“Did you test the soil?”
“I did. Good nutrients, so it’s not starvation. Moisture levels are fine, the sunlight is adequate, and there’s no pest damage.”
He sipped now, his eyebrows drawn together as he thought it through. “Something is hurting them, but it’s not from within.”
“Not hurting them. Draining them.” She sipped too, and the tart flavor of the lemon made her twitch her nose. “You said the animals were weird.”
He nodded once, playing with the condensation on his glass but never taking his eyes off of her. “I track herd patterns every season. Migration, feeding routes, rut behavior. It’s predictable within a margin. They are moving wrong.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “Deer are nervous. They graze in short bursts, heads up more than down. They are covering more ground than they usually need, like they are searching for something that isn’t there.” He shifted in his chair. “Birds are lifting off before anything spooks them. And because of that, coyotes and predators are ranging wider, crossing lines they usually respect. They are uneasy.”
His hands were curled around the glass, his head tilting as if he was narrating a memory. He was telling her things professionally, she knew, but... There was a tension in him that didn’t quite match the delivery of a polished ranger report.
Then it hit her.
He didn’t say,I saw signs of disturbance. He said they aremoving wrong. He said that thedeer were nervous, and thepredators were uneasy.
Those words were not measurements. Those werefeelingwords. Words he used because he lived in the forest long enough to be part of it. The ranger took note, but it was the wolf seeing it. And so, listening to the ranger might not be enough. She leaned back, her heart suddenly racing faster. “What does the wolf feel?”
He blinked, caught off guard, and a chuckle—half disbelief and half amusement—escaped him. “Like, normal wolves, or me?”
“We can talk about standard wolves in a minute, if we need to. Right now, I need your wolf’s take.”
“Why would you care about that?”
She drummed her fingers on the table, ready to add more to her mental flood of information. “Because your instinct is information, just written in a different language, and I’m all for communication.”
He studied her in that intense way of his, clearly still not convinced.
“Look,” she said, exhaling, “just because it doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet doesn’t mean it should be ignored. We’re taking into account animal patterns, and you are an animal.”
He raised an eyebrow, and she wished she had thought of bringing a shovel to dig herself a hole. “What I mean,” she rushed on, ignoring the heat on her cheeks. “You’re magik. Part of you is animal instinct, only yours is... amplified. Guided bythe man, which makes it even more powerful. And also, you can speak, where the deer cannot. So...”
Her hands fell to her lap. She knew she was blushing. She knew she sounded like she was half-teaching and half-babbling, but then, to her immense relief, he laughed. Softly, barely more than a chuckle, but it made her breathe easier.
He leaned back, eyes dark, scanning her face as if he could find his words there. “The wolf feels like the forest is shifting,” he murmured. “Some places are too light, like something is missing. Then you move, even just a mile, and it’s gone.” Frustration flickered over his face, his jaw tightening, fingers drumming once against the glass before he stilled them. “I feel it, but it slips if I try to grab it, leaving me with nothing but a hunch.”
She stopped, her brain putting together what he said and what they knew. “You know what we need?”
“Another drink?”
“No. I mean, yes, that. And also food because I’m starving. But we need a grid. You say it’s not everywhere. Not all my plants in the shop misfired. Those two things might be connected. So, what if the worst plant depletion lines up with the weirdest animal movement and what you perceive instinctually?”
“That would give us a map.”
“And a lot of answers are on maps. We need a plan. Obviously, I can’t cover the entire forest–“
“We can.”
She stared at him. He said it so simply, like covering miles and miles of living, breathing wilderness was the same as picking up milk. “How? It took us half a day to do the area we did.”
“The pack can cover it.”
“The pack can...” Her brain recalculated. Expanded. Adjusted scale. “Shoot, the packcancover it! I can show themthe plants, if they don’t know them, and how to take them and store them. Do you think they would mind?”
“They would not. And they only need to sniff what you need.”
