They looked down on it a moment, then Dave Martyniuk walked towards the wolves.

There were four left; the one Greg had punched had recovered and gone over beside the others. They didn’t retreat this time.

Martyniuk said something in that ancient language—Welsh or Gaelic, whichever it was. The animals looked at him. And then, after a moment, they turned and loped away together towards the oldest graves and the church beyond. The four men watched them go past the sunken area, around the church, out of sight.

“What did you say?” Edward Marriner asked quietly.

He was stretching out his back. That stone lid would have been heavy, Ned thought. His father was not a man inclined to lifting and pulling. Or to swinging blows with a branch. He was doing things Ned couldn’t even have imagined a week ago.

“I told them nightfall would likely see them home. I wished them peace on the journey back.”

“That’s it?”

Martyniuk nodded.

He picked up the nearest of the three slain animals and, limping, carried it out of sight behind the trees. He came back for a second one. Edward Marriner picked up the third. He looked surprised when he lifted it, Ned saw, as if it was too easy. He saw his father raise his eyebrows, and follow Uncle Dave among the trees.

“Some animals were harmed in the making of this coffee-table book,” Greg said dryly.

Ned looked at him. “You okay?”

Greg was still holding his shoulder. His second injury in two days. “Been better, man. Could have been worse, I guess. Where are the stuntmen when you need them, eh?”

The other two reappeared. Ned’s father was unbuttoning his shirt. He took it off. Ned fished quickly for his pocket knife again and opened the small scissors. His dad tried it, but the blade wasn’t big enough. Edward Marriner grunted, handed it back, and then tore the shirt from the bottom most of the way to the collar. He ripped off the buttons and wrapped the whole thing around Greg’s arm before tying it.

“That’ll have to do till home,” he said.

“Got a bullet for me to bite?” Greg said.

Edward Marriner, bare-chested, smiled briefly. “Tylenol in the glove compartment.”

“Have to do,” Greg said. “We live in a primitive age. At least you don’t paint your chest, boss.”

Another thin smile. “I may yet,” Ned’s father said.

Dave Martyniuk had a cellphone to his ear. He looked over. “Kim’s in her car. She’ll meet us at your villa. I said an hour?”

Marriner nodded. “About right. You’ll follow me?”

“I’ll follow.”

The four of them walked out, past coffins, past the tomb on their right and the ticket booth, between trees and under leaves, out the gate and into light.

As soon as the villa gate clanged open and they drove through with Dave Martyniuk’s Peugeot behind them, Ned saw the woman with red hair standing alone on the terrace, watching them approach.

His heart started pounding.

His father saw her, too. He pulled the car straight over to the visitor parking pad, not around to the driveway on the far side. He switched off the engine. The three of them sat a moment, looking up at her.

It was late in the day now, the sun over the city, light slanting back along the valley, in their eyes, the shadows of the cypress trees very long. The woman came down the steps onto the grass, then she stopped.

“I’ll go,” Ned said.

He got out and walked across the lawn. In the light, her auburn hair was gleaming. She looked amazingly beautiful to him.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

She wasn’t crying. She wasn’t the crying type. He was taller than she was now. Hugs were awkward. He was fifteen, wasn’t he?

He liked the way she held him, though, and said his name: half reproving, half reassuring. And he liked her known scent. And that she was here. That she wasn’t in a civil-war zone where people were being blown up, or hacked apart with farm tools—even if they wore armbands that marked them as doctors come from far away to help.

He’d gotten her out. But this wasn’t just his way of drawing her from the Sudan. They needed her here. He was almost sure of it.

He was also sure trouble was coming, in a red car not far behind them.

“We didn’t expect you till later,” he said.

“Why, dear?”

A mistake. Already. His first words. Jeez.

“You said evening to Dad, didn’t you? Yesterday?”

“Did I? I must have been guessing. I was able to bump onto an earlier flight from Charles de Gaulle. The only hassle was the taxi driver having no idea how to find this place. I had to call. The woman here gave him directions.”

“Veracook?”

Meghan Marriner smiled. “That what you call her?”

“Have to. There’s a Veraclean, too.”

“That’s fun.” His mother withdrew, looking past him. “Hello, honey. Reporting for duty. Present and accounted for.”

“Meg.”

He watched his father come up. His parents kissed. His mom laid her head on his father’s chest. There was a time when he’d have been embarrassed by that.

“You going native, cher?” His mother stepped back, eyeing his father’s bare torso.

“Last of the Mohicans. It’s a long story. We’ll tell, but it would be good if you had a look at Gregory first. Do you have a kit? We’ve only got basic first-aid stuff.”

“What happened?” Her tone changed.

“We ran into some trouble.”

“Ed. What kind of trouble?”

Ned looked back; Greg was getting out of the car. You could see blood on his arm all the way from here. It had soaked through the shirt bandage.

Uncle Dave had driven his Peugeot around the far side of the house, to the driveway, out of sight. Ned heard a distant car door close, but Martyniuk didn’t appear.

“Greg got clawed by an animal,” Ned heard his father saying.

“I wrapped my shirt around it.”

“A wild animal? He’ll need rabies shots. Where were you? Gregory, come and let me see that!”

Ned took note that his father didn’t answer either question.

Uncle Dave still didn’t appear. He must have entered the house through the main door on the other side, under the hill slope. Leaving us to our reunion, Ned thought.

Then he thought something else.

They hadn’t expected his mom to be here yet. And she’d know him, from Darfur. They’d been there until yesterday. There couldn’t be that many people associated with Doctors Without Borders in the Sudan. And this wasn’t the only time he’d been where she was, either.

She would go, to put it very mildly, ballistic when she figured out what he’d been doing. More trouble. But there was no way around this one, was there? Unless Uncle Dave stayed out of sight all the time. He was doing that now, but there was no…

They heard another car, gearing down for the last upward slope of the road. Ned turned, saw the red Peugeot approach. It stopped, idling in front of the gates.

“I’ll do the code,” he said quickly, and ran back over.

He punched the numbers. The gates swung and clanged. Aunt Kim drove through. Ned saw Steve in the passenger seat. Kate smiled at him from the back. His aunt slid her window down.

“Ned. How’s Greg?”

“He’s okay. Aunt Kim, my mom’s here. She’s checking him out, and—”

But his aunt’s gaze had gone past him. She was looking into the serene, end-of-day light towards her younger sister. Ned turned. His mother was still beside Greg but was looking back this way now, at the woman driving the red car.

They hadn’t seen each other, he thought, in something like twenty-five years. There was an ache in his throat, a rawness. You could think about the endless story they’d stumbled into here and call twenty-five years nothing, a blink. Or you could know that they were a good part of two lifetimes, never to return or be reclaimed.

He thought of Brys. The latest body buried in Les Alyscamps. The druid had spent so long trying to get something back. It couldn’t be done, Ned thought. Even if you thought you’d achieved it, what returned couldn’t be the same as what had been taken away.