She looked wistful. 'I don't know. I can't be selfish-'
'You've got to be, sometimes. Otherwise you can just give up your life to all these responsibilities everyone throws at you. They'll never stop.'
She stifled a yawn, then lay down next to him, staring up at the ceiling. 'That sounds like a lot of sense. Right now. But then I'll catch him looking at Mum's photo and crying when he doesn't think I'm around-'
'Don't you get lonely?'
She turned to look at him with her deep, dark eyes. 'Sometimes.'
He rolled on to his side and propped his head with his arm. 'You look like you like big fun. You're gonna go stir crazy in this place after a while.'
'Sometimes I think I already have.' She shrugged. 'You know how everybody needs something in their lives they believe in? Well, this croft is Dad's thing. For all the blood and sweat that goes into it and the poverty that comes out, he loves it. He'd die if he moved away. It looks boring, bleak, hard. But then you get up on an autumn morning to see the dawn slowly moving across the mountains in orange and brown. And you hear the wind across the hillsides on a winter's night, almost like it's a real person.'
'So what do you believe in?'
'Right now, looking after a man who raised a bairn while managing to keep body and soul together in a place like this. He's sacrificed for me. It's the least I can do in return. The very least.'
Veitch rolled back, his expression faintly puzzled, vaguely troubled.
'And what do you believe in?'
That question troubled him even more. 'Still looking for it, I reckon.'
She leaned over and gently touched the tattoo on his forearm; her fingers were cool, the contact hot. 'Tell me about these.' She smiled with mock lasciviousness. 'Do they go all the way down?'
Before he could reply, the door to the bedroom swung open and McKendrick glared out. 'Anna! To bed. Now,' he hissed.
She smiled at Veitch a little sadly, but there was nothing else to say.
The gale picked up during the night, whistling in the chimney and clattering around the eaves. Veitch woke repeatedly, reminded of Anna's description of the wind as a real person; at times he was convinced he could hear an insistent voice, warning or challenging. Over near the dying embers of the fire, Tom grumbled and twitched in his sleep. Veitch checked his watch: 3 a.m. Shouldn't be too long until dawn.
A rattling ran along the length of the roof. He sat bolt upright in shock an instant before he realised it was still the wind. He wouldn't be surprised if half the tiles were off come morning. He lay back down, but the rattling sound came back in the opposite direction.
His instincts jangled. Slowly he raised himself on his elbows and listened. It didn't sound like the wind at all. It sounded like there was someone on the roof.
A shower of soot fell down the chimney and the fire flared. His attention snapped to it, but his mind was already racing ahead. The resounding crash against the front door had him to his feet in an instant; it was so hard he thought it was going to burst the door from its hinges.
Tom staggered to his feet, still half asleep. 'What… what in heaven's name…?'
Veitch ran to the window and peeked out. A large grey wolf which looked, in his state of heightened tension, as big as a Shetland pony, was hurling itself at the door. With each impact, the hinges strained a little more. Veitch struggled briefly to make sense of the wolf's unnatural actions before jumping back and yelling, 'McKendrick! Bring your gun!'
But the crofter was already half out of the bedroom with his shotgun, looking dazed. 'You better see this,' he said.
Veitch ran into the bedroom. Anna was sitting up in a Z-bed, trying to make sense of what was happening. The curtains had been dragged back and outside Veitch could see several sleek wolves circling, all as big as the one battering the front door. The rattling on the roof echoed again; at least one of them was up there too.
'There must be eight or nine of them!' McKendrick said in disbelief.
'Have you got another gun?' Veitch snapped. The crofter shook his head.
Cursing, Veitch ran back to the living room and scrambled for his crossbow, suddenly aware of how feeble it really was. He barely had time to load a bolt when the door burst open and the wind howled in; the curtains flew wildly. The wolf struck him full in the chest with the force of a sledgehammer. He went down, winded, and then it was on top of him, jaws snapping barely an inch from his face. Its meaty breath blasted into his nostrils, its saliva dripped hot on his chin. He could barely breathe from the weight of it.
He forced his face to one side in desperate, futile evasion, anticipating the enormous power of the jaws stripping the meat from his skull. And then the strangest thing happened: deep in his head he felt an uncomfortable tickling sensation, like a dim radio signal on the end of a band. Slowly he found his face drawn back round until he was looking deep into the wolf's eyes, golden with the cold circle of black floating at the centre; they drew him in until he was lost in a gleaming intelligent soup, at once alien, yet a part of him.
The terrible spell was broken with the sound of smashing glass. Another wolf burst through the window and sprawled in the centre of the floor before righting itself. And then the rest of the pack was inside, circling low and fast. Tom tried to fend one off with a wooden chair. The wolf played the game for a second, then suddenly unleashed its jaws in a frenzied snapping that turned the chair to splinters in an instant.
From the corner of his eye Veitch could see his crossbow where it had fallen. Slowly he crept his hand spider-like along the floor towards it; it was already loaded, so he could put a bolt through the wolf's head with just one hand.
He was halfway to it when the wolf noticed what he was doing. A low, bass rumble started somewhere deep in its throat then rolled upwards into a bloodchilling snarl. Its movement was so swift Veitch barely saw it. Those golden eyes were shining before him, and then suddenly he was encompassed in darkness and the foul stink of the beast's breath. He felt its fangs sink into the flesh at the top of either cheekbone; fiery pain ran deep into his temple. It had his entire head in its mouth; it had to exert only slightly more pressure and his skull would shatter.
It held him like that for a few seconds while every desperate thought he had ever had rattled through his mind, and then, mysteriously, it released its grip. Before he could begin to fathom what was happening, it had released the crushing pressure on his chest and was padding away and out of the door.
All the other wolves had gone too, but the room looked as if it had been torn apart by a tornado. Shattered furniture lay all around, covered with shards of glass and torn material. Tom was slumped in a daze in one corner, but as he struggled to sit up it became apparent he wasn't badly hurt.
McKendrick, however, lay on his back half in, half out of the bedroom. His face was covered in blood and his gun was nowhere to be seen. Veitch scrambled over to him and raised his head so he could dab at the wounds with a remnant of curtain. After the shock of his appearance, the cuts seemed mainly superficial and it wasn't long before his eyes flickered open. Veitch began to speak, but the panic that flared in McKendrick's face silenced him instantly.
'They've taken Anna,' he croaked.
The winds had moved off across the mountains with the first light of dawn as they picked their way across the chill, dew-laden hillsides in search of Anna. Veitch took pole position with Tom at the rear; between them was McKendrick, who looked like a spectre, his skin grey, his eyes filled with a painful desolation; it was the face of a man who had seen his entire world destroyed in an instant.
They hadn't been able to bring themselves to discuss Anna or what was likely to have happened to her after the wolves took her. Instead they had attempted to understand why the pack had acted so unnaturally, and there were no easy answers there either. And so, silently and unanimously, they had agreed to pursue the creatures to bring back Anna, or what was left of her.
Veitch felt numb. His emotions about Anna and Ruth had been so confused, although even his usually superficial self-analysis admitted that Anna's minor problems were a psychological substitute for Ruth's more intractable ones; solving the former had been his unrecognised key to achieving his heart's desire. And he had been thwarted again.
The track was easy to pick up, even for the untrained eye: flattened grass and too many splatters of blood, which they tried to convince themselves belonged to the wolf McKendrick had wounded. They made quick progress downhill, but there was no sign of the wolves ahead of them. The pack had moved away from the croft with
