“Wolfie challenged my father to a game of pool,” I said, and nods all around suggested the pack had known that was their alpha’s goal from the beginning. The werewolves kept their eyes trained on me for orders, though, so I continued talking. “Until that ends, it’s not safe for any of you to go looking for Keith, so I’m going to try to track him from here.”
A whine from Blaze brought my eyes around to the young werewolf, and my wolf had no difficulty parsing his complaint. “I know you want to come,” I answered, “but we can’t risk it. If Wolfie loses the challenge, I’m going to have a hard enough time getting Keith past the border patrol and back to you—it would just be that much harder if any non-Haven wolves came with me.”
The pack was silent for a minute as we each imagined what would happen if Wolfie did lose the game of pool. But the werewolves’ calm energy didn’t falter, quite a tribute to their absent pack leader. “He won’t lose,” Chase said at last, and I nodded, looking both ways to make sure no cars were coming, then slipping off my t-shirt and regaining my fur. The hunt was on.
***
The last time I’d tracked a child through the woods, I’d been too scared to let my wolf loose, and even though I now realized my canine half had done her best to help me at the time, she had been virtually blindfolded by my distrust during that earlier hunt. Now, the wolf and I acted in harmony, my human mind suggesting what Keith might have been thinking at the same time as the wolf used her superior senses to pick up the teenager’s fading trail. The scents proved that Keith had come this way several hours earlier, probably arriving in the wee hours of the morning and cutting into the woods as soon as the day was bright enough to let him see where he placed his feet. Since my nephew had such a long head start, my wolf and I both knew that the sooner we found him, the better.
Despite the solemnity of the occasion, though, I couldn’t help enjoying the way my wolf’s muscles were able to stretch and push us through the forest at a trot. Dew was already coating the ground as a sunny autumn day turned into a chilly evening, and the water moistened our pads, helping us feel each imperfection of the ground beneath our feet. With the toughness of canine foot leather, acorns and twigs gently massaged our skin rather than causing pain, and we sidestepped a leafy area in favor of a patch of rounded pebbles to enhance the sensation.
Then all enjoyment receded into the background as Keith’s scent abruptly mutated just as we ran upon a pile of rags that had once been a t-shirt and pair of boxer shorts. The teenager had clearly felt the shift coming early enough to pull off his shoes and jeans, which was a plus since denim can make a change of form extraordinarily difficult, but Keith hadn’t had time to remove the rest of his apparel. I felt guilty, knowing I’d made my nephew wait too long for his first shift, and now he’d been forced to change into wolf form alone in the woods, with no pack around him.
Focus, my wolf reminded me, throwing back the same words I’d sent her no more than an hour previously. The wolf was right to stay calm, not just because there was no point in panicking, but also because we were still in the heart of Haven’s forest, so Keith’s wolf would have had nothing nearby to harm … as long as he didn’t run too far in any direction.
Sucking in a deep breath through our nose, the wolf and I noted that Keith had turned up the mountain rather than down toward civilization, a perk given the unpredictable nature of a wolf on its first shift. We put our nose to the ground and began to run faster.
Chapter 21
Unlike Melony, Keith wasn’t hard to find, although it felt like I ran in wolf form for hours through the dark before I finally tracked him down. The young wolf had passed beyond the safety of Haven’s boundaries during his wolf’s first exuberant dash, and when I smelled blood along with my nephew’s scent, my heart sank into my metaphorical shoes.
I knew where we’d ended up due to my own meanderings as a young werewolf, when I’d pushed the boundaries quite literally and had run onto our neighbors’ properties. The Clarks’ farm wasn’t the best spot for Keith to land, but neither was it the worst. I distinctly remembered Mr. Clark spraying my furred rump with BBs, chasing me back into the woods when I’d come out onto his land in my own teen years. What I didn’t know was who owned the land now, or whether the current owners had young children who might have been allowed to go outside alone after dark. I shivered, realizing that the smell of blood was making my wolf’s mouth water, even though she was letting me take the lead as we came close enough to hear Keith breathing.