The Wolf in His Arms (The Runes Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF

blanketed the sky. She scanned
the cemetery. She was alone. She passed rows of headstones, her footfalls
crackling the ice-crusted snow.
    When
she reached Adam’s tombstone, she sat in the snow, ignoring the chill from the
ground. She rested her gloved hand on the cold marble and the corners of her
mouth turned up in a faint, weary smile. She said little on her Wednesdays with
Adam, but the time could be spent nowhere else. Sometimes she whispered his
name or voiced memories, but more often, she enjoyed the solitude and the
imagined company he kept her. She could see him as a child, often with Alec.
Some memories were stolen clips from home videos, but others were straight from
her mind, moments not captured on film or video, only in her heart.
    She
felt sadness clinging to her, like the ice on the top of Adam’s tombstone, and
she stood to dispel it. She tried to make this spot a place for reflecting on
her many, many treasured memories. The ache overtook her, and she turned from
Adam’s headstone as if ashamed as tears rolled over her cheeks. She looked
across the cemetery.
    The
cemetery where the family had their plots was old and wooded. A small river cut
through the cemetery and the land rolled in gentle hills, lending a park-like
quality. Dogwoods and magnolias, she recognized among the trees. She pictured
the barren branches burdened with pink and white blooms, adding to the beauty
of the cemetery in the spring.
    Ilene
wiped her hand across her cheeks and scanned the rows of stones, the nearly two
hundred years of loved ones laid to rest. Monuments and mausoleums built for
the loved ones of the city founders dotted the cemetery. Even in winter, green
ivy clung to many of them.
    Ilene
turned back to Adam. “I love you, son,” she whispered through her tears. “I
miss you so much.” She sat back to the ground. She placed her arm on the
tombstone and then rested her head on her arm, allowing the tears she had been
fighting.
    *           *           *           *
    Sitting
in her car at the edge of the cemetery, Carmen Salazar lowered the binoculars
she held to her eyes as Ilene began to cry at the headstone of her son.
    A pang
of guilt shot through Carmen for intruding on this private moment between
mother and son. She imagined her own grief if she lost her daughter, Mona.
    She
admitted to herself, over the last six months, the family had done nothing out
of the ordinary. They seemed like nothing more than a grieving family. She
leaned back in her seat, stretching her back. Carmen looked at herself in the
rearview mirror. She wondered if she should see a therapist. Perhaps the
missing persons cases—that day under the barn—had affected her more than she
let on. Isn’t my behavior obsessive? She wondered. Trailing a grieving mother
to the graveyard? Following a young woman to the gym? Spying on to two young
men in love?
    With
the engine off, the car was cold. Carmen rubbed her hands together and blew
into them. She hated the sneaking around, spying on a family that had already
suffered so much loss. But she couldn’t help but feel that they knew more than
they told, that there was more to what happened to them than the official
story. She watched as Ilene stood and walked toward her car to leave.
    Carmen
wanted to stop, to tell herself that she had seen nothing so far, because there
was nothing to see. Yet her instincts told her to hold on a bit longer. To
watch more closely.
    Because
something was about to surface. She could feel the approach of the inevitable
in her chest.

 
The Reform School
    Collin Stalinski
knew this time he was in trouble.
    The
police had caught him, literally, red handed. He had been in the middle of
spray-painting the side of a building when the police cruiser shined its giant
search lamp on him.
    Boom. Spotlight.
    Of
course, he ran.
    He
listened as the judge read the list of charges: vandalism, defacing public
property, resisting arrest, fleeing the scene of