“We are from our parents’ clan,” Baz said. He sounded almost as if he was reciting something ceremonial. “But we are starting a new clan of our own. You’re from one of the forest clans, aren’t you?”
The stranger stared at them, his eyes almost seeming to glow in the firelight. “You do not have permission to be here.”
“I know,” Baz said. He kept his hands in sight, slightly upraised, not a surrender but a gesture of truce. “We hoped to make this town into a ... a sort of bridge between our clans and yours. A place of goodwill and peace.”
Wild shifter clans, Arden thought, her heart pounding so loudly she feared it might be heard all the way from where she was hiding. They really did exist.
The stranger continued to gaze at the group by the fire, assessing them one by one.
Then he said, “I will consult my alpha. We will discuss this again soon.”
He stepped away from the firelight, vanishing into the shadows. The last thing Arden saw of him—and maybe she only imagined it—was the hint of something large and dark, maybe a bear, fading back into the blackness under the trees.
Arden pressed herself against the side of the building, her mouth dry. She couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to.
After a long, quiet moment, everyone at the fire started talking at once.
“Well, that was really?—”
“I never expected to see one of the?—”
“Do you think we’re in trouble?”
Baz raised his hands for quiet. “I think we should probably put the fire out and go to bed. If anyone is worried, we can stay together, but I don’t think they seem dangerous.”
“He said their clan doesn’t want us here,” Brown Braids said nervously.
“They aren’t going to attack.” This was Fern, and she sounded definite about it.
Baz turned to look at her. “Is this something you’re guessing, or one of the things youknow?”
He put a peculiar weight on the words, as if Fern sometimes knew things that other people didn’t. Arden remembered the conversation earlier, in which Declan seemed to rely on Fern’s intuition as if it was more than a mere hunch.
Fern hesitated. Then she said, “Not for certain. But I’m confident we’ll be safe tonight.”
The group started to get up, collecting their trash and dishes. Arden decided it was time to get back to her cabin for the night, behind solid walls.
For a sudden, reckless instant, she was terribly tempted to reveal herself to Baz. She would be safe with him from anyone who lived in the woods.
But would she be safe from his friends, if they recognized her and found out what she had done?
Arden crept back to her cabin. The night was pitch dark now, and full of wild sounds, all of which she was tempted to read as wild beasts or that strange person—a bear? had he turned into a bear?—coming back with his friends. The town that had seemed so safe and friendly to her before was now full of danger.
If I scream, they’ll hear me and come to help,she reassured herself.
But would she be any safer with Baz’s friends—his clan, his shifter clan—than with the wild shifters?
By the time she got back to the cabin, she was half-running. She closed and latched the door, then put her pack against it just in case. She covered the window with her jacket just in case anyone saw her light, then turned on her camp lantern and ate a protein bar while everything she had seen and heard tonight spun around and around in her head.
If Baz and his friends found out about her, they might be angry and drive her out of the town. But if the wild shifter clans knew who she really was, if they were like everyone said they were, there was a good chance they would kill her.
After she had thought about it for a while, she got up and rummaged in her pack. The envelope that she had carried with her all this time was stuffed down in the bottom. Arden took it out—a plain manila envelope, heavy with the papers contained inside.
If any of the shifters found her with this, they would definitely have awkward questions. But she couldn’t give it up—not this, not the all-important leverage it provided her.
The other thing that might give her away was her phone. Arden had been afraid for a while that it was possible to track her with it. She wouldn’t put it past her ex to have installed some kind of tracking software on it. She wasn’t quite as worried about it here, since she had already noticed there was no cell service in town, and the battery was just about dead anyway. But there was plenty of material on the phone that could reveal too much about her past: photos, emails, social media posts.
After making sure the phone was powered off, she slipped it into the envelope with the papers and looked around for a hiding place. Eventually she found a space between the homemade wooden bed frame’s headboard and the wall. Once she had wedged it into the gap, she didn’t expect anyone would find it unless they tore the room apart looking for it.
