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There was a breeze today. The trees rustled and hushed with the wind. It was a cool sound high up in the trees, but the wind never came near the ground. We moved through a world of green heat and solid brown tree trunks. Sunlight glittered on the leaves, hitting the ground in shining yellow patches before we moved into heavier shade. The shade was a few degrees cooler but still heavy with heat. It was almost dead-up noon, and even the insects had fallen quiet with the heat.

Richard stopped just ahead of us. “Do you hear that?” he asked softly.

Shang-Da said, “Someone crying. A woman.”

I didn’t hear a damn thing.

Richard nodded. “Maybe a woman.” He eased through the trees in a movement that was almost a run. Crouched, hands almost touching the ground. His power spilled back from him like the bubbling wake of a ship.

I followed him. I tried to look where I was going, but I stumbled and fell. Shang-Da helped me to my feet. I jerked away from him and ran. I stopped looking at my feet or the trees. I stared only at Richard’s back, his body. I mimicked his movements, trusting that if he could make the openings, so could I. I leaped over logs that I didn’t see until he moved over them. It was almost hypnotic. The world narrowed down to his body speeding through the trees. Again and again I almost careened into trees, pushing my body to move too fast. I was moving faster than my mind could work. If Richard had jumped off a cliff, I’d have followed, because I was just moving. It was like I’d given up everything to my body. I was just muscles working, legs running. The world was a blur of green and light and shade and Richard’s body sliding at a run through the trees.

He stopped like a switch had been thrown. One minute running, the next stopped, no in between. But I didn’t bump into him. I was stopped, too. It was like a part of my brain I couldn’t access had known he would stop.

Shang-Da was at my back. He stepped close enough for me to smell his faint, expensive aftershave. He whispered, “How did you do that, human?”

I glanced at him. “What?”

“Run.”

I knew that run meant more to the lukoi than the word said. I stood there, covered in a light dew of sweat, barely breathing hard, and knew that something had happened that hadn’t before. Richard and I had tried to jog together before, and it hadn’t worked. He was two inches shy of being an entire foot taller than me. A lot of that was leg. His speed for jogging was running to me, and even then, I couldn’t keep up with him. Add the fact that he was a lycanthrope, and, well, he was too fast for me. The only other time I’d kept up with him had been with him holding my hand, with him pulling me along with the marks and his power.

I turned to look at Shang-Da. There must have been something on my face, some soft astonishment, because his expression softened to something almost like pity.

Richard moved away from us, and we both turned back to follow his progress. As my pulse slowed, I could hear what they had heard ages ago: crying—though that was too soft a word for it. Someone was sobbing as if their heart were breaking.

Richard moved toward the sound, and we followed him. There was a huge sycamore in the middle of a clearing. On the other side of the tree’s large, (patchy) trunk, a woman huddled. She had squeezed herself down into a small, tight ball, her arms hugging her knees. Her face was thrown up to the sparkling sunlight, eyes squeezed shut, blind.

She had brunette hair so dark it could have passed for black, cut very short. She was white with a fringe of dark lashes pasted to her pale cheeks. Her face was small and triangular, but beyond that I couldn’t describe it. Her face was ravished with tears, eyes swollen, skin reddened. She was small, dressed in heavy khaki shorts, thick socks, hiking boots, and a T-shirt.

Richard knelt in the leaves beside her. He touched her arm before he said anything, and she screamed, eyes flying wide. There was a moment of utter panic on her face, then she threw herself against his chest, wrapped her arms around him,