees and a trailer, could do much worse to a girl and a dog.
Annie and the white dog veered off the main road. She figured there would be more places to hide there. The snow made it harder to run, but they kept at it for a while before she finally allowed them to slow down.
Annie reached out for the dog and plunged her fingers into its thick fur. He was still hurt. She had to do something. She stopped walking.
“I need to peek at your wound,” she said.
The dog gave her big, brown, sad puppy eyes, but sat down and moved so she could see his shoulder. The skin around the cut was ripped and a bit ragged, but not deep.
“Does it hurt?”
The dog shook his head. Annie gasped.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?”
The dog nodded.
The shock of it all knocked Annie backward a few steps. “That’s amazing! Oh my gosh. You are THE MOST amazing dog, ever!”
She reached her hand out slowly. The dog licked it, which made her giggle despite everything—despite the fact that they had no home, that they were lost in the middle of the cold, that they had been attacked. A dog’s lick can make you forget all that.
“We have to fix up that wound. I don’t have any bandages, though, and I think the snow has cleaned it out. It’s sort of scabbed over, but I don’t want the scab to come off.” She searched around for something to cover the wound, but it was all just snow and tree trunks and tree branches. Oh! My socks! She was wearing long soccer socks that were super stretchy. She leaned against a tree to keep her balance and took off her shoe and then her sock. First one, then the other. The frigid air stung her skin. The dog whined in protest.
“Nope. I’ll be fine,” Annie reassured him as she wrapped the socks around his frame, covering the wound and tying the ends together. Once she was done she wiped her hands together proudly and ignored the stinging pain in her feet. “Good. Let’s go.”
The dog whimpered at her.
“No protesting,” Annie said. “You have to be taken care of. Everyone needs that. Everyone except me.”