“Maybe there’s a fourth choice,” he said. “Something that didn’t occur to me until right this minute. There’s somebody else that might help us. At least she’s helped me find Jilly before. She’s got this connection with Jilly—something to do with what they both had to go through growing up. Thing is, I already owe her a favour and she hasn’t called in the marker on it yet. Asking for another might be pushing things—like I was trying to take advantage of her good nature—and I wouldn’t want to piss her off.”

“You make it sound dangerous,” I said.

“Guess it could be, depending on her standing in the pack. I used to see her more often, but not so much in the past few months. Could be somebody else has gone all alpha, and she might not even be running with them anymore.”

“She’s one of your canid cousins?” Walker asked.

Joe shook his head. “Sort of. The blood’s thin, but the heart’s big.”

“What’s her name?”

Joe turns to me and gives a slow shake of his head. “She doesn’t have a name—none that I ever heard her give out of anybody else ever used.” He gave us a humourless smile. “She can’t talk, you see.”

I thought about what Joe had said, how Jilly and this friend of his had shared certain experiences growing up.

“Somebody . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say cut, though I couldn’t erase from my mind the image of a man slicing off some little girl’s tongue. “Took away her voice?”

“She never had one—I mean, not like we do. She’s a pit bull. I found her in some freak’s backyard, chained up with the rest of her pack. Fighting dogs, born and bred to kill each other in the ring. So I let them go. Showed them the way into the otherworld where they could make a new life for themselves. And before you ask: no, she doesn’t owe me anything for doing the right thing. I made that clear to her when I tracked her down later and asked for her help.”

“But if she can’t talk . . .”

“Then how can she help us? That last time she took me right to Jilly.”

“So what are we waiting for?”

“Nothing. Except I’m going alone—it’s safer that way. You and Walker check out where that trail leads, see if you can’t get a line on your friend Lizzie.”

“And Odawa?” Walker asked.

Joe looked up between the trees where the giant salmon had swum away through the air, a bogan clinging to his dorsal fin.

“Damned if I know how we’re going to deal with him,” he said.

Without wasting any more time, he stepped away into the between and it was just Walker and me.