Marked In Flesh

CHAPTER 34

Firesday, Juin 22

Jackson trotted back to the Wolfgard cabin. While troubling, the meeting with the Panthergard had gone well. Only one of the Cats now living in the Sweetwater area had gone through the first level of a human-centric education—enough to read, write, and do sums, as well as speak with humans and make a purchase at a trading post.

Enough education to distinguish between normal human activity like farming and tending animals and activity that felt . . . wrong.

Nothing suspicious around Sweetwater’s Intuit village, but that wasn’t true about Endurance, the closest human village. Something wasn’t right there. Something had changed. But it was like trying to hook your claws into air, hoping to catch hold of the problem and deal with it.

one of the Ravens called.

He ran toward the cabin, momentarily relieved when he spotted Grace. Then Hope burst into view looking as terrified as a fawn being run down by a Grizzly.

“We have to hide!” Hope screamed. She ran past Grace, grabbing at the pups who had run to greet her. “We have to hide!”

“Hope?” Grace said, her white hair gleaming in the sun.

Jolting to a stop, Hope looked at Grace. “Fire. Death. We have to hide!” She ran toward the creek and the pups ran after her.

Jackson told Grace.

Grace pulled off her clothes, shifted to Wolf, and ran after the girl with the pack’s nanny and the juvenile Wolves following.

Jackson rushed into Hope’s room in the Wolfgard cabin. Where had the girl been? She wasn’t supposed to go out of sight of the cabin without telling an adult Wolf.

He stopped at the smell. Wasn’t Hope a little old to be piddling on the floor?

Spotting the scatter of pencils and crayons, he moved cautiously around the bed—and smelled a hint of blood that was almost overwhelmed by the scent of urine.

He came farther into the room, moving his feet with care to avoid stepping on Hope’s drawing supplies. When he lowered his head to sniff the floor for the blood smell, he spotted the drawings under her bed. He pulled out the intact drawing and then the pieces—and snarled.

All the pups and juvenile Wolves in the Sweetwater pack. Dead. Mutilated. No wonder Hope wanted them to hide!

Then he looked at the intact drawing. Meg Corbyn’s face in one corner. A hilltop view of the Intuit village at Sweetwater, all the buildings on fire. And filling the center of the paper . . .

He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. It was like the drawing she did of the mound of bison except . . .

Joe.

Jackson tore out of the cabin and ran as if everything in his world depended on his speed . . . because, at that moment, it did.

he called.

Replies from the Ravengard, Hawkgard, Eaglegard.

We’re going to be attacked. Watch the road. Give warning if any humans head our way.>

That was Grace.

Who? How many?

Reaching the communications cabin, he flung himself inside, shifting to human as he walked to the table that held the telephone and the computer.

“Jackson?” The Hawk minding the cabin stared at him.

Jackson stared back, then picked up the phone and called the number he had for Prairie Gold. Getting a busy signal, he hung up and called Howling Good Reads. No answer.

As he stood there, he smelled Hope and urine.

“The Hope pup was here?”

The Hawk nodded. “She used the telephone. She said ‘Meg, run, hide, death,’ and then she ran away.”

Jackson wrote a phone number on the pad of paper next to the phone. “Call this number. Keep trying until someone answers. Tell whoever answers, even if it’s a human, that the Wolves have to hide. They have to hide or they’re going to die.”

“Where are you going?”

“To warn the Intuits. Hope saw their village burning.”

Shifting back to Wolf, Jackson raced down the road. It wasn’t just Intuits who needed help in that village. There were the four surviving prophet pups living there too.