Etched in Bone

Kowalski glanced at Jane and pedaled faster. Instead of going over the bridge that would take them into the Hawkgard section—and commit the human to the big loop within the Courtyard’s three hundred acres—Kowalski turned onto the road that ran alongside the Elementals’ lake, heading back toward the Green Complex.

The Wolves ran, maintaining their distance even when Kowalski slowed down while going up a rise. They took turns pacing the bicycle and pushing their prey to run and run. Or pedal and pedal. As they reached the intersection with the Courtyard’s main road, Kowalski swung left toward the Green Complex instead of turning right toward the Market Square.

Most of the pack, having slowed to a trot as their prey tired, circled back toward the Wolfgard Complex. Nathan headed for the Market Square and the Liaison’s Office, where he would keep track of the deliverymen and guard Meg Corbyn, the Courtyard’s Human Liaison. Simon and Blair followed Kowalski until they reached the Green Complex. Then Blair continued on to the Utilities Complex while Simon dashed for the water trough in the common area that formed the open center of the Courtyard’s only multispecies complex. He lapped water, then shifted to his human form and dunked his head, flinging water as he stood up and tossed his dark hair away from his face. He splashed his arms and chest, then grinned when Kowalski parked the bicycle and approached the trough warily.

“That was a great game of chase!” Simon said happily. “You understand how to be play-prey.”

“I do?”

“Yes.” Simon cocked his head, puzzled by the human’s wariness. Hadn’t they just played, had fun? “Want some water?”

“Thanks.” Kowalski splashed water on his face and neck, then on his arms. But he didn’t drink.

Simon pondered the not drinking for a moment. Humans were clever, invasive predators who had recently shown the terra indigene once again why they could never be fully trusted—not even by one another. But physically they were so much weaker than other kinds of predators. This not drinking, for example. Nothing wrong with the water in the trough. Someone had already drained yesterday’s water, using it on the potted tree and other plants in the open area, and refilled the trough with fresh water for drinking and splashing. Humans would drink water pumped from the well if it was in a glass or a bucket or some other small container but couldn’t drink the same water from a shared outdoor container?

It made him wonder how they had survived as a species long enough to become such a problem.

“So, who doesn’t understand about play-prey?” Kowalski asked, rubbing a hand over his face.

“The female pack. Every time we invited them to play, they stopped riding their bicycles and asked if they could help.” Simon spread his arms in a “what’s that all about?” gesture. Then he pointed at Kowalski. “But you invited us to play, and we all had a good run.”

Kowalski snorted a soft laugh. “Well, I sure had a good run.”

“Since the females can’t pedal as far or as fast as you, maybe they could play chase with the puppies.” The pups would learn how to run as a pack without the risk of being kicked by real prey.

Simon studied Kowalski, who studied him in turn.

“I’ll talk to Ruthie,” Kowalski finally said.

They both heard the clink of glassware and looked toward the screened summer room below Meg Corbyn’s apartment.

“Must be later than I realized,” Kowalski said. “I’d better go home and get cleaned up for work.”

Simon watched the man walk toward the bicycle—and the summer room. For a moment, it looked like Kowalski was going to go in and talk to Meg, and Simon felt his teeth lengthen to Wolf size as his lips pulled back in a silent snarl. But Kowalski just raised a hand in greeting, said, “Morning, Meg,” and rode away.

Simon walked around the trough, then stopped suddenly when he realized he was naked in his human form. It had never mattered until Meg came to live in the Courtyard. But humans reacted in various ways to seeing one another without clothing, even when clothing wasn’t needed for protection or warmth. Meg had adjusted pretty well to friends shifting to human form to give her a message or answer a question before shifting back to their preferred furred or feathered form, but it was different with him—maybe because their friendship was different from any other she had with humans or terra indigene.

Most nights, he slept with her in his Wolf form. They had their own apartments, but those places were connected by the summer room and a back upstairs hallway, and more and more it was becoming one den instead of two. But they weren’t mates in the same way Kowalski and Ruthie were mates. Then again, terra indigene Wolves mated only once a year, when females came into season. Meg did the bleeding typical of human females, but she hadn’t shown any physical interest in having a mate. Except . . .

She’d asked him to go skinny-dipping with her a couple of weeks ago. Both of them naked, in human form. She’d been nervous about being in the water with him, and she seemed scared after he’d kissed the scar along the right side of her jaw—a scar made by the cut that had saved the Wolfgard in Lakeside as well as many other Wolves throughout the Northeast Region and even beyond.

He’d kissed her before—on the forehead once or twice. But when he’d kissed that scar, he’d felt a flutter of change inside him, and in the days that followed he began to understand on some instinctive level that he wasn’t quite the same as the rest of the Lakeside Wolfgard. Not anymore.

Maybe it wasn’t just for Meg’s sake that, after the kiss, he’d invited her to play a Wolf game despite their both looking human. Then she wasn’t afraid anymore. And since then . . . Well, it wasn’t lost on him that, in summer weather like this, human males wore next to nothing in and around their own dens and no one thought anything of it.

“It’s hot upstairs,” Meg said, not raising her voice because she didn’t need to. His ears might look human, but he was still a Wolf and could hear her just fine. “I brought some food down here for breakfast.”

“I’ll take a quick shower and join you.”

He hurried inside and up the stairs to the bathroom in his apartment. Washing his hair and body didn’t take long, but he stood under the shower, enjoying the cool water falling over him as he thought about the complication that was Meg Corbyn.

He had brought her into the Courtyard, offering her the job of Human Liaison before discovering that she was a blood prophet, a cassandra sangue—a breed of human females who saw visions of the future when their skin was cut. She had escaped from the man who had owned her and used her, and Simon and the rest of the terra indigene in Lakeside had taken her in.

That sounded simple but it wasn’t. Nothing about Meg was simple. She was the pebble dropped in a pond that was the Lakeside Courtyard, and the ripples of her presence had changed so many things, including the terra indigene who had befriended her. Because of Meg, the Courtyard’s residents interacted with humans in ways that were unprecedented—or, at least, hadn’t been considered in centuries. Because of Meg, the terra indigene throughout Thaisia had tried to save the rest of the blood prophets who had been tossed out like unwanted puppies by the humans who had owned them. Because of Meg, the Lakeside Courtyard had a human pack who provided an additional learning experience for terra indigene who had a human-centric education and needed to practice their skills with humans who wouldn’t take advantage of mistakes.

Because of Meg, he had the uncomfortable feeling that a little bit of being human had become attached to and inseparable from his Wolf form.

Plenty of human females over the years had wanted to take a lusty walk on the wild side and have sex with one of the terra indigene. And plenty of terra indigene had been equally curious about having sex in their human form. But that was about pleasing the body for a night and walking away. Or, for the Sanguinati, it was about using lust as a lure in order to feed off the blood of their preferred prey.

Having sex was different from becoming someone’s mate. Mating was serious business. It was about pack and family. Some forms of terra indigene mated for life; some did not. Even among the forms that usually mated for life, the bonds didn’t always hold. Simon’s sire, Elliot, never talked about why his mate had left him. And Daphne, Simon’s sister, had told them nothing about her mate or why she had shown up in Lakeside alone just days before her pup was born.

No, the mating bond didn’t always last, and most of the time, the repercussions were small. A pack might break apart if the dominant pair split. Some might leave for other packs, even other parts of the continent. But ordinarily, a species wouldn’t become extinct if a mating bond broke—and that could happen if his bond of friendship with Meg became something more but couldn’t survive being something more, couldn’t survive a physical mating. He knew it. Tess and Vlad and Henry knew it. Maybe some of the humans knew it. But he didn’t think Meg knew it, wasn’t sure she would be strong enough to carry that weight on top of what she had been asked to do already.

She had been hurt by the humans who had caged her and used her. Hurt in ways that made her fearful of the human male form. While he occasionally wondered if having sex with a human would feel different if the human was Meg, he wasn’t willing to risk their friendship, wasn’t willing to break the bond they already had. So he needed to be extra careful now for her sake, for his sake, for everyone’s sake. How much human would the terra indigene keep? The Elders had asked that question without specifying if they meant human population, human inventions, or the intangible aspects of a form that were absorbed along with the physical shape if you lived too long in a particular skin.

Simon shut off the water and dried himself before pulling on a pair of denim cutoffs.

When the Elders had first asked that question, he thought they expected an answer in words. But after the recent war that had broken the Cel-Romano Alliance of Nations on the other side of the Atlantik, and the Elders’ decision to thin, and isolate, the human herds in Thaisia, Simon understood that the answer would be shaped by what the Elders learned from the things that happened in and around the Lakeside Courtyard.

Meg fussed with the dishes on the small table in the summer room, but her mind was still replaying the image of Simon and Karl Kowalski standing by the water trough, talking. Simon had looked happy. Karl had had his back to the summer room, so she hadn’t seen his face, but he’d seemed tense. She wondered why Karl would feel tense about something that pleased Simon so much. Then again, a Wolf and a human didn’t often see things the same way.

But looking at them, their bodies communicating opposing emotions, she noticed the similarities. Unlike Henry Beargard, who was big and muscled even in human form, Simon and Karl had the strength and lean muscles of hunters who chased their prey—although she didn’t think Karl usually had to run after the people he arrested. They both had dark hair, but Karl’s was cut shorter than Simon’s. The real difference, at first glance anyway, was the eyes. Karl’s were brown, while Simon’s were amber whether he was in human or Wolf form.

And when Karl left, she noticed the parts of Simon that weren’t usually seen. She noticed—but she wasn’t sure how she felt. Scared, yes, but also a little curious. She and Simon were friends, and she adored his nephew Sam. But more than that, they’d become partners who were committed to keeping the Courtyard—and the city of Lakeside—intact. And they were partners who were committed to helping the cassandra sangue survive in a world that was too full of sensation.

In the stories she’d read, people who were drawn to each other seemed to fight a lot or have misunderstandings or had sex and then broke up before eventually getting together. But those were humans, not a blood prophet and a Wolf. There were things that had been done to her in the compound that her body remembered but were veiled from her mind—things that made it much easier for her to be around Simon when he was in Wolf form. She knew in her heart that Simon would never do bad things to her like the men in the compound had done, but the furry Wolf still felt like a safer companion, despite the teeth and claws.

And yet, this time, seeing Simon without clothes . . . Scary, yes, but thinking about it made something flutter inside her, something that made her wonder what it would be like if they . . .

“You’re upset.”

Startled, Meg almost knocked over a glass of water. She hadn’t heard Simon enter the summer room.

“No, I’m not.” But looking at him, she was distracted by the male body that displayed everything but the scary bits, which were hidden by denim cutoffs. Then she remembered that she wasn’t wearing anything except a thin cotton shift and panties. That hadn’t seemed important when she’d put them on after her shower.

She was asking for it. Meg couldn’t remember if she had read that phrase in a story or if it was part of a rememory—an image from an old prophecy. But she knew it was the excuse a man used in order to blame a girl when he forced her to have sex with him.

She hadn’t given a thought to how little she was wearing, but if she was noticing Simon’s body, was he also noticing hers? And if he was . . .

She was asking for it.

No! A human male might think that way, but Simon wouldn’t, not even when he was in human form. Her brain knew that; it would make things easier for everyone if she could convince her body.

“Yes, you are.” Simon stepped closer, and his amber eyes narrowed—but not before Meg saw the flickers of red that indicated anger. “You smell upset—and a little lusty. But mostly you smell upset.” He snarled, showing fangs that definitely weren’t human. “Did Kowalski upset you?”

“No.” Her insides were feeling shaky, but her reply was firm and definite. The last thing she wanted was for Simon to be angry with any of her human friends. “I was thinking of something that made me unhappy.”

He stopped snarling and cocked his head, looking more baffled than angry. “Why would you do that?”

She stared at him. She didn’t want to tell him what she’d been thinking about, which would be his next question, so she shrugged and changed the subject to one she knew would interest him: food. “I couldn’t decide what to eat, so I brought a lot of stuff, including this.” She picked up a container and a spoon, then hesitated.

“What is it?”

“Yogurt.” She swallowed a spoonful and wondered why Merri Lee and Ruth said it was yummy. Was this an acquired taste? “Try some.” She filled the spoon and held it out to Simon, wondering what he would do.

He leaned toward the spoon and sniffed. Then he ate the offering.

Meg held her breath, not sure if he would spit out the yogurt or swallow it.

He swallowed. Then he looked at the other food she’d brought down. “Why would you eat that when you could eat slices of bison?”

Since she couldn’t honestly say she liked the taste of bison, she didn’t see much difference. “Merri Lee and Ruth said yogurt is good for a person’s innards, especially a girl’s innards.”

“Glad I’m not a girl,” he muttered as he put a couple of bison slices on a plate before considering the rest of the available food.

Meg took another spoonful of yogurt before closing the container. There. She’d taken care of her innards for the day. She ate half the berries, then pushed the bowl toward Simon. She half hoped he’d refuse the offer, saying he had plenty of bison to eat, but he happily accepted his share of the berries without a word, leaving her to nibble on a slice of sharp cheese.

“You’re not eating,” Simon said a few minutes later.

“I’ve had enough for now.” Which was true since she intended to dash over to A Little Bite before work and see what Nadine Fallacaro and Tess had available at the Courtyard’s coffee shop.

They took the remaining food up to her apartment and washed the dishes before Simon went to his apartment to get dressed for work.

Meg stared at the clothes in her closet and considered what might be appropriate office wear for the person who was the Human Liaison and what was a practical way to dress on a hot, muggy day. She chose a pair of dark green shorts, a short-sleeve, rosy peach blouse, and a pair of sandals that looked nice and felt great.

After checking that the book she was currently reading was in her carry sack, Meg locked the front door of her apartment and went down the outside stairs to wait for Simon.

Lieutenant Crispin James Montgomery turned his head to look at Investigative Task Force Agent Greg O’Sullivan, who was sitting in the backseat of the patrol car. When O’Sullivan looked pointedly at the third man in the car, Monty turned his attention to his partner, Officer Karl Kowalski, who was driving them to a meeting with the new acting mayor and commissioner of police.

Kowalski was a vigorous man in his late twenties. A dedicated police officer, he believed that the best way to help the humans in Lakeside was to have a good working relationship with the terra indigene—a belief that had caused some personal problems with a landlord as well as creating a rift between Karl and his parents and brother.

But after the slaughter of humans in some Midwest and Northwest towns in retaliation for the slaughter of the Wolfgard in those same areas; after the storms that raged across the continent of Thaisia and slammed into Lakeside; after the humans saw the briefest terrifying glimpse of the terra indigene who lived in, and guarded, the wild country, Monty wondered if Kowalski still believed there was any hope of humans’ surviving the force and fury of the Elementals and the terra indigene who were known as Namid’s teeth and claws.

And he wondered what he would do if Kowalski and Michael Debany, the other officer on his team, wanted to work on another team or even transfer to another police station in Lakeside.

“Are you all right?” Monty asked. Was it pointless to ask with O’Sullivan in the car? The agent was doing his best to create a dialogue with Simon Wolfgard and the other members of the Courtyard’s Business Association, but no one knew him well enough yet to consider him a personal friend.

Kowalski stopped behind a bus that was taking on passengers instead of changing lanes to go around. If they stayed behind the bus and waited at every stop, they would be late for the meeting.

Out of the corner of his eye, Monty saw O’Sullivan cover the watch on his left wrist, a silent message: we can be late for the meeting.

In looks, Monty and O’Sullivan were opposites. Greg O’Sullivan was in his early thirties. He had green eyes that were always filled with sharp intelligence, and his short dark hair was starting to thin at the top. On the job, he had a burning intensity and a face that made Monty think of a warrior who had chosen an austere life.

Monty, on the other hand, was the oldest of the three men, even though he wasn’t forty yet. He had dark skin, brown eyes, and short, curly black hair already showing some gray—and not all the lines on his face came from laughter. Not anymore.

“I took a bike ride in the Courtyard this morning and ended up playing a game of chase with some of the Wolves,” Kowalski said. “I was the designated prey.”

O’Sullivan leaned forward. “Are you all right?”

Kowalski glanced in the rearview mirror, then swung around the bus when it signaled at the next stop. “More of a workout than I’d intended to take with it being so muggy. The Wolves didn’t hurt me, if that’s what you’re asking. Didn’t even try.”

Monty and O’Sullivan waited.

“It was a game to them, and somehow I had signaled willingness to play. But, gods, seeing them around the Market Square . . . It’s not that you forget how big they are, but I didn’t really translate what their size means when they’re hunting. When I saw them racing toward me, my instincts kicked in and I tried to outrun them. Couldn’t, of course.”

“Do you know what you did to join the game?” Monty asked quietly.

Kowalski focused on the traffic for a minute. “Simon said the girls stop and ask if they can help instead of accepting the invitation to play, so it could be as simple as me speeding up instead of stopping.”

“Predator’s instinct,” O’Sullivan said. “If something runs, a predator will chase it.”

“But they’ve never chased any of us before, and we ride bicycles up to the kitchen garden at the Green Complex all the time.” The traffic light turned yellow. Kowalski braked instead of speeding up to slip through the intersection before the light turned red. “At first I thought the Wolves chasing me hadn’t heard that we’re allowed to ride on the paved roads. But I recognized Nathan and thought I recognized Simon. The roads are posted with Trespassers Will Be Eaten signs, and when I first saw them coming at me . . .” He blew out a breath and pressed the accelerator when the light turned green. “Just a game. Simon thought we’d had great fun. Bet the other Wolves did too.”

“And you?” Monty asked.

“We look at the same things, but we don’t see the same things. It made me realize how easy it can be to screw this up and send the wrong signal.”

Monty looked out the window and wondered what sort of signal the new mayor and police commissioner were going to send.

Meg opened the Liaison’s Office, then glanced at the clock. Nathan was late, but Jake Crowgard was at his spot on the shoulder-high brick wall that separated the delivery area from the yard behind Henry’s studio.

Just as well she had the office to herself for another minute or so.

Her arms tingled. It wasn’t the pins-and-needles feeling that warned of the need to cut and speak prophecy. This was milder, more like a memo than a screeching alarm.

Opening a drawer, she lifted the lid of the wooden box Henry had made for her and looked at the backs of several decks of fortune-telling cards that she was learning to use to reveal prophecy instead of cutting her skin with the silver razor. Maybe today she would finally take all the cards out of the box and start discarding what wouldn’t be needed to create the Trailblazer deck of prophecy cards.

She stirred the cards in a vague effort to shuffle them. Not that it mattered. When a question was asked, her hands would prickle, and the cards were chosen based on the severity of that feeling.

Meg closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t influence her choice by recognizing the back of a particular deck. Placing her fingertips on the cards, she whispered, “What will the appointment of the new mayor mean to Lakeside?”

Nothing. Nothing. Her fingers brushed the cards while even the tingling faded away to nothing. Then a buzzing in the fingertips of her right hand. She brushed away the top cards until she reached the one that created the buzz. She picked up the card and opened her eyes—and knew the answer before she turned the card to see the image. The card had come from a children’s game and had been mixed in with her prophecy cards. But the images from the game had proved useful, even if the answers they provided were usually unwelcome.

What will the new mayor mean to Lakeside? A big question mark. Future undecided. Lakeside’s future had been undecided ever since the terra indigene here realized the Elders’ response to the Humans First and Last movement’s actions was going to be very, very bad.

But she’d hoped for a different answer today.

She’d put the card back and started to close the box when she thought of another question. Lakeside was a human-controlled city, but the Courtyard belonged to the terra indigene. Any outbreak of hostility between humans and the Others could have terrible consequences in the wake of the recent conflicts.

Meg closed her eyes and placed her fingers on the cards again. When she’d first begun working with the decks, she had decided that a three-card draw would represent subject, action, and the result. She didn’t know if that was the way other people used fortune-telling cards, but it seemed to be working for her.

“What is going to happen to my friends in the Courtyard?” She repeated the question over and over while she searched for the images that would provide the answer. When she’d selected the three that had produced the severest prickling, she took them to the big wooden sorting table and turned them over in the order she’d chosen them.

The first card had three images: train, bus, car. The second card had an explosion. The third card . . . the question mark. Future undecided.

That was not good.

She took a notebook out of a drawer, turned to a fresh page, then wrote down her questions and the cards she’d drawn as the answers.

She felt reluctant to put the cards away before she called someone to look at them and felt equally reluctant to tell anyone from the Business Association about this particular answer. Maybe one of her human friends? Ruth Stuart lived across the street in the two-family house on Crowfield Avenue, and Merri Lee was moving into an apartment in one of the adjacent stone buildings the Courtyard had recently purchased to provide a place for their employees to live if they were turned away from human-owned rentals.

A knock on the doorway between the sorting room and the back room made her gasp. Then she relaxed when she saw Twyla Montgomery waiting to be acknowledged. The sorting room was usually out-of-bounds to humans except for a special few, and with so many new people visiting the Market Square, the boundary was being reinforced with snarls and sharp teeth.

“Good morning, Miss Twyla,” Meg said.

She heard a scrambling in the front room and realized Nathan must have come in while she was using the cards.

“Good morning, Miss Meg.” Twyla crossed the room and set a travel mug and container on the sorting table. “And good morning to you, Mr. Nathan. It’s going to be a sticky day, and I don’t envy you having to wear a fur coat, no matter how fine it looks.”

Silence. Then Nathan acknowledged the words with a soft arroo and went back to the Wolf bed under one of the big windows in the front room.

Meg smiled. Twyla Montgomery was Lieutenant Montgomery’s mother. A thin woman with dark skin that was beginning to sag with age, brown eyes that usually looked kind, and short, curly hair that was more tarnished silver than black. But Twyla also had a no-nonsense attitude and didn’t take sass from anyone—a trait that made the Wolves keenly interested in observing her from a safe distance.

“Mr. Simon came into A Little Bite grumbling about yogurt and girl innards and how you don’t like bison,” Twyla said. “I thought he might have some kind of brain fever and was talking nonsense, but Miss Tess said you must not have eaten enough for breakfast, so she made an egg salad sandwich and a bit more for you.” A pause. “You skimping on food, girl?”

“No, ma’am. I didn’t eat much at home because I planned to pick up something when I got to work.” When Twyla stared at her, Meg added, “I really don’t like the taste of bison.”

“I tried a slice the other day and can’t say it appealed to me either. But I suspect if it was a choice between eating bison and going hungry, I’d like it just fine—and so would you.”

Meg nodded. “If that was the choice, Simon might learn to like yogurt.”

Twyla laughed. “You think so?”

Meg imagined being given a plate of rolled bison slices dipped in yogurt. Shuddering, she wondered if you could make a salad out of grass.

Twyla tapped a finger just above the three cards on the table. “What’s this about? Or can’t you say?”

“These are fortune-telling cards, but I call them prophecy cards. I’m trying to see if some of the cassandra sangue can use them to reveal prophecy instead of making a cut.” A thousand cuts. It was said that was all a blood prophet had before the cut that killed her or drove her insane. Since most prophets didn’t survive past their thirty-fifth birthday, Meg, at twenty-four, felt highly motivated to find an alternative to the razor.

“What do these tell you?” Twyla asked.

“I’m not sure. I asked what was going to happen to my friends in the Courtyard. These cards were the answer.” Meg waited until the older woman came around to her side of the table. She pointed to each card. “Subject, action, result.”

Twyla frowned at the train/bus/car card. “Does that mean travel or the transportation itself?”

“Could mean either. It was drawn as the subject, so that should mean the thing itself, but it could mean that one of these forms of transportation is bringing someone or something to Lakeside. The explosion, being the action card, could mean a ‘call the bomb squad’ kind of explosion or an emotionally explosive conflict between groups of people. So maybe a group of people traveling to Lakeside are going to cause some kind of trouble for the Courtyard. I’m getting pretty good at finding the cards that answer the question, but Merri Lee and I are still working on correctly interpreting them.”

As she watched Twyla study the cards, the skin between her shoulder blades began to prickle.

“What does the question mark mean?” Twyla asked, sounding troubled.

“Future undecided. That was the same answer I drew when I asked about the city of Lakeside this morning.” Meg studied the older woman. “You know what the cards mean, don’t you?”

“I have a thought, but nothing I’d want to share. Not just yet.” Twyla walked toward the back room.

“Thanks for bringing the food,” Meg said.

Twyla turned to look at her. “You’re welcome. Don’t you be skimping on food. There’s no need for that.”

Meg heard the back door of the office close. Then she reached over her shoulder and scratched at her back. She liked Twyla Montgomery, and even the Others offered the older woman a trust they rarely gave someone they’d known for such a short time. That was the reason Meg felt uneasy now.

She just hoped Miss Twyla decided to share her thoughts about the cards before something bad happened.

Twyla polished the desks at the consulate—the building in the Courtyard that was the domain of Elliot Wolfgard. He was the Courtyard’s public face, the terra indigene who talked to the mayor and the city council members, who attended political events, and who talked to the press. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that Elliot might be the urbane spokesWolf for the Courtyard, but Simon was the real leader.

“It never took the other humans this long to clean the desks,” Elliot said.

Twyla jerked upright in surprise and turned to face him. She hadn’t heard him come down from his office on the second floor.

At first glance, he could pass for the CEO of a successful company: expensive suits, thinning hair that was cut by someone who probably charged more than she usually made in a week, lean body that spoke of hours in a fitness place. Yes, he could pass for one, and she would bet plenty of CEOs and politicians had made the mistake of thinking that looking like them meant he thought like them. But the amber eyes belonged to a Wolf, and even if humans sometimes overlooked what he was, she was certain Elliot never did.

“I can see they didn’t take that long to clean in here, which is why it’s taking me longer than usual to give it a proper cleaning now,” she replied.

Elliot studied her. She was getting used to that. The Crows who worked in the Market Square had more questions than a houseful of small children, and at least one of them joined her whenever she went into a store to buy anything, wanting to know why she chose one thing over another. The Wolves studied her, studied all the humans who were allowed some access to the stores in the Courtyard, but she noticed they watched her and Nadine Fallacaro and Katherine Debany, Officer Debany’s mother, more than the younger women who were Meg Corbyn’s female pack.

Who taught the young in a Wolf pack?

“Come over here,” Elliot said. When she didn’t move, he added, “Please.”

He led her to the filing cabinets along one wall, then pointed to a stack of folders teetering on a small table tucked against the last cabinet. “Do you know how to file these the human way?”

She picked up a folder, looked at the designation on the tab, and chose the appropriate file drawer. Then she chose another drawer. And another.

She closed the drawers and turned to face him. “What sort of nonsense is this?”

“That’s the human way to file papers.”

“So you say.”

A flicker of red, like a flash of lightning, filled Elliot’s eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means that whoever did this had his own system to find things but made it near impossible for anyone else to put his hand on the proper file, or the fool just shoved things into drawers and hoped he’d never be asked to find anything.” She stepped forward to drop the folder on the teetering stack, and Elliot took a step back, watching her in a way that made her think he wanted to tear into someone’s flesh and hers would do.

“Can you fix it?” he asked.

He seemed to be having some trouble pronouncing the words, and she wondered what was wrong with his mouth now when it had been fine a minute ago.

“Do you know how to work in a place like this?”

Everyone in the Courtyard had a job. Everyone in a Wolf pack had a position. And while not all the humans who were being allowed to share in the Courtyard’s bounty had been assigned tasks, it had been clear that the Others expected all the newcomers to figure out what skills they could offer that would justify their being accepted.

Twyla considered what Elliot was saying. It would be a change from mopping floors and scrubbing toilets—although they needed someone to do that too. She didn’t think many people bothered Elliot, so it would be calmer than working at one of the Market Square stores, and she could use a little calm in her day if she was going to help look after the children in the afternoons.

“I never learned about typing and computers and such,” she finally said. “Answering the phone and filing—that I can do for you. But only in the mornings when the children are having their lessons. I came to Lakeside to help Crispin take care of Lizzy, and that has to come first.”

“Of course,” Elliot said calmly, his pronunciation once more crisp. “We take care of our young.” He paused before offering, “Sam is my grandson.”

Twyla smiled. “He’s a fine boy.” She’d seen Sam around the Market Square, sometimes spending time with the other children but more often in the company of Meg Corbyn and a young Wolf named Skippy. The first time she’d seen him and noticed the gray eyes, she’d thought he was a human child with hair that was an odd mix of gold and gray. And she’d thought he was Meg’s younger brother or a cousin. Then she’d seen Meg with a Wolf pup who had that same coloring.

“The Sierra listed computers and typing as some of her skills,” Elliot said. “Maybe she could—”

“No.”

The sharpness in her voice surprised her more than it surprised Elliot. But she’d had time to think about the prophecy cards Meg had drawn that morning. She didn’t know how someone else would interpret those cards, but she knew what she had deduced from them about her family. It made her angry, and it made her heart ache, to realize Sierra had lied to Crispin when the girl insisted that she had no way of contacting their brother, Cyrus. If she had been honest, Crispin still wouldn’t have paid for Cyrus’s train fare to Lakeside the way he had for his mother, sister, and two nieces, but he would have called his brother and warned him to leave Toland before the storm hit.

Twyla looked at Elliot. Not the actual leader, but he had a significant position in the Courtyard and among the Wolves. She couldn’t ask Crispin for help in confirming what she suspected. As a police officer, he had the means to find out, but it would create trouble between him and his little sister once he realized Sierra was in contact with Cyrus. “My Sierra is a good girl. She’s smart, she’s kind, she’s a hard worker, and she loves her children. And most days and about most things, she can be trusted. But we all have our weaknesses, Mr. Elliot, and Sierra’s weakness is her brother Cyrus. He twists her up and convinces her to do things she shouldn’t do—things she knows are wrong.” Twyla looked around the first floor of the consulate. “This is like a government office. Some things are everyday and don’t matter, and some things are no one’s business but yours. If Sierra worked here for you and Cyrus came by to pressure her into giving him information that would be worth selling, she might resist for a little while, but eventually she would give it to him and then try to justify why he should have it. That would cause trouble for her and for the rest of us.”

“But the Cyrus isn’t here,” Elliot said.

“I think he might be on his way here.” She went to one of the desks and wrote down the phone number for Howling Good Reads. She tore off the sheet and handed it to Elliot. “Sierra told me and Crispin that Cyrus hadn’t left a number where we could contact him. I think she lied. I think she’s called him a couple of times since we got here. Can’t say if she made calls on other phones without permission, but when I saw her using the phone near the cash register on a day when Mr. Simon and Mr. Vlad weren’t in the front of the store, she got flustered and claimed she was ordering pizza. I can tell you the children didn’t have pizza for lunch that day.” She hesitated. “The police have ways of checking calls made from a particular phone, but I can’t ask Crispin to check this. Even if I’m wrong about her calling Cyrus since we arrived in Lakeside, the lie she told before we left Toland will create tension between her and Crispin.”

Cyrus had always managed to create tension between his siblings, even when Crispin was standing up for Sierra.

“A lot of calls are made from the bookstore’s phone,” Elliot said.

“Most likely it would be a Toland phone number. One Mr. Simon and Mr. Vlad wouldn’t recognize.”

“All right.” Elliot folded the paper and put it in his pocket. “If your pup isn’t suitable, can you think of someone else who is?”

“Katherine Debany,” Twyla replied. “She worked as a personal assistant. Probably knows how to run an office like this better than the rest of us combined. I know Pete Denby was asking her about working for him a couple of afternoons a week.”

Elliot didn’t ask why a skilled worker would be available, and Twyla didn’t offer an explanation. Like her, Katherine had been dismissed because she wouldn’t join the Humans First and Last movement in order to keep her job.

“Tell the Katherine to see me.” Elliot headed for the stairs. His foot was on the first step when the phone rang. He looked back at her.

“You want me to answer that?” Twyla asked.

“Yes.” Elliot headed upstairs. “Thank you.”

Smiling, she picked up the phone. “Courtyard Consulate, Twyla speaking.”