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Maren looks at me for a long moment.

"Yes," she says. "I'm cold."

She walks back across the grass ahead of me and doesn't ask again, and that's worse than the fight would have been.

I wait until she's inside before I go back up on the porch.

The print sits at the height a woman Lila's size would reach without stretching. I hold my own hand over it, an inch off the wood, and the heat comes up into my palm before I'm halfway there.

Nobody holds that for eleven seconds. Not a witch. Not a wolf.

Sid arrives at my boot and sits down like he's been invited.

You're going to want to be sure.

I look down at him. Six days ago this cat was just a cat.

Then be sure fast.

He walks off toward the house with his tail up, and I stand there trying to figure out how long this is going to take.

Cass and Tobin come at four.

I hear the truck at the bottom of the road before it turns in, and I'm on the porch when they park, because I don't let anybody through the gate without seeing the yard first anymore.

Cass gets out grinning. She's five foot four and has put two men through a wall in front of me.

"You look terrible."

"Slept on a step."

"Romantic."

Tobin doesn't get out right away. He's sixty-one and he was in this pack when my father ran it, and he still knocks on the same door he's been walking through for thirty years.

That's how I know what this is before either of them opens their mouth.

"Say it," I tell him.

"Cass, tell him."

"Coward." Cass leans on the rail. "There were witches on the ridge Tuesday night. Lantern, we think. Nobody said hello. Then Wednesday someone put a mark on a human's door in daylight, in the middle of town, four blocks from the school."

"She's not human."

"No," Tobin says. "She isn't. That's the problem."

My wolf comes up under my skin, fast and hot.

Mine. Mine. Ours.

Later.

"Forty of us," Tobin says. "Kids in that number. Marcy's twins are seven. If the Veiled Hand decides this pack is standing between them and a witch they've wanted for a generation, they won't come at you, Gage. They’ll come for the weak ones in the pack."

"They haven't touched a wolf."

"Not yet."