Chapter 4 – Downwind

Dax

For the last hour I've been telling myself I'm only out here to keep the idiot from getting himself killed.

It's a good lie.

Responsible.

Very Alpha.

The kind of thing my father would've said with a straight face right before going off and doing exactly what he wanted.

Truth is, I caught his trail at the fence and the rest of me made the call before the part that's supposed to be in charge got a vote.

Closer, the wolf says. He's right there. We could be right there.

"We're staying in the trees."

Why.

Good question.

I keep him downwind, forty feet back, and answerless, which is where I've kept most things about the hunter since this whole mess started.

He works the trailhead like he was built for it.

He has real skill, I'll give him that, and it costs me something to give him anything.

Crouched, flashlight in his teeth, reading the dirt with that intensely focused face.

The one that isn't sneering at me for once.

All economy, no wasted motion.

I wonder if he even knows how to crack a smile.

He follows the drag line into the trees and I drift after him on silent feet, hating that watching him be good at this does something to me that watching him fail to shoot me never managed.

Ours is good at what he does, the wolf says, utterly insufferable. Look at his talent. He’s wasting his time pointing that at us. We should keep him.

"He’s not a stray we get to take home."

Says you.

Noah stops over something in the leaves and goes very still, and even from here I smell an emotional shift in him.

His focus cracking into something rawer for a second before he stamps it flat.

I can't see what he's looking at.

I can see what it does to his shoulders.

Whatever it is, it's bad, and he carries it the way he carries everything, alone and silent and as though it’s violated some private rule he lives by.

Then his head comes up.

The crossbow comes up with it, fast, sweeping the dark right across where I'm lying, and for a second those pale green eyes look dead at me and see nothing.

His senses are keener than most. He knows something's out here. He just can't find it.

"Nerves," he tells the trees, and goes back to work, and the wolf preens like the man paid us a compliment.

He follows the grooves to the base of a birch, and that's when I get it.

Under the man, under cold dirt and a dead phone and all that furious wanting he hauls around, there's a new thread, and it sends my instincts snapping upright like a struck wire.

Old and sweet and rotten.

Magic. The bad kind. Only a few miles from where my pack sleeps and I didn’t know about it until now.

Sloppy and irresponsible. I should have investigated this better myself.

The scar over my eye, the one that hasn't so much as itched in three years, goes cold.

Tight and painful, like a freezing fingertip pressed to it.

That’s never happened before and I don’t know why it’s happening now.

I bury it with the rest of tonight's questions.

The hunter's got his sleeve shoved up, glaring at his forearm like it sold him out, and I realize his ink's doing whatever my scar just did.

Reading the wrongness.

Hating it.

So we agree on something.

Adorable.

I shift behind a trunk, drag the sweats on, and step out where he can see me, because otherwise he puts a bolt in me on reflex and then sulks about the wasted silver.

"Back away from the tree," I say.

He's on his feet with the crossbow up before the last word lands.

"How long have you been watching me?" he asks.

Not how did you find me.

How long.

So he felt me out here the whole time and couldn't do a single thing about it.

Good.

"Long enough to watch you crawl around in the dirt sniffing out a trail I handed you. You're welcome, by the way."

"You followed me."

He says it like it's my crime and not his failure.

“I should have known you were there. How are you masking your presence?”

"I’m better than you are. You never make me. That's the arrangement. You aim a weapon at the spot I just left, I take it off you, we do it all again a few days later."

I let him sit with that for a minute.

"You're less of a threat and more of a hobby at this point."

His jaw sets hard, a muscle ticking under three days of stubble.

I must admit, watching a man who's tried to put silver in me eleven times grind his teeth on my account is the best thing that's happened since Tuesday.

Petty.

Earned.

He keeps the bow up.

I walk into it anyway, close enough that the broadhead's a few inches off my chest, because the bow is the least dangerous thing in this clearing and we both need him to start realizing that.

"This is your territory," he says. He's reading my face now instead of the soil. "And you didn't know."

"At least I knew people were going missing."

It comes out with teeth.

"I didn't know somebody set up shop on my doorstep to do it."

"Who’s behind this then?"

"If I knew that, I wouldn't be standing here letting a hunter aim a silver bullet at my kidney. I'd be at their throats."

And that's the part with the hook in it, the part that's been chewing on me since the smell hit.

“There hasn’t been a strange wolf on my territory in months. No scent, no tracks. Nothing that wasn’t already scrubbed clean. You don’t run something this big in my backyard and leave me with nothing to find. Someone’s hiding it from me. On purpose. And they’re doing a damn good job of it.”

The bow drops an inch.

"A witch could do that," he says.

"A witch is doing that."

So now we're agreeing, the hunter and me, over a dead girl's phone.

“She’s not doing it alone. There are wolves working with her,” he states the obvious.

Like a few bad wolves mean we’re all evil.

He clearly hasn’t taken a good luck at humanity recently.

I don't want him here.

I want him gone.

Still breathing, but somebody else's problem.

Instead, he’s the only other person in this county who can see the shape of it.

And that lands in me somewhere between useful and unbearable.

Tonight, I’m not choosing between the two. It’s not a luxury I can afford right now.

He's close.

Neither of us decided that and here we are, a stride apart, and the wolf has quit clowning.

He's up at full height.

Ours. Protect. Keep.

One flat note, over and over, because the man's standing a yard off a witch's mark and the wolf wants him moved.

I remind the wolf the man is the enemy.

I've reminded him a hundred times. He has never once listened.

Then I catch it. Before the hunter does.

The air goes sweet, then it goes rotten, wet and thick, and under that something heavy drags itself toward us through the brush, wrong in the joints, too much weight landing in unexpected places.

His nose is better than most humans’.

Mine's miles better than his, so mine picks it up first.

I grab a fistful of his jacket and haul him behind me without thinking about it, and he goes rigid with the insult of it.

"Wolf, what the hell do you think you’re-"

"Shut up."

It's at the edge of the flashlight now.

Low. Too big.

Eyes throwing the light back at us in unexpected ways.

Nothing this rotten should still be alive.

The reek of opened ground rolls off it in waves.

Decomposition and that same sweet wrong magic, something that died and got stood back up and pointed at us.

The wolf quits saying ours.

He says kill it.

We’re finally on the same page again.

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