Footprints

August stepped outside with his three Omegas and his Beta, Beaux, so that they could tell him more about what had happened. He did his best to listen, but his mind kept going back to the woman inside of the Health Center. She looked so frail, so weak. His mother was a talented healer, and if anyone could find a way to help the girl, it was Isabella, but she was so broken, as his mother had said, she just might neve wake up.

“She was just lying there, you know?” Grant was saying. “So still. I thought she was dead.”

“She wasn’t moving at all,” Sidney reiterated. “It was frightening.”

“We had to shift to get her back here,” Ronnie continued. “We found some clothes in a narrowed out hollow tree and shifted so we could carry her back. If she’d been even a little bit conscious, we might’ve been able to get her on one of our backs, but we were afraid she’d fall off.”

August nodded. All of that made sense. “Why don’t you guys show me where you found her?” he suggested.

“Sure. We need to get back on patrol anyway. We let the guards know we were coming in so they could keep an eye out, but it’s our turn to run the perimeter,” Sidney explained. August was impressed that they’d seemed to think of everything, but he wasn’t surprised. These were just the type of Omegas he had in his pack.

Turning to Beaux, August said, “Keep an eye on things while I’m gone?”

“Sure,” his Beta said, though he looked a little disappointed that he wouldn’t get to go along. “Let me know if you find any more bodies.” He chuckled, and August smiled at him politely, but he didn’t really think it was funny. Hopefully, that girl wouldn’t end up being just a body, and he could talk to her and figure out where she’d come from and why she’d been running through the woods in her human form.

The Alpha and the three Omegas quickly shifted into their wolf forms, leaving their clothes behind, and August ran behind the other three, letting them lead the way to the location where they’d found the girl. He was fairly certain there wouldn’t be any clues about who she was or where she’d come from in that exact spot, but they hadn’t had a chance to go further into the forest in the direction she’d come to see if there was anything else that could let them know what had happened to her. Now that she was safely in the Healing Center, they’d be able to do that.

It took about a half an hour for them to come upon the spot where the girl had been laying. All three of the Omegas came to a stop to let August check it out. He stood back for a moment, making a survey of what lay before him. Blood on the leaves, a rock with a dark stain of crimson on it where it looked like maybe she’d hit her head when she’d fallen, and bloody footsteps leading up to the place where she had collapsed let him know that she’d been in an awful state when they’d come across her.

“This is where she was lying,” Grant said, using the mind-link, as if he hadn’t figured that out.

“Let’s follow her tracks as far as we can, toward the border,” August said, once he was clear there was nothing else to find here.

He led the way this time, Sidney behind him, Grant and Ronnie on the other side of the trail. It was basically a straight path through the forest, heading in the direction of the border they shared with Black Hole Moon. They came to a small stream that was still on their property, and August leapt across it first, followed by his packmates. On the other side, he didn’t immediately see footsteps.

“The two of you go that way,” he said to the males. “Sid and I will have a look down here.”

Ronnie and Grant ran off, and he headed south along the bank of the stream.

They trotted along the babbling body of water for about ten minutes before August found her entry point. He could see where she’d gotten into the water here, but her tracks weren’t the only fresh ones. There were wolf tracks, too, several sets of them. Either she hadn’t been alone--or she’d been followed.

Sidney leapt back across the stream and said, “The wolf tracks pick up here!”

August jumped over as well, and sure enough, there they were. The two of them followed the tracks for a few minutes but then, they disappeared, short of where the girl had gotten out of the water. On the other side of the stream, August could see the wolf prints on the other side, disappearing into the thick forest headed toward Black Hole lands. He hadn’t noticed them before because they weren’t running parallel to the stream, and he had been looking for human prints, not wolves. So, whoever had followed her had given up and headed back home, probably thinking she’d drowned. The stream was narrow, but it was deep in places and had a rushing current.

If he knew the Omegas of Black Hole, though, he had a feeling they wouldn’t give up. Whoever this girl was that they had been chasing her down, they would want confirmation that she was dead, or they’d want her returned to them. If it was up to August, they’d get neither. Clearly, she had been abused by someone, and he wanted to know why. Unless there was a damn good reason, and he couldn’t think of what that could possibly be, they’d have some justice coming their way for leaving her nearly beaten to death and lying in the forest alone to die.