Connor is the first one there, muttering curses when his boots slip in the mess.
The other, recently promoted men push in close to look at the slaughtered deer, and I comfort myself with the knowledge that none of the lieutenants who’ve left to carry out different tasks for Ty could be our resident psycho.
Not that I really thought my brothers would betray me, not like this. But it’s good to have confirmation all the same.
The scene is studied and discussed. My mother herds the horrified mothers and curious young back into the den. A few of the young men are tasked with cleaning the kill from the path, and the rest of the crowd disperses back to their duties and the dark.
That’s when it occurs to me that there is still no scent signature on the bodies themselves.
Not only that, but every male wolf who could have done it came to the scene, so they’ll all smell like it. Meaning it could be anyone.
“I know,” Ty says when I say this to him inside the den, keeping my voice low so no one can hear. “I wanted to see how fast everyone showed up.”
“Did anyone make you suspicious?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. A sign, I think, that he’s wearier than he likes to let on. “I don’t like this shit. I was on that path maybe twenty minutes before and it was clean. You could sense the pack all around you on the way back the same as I could. How could someone get in there, kill two reasonably sized deer, and then disappear without a trace?”
I don’t think he’s actually asking me that question. He already knows what I think.
Ty doesn’t look at me as we make our way into the grand cavern. He’s too busy letting that dark gaze of his move over everyone gathered inside. He doesn’t say the word, but I feel it echo inside both of us.
Traitor.
It leaves a sour taste in my mouth for the rest of the evening.
Ty’s already gone when I wake up—probably busy trying to sniff out the traitor here in the den, if I have to guess. Though he’ll have to do it carefully. If he starts making accusations without uncontestable proof it could lead to muttering about crowns not fitting the ego beneath and so on, and it’s too soon into this new role of his for that.
I lie in bed, fretting up at the lack of skylight above me. I think about Winter’s two warning dreams about me. More specifically, about the wolf who wants to kill me. With the noise and anxiety of wolf week gone now, I let myself think over everything that’s happened since the last full moon.
Dead things left everywhere. Someone stalking me. A traitor in this pack who not only gotthis closeto me in the woods but almost certainly had everything to do with stoking the tensions during the gathering that pushed everything to a boiling point.
Just because it worked out in Ty’s favor doesn’t mean it wasn’t treacherous.
And the more I lie there, thinking about treachery, the more I start to connect the dots. Or ask myself why I hadn’t connected the dots before.
The first sacrifice I saw was on the path outside the den. Not far from where whoever was stalking me almost got me. The same place where we found that mess of guts and heads last night.
In my head, I realize, I’ve been dividing those ripped-up creatures from the ones I’ve found all around the cottage and the ones Savi’s seen at the borders of her property. I’ve unconsciously divided them. One seemed like the work of Vinca, possibly, or some minion of hers. The other seemed liked pack shit.
But what if they’re not separate at all?
Once I think that, I start thinking about all the other things that have felt like the sacrifices over the last few months or so, even if they weren’t actually sacrifices—and I sit up then, my head spinning.
Because I can think of another consistent, annoying issue that we’ve been having for a while now—and I’m suddenlycertainthat I have toget to the office to look through all my meticulous notes to see if I’m onto something.
I hike down from the den and pick up my trusty old Explorer from where I left it in the parking area at an old trailhead that no one uses anymore. Then I drive through the hushed, quiet valley morning down to the warehouse in Phoenix. I nod at the wolves I find there, a couple of younger guys just back from a run down south.
“The summit is a death trap,” one of them tells me, scowling south like he can see over the mountains that rise up at the California border. “And I don’t mean the snow up there, though it’s from hell.”
“It’s always bad this time of year,” his companion says. “But this was real bad.”
“There were also too many trolls,” the first wolf tells me. “It’s like they knew we were coming.”
This is the same thing that a lot of the wolves have told me lately. Even some of the ogres have made it clear that there’s been an uptick in attacks on our people out there. No matter how much secrecy we try to impose over what we’re doing and when, someone always knows.
Today I have to wonder if that means the traitor has his fingers in our business as well as our community. That actually makes me feel a little sick, but I don’t want the wolves here today to see that.
“Did it affect our shipments?” I ask, stone-faced.
