The night of full moon, Suki pretended to go to sleep as normal, curled up on a patch of clover with one wing covering her face. The pixies had made me promise to stay safely in bed, but of course I broke the promise straight away. I sat watching the patch of clover from an upstairs window.
The wait was long and boring, but I didn’t dare stop looking, even for a moment. I wondered what a ghoul or a spectre would look like, if they did indeed come. I had a torch of my own, too. I wasn’t sure if they would be a threat to a person, but I wasn’t going to take any chances.
After I had waited for a couple of hours, I was startled by the noise of something large, moving against the garden fence. Moments later, an animal jumped into the garden. It wasn’t a ghoul or a spectre, that was for sure. In the moonlight, it took me several seconds to realise that it was a wolf. Meanwhile, Suki had turned the torch on, but the wolf was not interested. It grabbed her in its jaws and leapt the garden gate, before running towards the road.
I dived down the stairs and fumbled with the front door. I didn’t have a clear idea what I was going to do, but I didn’t want to lose sight of the wolf. As I stepped outside, disappointment and relief mingled in my mind: the wolf was nowhere to be seen. I stopped and thought for a moment. The wolf had run towards the road. If it was still near the road I might just catch up with it by using the car. I would never catch it on foot, that was certain.
I backed the car out and started driving round some of the roads near my house. I wished I had some kind of weapon, but there hadn’t been any time. (Also, I didn’t fancy explaining to a policeman that I needed a weapon because I was searching for a kidnapped pixie.)
I was almost ready to give up when I looked out over a field, and saw a wolf running away, silhouetted against the moon. I had run out of options. The wolf was well away from the road, and obviously it was far too fast for there to be any point in running after it.
I did the only thing I could do. I went home, got into bed, and tried to sleep—but I couldn’t stop worrying about Suki. I wondered if I would see the other pixies the next day, and if so, how they would try to rescue her.