Ryder arrived fifteen minutes later with a team of Moonfang’s finest trackers. They were good, I’d heard. Better than good. They had tracked rogues through rivers and across mountain ranges, through cities and deserts and every terrain in between.
We would need every ounce of their skill.
Noah stayed behind with Cole and Lina. I hated leaving my mate, but I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t wait. Every second we wasted was another second Mary had to disappear with Thomas.
The old woman at the gas station was still there, sitting on a bench outside the convenience store, smoking a cigarette. When we approached, she squinted at us with rheumy eyes.
“Yes?” She asked.
“Hello, sorry to disturb you,” Hunt started, smiling and trying to charm the old lady. “Were you perhaps the person that gave a teenage boy a box…?”
“You’re looking for the package,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, we are.”
She jerked her thumb toward the store. “Person behind the counter gave it to me. Asked me to give it to the kid when he came by on his bike. Fifty bucks to hold onto it for an hour. I didn’t ask questions.”
I pushed through the door of the convenience store. The person behind the counter, a bored-looking man in his fifties, pointed us to a neighbor from a nearby town who had been paid to deliver the package to the gas station.
The neighbor pointed us to a friend of a friend who had received it from a stranger at a bus station.
We followed the chain link by link, moving through a maze of innocent people who had been manipulated without their knowledge. Each one gave us another name, another location, another person who had touched the box. The trail wound through three towns, doubled back on itself twice, and eventually led us to Pine Valley.
Finally, we found the source.
A little boy, maybe seven years old, sat on the steps of a rundown apartment building. He was playing with a battered toy car, running it back and forth across the cracked concrete, making engine noises with his mouth.
He looked up when we approached, his eyes curious but not afraid. Kids were like that sometimes. They hadn’t learned yet that the world was full of monsters.
“Hey buddy,” I said, crouching down to his level. “We’re looking for a lady who might have given you something to deliver. Do you remember anyone like that?”
The kid nodded slowly, still pushing his car back and forth. “The pretty blonde lady? She was nice. She gave me five whole dollars to give a box to Mrs. Patterson down the street.”
“Can you tell me what she looked like?”
“She had yellow hair. Really long, like a princess. And she smelled like flowers. And she was holding a baby.”
A baby. Thomas.
My claws bit into my palms. I forced them to retract.
“Do you remember which way she went after she gave you the box?”
The kid pointed down the street, toward the edge of town where the buildings gave way to dense forest. “That way. She got into a car. A gray one.”
I turned to the trackers. “Can you pick up her scent?”
One of them, a grizzled older wolf with scars across his face, moved around the area where the kid was sitting. He inhaled deeply, his nose twitching, eyes half closed in concentration. He walked in slow circles, expanding his search, cataloging every smell.
“Got it,” he said finally. “Faint. Old. But I’ve got it.”
Relief crashed through me. We had a trail. We had a direction. We had a chance.
“Follow it,” I ordered. “Don’t lose it. Report back the moment you find anything.”
The trackers shifted and took off into the forest, a blur of fur and muscle disappearing between the trees.
It was just a matter of time now.
