Forests of the Heart Read Online Free PDF Page A

streets. Had they even kept to human form, or was there now a wolf pack running through the city? Perhaps a scatter of wild dogs since dogs would be less likely to attract unwanted attention. Or had they taken to the air as hawks, or crows?
    Knowing as little as she did about them, it was impossible to say.
    She walked on, past the gazebo, into the trees where, in places, snow lay in thick drifts. The cottages were all dark, their occupants asleep. A thin trail of smoke rose from the chimney of Virgil Hanson’s, the only one of the six to have a working fireplace. She regarded it curiously for a moment, wondering who was inside. In all the months that she had been living here, that cottage had stood empty.
    Past the buildings, the trees grew more closely together. She followed a narrow trail through the undergrowth, snow constantly underfoot now, but it had a hard crust under a few inches of the more recent fall, and held her weight.
    There was no indication that anyone had been this way before her. At least not since the last snowfall.
    There was a spot at the back of the property, an enormous jut of granite that pushed out of the wooded slope and offered a stunning view of the city spread out for miles, all the way north to the foothills of the mountains. Bettina was careful as she climbed up the back of it. Though there was no snow, she remembered large patches of ice from when she’d been here a week or so ago. In the summer, they would sometimes sit out near the edge, but she was feeling nowhere near so brave today. She went only so far as she needed to get a view of the mountains, then straightened up and looked north.
    At first she couldn’t tell what was wrong. When it came to her, her legs began to tremble and she shivered in her borrowed parka with its long dangling sleeves.
    “Dios mío,”
she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.
    There were no lights from the city to be seen below. None at all.
    She felt dizzy and backed slowly away until she could clutch the trunk of one of the tamaracks that grew up around the rock. For a long moment, it was all that kept her upright. She looked back, past the edge of the stone where normally the glow of the city would rise up above the tops of the trees, but the sky was the dark of a countryside that had never known light pollution. The stars felt as though they were closer to her than she’d ever seen them in the city. They were desert stars, displaced to this land, as feral as
los lobos.
    Myth time, she thought. She’d drifted into
la época del mito
without knowing it, walked into a piece of the past where the city didn’t exist yet, or perhaps into the days to come when it was long gone.
    “It is easier to stray into another’s past than it is to find one’s way out again,” someone said.
    The voice came from the trees, the speaker invisible in the undergrowth and shadows, but she didn’t have to see him to know that he was one of
los lobos.
“We are wise women,” Abuela liked to say. “Not because we are wise, but because we seek wisdom.” And then she’d smile, adding, “Which in the end, is what makes us seem so wise to others.” But Bettina didn’t feel particularly wise tonight, for she knew what he’d said was true. It was not so uncommon to step unawares into myth time and never emerge again into the present.
    “Who’s to say I strayed?” she said, putting on a much braver face than she felt.
    With a being such as this, it was always better to at least pretend you knew what you were doing. Still, she wished now that she’d taken the time to invoke the protection of Saint Herve before going out into the night. He would know how to deal with wolves—those who walked on two legs, as well as those who ran on four.
    El lobo
stepped from out of the shadows, a tall, lean form, smelling of cigarette smoke and musk. There was enough light for her to catch the look of mild amusement in his features and to see that he was indeed, oh so handsome. After all