Get up.
Buck awoke with a start. “Honey?”
She murmured something, nestling closer against his side. Her eyelids fluttered, then stilled.
Buck rubbed a hand over his face, trying to figure out what had woken him. From the faint light visible through the curtains, it was coming up to dawn. He must have slept through most of the night.
And in my own body too. Huh.
He looked down at Honey. No real need to wake her up, he supposed—unless you counted his own. He imagined sliding back under the covers, running his tongue all the way down her curves until he tasted the sweetness between her thighs…
It was a tempting thought, but he shook it off. Something was nagging at him, pulling on the edge of his mind. Not a voice, or the familiar bite of pain in his scar. Just a feeling, an urge to…
Get up.
Anyone who spent any time working on a wildfire crew learned to pay attention to those nagging little warnings. He automatically sniffed the air, but there was no hint of smoke. Still, a feeling of wrongness plucked at his senses. And he hadn’t lived to retirement by second-guessing his subconscious.
Honey stirred as he got out of bed. She mumbled a sleepy, indistinct, “Buck?”
“It’s probably nothing.” He bent over to kiss her cheek. “Go back to sleep.”
He dressed quickly, pulling on his boots. Dragging the desk away from the door would have made too much noise, so he went out the window instead. The sky was just starting to shade to pale mauve at the horizon, but to his eyes, it might as well be mid-day. He frowned, scanning the sleeping camp for any sign of trouble.
That way.
He couldn’t have said what made him turn toward the woods. His assessing gaze swept the forest—and snagged on a faint break in the undergrowth.
Honey’s trail, he realized. She’d told him how she’d taken a roundabout route through the woods to reach his cabin, avoiding the paths. Had she managed to shake Ignatius off her tail?
Maybe that was what was bothering him. Buck set off into the woods, following the faint traces of her passage. He’d always been a pretty good tracker, even before he'd been bitten. Now, to his unnatural senses, each bent twig and scuff in the leaf litter might as well have been outlined in glowing neon.
“Damn it,” he said under his breath. If he could follow her trail this easily, no doubt most shifters would as well. He did his best to obscure it, obliterating the faint imprints of her bare toes under his own heavy tread.
Still, she seemed to have been successful at losing Ignatius. He got all the way back to the actual trail before picking up any sign of a second person—a smaller footprint, ridged by the sole of a sneaker.
Feeling faintly ridiculous, he squatted, inspecting the footprint. He hadn’t the foggiest idea what kind of shoes any of the campers wore—apart from Archie, because he’d lost count of the number of times he’d had to find the damn things after the kid got too excited and furred up without getting undressed first. Still, something told him that the footprint had been left by Ignatius.
He sniffed again and scowled. Right.That’show he could tell.
Since there was no way in hell he was going to crawl around with his face in the dirt like a damn dog, he stood up. He strode down the path, scanning the ground. It was harder to spot signs on the hard-packed earth than the virgin forest floor, but after a while he was rewarded with another faint sneaker-print. It pointed uphill, away from the camp.
Good. That meant that when Honey had diverged from the path and circled back through the woods, Ignatius had carried on. He must have eventually figured out that she’d given him the slip. In all probability, he’d assumed that it was because she’d shifted into her wolf form. Her secret was safe…
… so why did he still have that nagging feeling of unease?
He stared at Ignatius’s trail. That telltale footprint, heading up the mountain…
And no footprints heading back.
“Damnit!” He lifted his voice. “Ignatius!”
His bellow bounced back at him from the tree trunks. Apart from that, there was no other response. Buck swore under his breath, breaking into a run.
“Ignatius!” he called again. “For the love of baby bunnies, kid, don’t tell me you’ve finally found your dragon and flown away…Ignatius!”
He didn’t dare sprint flat-out, in case he missed a clue. He stuck to a lope onlyslightlyfaster than a normal human could run, searching the surroundings for any sign of the kid.
Even with all his senses on high alert, he almost went straight past it—a faint deer trail, just worn enough that in the dark a kid might mistake it for the continuation of the hiking route. There wasn’t so much as a bent twig, yet some instinct told him Ignatius had gone that way.
