"No, no, no." He fumbled with the pencil, then patted his pocket. "Do you happen to have a cigarette?"
She glanced at him in disbelief, and he flinched. "No, of course you don't. What am I saying? It's a filthy habit. I quit last week."
Hannah opened her mouth, closed it, then spoke slowly. "Look, Doctor-I mean, Paul. I'm here because I don't want to be crazy. I just want to be me again. I want to graduate with my class. I want to have a great summer horseback riding with my best friend, Chess. And next year I want to go toUtahState and study dinosaurs and maybe find a duckbill nest site of my own. I want my life back. But if you can't help me ..."
She stopped and gulped. She almost never cried; it was the ultimate loss of control. But now she couldn't help it. She could feel warmth spill out of her eyes and trace down her cheeks to tickle her chin. Humiliated, she wiped away the teardrops as Paul peered around for a tissue. She sniffed.
"I'm sorry," he said. He'd found a box of Kleenex, but now he left it to come and stand beside her. His eyes weren't analytical now; they were blue and boyish as he tentatively squeezed her hand. "I'm sorry, Hannah. It sounds awful. But I'm sure I can help you. We'll get to the bottom of it. You'll see, by summertime you'll be graduating withUtahState and riding the duckbills, just like always." He smiled to show it was a joke. "All this will be behind you."
"You really think?"
He nodded. Then he seemed to realize he was standing and holding a patient's hand: not a very professional position. He let go hastily. "Maybe you've guessed; you're sort of my first client. Not that I'm not trained-I was in the top ten percent of my class. So. Now." He patted his pockets, came up with the pencil, and stuck it in his mouth. He sat down. "Let's start with the first time you remember having one of these dreams. When-"
He broke off as chimes sounded somewhere inside the house. The doorbell.
He looked flustered. "Who would be..." He glanced at a clock in the bookcase and shook his head.
"Sorry, this should only take a minute. Just make yourself comfortable until I get back."
"Don't answer it," Hannah said.
She didn't know why she said it. All she knew was that the sound of the doorbell had sent chills running through her and that right now her heart was pounding and her hands and feet were tingling.
Paul looked briefly startled, then he gave her a gentle reassuring smile. "I don't think it's the apocalypse at the door, Hannah. We'll talk about these feelings of apprehension when I get back." He touched her shoulder lightly as he left the room.
Hannah sat listening. He was right, of course. There was nothing at all menacing about a doorbell. It was her own craziness.
She leaned back in the soft contoured chair and looked around the room again, trying to relax.
It's all in my head. The psychologist is going to help me....
At that instant the window across the room exploded.
Chapter 2
Hannah found herself on her feet. Her awareness was fragmented and understanding came to her in pieces because she simply couldn't take in the whole situation at once. It was too bizarre.
At first she simply thought of a bomb. The explosion was that loud. Then she realized that something had come in the window, that it had come flying through the glass. And that it was in the room with her now, crouching among the broken shards of windowpane.
Even then, she couldn't identify it. It was too incongruous; her mind refused to recognize the shape immediately. Something pretty big-something dark, it offered. A body like a dog's but set higher, with longer legs. Yellow eyes.
And then, as if the right lens had suddenly clicked in front of her eyes, she saw it clearly.
A wolf. There was a big black wolf in the room with her.
It was a gorgeous animal, rangy and muscular, with ebony-colored fur and a white streak on its throat like a bolt of lightning. It was looking at her fixedly, with an almost human expression.
Escaped fromYellowstone , Hannah thought dazedly. The naturalists were reintroducing wolves to the park, weren't they? It couldn't be wild; Ryan Harden's great-grandpa had bragged for years about killing the last wolf in Amador county when he was a boy.
Anyway, she told herself, wolves don't attack people. They never attack people. A single wolf would never attack a full-grown teenager.
And all the time her conscious mind was thinking this, something deeper was making her move.
It made her back up slowly, never taking her eyes off the wolf, until she felt the bookcase behind her.
There's something you need to get, a voice in her mind was whispering to her. It wasn't like the voice of another person, but it wasn't exactly like her own mental voice, either. It was a voice like a dark cool wind: competent and rather bleak. Something you saw on a shelf earlier, it said.
In an impossibly graceful motion, from eight feet away, the wolf leaped.
There was no time to be scared. Hannah saw a bushy, flowing black arc coming at her and then she was slammed into the bookcase. For a while after that, everything was simply chaos. Books and knick-knacks were falling around her. She was trying to get her balance, trying to push the heaviness of a furry body away from her. The wolf was falling back, then jumping again as she twisted sideways to get away.
And the strangest thing was that she actually was getting away. Or at least evading the worst of the wolf's lunges, which seemed to be aimed at knocking her to the floor. Her body was moving as if this were, somehow instinctive to her, as if she knew how to do this.
But I don't know this. I never fight... and I've certainly never played dodge ball with a wolf before....
As she thought it, her movements slowed. She didn't feel sure and instinctive any longer. She felt confused.