"Have fun while I was gone?" Kayla announces, waking me out of a bored doze. Nothing else to do but sleep. Too cold. No food. Several times I wished for that book I'd stolen from the library in Broken Bow. Too bad it was in my backpack, with Kayla, the whole time. Too dark to read now anyway.

"I finally got more clothes." She drops the crammed backpack on the mattress. I notice she's wearing a new pair of fuzzy gray mittens that smell like the bottom of a box left in storage. Between her knit hat pulled down over her ears and forehead, and the fleece scarf that covers her mouth, all I can see of her is her red nose and brown eyes.

The backpack oozes other scents just as strange. Smoky car seat. Mothballs. A faint gardenia-scented perfume. "Socks. Long underwear. Regular underwear." Kayla pulls these garments from the backpack as she names them. "Flannel-lined jeans. Fleece shirt. Down vest."

She looks at me. "What are you waiting for? Start stripping." She grins. "Now."

I smile back, but wait to see what else she has.

"You think I'm kidding? Come on. You need to put this stuff on."

"Okay." I feel more than a little weird taking off my clothes in front of Kayla. Plus it's freezing, so I'm hopping around trying to get my pants down as fast as I can. I grab the long underwear.

"Daniel, you need to put on the new underwear." She shakes the package at me. "Yours smells like... well, let's just say I can tell you haven't done your laundry in a few weeks."

"Okay," I say, accepting the underwear. She continues to watch me. "Um... maybe you could turn around or something?"

"What, are you shy?" Kayla grins. I suddenly get the idea that she was hoping to see me take off my underwear. But she turns around.

To be safe, I turn my back to her while I change. When I'm done putting on the underwear and the socks and the long underwear and turn back to get one of the new pairs of pants, Kayla's watching me with that grin still on her face.

I can feel myself blushing and I can't seem to meet her eyes. I have a harder time than usual putting on a simple pair of pants. As I'm fumbling with the button on the fly, Kayla's fingers dance up my spine.

"You need some help?"

"No!" My voice is a little too loud and I jump away from her touch. There is a tense moment.

"Here's a clean shirt." She hands it to me. I glance up at her eyes. She avoids mine and her smile is gone.

I take off the scraps of the shirt I'm wearing.

"You've healed up pretty quick," Kayla remarks. I raise my eyebrows. She gestures to her neck. "The bruises. They're gone."

My fingers explore my neck, pushing where only yesterday it was so sensitive. No pain at all. How long since I had that rope around my neck? Has it really only been two days?

"Yeah. I guess they're all healed up." I pull the thermal shirt on. I feel warmer already.

"You need to eat more," Kayla says, eyeing my ribs. "And I don't mean broccoli soup."

I lean over to see if she has anything in the backpack I haven't sniffed out yet. There's a faint trace of hamburger but it's coming from Kayla's breath. "You didn't bring any food back?"

"I barely had enough money to get clothes for you. I had to steal the socks and underwear."

"But you had enough money to go to McDonald's."

She stares at me. "It was Wendy's. I guess you don't need any training for your sense of smell."

My stomach growls. Or maybe I'm growling at her.

"Look, see? Now you have warm clothes and we can both leave here and get something to eat. Okay?"

My eyes narrow, but not before the darkness pulses in and out.

"Daniel, calm down. Changing now isn't going to help anyone."

I swallow the bile that has risen up in my throat. That faint wisp of hamburger slathered with special sauce and tomatoes is driving me crazy.

Daniel.

I blink and squint and blink. My vision's gone blurry.

Daniel, calm down.

A wave of warm, happy feelings shudders through my system and suddenly I can see clearly again. I suck in deep breaths. No nausea. I feel great.

"Feeling better?" Kayla looks at me with raised eyebrows.

"Yeah," I say. "I thought I was gonna black out for a minute there but now I'm fine. Wow. I can't remember the last time I felt this good." I look around at my surroundings like I'm seeing them for the first time.

"Here's what we're going to do," Kayla says. "You are going to finish getting dressed. Then we are going to decide where you want to eat."

"Wendy's sounds good to me."

Kayla snaps her fingers at me. "Come on. Put that sweatshirt on. And the vest. And the coat."

"What's the rush? Why can't we talk about dinner while I get dressed?"

"One thing at a time."

I don't like her tone and that good feeling I had before is starting to wear off. I yank the sweatshirt on over my head, hearing the sound of a seam ripping. "I'm just hungry," I snap, jerking my arms through the vest. "All I've had to eat lately is a can of soup, and that was yesterday."

"Button it," Kayla says, pointing to the snaps on the vest as I'm reaching for the jacket.

I glare at her.

She smiles sweetly. "Please."

I continue to glare as I snap each button closed. After shrugging on the jacket, I zip it up to my nose. "Happy?"

"Very."

"Now can we talk about food?"

"Hat and gloves first."

Finally, all suited up, I growl, "Food."

"Okay." Kayla takes a deep breath and smiles. "Food."

"Yes."

"You have two options. We can head into town, which is about an hour on foot, and see what's still open and where we can steal some food from."

The idea of stepping out into that frozen tundra does not exactly appeal to me. Now that I'm finally warming up, I'm realizing exactly how cold I had been. "What's option two?"

"We can go hunting."

"You have a gun?"

"No..." She raises her eyebrows, looking at me like I should know what she means.

"Hunting. As wolves."

"Bingo."

"That's not an option."

"You're going to have to learn sooner or later," Kayla says. "Right now, you're in a pretty deserted area, so we're unlikely to come across any people. And considering we don't have any money... it's free food."

I swallow and stare outside. "I think later is better."

Kayla nods and puts her own mittens back on. "Then back into town we go."

"You'd rather go hunting."

Kayla looks at me. "This isn't about me. This is about you. You don't feel comfortable going hunting, and that's fine. We'll try it later. Right now, we need to get you some food, okay?"

I look away and follow Kayla outside without saying anything. I feel weak, like it took all my strength to keep from succumbing to that change a few minutes ago. The cold cuts into every chink in my winter armor. All I can do (besides shiver) is trudge behind Kayla along the little path she's made with all her trips into town through the snow.

It isn't snowing, and in the darkness I can see for miles along the flatlands. An occasional tree, bowed under the weight of the frost. A dark ribbon through the snow that is a road, with headlights flaring and blinding me.

Kayla keeps away from the road.

Over a low hill the town throws off an electric glare that turns the sky a faint pink above its rooftops. When I look up at the clear starry night I realize there is no moon. And no streetlights anywhere nearby. Only that faint pink glow from several miles away.

I don't mention my observation to Kayla. She'd think I was dumb, only now noticing that I can see better in the dark than normal people. I bury my nose into my scarf and keep walking.

My scarf smells like wood fires.

The noises are not alarming at first. Of course, it's so silent out here that the crunching of our boots through the snow deafens me. Once my ears become accustomed to that sound, I pick up the whishing of tires across that road half a mile away, and Kayla's breathing, which is silent except for a little whistle when she inhales, then her heartbeat, a relaxed BOM-bom BOM-bom. I tune into that sound and follow it, my eyes closed to keep the wind from freezing the tears against my eyeball.

Then I hear the snuffling.

It reminds me of when a dog smells food under the couch. He sniff sniffs, then snorts out so his nose is clear to sniff again. Sniff sniff snort. There's some heaving breathing too, panting. And there are a lot of mouths breathing and noses snuffling.

Kayla doesn't do anything so for a while I ignore it. Probably some animal, some harmless animal burrowing under the ground, a herd of bison or something

(doesn't sound underground, doesn't sound that big)

until I can't ignore it anymore. It sounds like a pack of something running. I pull my nose out from the scarf and snort myself a few times

("This thing stinks," I tell Kayla when she looks back at me)

and inhale a big double lungful of icy cold air.

The thing about icy cold air is that most of the time it makes it hard to smell anything. Frozen things don't have a smell.

The other thing about icy cold air is that when everything else has no smell because it's frozen solid, you can smell heat-pumping creatures that much better.

This smell puts my nerves on edge. It's like that night in the playhouse all over again. The smell, the sounds – I know it's a pack of wolves coming up on us, and fast.

"Watch it," Kayla says. I've walked into her, not paying attention to where I'm going and thrumming with nervous energy.

"Do you smell that?" I ask her.

She sniffs the air.

"I don't smell anything."

I shove my nose back into the burnt wood scarf.

"What was it?"

Kayla sounds so patient. I shrug. "Nothing, I guess."

We continue.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm so crazy hungry for food that I'm hearing things. Smelling weird stuff. Kayla should be able to smell that. If she's not worried, I shouldn't be.

For the next half hour walking to town, my muscles burn with alertness.