Chapter 3 – Sign

Noah

Three miles from where you should be standing.

The asshole could have at least given me a direction.

Fortunately, I’ve learned to trust my instincts.

Hunters don’t have any inherent magic, but our senses are more developed than those of ordinary humans.

So here I am.

Three miles out from the Northgate fence, flashlight clamped in my teeth, doing a wolf's homework like the obedient idiot I've apparently decided to become tonight.

If Dad could see me taking field assignments from an Alpha, he'd disown me, dig up dear old Grandpa to disown me a second time, and then bill me for the shovel.

I’m currently crouched in the dirt off the Carrow Creek trailhead, reading a story I'd pay good money not to be true.

It's the kind of spot people actually use.

Gravel lot, a wooden sign with the map scratched off, a trash can nobody's emptied since the last mayoral race.

There’s a bus stop half a mile back.

Right where the lights give up and the trees take over, and if you wanted to lift a person and have it read like they just wandered off into the dark, you couldn't draw it up better than this.

Somebody got taken here.

I read ground the way some people read a face.

Dad had me tracking before I could ride a bike, hours of it, deer then boar then the things that track you back, and dirt never learns to lie.

This dirt is shouting.

Scuffs at the lip of the lot, where the gravel quits and the soil starts. Heel marks. Somebody dug in.

Somebody very much did not want to go.

Then the heels stop digging and start dragging, two long parallel grooves headed into the trees, and that's the detail that turns my stomach over.

Because you only drag what's still attached to its heels. Still alive. Alive enough to fight the whole way in.

I follow the grooves.

Prints in the soft ground past the treeline. Big ones, splayed.

And here's what my gut gets a full second before my brain catches up. There's more than one set, and they aren't chasing.

They're spaced.

Flanking.

Moving together the way trained things move, the way my family moves closing on a hunt, and a feral doesn't do that.

A feral is all teeth and noise and ruin.

This is footwork.

This is a drill.

Something glints off to the side of the drag line. I put the light on it.

A phone. Face down, screen spiderwebbed into a frost pattern, dead for days.

The case is one of those clear ones packed with little floating gold stars.

The kind a person picks because it's cute.

Because they're young enough to want their phone to be cute.

I don't touch it. I just look at it sitting in the dirt being the loudest quiet thing I've seen in a while.

And my idiot brain, with immaculate timing, chooses right then to hand me the wolf.

The weight of his arm across my collarbones.

That slow pull of breath at the hinge of my jaw, like he was memorizing me for later and in no particular rush about it.

The way my body had opinions I didn't authorize.

I’m crouched over a dead girl's phone thinking about how a werewolf smelled.

That seems healthy.

Nothing to examine there.

I shove it down so hard it leaves a mark and get back to the dirt, where it's safe, where it's only murder.

No blood spray.

That's the next wrong thing, and it's a loud one.

You put a deer down and there's a whole essay written in red.

A heavy splash of blood where the throat was cut, tapering to a line, then droplets, as you carry your kill.

Here there's a dark patch at the lot edge the size of a saucer, and then nothing.

No kill happened in these trees. Nobody got opened up out here.

They didn't come to feed.

They came to collect.

The back of my neck goes tight.

Not a sound, exactly.

The opposite.

The woods get that held-breath quality they get when something big has decided to be still, and every enhanced nerve Lillianna ever gave me lights up, screaming at me that I’m being watched.

I come up with the crossbow before I've finished the thought, sweeping the black between the trunks, finger right next to the trigger.

Nothing.

No eyeshine, no shape, no shift in the dark.

Just me and a phone full of gold stars and the very strong sense that I'm wrong about the nothing.

"Nerves," I tell the trees, which is a thing sane people do.

My phone goes off and I nearly leave my skin behind.

Heidi's face appears on the screen, that photo from the lake where she's mid-laugh and looking breathtaking in a red bikini.

I answer it crouched over a drag mark, because not answering is exactly the kind of thing she'd lie awake over, and I've already spent tonight's whole budget of making her wonder if I’m okay.

"Hey, you."

Warm, half asleep.

"Tell me you're coming over. I made way too much pasta. There's a lasagne situation."

"Can't tonight."

A beat too quick. I hear it. She doesn't.

"I’m still working."

“Are you in danger?”

“No. I am the danger,” I say in a deep, growly voice, playing it up for her.

Her own father is a hunter too, she knows the drill.

She laughs softly and it goes through me sideways.

She’s an amazing woman. I’m the luckiest man alive to have her.

I’ve been thinking about proposing. I should really get my ass in gear and do it.

Something keeps holding me back every time I decide to go and look at rings.

"Don't stay out too late," she says. "Text me when you're home, okay?"

"Always do."

She says I love you. I say it back, really meaning it.

I pocket her face and turn to the quiet patch of dirt where a person disappeared.

That's when my skin starts up for real.

The ink goes hot when it's near something it doesn't like, a low burn under the lines on my forearms, hackles I wear on the inside.

I’ve been out all night and it's never so much as warmed. Not even when that werewolf was leaning on me.

It's burning now, and it climbs toward my elbows when I swing the light to the base of a birch where the grooves finally stop.

There’s a mark cut into the bark. Filled with something dark that isn't sap and isn't blood.

Even on both sides. Deliberate.

The shape a hand makes on purpose, with a whole intention sitting behind it, and the runes on my skin hate it enough that my back teeth ring.

I crouch closer, and the burn spikes, a hot wire drawn up the inside of my arm.

Whatever's in the cut still has life in it.

Not old.

Not a leftover.

Days, maybe, the same age as the phone full of gold stars, which means whoever scratched it stood right here and did it slow, unbothered, with a person screaming somewhere nearby, and took their time getting it right.

Wolves don't carve.

And wolves don't flank.

And they don't take a person alive and walk them into the trees in formation and lay them at the foot of a marked tree.

The four-legged kind kills you where you drop and eats what it can carry.

This was patient.

This was a plan.

This had a person's head behind the teeth.

The mark means a witch.

And wolves and witches don't run together; they like each other about as much as cats like baths.

 Somebody put a pack and a witch on the same job, the same night, the same way, and the reasons big enough to do that are never small.

So, nobody's wandering off.

They're getting taken, alive, on a schedule, by wolves that move like a unit, and handed off to whatever scratched that into the bark.

Alive.

That's the piece that won't lie down.

It doesn't match anything I was ever taught.

Wolves and a witch, clean and unhurried, carrying people off whole and on purpose.

Why?

All I know right now is that it's deliberate.

Too many have gone missing for it not to be a pattern.

The wolf told me the truth.

I don’t really know how to deal with that.