Chapter 3 – Sign

Noah

Somebody dug their heels in hard right here.

There are two deep gouges at the edge of the gravel, where the parking lot ends and the dirt starts. Whoever made them didn’t want to go wherever they were being dragged.

I’m crouched over them with my flashlight in my teeth, right where a werewolf told me to look.

If Dad could see me taking directions from an Alpha, he’d disown me, dig up Grandpa so he could disown me a second time, and then bill me for the shovel.

I counted them anyway. Stood at that fence with my phone out like a man checking the hockey scores and went through every missing person post the county has put up since spring.

Five. All of them teenagers. Not one of them seen since.

Young people leave Tamarack all the time. There’s very little here to stay for. It’s rural and job prospects are scarce. But most of them don’t vanish without a trace.

And there’s a pattern here. Every one of these five was last seen at the edge of town. A bus stop. The gas station out on the highway. And one of them right here, at the Carrow Creek trailhead.

I picked this one because it sits about five kilometers from the Northgate fence, and that’s the number he gave me.

People occasionally come here to hike in daylight. There’s a gravel lot, a wooden sign with the map scratched off it, and a trash can nobody’s emptied since the last election.

Down the road there’s a bus stop, and after that the streetlights quit and the trees take over. If I wanted to grab a person and have it look like they wandered off into the woods, I couldn’t pick a better spot if I tried.

Dad had me reading ground while other kids were learning to swim. Deer, then boar, then the things that track you back. Dirt doesn’t know how to lie, and this dirt is shouting.

The heels stop digging and start dragging. Two long grooves, side by side, running straight into the trees.

That turns my stomach over, because whoever this was, they were alive the whole way in, and fighting it.

I follow the grooves past the first trees, keeping the light low.

There are prints in the soft ground past the trees. Big ones, splayed, and there’s more than one set. They’re not chasing. They’re spaced out, one on each side of the drag line, staying in position like they’ve been taught to hold formation.

A feral wolf doesn’t do that. They’re all teeth and noise and a mess left behind. This is carefully controlled. Somebody taught these wolves to work together, and they listened.

Something glints off to the side of the grooves and I swing my light in that direction.

A phone, face down, the screen cracked into a spiderweb. One of those clear cases with little gold stars floating around inside it. You buy a case like that when you’re young enough to still want your phone to be cute.

I don’t touch it. I stay crouched over it, looking, and my stupid brain picks that moment to flash to memories of the wolf.

His arm across my collarbones. That slow breath in against my jaw, like he had all night and planned on using it. My body having opinions I never signed off on.

I’m kneeling over a missing teenager’s phone and I’m thinking about how it felt to have a werewolf pinning me.

I shove it down and go back to the dirt, which is a lot less confusing than he is.

There’s hardly any blood, and that’s just as wrong as the prints. If you take a deer down, the ground tells you all about it.

A big splash where the throat opened and then a trail of drops wherever you carried it. Here there’s one dark patch at the edge of the lot, about the size of my palm, and after that nothing.

Nobody got opened up out here. They didn’t come to feed.

They came to collect.

The back of my neck starts prickling. The woods have suddenly gone quiet the way they do when a predator is lurking nearby.

Every nerve Lillianna ever sharpened for me starts screaming the same thing. You’re being watched.

I come up with the crossbow before I’ve finished the thought and sweep it across the deep darkness between the trunks, finger resting next to the trigger.

Nothing. No eyeshine, no shape.

Just me, a phone full of gold stars, and the very strong feeling that I’m wrong about the nothing.

“Nerves,” I say out loud, which is a thing sane people do.

My phone starts ringing and I nearly leave my skin behind.

Heidi’s face appears on the screen. The photo from the lake, where she’s laughing in her red bikini.

I answer it crouched over a drag mark, because if I don’t she’ll be lying awake half the night and I already used up tonight’s allowance of making her wonder if I’m okay.

“Hey, you.”

Warm. Half asleep.

“Tell me you’re coming over. I made enough spaghetti for a wedding buffet.”

“Can’t tonight.” It comes out too fast. I hear it. She doesn’t. “I’m still working.”

“Are you in danger?”

“No,” I say, dropping my voice as low as it goes. “I am the danger.”

Her dad’s a hunter too. She grew up with this. She knows exactly how many of us think we’re Walter White.

She laughs softly, and it goes right through me.

She’s an amazing woman. I’m the luckiest man alive and I know it. I’ve been thinking about proposing, and I should get my ass in gear and do it.

Something keeps stopping me every time I decide to go and look at rings. No clue what. I’d like to find out before she does.

“Don’t stay out too late,” she says. “Text me when you’re home, okay?”

“Always do.”

She tells me she loves me. I say it back and I mean it, every word, even crouched in the dirt with a crossbow across my knees and that cracked phone at my feet.

I put the phone away and turn back to the spot where a person disappeared.

That’s when my skin starts up for real.

The ink turns hot when there’s magic close by. A low burn under the lines on my forearms, like hackles I wear on the inside.

I’ve been out all night, and it hasn’t so much as warmed. Not even when that damn Alpha pinned me to a tree, which in retrospect seems like a massive failure on the tattoos’ part.

They’re burning now.

I swing the light toward the base of a birch, where the grooves finally stop, and the heat climbs toward my elbows.

There’s a mark cut into the bark. Filled with something dark that isn’t sap and isn’t blood. It’s even on both sides. Clearly done with great deliberation.

My tattoos have never hurt this much. I shove my sleeve up to look, fully expecting to see them glowing. They’re not. They just hate it.

I crouch closer and the burn spikes up the inside of my arm, across my shoulders and down my back.

Whatever magic’s in that cut is still alive. Days old at most, about as fresh as those heel marks. Somebody stood right here with a person screaming somewhere close by and took their time getting the lines even.

None of this reads like wolves, except the paw prints.

Wolves don’t carve. They don’t walk a person into the trees alive, in formation, and leave them at the foot of a marked tree.

They kill you where they take you down, gorge themselves on the spot and carry off what they can. The rest stays behind.

That mark means a witch is involved. And wolves enjoy being controlled about as much as cats like baths.

Which means this witch is powerful enough to force cooperation from creatures who won’t give it willingly.

None of the so-called runaways have left of their own accord. They’re being taken alive, on purpose, by wolves that move like an army unit, and handed to whoever scratched that into the bark.

Nothing Dad ever taught me about takes people alive.

The wolf told me the truth.

I don’t know what to do with that. He’s a monster. He was also right, and I’m standing in the dark right where he sent me, hating it.

The watched feeling comes back, and this time my heart kicks hard, exactly the way it did earlier tonight. I know who’s behind me before he opens his mouth.

“Back away from the tree slowly,” Holt says in a low voice.