His stomach muscles clenched, and he took a deep breath. “Jesus Christ.”

Help me.

He started to shake. “This isn’t happening.”

God…Oh, God…help. I need help.

He slammed the glass onto the cabinet and stalked out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, inhaling one after the other of deep, lung-chilling breaths of cool night air. When he could think without wanting to throw up, he sat down on the steps with a thump and buried his face in his hands, then instantly yanked them off his face, unable to believe what he’d felt.

His hands were cold…and they were wet. He lifted his fingers to his cheeks and traced the tracks of his tears.

“I’m crying? For God’s sake, I’m crying? What’s wrong with me? I don’t cry, and when I do, I will sure as hell need a reason.”

But anger could not replace the overwhelming sense of despair that was seeping into his system. He felt weak and drained, hopeless and helpless. The last time he’d felt this down had been the day he’d regained consciousness in a Kentucky hospital and seen the vague image of his sister’s face hovering somewhere above his bed.

He remembered thinking that he’d known his sister was an angel to have put up with so many brothers all of her life, but he’d never imagined that all angels in heaven looked like her. It was the next day before he realized that he hadn’t died, and by that time, worrying about the faces of angels had become secondary to the mind-bending pain that had come to stay.

Out of the silence of the night, a dog suddenly bugled in a hollow somewhere below Chaney Creek. The sound was familiar. He shuddered, trying to relax as his nerves began to settle. This was something to which he could relate. Someone was running hounds. Whether it was raccoon, bobcat or something else that they hunted, it rarely mattered. To the hunters, the dogs and the hunt were what counted.

He listened, remembering days far in his past when he and his brothers had done the same, nights when they’d sat around a campfire swapping lies that sounded good in the dark, drinking coffee made in a pot that they wouldn’t have fed the pigs out of in the light of day and listening to their hounds running far and wide across the hills and in the deep valleys.

He sighed, then dropped his head in his hands, wishing for simpler times, saner times. He wondered where he’d gone wrong. He’d married Shirley full of good intent, then screwed up her life, as well as his own.

And now this!

He didn’t know what to think. He’d survived a wreck that should have killed him. But if it had messed with his head in a way they hadn’t expected, then making a new life for himself had suddenly become more complicated than he’d planned.

Help. I need help.

He lifted his head, like an animal sniffing the air. His nostrils flared, his eyes narrowed to dark, gleaming slits. This time, he knew he wasn’t dreaming. He was wide-awake and barefoot on his sister’s back porch. And he knew what he heard. The voice was inside his head. He shivered, then shifted his gaze, looking out at the darkness, listening…waiting.

When the first weak rays of sunlight changed the sky from black to baby blue, Wyatt got to his feet and walked into the house. It had taken all night, and more soul-searching than he’d realized he had in him, but he knew what he had to do.

Somewhere down the hall, Joy babbled, and Toni laughed. Lane smiled to himself at the sound, buttoning his shirt on his way to the kitchen to start the coffee. He walked in just in time to see Wyatt closing the back door.

“Up kinda early, aren’t you, buddy?” Lane asked, and then froze at the expression on Wyatt’s face, grabbing him by the arm. “What’s wrong?”

Wyatt tried to explain, but it just wouldn’t come. “I need to borrow one of your cars.”

Lane headed for the coffeepot, giving himself time to absorb the unexpected request, and wondering about the intensity of Wyatt’s voice. Yet refusing him was not a consideration.

“It’s yours,” he said.

Measuring his words, along with coffee and water, Lane turned on the coffeemaker before taking Wyatt to task. “Mind telling me where you’re going so early in the morning? This isn’t exactly Memphis, and to my knowledge there’s no McDonald’s on the next corner cooking up sausage biscuits.”

“I’ve got to go,” Wyatt repeated. “Someone needs me.”

Lane’s posture went from easy to erect. “Why didn’t you say so? I’ll help.”

Wyatt shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. Hell, for that matter, I don’t understand. All I know is, last night while I was wide-awake and watching dark turn to day, someone kept calling my name.”

The oddity of the remark was not lost on Lane, but trespassing on another man’s business was not his way.

“Do you know where you’re going?” Lane asked.