The convoy's rear vehicles are trying to reverse up the access road, which is exactly what Cassidy's creek crossing analysis predicted—they don't have room to turn, and the soft ground on the shoulder is pulling at their tires every time a driver gets too close to the water. The flatbed with the generator is alreadylisting badly, one wheel sunk past the rim in the creek mud. That vehicle isn't leaving under its own power.
What I want is to be down there.
The rational part of my brain knows I'm more valuable on this ridge with radio contact to every team than I would be in the trees with one flank and a shoulder that hasn't finished deciding whether it's going to cooperate. The wolf doesn't care about rational. The wolf wants to be in the trees with the pack, running the dark, taking the fight to something that came onto our land with rifles and someone else's money.
I watch the access road instead.
"Two hunters secured at the ravine," Ciaran radios. "Non-lethal. Zip-tied."
"Hold them until we can hand them to Graves," I say.
"Understood."
The bond pulls my attention north before my eyes get there—a familiar direction, a familiar warmth, moving along the far ridge path. Cassidy.
She took the youngest wolves and the elders up the north trail to the cave system two hours ago, the route I showed her when she asked about the pack's emergency protocols. She wanted to help, and I gave her the safest job, guiding the kids and elders to secret caves in the mountains.
She made it. They all made it. The bond carries relief in it, and I take a moment to feel it before I look back at the access road.
Graves calls while Ciaran's team is tightening the ravine choke.
"I set up a road inspection, and it’s holding at the south county junction," he says. "My deputy is very thorough about checking vehicle registrations tonight. Nobody civilian is coming up that mountain road for at least another hour."
"Thank you, Sheriff."
"Don't thank me. Just keep it on your side of the line." A pause. "How's it looking up there?"
"Manageable," I say.
"Right." He doesn't ask what manageable means. "Check in when it's done." He hangs up.
I move off the ridge.
The shoulder is going to be a problem by tomorrow, but that is a tomorrow problem, and the access road is where I need to be right now.
I come down through the eastern tree line and find the convoy's front position in worse shape than it looked from above—both lead vehicles are disabled, two more with blown tires, the hunters who haven't been secured by Ciaran's teams clustered in uncertain groups with rifles they're not sure where to aim.
Their leader is in the access road, at it’s center.
He's big, late forties, tactical gear with a private security patch I don't recognize on the shoulder. He holds his rifle at a low ready and watches the tree line with the unhurried attention of someone who has spent enough time in the field to stop panicking when plans go sideways.
When I step into view in human form, he turns toward me without flinching.
"Blackmoore," he says. He knows my name. Of course he does.
"You're on private posted land," I say. "You've had two vehicles disabled and six men secured. The rest of your convoy isn't going anywhere tonight." I stop ten feet from him. "Leave. Tonight. Permanently. Don't come back to this mountain."
His face morphs to a flat, measuring expression. "We're not here for a property dispute."
"Then what are you here for?"
"Confirmation," he says. "We've had reports. Trail cameras in three counties, behavioral documentation, corroboratingwitness accounts." He tilts his head slightly. "There's more than wolves running around up here. The kind of more that certain organizations pay very well to acquire documented proof."
He means shifters. He doesn't say it, because saying it out loud in the forest at two in the morning makes a man sound unhinged, but he means it, and we both know he means it, and the implication hangs in the access road air between us like a challenge.
"You have footage of wolves on private land," I say. "That's what you have."
"I have footage of something that doesn't move the way wolves move," he says. "And I have an employer who finds that interesting enough to pay for a retrieval operation."
