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CHAPTER 10

“YOU REMEMBER THE Griffin case a while back? Those missing kids?” The chief’s sitting at his desk all the way near the door, but my hearing’s sharp.

“That was before my time,” says a female voice. I think it’s the 911 operator. What’s her name? Pearl—that’s it.

“They were brother and sister, ages four and six, who disappeared from over in Wyoming. This was about ten years back.”

My hands grip the bars so hard that my fingers turn white. A brother and a sister? Disappeared ten years ago?

“Don’t tell me the details, Chester,” Pearl says. “Not unless it’s a happy ending.”

I want him to tell all of it. Every last thing.

What if those two kids were us ?

“Mom sends them out to play one day,” the chief says. “After a while she realizes she hasn’t heard them in a while. Usually they fight, and they can get pretty loud. So she goes outside to check on them, and they’re gone.” He snaps his fingers. “Just— vanished .”

Pearl gasps. “I’d have died of a heart attack right then and there. There is a happy ending, right?”

“Police looked everywhere. Search and rescue combed every inch of the forest near their house.”

My hands are sweating now. How old were they? What did they look like?

Holo comes to stand beside me. “Are you okay?”

I shush him. I need to hear what the chief has to say.

“Did they ever find them?”

There’s a long pause. “They found their bodies,” the chief says finally. “They’d been murdered. Dumped in a river. The killer’s still at large.”

“God, Chester, I told you no details unless—”

“I’m sorry, Pearl. But suddenly I’ve got two reasons to wonder about missing kids, and they’re both glaring at me from over in that jail cell. I know that a lot of missing kids are runaways, trying to escape bad parents or poverty or abuse. They don’t always get happy endings, either. But it’s the ones who get kidnapped that you really have to worry about. Most of them are dead within three hours of being taken.”

Pearl’s voice goes lower. “I’m guessing you think those two back there are runaways?”

“Either that,” Chester says, “or else someone took them and they got real lucky and escaped.” Then he shakes his head. “Or maybe they really are the children of wolves.”

“I swear, sometimes my Andrew acts like he was raised by ’em,” Pearl muses. “Teenagers! They aren’t what I’d call civilized. Even the ones with two parents trying their best, like Lord knows Bill and I do.”

My mind’s a jumble of emotions as I walk back to my hard bed. For a minute, I’d thought the chief might be talking about Holo and me.

Do I really want to know the truth about who we are and where we came from? Honestly, I don’t know if I do. I’m not sure I could handle it.

“When can we go home?” Holo asks.

I reach out to ruffle his hair but then stop myself. I tell him I don’t know yet.

Because I have no idea what’s supposed to be home right now.