My front door stuck shut.

“Great, I guess it rained here, too,” I muttered, carefully jiggling the key and pressing my shoulder against the top of the door frame—the part that swelled shut after every single storm. The part I kept meaning to sand down, if I ever had a freaking half an hour to spare. My stupid door finally swung open, almost knocking me off balance. I stumbled into the hall table and heaved my filthy, smelly backpack onto the living room floor.

It looked like Susan had watered my houseplants and collected my mail. A tiny stack of envelopes waited on the table, just under my fingers. I sighed and sorted through them. Credit card offer. Open a bank account with us and get a free shotgun. Have I considered switching my car insurance?

The penultimate letter made my stomach drop. That plain white envelope. That tight, neat handwriting and the subtly pretentious return address sticker, a gold embossed Barry R. Richardson, Ph.D. 237 Monticello Place. Evanston, IL.

Well, of course. It was almost the end of the month. And Barry R. Richardson, Ph.D. is nothing if not punctual. I ripped open the envelope and found the check. No note, no card, just the check, which had been folded in half and slipped into the white envelope. As per usual.

I told Barry I didn’t need alimony payments anymore. I had my own job now, thank you very much, as a tenure-track professor at a respected research institution. I told him two years ago I was no longer interested in receiving monthly checks from the world’s foremost authority on the role of dragons in medieval literature, the great Professor Richardson. He responded with some half-hearted email about the complications of renegotiating the divorce settlement, and I’d let it slide. My fingers trembled as I unfolded the check. This was as close as we’d come to speaking in over a year, my fingers on the paper he’d touched a week ago.

“Damn it, Barry, I don’t want your money,” I said, but my voice sounded feeble, even to me. I imagined ripping up the check, stuffing the tiny paper flecks into the garbage.

“But first,” I said, placing the check delicately on the table, “a really long, really hot shower.”

That night I stood in my bedroom and stared at my closet with my arms crossed over my chest. I didn’t have a single sexy outfit in my entire goddamn house. I hadn’t even owned much lingerie when I was married, and most of that had just made my ass look huge and my boobs look saggy. When the neat little boxes of my married life arrived at my parents’ house, I threw away anything remotely intimate, leaving me with a nighttime wardrobe that consisted entirely of flannel pants and tank tops.

“Karen, you’re being insane,” I told my reflection in the bedroom mirror.

I wasn’t even certain that what I wore to bed was what I wore in the field with Vali. Maybe, if I just concentrated hard enough, I’d show up in a black lace corset. I smiled as a slow tingle of arousal moved through my body. Damn, I couldn’t even come close to explaining who Vali was or how the dreams worked, but that mystery didn’t seem to dampen my libido. I pulled on a tight white T-shirt and my very best underwear and climbed under the covers. My clean sheets felt so good after a week in the wet sleeping bag that I almost moaned in pleasure.

“I’m ready for you, Vali,” I whispered.

I closed my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep, but it did not come easily. Those clean sheets soon felt too hot, and I kicked off the cover. My house seemed full of strange noises after so many nights in the backcountry; the refrigerator kicked on and off, traffic purred outside my windows, and the pipes gurgled and trickled. Without the moon and stars overhead, my bedroom seemed too dark, almost claustrophobic. I was idly debating pitching my tent in my own backyard when sleep finally took me.

My dreams were strange. At first, I was falling, and then I ran through the aspen grove. The blue sky above was mottled with clouds, the grass dotted with wildflowers, but I couldn’t seem to find our aspen grove. Every turn led me back to where I had started, a strange, dark forest where the trees crowded so close together they felt like the bars of a cage.

“Vali!” I screamed. “Vali, can you hear me?”

For one horrible moment I almost thought I heard a response, some distant, echoing cry. I bolted toward it, but the further I ran, the more the trees closed in around me, their leaves snapping in my face, their twigs snagging my hair. The dream shifted, and I found myself back where I’d started, my legs trembling and my chest heaving as I screamed Vali’s name over and over. There was no further response.

I blinked open my eyes, forcing myself awake. My lungs still burned from sprinting through the dream forest, and the backs of my hands and arms felt raw with scratches. For a heartbeat, before the glowing blue numbers of my alarm clock came into focus, I thought I might still be dreaming.

It was four in the morning. Just fucking great.

Grumbling, I tossed the covers off and wrapped myself in my ratty old blue robe. Falling back asleep was going to be impossible. Might as well answer my bajillion emails.

By the time the sun rose over Bozeman, I’d finished an entire pot of coffee and my empty inbox was a thing of beauty. Amber, our department secretary, sent me a cryptic email two days ago about a “message” she had for me. Of course, she couldn’t just send me the message; Amber was not one to miss the opportunity for drama.

“Please don’t be a message from Barry,” I said to my kitchen as I washed out my coffee pot.

I packed up my laptop and filled the back of my Subaru with all the transmitting equipment we’d used in the park, ready to return it to the lab.

“Please not Barry,” I whispered as I drove toward campus. “Anyone but Barry.”

****

AMBER WAS ON THE PHONE, laughing shrilly as she leaned over the hundreds of baby pictures decorating her desk. It sounded like our department head had a huge, public argument with his rival in the math department, and she was giving someone on the other end of the line a blow-by-blow recap. She waved her hands at me, hung up the phone, and launched breathlessly into a painfully detailed description of exactly everything I’d missed. I nodded, smiled, and tried not to look too anxious.

“And you had a message for me?” I asked as soon as she paused for breath.

“Oh, you got a call from Stanford,” Amber said.

“What?”

“Yeah, someone at Stanford wants to talk to you. Something about the wolves.”

“I don’t know anyone at Stanford,” I said.

“Hold on, I took a message. It’s in here somewhere.” Amber bent over the chaos of her desk, shifting staplers, Post It notes, coffee mugs, and picture frames. “Oh yes, here it is. Professor Laufeyiarson. And there’s the number.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking the paper and edging out of the office.

I rattled my office door open, dropped my laptop into the pile of course requests covering my desk, and sat down.

“A collaboration with Stanford would be huge,” I whispered, fingering the note from Amber.

But who the hell was Laufeyiarson? Wildlife biology is a pretty small field, and I was almost positive the only person at Stanford who studied predators was Garcia. I dialed the number as I pulled up Google, typing in Laufeyiarson Stanford and clicking the first link.

Stanford’s website loaded as the phone rang. I blinked at my computer screen. Laufeyiarson was a woman. A young woman. And she studied...I squinted to be sure. Norse mythology? What the actual fuck?

“Hi! This is Professor Caroline Laufeyiarson,” a cheerful voice said on the phone.

“Oh! Yeah, this is Karen from MSU—”

“If you’d like to leave a message, please press one. If you need immediate assistance, please press two for our administrative assistant. My office hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from ten to—”

“Right,” I muttered, trying to pull myself together enough to leave a somewhat coherent message. “This is Karen McDonald from MSU, returning your call about, uh, wolves.”

I hung up the phone and rocked back in my chair, feeling more or less like an idiot. Someone cleared their throat behind me, and I turned to see Colin in the doorway.

“Yes?” I asked, mildly surprised to see him here before ten in the morning.

Colin nodded toward the lab. “Zeke’s got something to show you.”

“Zeke’s here? This early?”

Colin grinned. “He thought he noticed something in the park and wanted to check it out. He called me this morning.”

“Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

I grabbed my water bottle and followed Colin to the lab. Zeke sat hunched over his workstation, surrounded by empty energy drink cans, Frito bags, and three computer screens, all filled with numbers.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Zeke spun around in his chair, frowning. “I just finished crunching the latest numbers. Something’s weird.”

He tapped a few keys and a map of Yellowstone came up on the screen. Glowing red triangles filled the map; the location of various packs.

“That’s old data,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” said Zeke. “Two years ago.”

He bent over the keyboard, and the red triangles shifted around the map. “Here’s last year. Now, look at what happens when I enter the data from our trip...”

The map changed again. Only now the triangles were spreading, or dispersing, leaving a ring of empty darkness in the center of the map.

“That...that doesn’t make sense,” I said. I tapped the blank space in the center of Zeke’s screen. “That’s prime territory in the middle of the park.”

“No shit,” said Zeke. “And look what it matches.”

He pulled up another map. I took a deep breath. The bright red outline of the volcanic caldera, the super-volcano sleeping beneath Yellowstone, perfectly matched the pattern of red triangles.

“They’re leaving the caldera,” I whispered. “But why?”

“Maybe it’s about to blow,” Colin’s soft voice said from behind me.

I shook my head. “Don’t even joke about that.”

Yellowstone National Park is the largest volcano in the world. The last time this volcano erupted, six hundred thousand years ago, it sprayed volcanic ash as far south as Mexico. It blotted out the sun. It may even have triggered the ice age.

“Well, maybe you should ask your friend what’s going on,” Zeke drawled, his eyes still fixed on the computer screen.

“Good thought,” I said. “I’d bet Diana’s noticed this...this bizarre migration pattern. But why didn’t she say anything when—”

My voice faded as I realized Zeke was staring at me with a raised eyebrow. “Nah, I meant your, uh, your other friend. You know, Wolf Man.”

I glanced to make sure the door of the lab was closed, then I shook my head and closed my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Zeke, what about, ‘What happens in the park, stays in the park?’”

“Hey, all I’m trying to say is that sexy Mr. Wolf Man might have a unique and valuable perspective on this particular situation.”

I turned to Colin for support, but he was nodding along with Zeke. “Karen - I mean, Professor McDonald - you should do it. This could be important. You can talk to him, right?”

I opened my mouth to respond and couldn’t think of a single word.

Zeke leaned back in his chair and put his arms behind his head. “Boss Lady, I know you’re all about pretending none of that crazy shit in the park ever happened, but seriously. What the fuck’s going on with the wolves? These are not normal migration patterns. They’re leaving primo habitat. There’s got to be a reason.”

I sighed and looked out the window. The leaves on the elms were already starting to change from deep green to a bright, sunny yellow. “I don’t even know how to contact him,” I said.

Colin and Zeke exchanged a look that worried me.

“Well, you could try—” Zeke started.

“And this conversation is over,” I said, cutting him off and desperately hoping my cheeks didn’t look as red as they felt.

“Okay,” Zeke drawled. “But if the park is getting ready to blow, it might be nice to have some advance warning.”

“Thanks,” I said, backing out of the lab before either one of them could make another Wolf Man comment.

I bit my lip as I sank back into my desk chair. If the Yellowstone caldera blows, I thought with a numb, sinking feeling, we’re all totally fucked.