Now, with the first light of dawn turning my car-mate from a black lump into a slumped human figure, he spoke without opening his eyes. “They need to wake Nina up and have her call the human police.”
“You didn’t sleep at all,” I answered, surprised into a laugh by his abrupt observation. I’d thought for sure Mr. I Don’t See the Purpose of a Pack would conk out and ignore the drama unfolding back at our home base. But, no, Hunter had been mulling over the same issues I’d been gnawing on for the last two hundred miles, and unlike me he seemed to have come up with a plan of action.
Rather than answering, Hunter stretched long legs into the shallow floor well, then redialed the same number I’d been calling every fifteen minutes in search of updates. The news so far had been no news. And when the highway had climbed from piedmont to mountain an hour ago, displaying rime-coated trees flickering through the glare left by my shining headlights, I couldn’t help believing that Nina’s twins could never have survived such a wintry night.
“We’re still searching,” Terra greeted us, cutting straight to the point. “Ginger is waking the rest of the pack to get a head count now. But six of us have already walked the entire mountainside three times over. There’s no sign of the infants. No scent trails or tracks are leading away from Lupe’s cottage either.”
Terra didn’t have to draw the obvious conclusion aloud to get her point across. If no one entered or left the bloodling’s cabin other than Lupe and the sleeping Nina, then maybe I was wrong and the young bloodling was right. Maybe my charge really had gone off the rails and consumed her adopted siblings in some kind of fugue state.
“No,” Hunter said simply, none of the doubt Terra and I shared evident in his voice. Then he repeated the same words he’d voiced only moments earlier. “Wake Nina and have her report a kidnapping to the human police.”
“The blood on the floor...” Terra started.
“...Is irrelevant. The babies are going to turn up alive and well somewhere in one-body territory. But if Nina doesn’t call the police immediately, she’ll be up on charges of neglect for letting the pups out of her sight. She could lose them. This is how human law works.”
For all of his bloodling nature and recent profession as a shifter enforcer, Hunter possessed more insight into the one-body world than the rest of us put together. After all, he’d spent a third of a lifetime in the U.S. Navy. No wonder he understood human regulations on a level most shifters found unfathomable.
Well, most shifters save Terra, who had spent a similar span of time among humankind. “Hmm,” she said absently as she turned my mate’s words over in her head. Then, “You know who took them.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea,” Hunter confirmed.
By this time, we’d pulled off the highway into Arborville proper and were winding through town on the way to the little country road that led to our home. The landscape I’d been longing for all night, though, now seemed to epitomize unimportance. Instead, I ached to pepper my companion with questions—“who?”, “where?”, and “why?” being at the top of my list.
But, instead, I felt obliged to mention the obvious. “Can our pack really handle having an unknown one-body sniffing around the territory right now, when we’re due to leave for All-Pack tomorrow morning?”
“Our pack can handle it,” Hunter said, his voice far more certain than I felt.
As he spoke, we pulled up the same rise I’d so joyfully ascended with Robert only a little over a week earlier, the community building of Wolf Landing once again popping into view. Only this time around, there were no celebratory balloons, banners, and streamers. Just sleepy-faced shifters drifting out of the trees to huddle in a confused mass atop a thin coating of freshly fallen snow.
I didn’t even recognize half of the people present, actually. Which made me twitch until I realized I was seeing Sinsa and Calla and who knows who else in human form for the first time in my life. Surprisingly, once my brain adjusted to the change in shape, I was able to pick out most of their identities by posture alone.
“Ah,” Hunter said, drawing my attention away from the unfamiliar faces.
For a moment, I didn’t know what had made him sigh in such a disappointed manner. But then I pulled my gaze away from the people and scanned the vehicles instead.
One car in particular had been sitting beneath the bare-branched walnut tree for most of the past week. I’d resented the rental every time I walked by, had smiled whenever I found the spot vacated. But now, I was absurdly regretful to find the vehicle missing because the loss implicated a shifter who I’d very much hoped possessed a softer, gentler side beneath his tough exterior.
“Grey.” I spoke my realization aloud, crestfallen but unsurprised by the empty parking space. A rectangle of dark earth suggested the vehicle had been present when the snow first fell, which I understood had occurred in the early hours of the evening the day before. Between then and now, two twins had gone missing and the Tribunal’s newest enforcer had also taken his leave.
“Grey,” Hunter confirmed, setting his hand atop mine in an instant show of support. Then, as we parked and clicked out of our seat belts, he waved away his discouragement in seconds. “Let’s go find the twins.”
***
Grey’s footprints smelled like nothing.
They weren’t even footprints, really. Just scuff marks in the shallow snow where the enforcer had dragged a branch or other object behind him to throw us off the trail.
And, in the darkness, the ploy had worked. Now, though, the watery sunshine stretching over the nearby hillside revealed signs that even Wolfie’s keen eyes had missed by moonlight.
“No scent,” my former alpha noted, brow furrowed as he knelt beside the one clear footprint that remained of Grey’s nearly invisible trail.
No scent. The words echoed ominously in my mind, reminding me of the crime scenes I’d recently visited with Robert. Crime scenes that I’d determined to be of human origin due to the distinct lack of shifter aromas. Had my gut been right all along when it suggested a werewolf might have been responsible for the carnage? And had that same werewolf been sleeping only a few feet away from the beloved members of my very own pack?
The slap of a screen door pulled my gaze back to the community house before I could mention the coincidence, and I smiled despite myself as Ember flew toward us in a bundle of puffy pink coat and neon green ski pants. Our resident one-bodies followed more sedately in her wake, Celia propping up a drooping and tear-streaked Nina.
“We called the police,” the former said quietly, well aware that lupine ears would pick up her words despite the distance that still lay between us. “They said they’d send someone out soonish. And I called Paul too just in case we need someone on our side when we deal with the force.”
Nina tried to choke out a comment as well, but her words were swallowed by a silent sob that wracked her abruptly fragile frame and set the rest of us shivering in sympathy. By my side, Lupe growled between human teeth at the show of emotion, but it was Sinsa who shifted upward from lupine to human form and loped across snowy ground to pull Nina into a hug.
The girl was only thirteen in human years, but she’d matured rapidly as a wolf and appeared to be in her mid-twenties to the untrained eye. Her skin was also several shades darker than that of the other shifters around her, making me wonder whether she might be related to the Byrds or to other southerly wolves who I’d yet to meet.
Still, skin color was the last thing on my mind when the unlikely duo embraced. “The pups will be safe,” Sinsa muttered into the older woman’s hair, her tone of voice not matching the soothing nature of the words. Instead, I got the distinct impression the bloodling was ready to tear out throats and claw out eyes if she thought the gesture would return the twins to Nina’s loving arms...or even simply make the mother feel a trifle better.
Given her one-body upbringing, I fully expected Nina to pull away from the half-feral shifter. But she’d fostered a bloodling for too long to balk at eithe
r harsh words or casual nudity. “I know you’ll do everything you can,” she answered a bit more clearly than she’d managed to speak previously. Then, meeting Lupe’s eyes, she nodded stoically, absolving the cringing youngster of any perceived guilt.
“We really will find them,” I offered, feeling more confident than previously now that I was enfolded in the heart of my pack. All around us, shifters hunted clues, some two-legged and others in lupine form. Eyes and feet turned in our direction at intervals but otherwise continued about their assigned tasks, the entirety of the pack united in a dance of shared effort.
In fact, even as we soothed the angstful mother, Cinnamon called out from the edge of the trees. “I think this might be relevant,” he said, trotting toward us with a huge black bowl cradled in his hands. But before I could decide why the item’s appearance niggled at the back of my skull, the crunch of tires on gravel pulled my gaze back toward the driveway.
I couldn’t tell who was coming at first, and for an instant my heart rose in my chest. Had Grey seen the error of his ways and determined that infant humans were far too much work to keep around? Had he decided to return the twins to their mother and take his lumps like a wolf? If so, I was prepared to shower him with praise and accept the gift of unharmed infants without further complaint.
But the vehicle rolling toward us materialized into a station wagon that was only mildly familiar. Unusually, the driver was seated on the right-hand side, his arm dangling out the window despite the cool morning air. Mailman, my wolf noted half a second before I came to the same conclusion.
This was a particularly bad time for our pack to receive visitors, but community relations were always of utmost importance. So I struggled to paste a smile onto my face, reminding myself that our rural carrier willingly went the extra mile to make sure that folks along his route had everything they needed. The least I could do by way of reciprocation was to act more welcoming than that alpha who had literally slammed his gate in my face the morning before.
“Do we have the Christmas cookies packaged up?” I asked Celia, referring to the thank-you treat she’d told me was customary for rewarding mail carriers at this time of year.
“Run in and get them, Ember,” my mother said in lieu of an answer. “They’re on the kitchen counter in a red tin with a bow.”
“Sure thing Great-Aunt Celia,” Ember answered, tripping away gaily even as the mailman’s car rolled to a stop.
Usually, the one-body would have disembarked and handed over whatever he’d come to deliver personally. Now, though, his eyes widened as he took in the strange assemblage of clad, unclad, and half-clad people arrayed across our lawn. And I couldn’t really blame him when he chose to merely clear his throat instead and lean a little further out the window, his eyes flickering from wolf to wolf as he spoke from the safety of his locked car.
“I have a certified letter here for Celia Hallowell,” he greeted us. Then, without waiting for my mother to either accept the proffered paper or to acknowledge receipt with a signature, he added: “The mayor’s working up a new county ordinance. No pit bulls, rottweilers, or dogs over fifty pounds allowed. Town meeting tomorrow evening to put it to a vote.”
I had a feeling the mailman had originally intended to commiserate with us, to warn us about Amanda’s intentions in a more roundabout fashion that showed his support for our supposed rescue operation while also empathizing with the mayor’s need to promote the safety of our shared community. But instead, I could see his opinion changing as his gaze scanned across our lupine pack members, all of whom weighed in at considerably more than the stated fifty pounds.
Our pack mates looked big. They looked wild. And, this morning in particular, they looked dangerously out of control.
I wanted to argue the mailman back around to our point of view. Or—a smarter option—to sic my well-respected mother on the unsuspecting human’s heartstrings.
I didn’t, though. No, I just stood frozen as the postal employee’s car made a three-point-turn and then rolled back down the drive without waiting for his holiday treat. Because all I could think was: Town meeting tomorrow evening. That’s when we’re supposed to be at All-Pack.
Chapter 18
Cinnamon’s black bowl turned out to be a portable charcoal grill, familiar because I’d seen a very similar object resting beneath an out-of-season scarecrow near the second crime scene. This particular incarnation of the device had been tossed over the hillside beside our parking area, the hot coals sizzling into the snow and not quite managing to set the forest alight in the process.
“I tried it out,” the twin noted. “Look.”
By way of demonstration, he fell back to the ground on four paws and trotted a short distance away through unsullied snow. Tiny specks of black rested in his first few prints, but the more important point was what was missing—any olfactory indication of Cinnamon’s passing whatsoever.
I doubted the trick would have stood up to the heat of summer, but dry winter air already made scent-tracking difficult. Add in feet scuffed through charcoal and the result was no obvious sign of a shifter’s presence at all, at least not after a light breeze had carried away scent that lingered in the general vicinity for the first few minutes.
Grey is the killer. I didn’t want to believe it and I really didn’t want to deal with the aftermath. But, given the fact that the Tribunal enforcer had recently kidnapped two innocent infants, it was time to pull out the big guns.
First, though, my supporters needed direction. “Wolfie, are you tracking Grey’s car?”
“Working on it,” my former alpha said without looking up from his laptop. Strings of letters and numbers scrolled across the screen. And even though the computer-speak made no sense to me, I was confident that if there was a digital trail to be found then Wolfie would find it.
“Celia,” I continued, “can you pull some strings and make that town meeting happen sooner rather than later? Tomorrow morning is the latest we can manage since we have to reach All-Pack by sunset.”
“Will do,” my mother said, willingly taking direction from a child who she’d once left behind on purpose.
“Ginger, I need everything there is to know about this region’s All-Pack. People have been closed mouthed and vague. But we’re going to look like idiots if we turn up with an armed contingent and it’s really just a family-friendly picnic.”
“Fat chance of that,” the twin huffed. But she was already striding away, fingers flying across her smartphone’s screen as she assessed which of her copious contacts would be the best to question first.
Finally, I turned to my greatest asset—my mate. “Hunter,” I said at last, pulling his attention away from the grill Cinnamon had abandoned at our feet. My mate’s face was a hard mask, his stance suggesting that he was no more pleased than I was to have been caught cradling a viper at our bosom. Still, I knew he’d want to be snapped out of his brown study, so I included him in my flurry of requests.
“There’s one more vote up for grabs and we need one more ally. Can you finagle an alliance with Hoyt Taylor by hook or by crook?”
I expected the same easy agreement from my partner as I’d received from the other members of our crew. So his answer shook me to my core.
“No,” he said simply, naysaying me for the first time in front of our shared clan. Then, without another word, he grabbed my hand and drew me away from the circle of interested eyes.
And perhaps it was only the tree shadows blocking out the weak sun, but the air felt unaccountably colder as we walked side by side up the trail.
***
“What do you mean, no?” I demanded as soon as we’d stalked far enough away so our words wouldn’t easily carry back to the shifters we’d left behind. “We need to call Robert and catch Grey before he kills again. The charcoal, the timing, Nina’s pups—it’s obvious he’s the one we’ve been hunting all along.”
“Agreed,” Hunter said simply.
“But...?” I drew him out. My mus
cles were vibrating with the urge to rush, to run, to reach Grey before it was too late. Still, I forced myself not to pace, to instead open myself to my mate’s essence and sense the wolf hidden beneath his skin.
What I saw scared me. Hunter’s animal half stood so still it almost appeared to be a mannequin rather than a living, breathing wolf. Only the beast’s eyes moved, flicking from side to side as it assessed each potential threat or source of prey.
This was the killer I often forgot lurked beneath my mate’s genial exterior. This was the alpha protector who I now realized wasn’t disagreeing with my reasoning so much as he was unwilling to let me out of his sight and into the path of danger.
It was a sweet sentiment, but alpha protectiveness wasn’t going to save the twins and get us through All-Pack unscathed. So I attempted to draw Hunter back into the realm of words and rational human thought. “We have to be smart about this,” I admonished, vividly aware for the first time in a long time that my mate’s bloodling nature lay no more than an inch beneath the surface. “If we don’t win territorial rights,” I reasoned aloud, “then we won’t have a home to return to.”
As I waited for his rebuttal, a chickadee called cheerfully above our head and the soughing of wind-pressed pines on the ridge filled the air. So what lay between us wasn’t silence...but the moment was definitively uncomfortable and completely devoid of human communication.
Only after I’d nearly given up on hearing him speak did Hunter mutter a reply at last. “If Grey tears out your throat,” he whispered, his voice husky with emotion, “then I’ll never have a home to come back to again.”
His statement was impossible to argue with, but I had to try. Before I could open my mouth, though, my mate’s skittish eyes turned back toward the trail we’d so recently walked down.
Then I was flying through the air, Hunter’s arm pushing me behind him and tucking me close against his side. Abruptly, I found myself enfolded in a backwards embrace, a lupine form of protection and possession. And in the face of the day’s drama, I’m not ashamed to admit that, for a long moment, I melted and simply allowed myself to be held.
Wolf Landing (Alpha Underground Book 3) Page 12
