Chapter Three — Three Ahead, One Behind

The Mark at my neck prickled before I saw anyone, the way skin knows a hand is coming.

I kept walking the ridge road with my collar up and an empty rucksack over one shoulder. The wind came off the high ground with ice riding in it, straight down the back of my jacket.

Somewhere behind me a boot turned on gravel, once, and then took great care not to do it again.

Don't run, Nyx said. Count them.

I counted. One at the bend where the culvert goes under the road, pretending to check a fence line that hadn't needed checking since spring.

One in the trees above the switchback. One at the crossroads ahead, sitting on a tailgate with his arms crossed.

Three ahead, one behind. Nyx sounded almost pleased to have something to do. That's a net, Aria. Not a patrol.

I stopped in the middle of the road.

"Delta Ames," I called. "Your fence is fine."

He came out of the ditch grass slowly, the way you approach a horse. Blood Moon Pack through and through — I'd have known his Scent with my eyes shut, wet wool and engine grease.

"Aria."

"Three days," I said. "You've been out here three days."

"Four."

"Then you're bad at this."

"I'm not trying to be good at it." He rubbed the back of his neck. "If we wanted you not to notice, it wouldn't be me."

"Whose orders?"

"Whose do you think."

"I'd like you to say it out loud."

Ames looked down the road, then back. "The Alpha's."

The wind took a while to get through that. My Mark was still prickling, and I had a mint in my cheek that I'd been chewing since the cabin, and it had gone flavorless about a mile back and I kept chewing it anyway.

"Say the rest of it," I said.

"There isn't a rest."

"There's always a rest, Ames."

He blew out a breath. "Watch her. Don't touch her."

"That's two things. There were three."

"Log who comes near," Ames said.

"So you're watching me."

"We're watching for someone," he said. "You're just where they'd come."

That landed differently than he meant it to. I turned it over twice before I answered.

"Bait," I said.

"That's your word."

"It's the correct word."

"It's not how the Alpha put it."

"How did he put it?"

Ames's jaw did something complicated. "He didn't put it. He gave the order and then he stood there a while and didn't say anything else, and Beta Cole had to ask him twice about the rotation."

Interesting, Nyx murmured. Keep him talking.

"Who else is out here?" I asked.

"Me. Two others."

"And?"

"And nobody. That's the whole roster, Aria, I'd tell you if it wasn't."

He believed that. I could hear that he believed it, and that was the part I carried the rest of the way down to the crossroads.

Hollis keeps the only store between the ridge and the highway, and the door still has the same bell, and he still has the same three-legged dog asleep on a feed sack by the register.

"Miss Vance," he said, which is what he calls everyone he's decided not to have an opinion about.

"Mr. Hollis."

I filled the basket badly. Rice, eggs, two loaves, peanut butter, four cans of the cheap stew, crackers, a bag of apples. I put the basket on the counter and heard how it sounded — the sound of a woman buying for a house of four.

Hollis rang it without comment until the end. "Twenty-two forty."

I counted it out. I was forty cents short.

"Take the crackers off," I said.

"Take them anyway."

"I'd rather not owe anybody this week."

"You'd rather not eat, either?"

"Mr. Hollis."

"Forty cents," he said, and shrugged one shoulder. "I'll steal it back off you in the spring."

The dog had left a white hair on my sleeve. I brushed at it while he bagged, and it moved a half inch and stayed, and I brushed at it four more times over the next minute like a woman with nothing worse on her mind.

The bell rang behind me on my way out, and Trace Bellamy came through it.

He'd been two rows back at the Circle. His was the mouth the word unclean came out of, and he hadn't bothered to lower his voice then, either.

"Big shop," he said.

"Move, Trace."

"For one person." He set his shoulder against the doorframe so the gap was too narrow. "Or is it?"

"You're in my way."

"The Pack's been asking questions about you." His eyes went to my collar and stayed there, and I felt every inch of the Mark under the cloth.

"Then the Pack can ask me."

"Whether a wolf that won't be released ought to walk around loose," he said. "Whether that's a Council matter or a Pack matter."

Break his knee, Nyx said, very calm. He'd fold.

I shifted the bag onto my hip and said nothing, because Wren had said keep your collar up, and because my hands were not steady.

"Nothing to say," Trace said. "You had nothing to say on the stone, either."

"Bellamy."

The voice came from the far end of the porch, unhurried, and it did not belong to anyone from the Blood Moon Pack.

He was sitting on the porch rail with his boots hooked in the slats — young, lean, a canvas coat with the cuff turned back once. What came off him on the wind wasn't wet wool and engine grease. It was cold mineral and juniper and something under that like a coin held too long in a fist.

Silver Ridge.

Trace's head came around. "This isn't your ground."

"No," the stranger agreed. "It's a store."

"You're a long way from the ridge."

"I'm buying cigarettes." He didn't get down off the rail. "You're standing in a doorway shouting at a woman holding eggs."

"Careful, Silver Ridge."

"I'm being careful. One of us is embarrassing his Alpha, and it isn't me."

Nobody moved for three full seconds. I heard Hollis's dog resettle on the feed sack inside.

Trace laughed like it cost him money and stepped out of the doorway. "Enjoy your groceries, Aria."

He went down the steps and up the road, and he did not look back, and the stranger watched him the whole way with his chin tipped down.

"Thank you," I said.

He didn't answer. He didn't look at me at all — not once, not when I said it, not when I came level with him on the porch. He kept his eyes on the road.

That was when I understood I had the shape of it backwards.

I made myself walk. Twenty yards on, I stopped and pretended to shift the bag and looked back the way a person looks back for nothing.

The Silver Ridge wolf was still on the rail. Ames was standing at the culvert two hundred yards off, where he'd been since morning, arms loose, watching the store. And the stranger's head was turned three degrees — not toward me, toward Ames.

He wasn't following me. He was counting them.

He's marking their rotation, Nyx said. Same as we did.

Three of Damien's, spaced along a road nobody uses, to log who comes near me. And at least one of Kai's, out in the open on Hollis's porch, logging Damien's. I had been walking around inside somebody's arithmetic for four days and had thought I was simply being punished.

The mint had gone to nothing in my mouth. I spat it into the grass, and picked the dog hair off my sleeve, and got it this time, and stood there holding a white hair between two fingers on an empty road while the whole board rearranged itself in my head.

Damien set watchers on a woman he swore he'd cast off. Kai set watchers on Damien's watchers. Neither of them had come near me himself.

And a Silver Ridge wolf had just put himself between me and a Blood Moon throat, for free, without once meeting my eyes.

Why would an enemy help the Alpha's rejected Mate?