Chapter 4: The Enemy Within Reach

Theron ran the four stops in under nine minutes.

He didn't take the bus. He went through alleys and over a chain-link fence he didn't remember choosing, and the whole way his chest kept up one thought. He's late. He's late. He's late. He'd trained that wolf himself. If the kid was dead, Theron had done it with one text and a careless order.

Her building sat at the end of a dead-end street. Four floors. One working light. The wolf was supposed to be across from the front door, in the gap between a recycling bin and the wall.

He wasn't there.

Theron stopped. Breathed in.

Rain. Garbage. Wet brick. The wolf's own scent, sharp and young, heading toward the back of the building.

He followed it.

The kid lay behind the stairwell on his side, one arm folded under his head like a man who'd lain down on purpose. Theron dropped to his knees. Pulse. Strong. Breathing. Slow and even. No blood anywhere. No marks on his throat or his skull.

"Hey." Theron gripped his shoulder. "Look at me."

The wolf's eyes came open slowly. They found Theron's face and went wide. He scrambled up, winced, and sat back down.

"Alpha. I..." He looked around at the stairwell, the sky. "What time is it?"

"Three forty."

"That's wrong." His voice cracked. "I texted you at two. I was at my post." His hands went to his pockets. His phone lay beside him on the ground, screen dark. "I don't remember coming back here."

"What's the last thing you remember?"

"Typing quiet." He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. "Then it's like somebody cut the tape. An hour, just gone."

"Were you hit?"

"No. I'd know." He sounded insulted by the question and scared by it too. "Nobody got close. I'd have smelled them."

Theron lifted his head and took the air apart again. The wolf. Rain. Trash. The hot, oily breath of a wall vent.

Nothing else. No stranger. No trail. By the air's account, nobody had been here at all.

That scared him more than any scent would have.

He looked up at the building. From the whole street, only a handful of heartbeats. He sorted them. Fourth floor, corner. Slow. The rhythm of a woman asleep.

He knew which one was hers before he could have said how.

He let out a breath that took something with it.

He could climb. It would take under a minute. And she'd open her eyes to a man at her window, after a night like hers, after a body on her floor. What would that make him?

He stayed where he was.

"Is she all right?" the kid asked. "The woman?"

"Asleep."

"Then it wasn't about her." The kid frowned. "Was it?"

Theron didn't answer. That was an answer, and he hated it.

"Go home," he told the wolf. "Get checked. Tell nobody until I say."

"Alpha, I failed you."

"You were taken out of a fight you never saw. That isn't failing." He pulled him to his feet. "Go."

He stood in that dead-end street until the first gray showed over the rooftops. Then he went home.

He'd said six. The word kept circling. He'd stood in her doorway at one in the morning and told a stranger he'd be there when she started, and he meant it. He meant it more than he'd meant most things.

By eight, the study smelled of coffee and cold paper.

Theron had been awake for twenty-six hours. He'd read the same report three times. It still said what it said. A scout dead in a corner store. A guard down for an hour. No scent at either place.

Someone had walked through his lines like water through a screen. That wasn't how the Umbrial worked. That was someone with a reason.

A short knock. The door opened before he answered. Only one person did that.

"You haven't eaten," Ismene said.

She set a mug on his desk and took the chair across from it like she'd been there all her life. In a way, she had. Ten years she'd been the voice at his shoulder. Guide. Counselor. The closest thing to family the Alpha's seat allowed. She'd sat up with him through every bad night of the job and never once made him feel she was counting. She carried a leather notebook and a pen with pale blue ink, the same color she'd always used. She opened to a clean page.

"Tell me," she said.

He told her. The scout. The store. The woman. The unfinished sentence. The wolf asleep in the dark behind the stairwell.

"What was the last thing the scout said?"

"I already know something you." He shook his head. "Then nothing."

"You." She wrote it down. "Not who. Not what."

"No."

"Pity."

He left out only one thing. Mine. He couldn't have said why. It felt like something that would break if he said it out loud to anyone yet.

Ismene listened. She wrote very little down. When he finished, she capped the pen.

"A scout alone," she said. "And no one to carry the report back."

"He was killed before he could."

"The Umbrial have pulled back from the east," she said. "My sources say it's been quiet for a week. So either he acted alone, or someone wants you looking at them. Be careful who you ask."

"I know."

"The woman." Her eyes rested on his face. Calm. Steady. "She's human?"

"Yes."

"Then she's a witness and nothing more." She nudged the mug until it sat square on the desk. "Witnesses get hurt, Theron. If whoever sent him knows what she saw, and they do now, the worst thing you can do is stand where she's standing. Every hour you spend near her draws their eyes to her."

"I posted a guard."

"And look what happened to your guard."

It stung, because it was true.

"Pull him off," she said. "Pull everyone. Let her be a woman who sells cigarettes. If they think she's nothing, they'll leave her alone. The moment you act like she matters, she does."

He rubbed his face. He was so tired the words came at him like sound through water. And they made sense. That was what scared him. They made perfect sense.

"You're sure."

"I'm sure." She reached across and rested her hand on his for a second, brief and warm. "I'm always sure. That's why you keep me. Eat something. Sleep. Leave the woman alone."

"Ismene."

She waited, patient as ever. The word was right there behind his teeth.

"Nothing," he said. "You're right."

"And don't go back there tonight."

He nodded. He was too tired to do anything else.

She stood and tucked the notebook under her arm. At the door she paused. She smiled at him, small and tired. "I'm glad you're all right," she said. And she meant it. He could hear that she meant it.

The door clicked shut.

Theron sat with the cold coffee and the report. Somewhere beneath the exhaustion, a small wrong thing turned over and tried to get his attention.

Tonight.

He hadn't said anything about tonight.