It probably was, Burke thought. But when Chen and Alvarez looked at him, as if inviting him to confirm what they suspected, he said nothing—for all their sakes.

CHAPTER 31

They gathered in the wild country between Tala and Etu, and their footsteps filled the land with a terrible silence.

While the rest of the Elders listened, the two who had returned from Lakeside told the story of the sly predator that wasn’t a danger to the world or to Namid’s teeth and claws but was still dangerous because of the harm it could cause within a human pack—a harm that touched the smaller shifters. They told their kin about the sweet blood howling not-Wolf and the Wolf who wanted to be her mate. They spoke of job-fair migrations and the proper way to ask for tasty Wolf cookie treats. And they spoke of their mistakes in ignoring the animosity the smaller shifters felt toward the Cyrus human and how the not-Wolf had been lost and could have died because they had not heeded the Wolf’s warnings about that particular kind of human.

The two who had been in Lakeside told their story. And when the Elders made the journeys back to their own territories, they took the story—and its lessons—with them.

CHAPTER 32

Moonsday, Messis 27

Vlad filled the checkout counter with the book requests from terra indigene settlements. A few of the requests mentioned a specific book or author—human, Intuit, or Other. Most were requests for a kind of story that sounded similar to the hunt for Cyrus Montgomery and the rescue of Meg Corbyn: police and terra indigene working together; resourceful but wounded girl; plenty of blood and gore as the hunters tore through the bad human’s accomplices to find the girl before she received a fatal wound.

The requests themselves held a hefty dose of fiction—although he suspected variations of the story would be written in the next few months—but he still needed to find something among the published books that might come close to the story requested. And he’d ask the police to recommend a nonfiction book about police cars that would satisfy the request from the Crowgard living around the Feather Lakes.

Tess walked through the archway and stopped at the counter. He hadn’t seen her since Meg’s abduction. Her hair was brown and wavy with a few narrow streaks of green, a sign she was almost relaxed.

“There are strange humans in my coffee shop,” Tess said. “Nadine said you would explain.”

Vlad walked over to the archway and looked into A Little Bite before returning to the checkout counter. “Officer Daniel Hilborn is Officer Debany’s new partner. He comes here a couple of hours before his shift starts and observes. He’s learning who is who and who works where.”

“He called me ma’am. I think he’s afraid of me.”

He has good reason to be, Vlad thought. “Sally Esposito is a psychologist from Ferryman’s Landing who has volunteered to come to the Courtyard a couple of days a week to provide counseling for anyone who needs some help.”

“Meg?” Tess’s voice was quiet, but Vlad wasn’t fooled—not when black threads suddenly appeared and her hair began to coil.

“She’s having bad dreams. And she’s had a few episodes of seeing things that aren’t there. The doctors at Lakeside Hospital are fairly confident that her brain wasn’t damaged by . . .” He stopped. How much did Tess know about the way that Cyrus had cut Meg? Better not to bring it up since he didn’t want to deal with her if her mood turned deadly. “Anyway, Ms. Esposito came here with Steve Ferryman to talk to the Business Association about providing some counseling—not just for Meg but also for Lizzy, Frances, and Sarah Denby.”

“Getting inside the brain of a blood prophet must be a professional coup.”

“You weren’t here to voice an opinion when we had to decide,” Vlad said coldly. “Then again, you weren’t exactly absent, were you?”

“I didn’t ask Nyx to come with me on that hunt,” Tess replied just as coldly. She looked away. After a brief silence, she said, “How is Leetha?”

“She’ll heal, although she may have some scarring around her mouth when she’s in her human form.” Thinking of that, Vlad relented. “The newspaper said the men drank household cleaners in some kind of lethal, winner-take-all game.”

“One of them drank what they had added to the skin cream.” Tess didn’t look at him. “Harvesters are usually lone predators. Do you understand how rare it is for one of us to have friends? What happened to Leetha . . . She barely touched that . . . human, wasn’t trying to feed. But it could have been Nyx—or you. It could have been a Wolf biting an enemy.” She used one finger to shuffle a book request back and forth on the counter. “When we found those men, one of them smeared the cream on his arm and told Nyx they would give her two hundred dollars and all the blood she could drink if she could bite his arm.”

“Fucking monkeys,” Vlad muttered.

Tess nodded. “We made a counteroffer. Or I did.”

Seeing a companion die because of one look at Tess would be a game changer.

“After they saw the first one’s brains leaking out of his ears, they swore they were just getting their own back at that Sandee for cutting into their girls’ profits, swore they didn’t know the cream would really hurt the Sanguinati. We knew he was lying because of what that Sandee had told Captain Burke.”

Either Burke hadn’t noticed smoke hiding in the shadows when he interrogated that Sandee or he’d pretended not to notice. Either way, it explained how Nyx and Tess had reached the men first.