Now, he clung in motionless silence to the shadows of the overgrowth, his burning amberish eyes piercing the night as if it did not exist. He watched the girl's approach and knew her from the night before. There was youth and vivacious beauty in her movements, his inimitable instincts told him. Earlier, he had stalked the house not a half-block away of the brute-man who had so cruelly killed his mate. Then, he had intuitively moved toward this overgrown excavation where a human's shelter had once been started and not completed. Only the pit where the cellar had been dug, its stone foundation laid and nearly hidden beneath scrub brush, remained. There, he waited, a mysterious and indefinable power advising him of the oncoming girl and her relationship to the man and the town he had sworn his animal vengeance against.

… Sometimes, maybe too often, when she was alone and uneasy in the darkness, Annie thought of her parents and that fateful night they had the accident on the way to San Diego. It was futile, even foolish, she knew; they were very gone… long ago… and now there was only Uncle Link, but she couldn't help thinking about them sometimes.

Well… she did love her uncle. He'd been good to her; besides, he was her mother's brother and only living relative. But… but the way he'd begun to look at her lately, too often in fact, especially when he'd been drinking, which was every night… His eyes… the gleam in them, and the twist to his mouth… God, it frightened her. It was those times that she was glad that Nell Carter was in the house. Perhaps, she was being silly… after all, he was the town's Chief of Police, and certainly he'd never made even one out of the way advance toward her in the six years she'd lived with him. Really, it was unfair of her to harbor such feelings. He had enough enemies in the valley as it was without her adding her name to their list.