Chapter 24 Names Without Name

• The wind had shifted again. Lucy noticed it in the way the snow clung to corners of crumbling buildings and pressed itself against the windshield of her vehicle in thick, relentless swirls. The air felt heavier today, the cold sharp enough to scrape the inside of her lungs. She adjusted the scarf around her neck as she stepped out, a familiar tension settling into her shoulders.
• The foxes were waiting.
• Not at her doorstep, not even at the alley’s mouth — but not far. She spotted them by a collapsed fence, two pale shapes against a world of white. The injured one limped as it moved to stand beside the other, their forms nearly identical now that the blood-matted patch of fur had begun to heal over.