Chapter 4 – Downwind

Dax

So much for slowly.

He spins around with the crossbow up and his flashlight in my eyes, and I’m staring down a silver broadhead again.

I said it low, in the voice I use at the gym when a kid’s stuck under a barbell and starting to panic. Apparently, it doesn’t work on hunters.

I wanted him away from that tree. My scar went cold as soon as I got close to it.

It cuts through my eyebrow, and I haven’t felt a thing in it for three years. Now it aches all the way to the bone, and it got worse with every step I took toward that birch.

Scars probably do that in October.

The cut in the bark stinks, too. It’s sweet and rotten at the same time, like roadkill somebody poured syrup over, and my wolf is growling at a tree.

“How long have you been out there?” Noah asks. The bow doesn’t move off my chest.

“Since the parking lot.”

“You followed me.”

“I pointed you at whatever’s been taking people, and then I let you walk out here by yourself at night. Somebody had to make sure you didn’t get eaten before you got around to shooting me properly. At this point you’re less of a threat and more of a hobby.”

That’s all he’s getting out of me. The truth is that I sent a hunter straight at whoever took Mary, and I’ve been scared sick about it ever since Finn showed me that flyer.

I left my hoodie on the porch so I wouldn’t shred it if I needed to shift, and tracked him from my fence like a bloodhound with abandonment issues. I did it on two legs the whole way.

If a white wolf had walked out of those trees at him, he’d have shot it. He’d have missed, but I’d rather not give him the practice.

He’s fine, though. He’s standing in front of me in one piece, aiming at me like always, and I’m so relieved I almost laugh.

“I don’t need a babysitter,” he says.

“You crouched there on the phone and never once looked behind you. I could have walked right up and bitten you.”

‘We should have,’ my wolf agrees.

Noah’s jaw locks up tight. He knows I’m right, and I can see how much he hates it, which is my cue to make it worse.

“‘I am the danger,’” I say, as deep as my voice will go.

He goes red from the collar up. I can see it fine in the dark.

“You were listening to my phone call.”

“You had a whole conversation out here at night with a wolf in the trees. Everything with ears heard it.”

What I don’t mention is the end of the call. She told him she loves him, and he said it back. His heart didn’t even stutter. He meant it.

I’ve got no right to be jealous of a girl I’ve never met, so I’m not. I’d just like to bite his phone in half.

‘We should keep him,’ my wolf says.

He’s not a stray we get to take home.

‘Says you.’

“What do you want, Holt?”

“I want you to step away from that thing.”

“Why?”

“Because it stinks.”

He thinks about that for a second before he tips his head at the ground beside the drag marks, without taking the bow off me.

“You can smell that? Then tell me what made those.”

The prints run along both sides of the grooves, and they’re wolf. I don’t need a nose for that part. I’ve been leaving tracks like that my whole life.

To get to them, I’ve got to walk past the end of his crossbow. He doesn’t move, and I don’t stop, so the broadhead ends up resting on my bare chest.

‘He aims at our heart every single time,’ my wolf says, thrilled. ‘He thinks about it a lot.’

Up close, he’s got a smear of dirt on his cheekbone, and he’s glaring at me like I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to him.

His sleeve’s shoved up past the elbow. There’s ink all over his forearm, black lines and symbols packed in tight, and he’s holding the bow like that arm hurts.

Nobody told me he had tattoos. Now I want to know where the rest of them go.

Either the hunter’s got a rash, or that ink hates this tree as much as my eyebrow does. I’d really like to know who’d put ink like that on him.

‘He could shoot us right now and he isn’t,’ my wolf says. ‘That means he likes us.’

He wants answers more than he wants me dead, I tell him. That’s not the same thing.

“Are you going to shoot me, Hunter, or are you going to let me look?”

He actually steps aside.

The bow follows me down as I crouch by the closest print and get my face near enough to put dirt on my nose.

There’s a squirrel that ran over it in daylight, and the gravel off Noah’s boots. That’s all. Whatever made this print was nearly as big as me, and I can’t smell it.

I try a few more. Every one of them is the same, and my wolf won’t stop pacing.

“Well?” Noah says.

“They smell like dirt.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means a wolf made them and didn’t leave any scent behind. That doesn’t happen. We all have a smell, Hunter. We roll in things. We hunt things. We like to rub up against each other. A wolf can’t cross a parking lot without leaving his whole life story behind him, and there’s nothing here. Not from any of them.”

He doesn’t answer right away. He’s studying my face the same way he studied that dirt.

“That’s very convenient for you,” he says.

“Several teenagers gone since spring. One of them taken a few kilometers from your fence, by a pack that moves like they’ve been running drills. And the Alpha next door can’t smell a thing. You can see how that looks from where I’m standing.”

“I know exactly how it looks.”

I get up so I’m looking him in the eye.

“If one of mine had been here, I could tell you which one, what they had for dinner and who they’re sleeping with. Nobody in my pack has ever taken a person. And if I knew who was doing this, I wouldn’t be out here letting you aim at my heart. I’d be at their throat.”

I’d know. Except I didn’t smell anything the night Mary was taken, and I was a wall away from her. I thought I’d just been careless. Now my nose is right on top of their tracks, and it still can’t find them.

Somebody’s hiding them from me, right on my doorstep.

I don’t know what Noah sees on my face. Whatever it is, the bow drops an inch.

“They took her alive,” he says. “Whoever it was, she fought them the whole way to that tree. And a witch cut that mark. Nobody else carves like that.”

“No wolf I know would take orders from one. I’m their Alpha, and I can barely get mine to take out the trash.”

“Then she isn’t asking them, she’s forcing them.”

If she can make wolves do that, nothing says she can’t do it to mine.

That’s when I catch the smell.

It’s rot, but not any kind I know. It’s not wet leaves, or a deer that crawled into a ditch to die.

It’s the smell of a grave somebody dug back open, heavy and wet, and it’s full of the same sweet, sick stink as that tree. My scar goes from aching to stabbing so fast my eye waters. I’m scared, and I can’t even tell what it is yet.

I can hear something big coming our way. It doesn’t walk right. The weight lands in all the wrong places, like its joints got put back in a different order.

And Noah’s human. He doesn’t heal like I do. If whatever that is gets its teeth in him, he’s not getting back up.

In every zombie movie I’ve ever seen, the guy holding the flashlight dies first. Noah’s holding the flashlight.

Absolutely not. I get a handful of his jacket and haul him behind me. His flashlight goes flying and lands in the leaves, still on.

“What the hell do you think you’re-”

“Something’s coming. It smells dead and it walks wrong. Stay behind me, please.”

He stays behind me, technically. The bow comes up over my shoulder like I’m a fence post he’s propping it on. God forbid the man take one instruction from me in his whole life.

It lurches into the light, hunched over. It’s bigger than a man and shaped almost like one, and I really wish it wasn’t. Its skin hangs off it loose, the wrong color for anything alive, and its eyes catch the flashlight and shine.

What the fuck is that? Can you even kill something that’s already dead, or do I just keep pulling bits off until they quit moving?

Nothing that smells like that should be able to walk. It’s still coming.

Its head swings past me and stops on Noah. He’s not even holding the flashlight anymore and it’s looking at him anyway.

Oh, hell no. He’s tried to shoot me more times than I can count, and I don’t care. I can’t lose him. I don’t even have him. Focus.

The wolf says, ‘Kill it.’

I shove Noah back another step and let the change take me.