Prologue Pt3

He paused for a moment and looked around quickly, then circled around the area to be sure that none of the human soldiers were nearby. Once he was sure that the area was secure, he moved toward the tree stump and was shocked to find the tiniest little blonde-haired girl curled up inside the stump, wrapped in a warm blanket and still wearing her bedclothes.

Marcus smiled at her. “Hello there. What’s your name?” He asked her softly. “Would you like to come with me? I’m going on an adventure and I really need a beautiful young princess to protect. It always makes the story better when there’s a princess, don’t you think?”

The girl remained curled up, but she watched him through a pair of large brown eyes that barely peeked up over the edge of her blanket. After some careful consideration, the girl nodded. “Sara.” She whispered.

“Sara? Why that is a perfect name for a princess.” He bowed his head deeply as he would do to a wolf of higher station. “Milady Sara, would you do the honor of allowing me to be your knight and protect you on this adventure?”

A soft little giggle was the only response she gave, but it was enough. Marcus grinned and gave her a wink, though the effort to appear cheerful for the child nearly tore his heart out.

“Come then.” He held out his arms for her and she crawled in and laid her head on his chest. The trek through the woods was a long and difficult one.

Marcus carried the little girl in his arms the entire way. She didn’t weigh much more than a feather so it wasn’t much of a challenge and she slept most of the way, or at least she kept her head down and stayed very still for most of the way.

The trip itself wasn’t much more than a day’s run for him in wolf form, but with the little one in his arms, he didn’t dare to try to shift. He could smell that she was one of his tribe, but he didn’t recognize her from around the small neighborhood.

He couldn’t remember having seen her out playing with the other children. Despite the actual trip only being a day’s run, he moved in an erratic pattern, sometimes retracing and circling his own pathway multiple times in various different directions before turning and starting toward his actual destination. He’d given the others three days to meet him at Hobbs for the very same reason.

They would all be circling around, re-walking over terrain that they had already traveled just to make the scent and the tracks harder to follow. As he moved, he ran the night’s events over in his mind, trying to decide what he could have done to prevent the atrocity from happening in the first place.

He needed to pick out every detail he could think of to use in the future to protect them from the same thing happening again. They had come out of nowhere. No one had heard them or smelled them.

How had they done it? A damn neighborhood full of werewolves and they had managed to sneak in without anyone noticing. There had been no real scent from the humans.

They had somehow managed to mask their own scent from his pack. How had they managed to do such a thing and why in the hell was Allan working with humans to kill his own kind. Why hadn’t he been able to smell Allan’s scent?