<Jackson? Is the human pup hurt?>

<Yes. We need the small wagon to take her down to the Intuit village. She can’t walk that far.>

The faces disappeared. This terra indigene settlement didn’t own any horses or burros. When the Others needed such creatures, they rented them, along with the humans who would handle them. But they did have a small wagon that could be pulled by up to three individuals in human form and was mostly used when the Others went down to purchase human-made merchandise. It was big enough to hold Grace and Hope.

Taking a last deep breath, Jackson turned back to the room. Some blood on the sheet, but not as much as he’d thought when he first saw Hope standing there with blood dripping down her arm. Most of the blood was on the drawing, although he would check all the pages carefully to make sure there wasn’t a speck of blood on the rest of the paper.

She’d been doing so well since she’d come to live with them. She’d said she wanted to live. Hadn’t they done everything they could to help her do exactly that? So why . . . ?

Jackson sucked in a breath as he stared at the drawing. A mound of bison, clearly dead. Bloody Wolf prints on all the carcasses. That didn’t make sense. Wolves wouldn’t drag their prey into a mound like that, and killing one bison was hard work and provided several days of food for the entire pack—for the whole terra indigene settlement. So why did Hope draw a slaughter? No recognizable landmarks. Was this going to happen around Sweetwater? Somewhere else?

Meg Corbyn—Meg, the Trailblazer—tended to see prophecies about the Lakeside Courtyard. But that hadn’t always been true. It seemed her abilities, her sensitivity, became refined to Lakeside and the nearby communities that were connected with her Courtyard after she’d been living in Lakeside for a few weeks. But Hope’s vision drawings ranged across the land.

He glanced at the drawing on the desk. Could these girls, these blood prophets, make connections that linked places because of their own connections to the people? Meg and Hope had known each other in the compound where they had been caged and cut so that wealthy humans could know about the future.

Meg was still struggling with her own addiction to cutting, but she was the Trailblazer for the rest of the cassandra sangue, and she might have the answers he needed right now.

Shifting his human hands into Wolf paws that had useful claws, Jackson tore the sheet, making a pad out of the clean linen. He placed the drawing pad on the linen. When the blood scent overwhelmed him to the point that he started salivating, he realized that the paper was more saturated with blood than he’d first thought.

More than a cut, he thought uneasily as he rolled up the part of the sheet that had blood on it. She’d been drawing with her own blood . . . because she needed that color.

The bathroom door opened. Grace led Hope into the bedroom, then stopped when she saw him.

<Jackson?> Grace said.

<We need help,> he said. <More than the human bodywalker.>

The pup looked scared. Did she think he would drive her out of the pack for this? He could. Maybe he should. But connections weren’t always about place, and several of Hope’s past drawings made it clear that there was a link between Sweetwater and Lakeside.

He and Simon, friends since they were juveniles, were the link.

And looking at the picture of dead bison, he thought of another Wolf linked to him and Simon through friendship.

Balling up the part of the sheet that had blood on it, Jackson walked out of the bedroom and put the sheet into a metal bucket half-full of fresh water. Then he got dressed and handed Grace the summer dress she’d been wearing yesterday before they’d shifted to Wolf form and gone to sleep.

Yes, they needed more help than the human bodywalker if they were going to keep the pup alive.

CHAPTER 5

Windsday, Juin 6

Joe Wolfgard narrowed his eyes against the sun and road dust. He was the newly chosen leader of the terra indigene settlement located at the southern end of the Elder Hills and an unknown commodity for the Intuits living in Prairie Gold, the human town connected to the settlement. So he tried not to growl at the Intuit who was driving the pickup. It wasn’t Tobias’s fault that some humans had gone rabid and killed many bison.

“You’ll need to post guards at the town,” Joe said. “Maybe put up a barricade across the road to stop strangers before they get too close to your mates and pups.” And he would talk to the Hawks, Eagles, and Ravens about keeping watch and reporting any human or vehicle heading for the town.

Tobias Walker, the foreman of Prairie Gold’s ranch, tightened his hands on the steering wheel. “You think we’re in danger?”

“Don’t you?”

Tobias didn’t answer.

“Just because the humans who did this started with four-legged animals doesn’t mean they won’t go after targets that look like themselves.”

“You’d have to ask my mother about that,” Tobias said. “She’s the one among us who’s most sensitive to other people.”

Jesse Walker, Tobias’s mother, was an older, vigorous, gray-haired female and the leader of the Intuits in Prairie Gold—at least, she seemed to be since the rest of the humans referred him to her for answers to his questions about the town. She ran the general store and knew everything about everyone—including the terra indigene who had begun to venture in to purchase human-made items instead of receiving twice-monthly boxes of supplies that were left at the edge of their settlement. She had a Crow’s curiosity, always asking questions and poking into people’s lives, but she was so friendly when she did it, no one seemed to mind, especially when the next time you came to her store, she’d have just the thing you needed but didn’t even know you wanted.