CHAPTER SIX

Selene had the burned boot print sketched on paper before Damon had even finished washing the smoke out of his hair, which was, he reflected, either a testament to her efficiency or proof that she'd been half expecting something like this since the moment the courtship was announced.

"Wolf tracks would show claw drag on a turn this sharp," she said, spreading the sketch across his desk the next morning, tapping a finger against the heel mark. "Human tracks would sit deeper, given the weight most humans carry compared to either of us. This is somewhere in between. Vampire, most likely, moving fast but controlled."

"So one of ours."

"One of ours, or someone who wants it to look that way." Selene straightened, arms crossed, studying him with the particular scrutiny she reserved for moments when she suspected he was about to do something reckless. "You have a short list of vampires unhappy enough about this arrangement to burn down a bridge over it."

"Aurelius didn't do this personally. He's too careful, and too proud. If he wanted to stop the courtship, he'd do it in council chambers, in front of witnesses, where he could make sure everyone knew exactly whose idea it was." Damon studied the sketch, turning it toward the window light. "But he's not the only one on that council who agrees with him. He's just the loudest."

"You think someone acted on his behalf without his knowledge."

"I think it's possible. I also think it's possible this has nothing to do with Aurelius at all, and I'm looking for a familiar enemy because an unfamiliar one is harder to prepare for." He set the sketch down. "Either way, I want to know who was near the waystation that night. Servants, guards, anyone with reason to be on that bridge."

Selene was already writing the list in her head, he could tell by the way her eyes had gone distant and calculating, the particular look she wore when a problem became, to her, simply another item of house business to be managed. "I'll start with our own people. It'll go faster if the wolves handle their side separately. I doubt Elena Voss would appreciate you sending vampire investigators onto pack land to interrogate her father's guards."

"No," Damon agreed, and found, saying it, that some part of him was already anticipating the conversation where he'd suggest exactly that division of labor to Elena, already looking forward to it in a way that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with wanting to see her again sooner than the Council's schedule technically required.

He caught himself at the thought and did not examine it further, mostly because he suspected, correctly, that he wouldn't like what he found if he did.

The days between courtship meetings had, by unspoken agreement between the Council and both houses, been left unstructured, a fact Damon found himself testing three days after the fire by riding, alone, unannounced, to the edge of Voss pack territory, telling himself the whole way that this was reconnaissance and not the alternative, less strategic explanation his own chest kept insisting on.

He did not cross the border. He'd learned enough about pack law over the centuries to know that an uninvited vampire on wolf land, even one currently engaged in an Oracle-sanctioned courtship, was liable to be treated first and identified second. He stopped at the treeline, dismounted, and was still deciding whether the whole excursion had been a mistake when a familiar voice called out from somewhere in the trees to his left.

"You're either lost," Elena said, emerging from the underbrush with a bow slung across her back and an expression that suggested she'd clocked him well before he'd noticed her, "or you've developed a habit of loitering at borders that aren't yours."

"Neither. I was investigating."

"Investigating my forest."

"Investigating the fire." He held up the sketch Selene had made, watching her expression shift from wary amusement to something sharper and more focused. "My steward thinks the tracks belong to a vampire. I wanted to know if your side found anything different."

Elena crossed the last of the distance between them, close enough now that Damon could see the faint shadows under her eyes, the look of someone who hadn't been sleeping especially well either. She took the sketch, studying it with the same frank, assessing attention she brought to everything, and after a moment, shook her head. "We found the same tracks. Rhys thought vampire too, for what it's worth, and he's better at reading a print than anyone else in the pack. Which means either your enemy did this, or someone wants both of us thinking it was."

"That's what I told Selene."

"Great minds." She handed the sketch back, and for a moment neither of them moved to end the conversation, the treeline between wolf and vampire territory feeling, suddenly, less like a border and more like simply the place where they happened to be standing. "You rode all the way out here for a boot print you could have sent by letter."

"I did."

"Why?"

Damon considered several answers, all of them technically true, none of them the whole of it. "Because letters are slow, and because I wanted to see if your side of this arrangement was taking the sabotage as seriously as mine is." He paused. "And because I wanted to see you sooner than next week, and I've decided, against my better judgment, to simply say that instead of constructing an elaborate reason around it."

Something crossed Elena's face, quick and startled, before she recovered into something drier. "That's either very honest or a very good strategy for looking honest."

"I've been accused of many things. I don't think anyone's ever accused me of being good at strategy involving my own feelings." He found, saying it, that it was true, and that admitting it out loud to a werewolf on the edge of her family's land was a stranger and more freeing thing than he'd expected it to be. "Aurelius would tell you I'm terrible at it. He's not wrong."

Elena studied him for a long moment, the kind of look that felt like it was measuring something more than his words, and when she finally spoke, her voice had lost some of its usual sharp edge. "For what it's worth, I told my father I was going hunting rabbits this morning. I've been out here for two hours and haven't drawn my bow once."

"Investigating the border," Damon said.

"Something like that."

They stood there a moment longer, the wind moving through the trees between them, neither quite willing to be the one to end the conversation and neither entirely sure how to continue it without saying something that would make the whole strange, unplanned meeting feel like more than it was supposed to be. It was Elena who finally broke it, tipping her head back toward the deeper woods behind her.

"I should get back before someone notices I've been gone longer than a rabbit hunt should take. But if you're serious about splitting the investigation, my father's men can canvas the human settlements near the bridge. They talk more freely to us than they would to a vampire showing up asking questions."

"Agreed. I'll have Selene compare notes with whoever your father assigns."

"Rhys. He'll hate working with a vampire steward. He'll do it anyway, because he's annoyingly reliable like that."

"Selene will feel the same about him, I imagine. She's efficient. She doesn't waste time disliking people who are useful."

"High praise, from the sound of it."

"The highest she gives." Damon found himself, unexpectedly, reluctant to end the conversation there, some part of him cataloguing the moment the way he suspected he'd be turning it over later, alone, in the too-quiet halls of Ashgrove Hall. "Elena."

"Yes?"

"Thank you. For the fire. For pulling elders out of a burning building instead of using the chaos as an excuse to walk away from the whole arrangement, which you could have done, and no one would have blamed you for it."

Elena's expression softened, just slightly, just enough for Damon to notice. "I told you. I've buried people because our kinds couldn't stand each other. I'm not going to be the reason it gets worse, not over something as small as a scare tactic from whoever's trying to stop this." She held his gaze a moment longer than strictly necessary. "Besides. The company's growing on me. I'd hate to lose it to an arsonist before I've decided whether I actually like it."

She left before he could find an answer worth giving, disappearing back into the trees with the easy, silent grace of someone who'd grown up running those woods, and Damon stood at the border a long while after she'd gone, turning the sketch over in his hands without really seeing it, aware that he'd ridden out here to investigate a fire and was riding home instead with a problem considerably harder to solve: the growing, undeniable, entirely inconvenient suspicion that whatever the Oracle had seen when she named the two of them, she might not have been wrong.