Chapter 3

Caleb POV

I made the full loop around the commune's edge on foot before patrol, same as I usually did when time allowed. My second could've handled it, or I could've sent anyone down the line but I preferred seeing things with my own eyes. There was no substitute for that, regardless of what Jules thought.

The Moon Edge pack had held this stretch of Kisatchie for longer than I'd been alive, and not without cost. Wild territory was shrinking everywhere. Packs that had ranged freely a generation ago were now compressed into smaller and smaller corridors, bumping up against human development, against each other. Our land was the kind other packs dreamed about: enough canopy, enough river, enough distance from the nearest town to run without risk. That made it worth fighting over. I'd never let myself forget that, even during the quiet stretches.

Everything checked out. I rolled my shoulders down and headed back into the commune.

Midday had the place humming. Kids ran between the houses while a few of the older women ran lessons near the fire circle. The men who worked jobs in Jensen had already left for the day manual work, contracting, labor that brought money back without drawing attention. Everyone else was preparing for the afternoon rotation.

Jules fell into step beside me before I'd made it twenty feet.

He was the closest thing I had to a brother, which was either a comfort or an annoyance depending on the day. We'd grown up side by side after my parents died. I'd been shuffled around from household to household the way orphaned pack kids often were, but I kept landing at Jules's place. His mother had never made me feel like a burden. If it weren't for the fact that I had my father's black hair against Jules's deep red, people who didn't know us assumed we were blood. Sometimes I almost believed it myself.

"Perimeter clear?" he asked.

"Yes."

"You walked it yourself again."

"I did."

He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. "One of these days you're going to trust someone else to tell you the sky is still up."

I didn't bother responding to that.

We walked toward the guard post at the commune's edge, Jules filling the silence the way he always did easy conversation about things I mostly didn't track. Apparently two pack members had started seeing each other. James and Diana, neither of whom I knew particularly well.

"My mom told me," Jules said. "Right before she spent twenty minutes asking why I haven't done the same."

"That's unfortunate."

"She's going to move on to you eventually, you know."

"I'm not her son."

"She doesn't see it that way." He paused. "She'd settle for grandchildren by any available means."

I grimaced. "Then she'd better set her sights elsewhere."

Jules kicked a root out of his path. "It'd be easier if the mate thing just happened, honestly. Like no deliberation required. The universe just hands you a person and that's that."

"That sounds like a nightmare."

He looked at me sideways. "Still?"

"Still."

He dropped it, but only because he knew I meant it. Fated mates had their place. My own parents had been paired that way, and I understood the pack logic of it, the stronger bloodlines, the stability it was supposed to produce. But I'd come of age without feeling any pull toward anyone in Moon Edge, and I hadn't lost sleep over it. My value to this pack wasn't measured in offspring. I'd proven that much already.

The patrol team was assembled at the post by the time we arrived. Six wolves, all of them capable, all of them knowing what to do without being told. We'd done this enough times that the briefing was unnecessary. South sweep first, then clockwise through every section until we'd covered the full territory. Clean run, no incidents, usually back within the hour.

I gave the word and we stripped down, leaving clothes folded at the post.

The shift came quick and quiet, muscle and bone reorganizing into something lower to the ground and faster. I moved to the front without discussion. That was how it had always been.

Jules called me paranoid for varying the route, same as he called me paranoid for walking the perimeter myself. I didn't argue with him. The Alpha hadn't put me in this position because I was the biggest wolf in the pack though that helped. He'd picked me because I thought in patterns, noticed when things repeated and when they stopped, understood that predictability was a vulnerability. Paranoia and preparation looked identical from the outside.

We pushed south through the pines, spread in loose formation, paws quiet on the needle-covered ground.

I felt it within minutes.

Not a sound or a smell, something beneath that. A quality in the air, a tension in the way the forest had gone inward. The birds had nothing to say. The small animals that typically registered our presence with mild alarm and then returned to business were simply absent. That kind of quiet had a specific cause.

Something else was hunting in our territory.

I glanced back at Jules. His ears were flat, eyes sharper than they'd been a moment ago. He felt it too.

I kept us on course but dropped my nose lower, pushing through layers of pine resin and damp soil. Then I found it feline musk, heavy and distinctly wrong. Not a wandering bobcat. This was a shifter scent, and it wasn't alone. Multiple signatures, grouped, moving with purpose.

I adjusted direction without signal and the team followed, pulling into a tighter formation. We tracked the scent east, closing the distance.

And then a second thread cut through the first.

Wolf. Female. Unfamiliar, no trace of Moon Edge in it, no pack marker I recognized at all. The scent was strong but wound through with something that read unmistakably as fear.

I pushed faster.

Feline shifters, multiple, running in coordinated pursuit. And a lone wolf somewhere ahead of them.