“And I’ll make certain you don’t work for anyone else, either,” he continued. “No one’s going to want a yellow-bellied tree-hugger on their crew. You work for me now, or you don’t work. Period!” He looked around the room. “And that goes for the rest of you.”

“At least I’ll still be alive to walk to the unemployment line,” Droine said under his breath. He left the trailer, slamming the door behind him.

Ceballo stepped in front of the door to block the way. “Anyone else?”

The rest of the men were too afraid to speak up. They still might leave, but if they did, they’d do it later, when Ceballo wasn’t looking.

“All right, then,” he said. “Let’s get to work and show these people they don’t scare us one bit.”

But the men were scared…as much of Ceballo as they were of the spirits that haunted the forest each night.

Chapter 16

They could hear the school bus coming down the road toward them. There was a plume of dust rising up between the trees, and the thrum of its diesel engine was growing louder by the second.

Argus was nowhere in sight.

“He’s not going to show, is he?” Harlan asked.

Noble shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Tora took a quick look around. “Do you think he’s gone forever?”

Again Noble shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Why would he want to leave, anyway?” Harlan asked. “There are four of us. We’ve always been four, and we always will be four. We’re stuck with each other for life, whether we like it or not.”

Noble looked at his smaller brother and smiled. “You say that now, but things change, no matter how much you don’t want them to.”

Tora said nothing, and judging by the look on her face, she knew and understood what Noble was saying. She was in love, or at least in like with Michael. One day she might want to spend more time with him, and who knows, even get married. When that happened, she’d have to tell him of their secret and they’d no longer be four, but five. Harlan too might find someone, or decide he’d like to pursue a career in computers that would take him out of the forest and into the city—Vancouver, Toronto, maybe Waterloo. Tora had expressed interest in perhaps becoming a vet or an actress, and either choice would require schooling. And what about himself? He might want to become a doctor or a lawyer or maybe even a politician. One thing was for certain, in a few years the pack would be scattered to the four winds with faint hope of regrouping and settling back into the forest from which they’d come. So much could happen over the years that they all had to be prepared for change. They had to adapt to it, not resist it.