What would Merri Lee or Ruth do to convince a male to go along with her plan?
Meg walked up to Simon, went up on her toes, and licked his cheek. Okay, Merri or Ruth would have given him a human kiss, but judging by the surprised and pleased look in his eyes, he didn’t care about that.
He ran a hand over her short black hair and gave her a light scritch behind her ear. Then he got into the BOW and drove away.
Feeling independent and competent and free, Meg left the Green Complex and walked on the grass to reach the big kitchen garden. Along with the Green Complex’s residents, she and her human friends had been harvesting vegetables for the past few weeks. They’d picked a bit of this and that during Sumor, but now it seemed there were all kinds of vegetables that needed to be picked every day—and whether it was true or not, it felt like she was picking zucchini every day. The peppers were growing and almost ready, and there would be fresh corn soon. It was fun to come out here and see what was flowering and what was getting ripe and . . .
What was that?
White and red. And a patch of brown over there. And . . .
A couple of days ago, she had startled a young rabbit grazing near the garden. She hadn’t meant to; she just hadn’t seen it. But when it moved, it had dragged a hind leg. Had it been hit by a car? The complexes weren’t built that close to the city’s streets, but animals did cross the streets looking for food. Julia Hawkgard told her dead prey was often found on the grass beside Parkside Avenue—animals that had been moving from the park to the Courtyard or the Courtyard to the park. But Parkside Avenue was on the other side of the Courtyard. An injured rabbit wouldn’t cross all that land.
Meg approached cautiously, her stomach already doing little flips.
White bone stripped of muscle but still connected with ligaments—and still attached to a furred foot. The patch of brown turned out to be a hunk of fur. And the red . . . Was that the bunny’s backbone?
Meg backed up and screamed when she hit something.
Big hands held her up. Henry’s voice rumbled above her head. “It’s just a rabbit, Meg.”
“Someone ate the bunny.”
“No one in the Green Complex. Not all the hunters who look for food in the Courtyard are terra indigene.”
“Do you think Simon . . . ?” He ate bunnies. So did Sam. So did all her neighbors except maybe Tess and Vlad, and she wasn’t sure they hadn’t. Even she had eaten rabbit a few times. But it had been cooked. And nothing on her plate had looked like that.
“None of your friends ate the rabbit,” Henry said.
“How do you know?”
“They wouldn’t have left bones and scraps where you or the female pack would find them.” He put his arm around her shoulders and led her away from the garden.
“He had an injured leg,” Meg said when they reached the Courtyard’s main road and started walking toward the Market Square.
“That made him easy prey.” They walked in silence for a minute before Henry said, “Why did Simon leave you behind?”
“I wanted to walk to work. Wanted the extra time to approach the Market Square.” Meg sighed. “If I’d gone with Simon, I wouldn’t have seen the bunny, the . . . backbone.” Seeing the leg bones hadn’t been so bad, but the image of the backbone would stay with her.
“All meat hopped or ran or flew before it became meat,” Henry said. “That is the way of things.”
She nodded. That was the way of things. But the raw truth was a little harder to accept.
? ? ?
Shit, fuck, damn, Simon thought when Henry told him about Meg’s discovery. “Better tell whoever is cooking at Meat-n-Greens today not to put rabbit on the menu board.”
“I already did,” Henry said. “But that one looked like it was eaten where it was caught.”
When she saw an injured bunny, Meg’s feelings would have gone all gooey. A Wolf, seeing the same thing, would have grabbed the quick meal and taken it to the Wolfgard Complex for the pups or eaten it himself.
“I will go back and dispose of the bones and scraps,” Henry said. “You should find something to distract our Meg so she doesn’t spend the day thinking about the rabbit.”
“There’s not . . .” Simon looked at the box that had been picked up at the train station early that morning. “I might have something to distract her.” Of course, he hadn’t done more than glance at the books Jesse Walker had sent for his review and had no idea if they were exciting mystery-thrillers with lots of chasing or scary stories. Well, if the books scared Meg and she kicked him because of bad dreams, he couldn’t snarl at anyone but himself.
Simon picked up the box and left the office, pausing long enough to tell Vlad he was going to the Liaison’s Office.
The back door of the Liaison’s Office was locked. He’d expected that. What he hadn’t expected was to hear a footstep on the stairs above him and see Greg O’Sullivan looking down at him, a hand on the service weapon the ITF agent carried.
“Mr. Wolfgard.” O’Sullivan’s hand moved away from the weapon. He came down the stairs, his steps quick and light. “Didn’t know it was you.”
Simon watched the agent. Nadine Fallacaro and Eve Denby both said the second room above the office was similar to a hotel room, with the perk of a small fridge to hold cold drinks or snacks. O’Sullivan had been happy to become the tenant, saying it was more secure than a regular hotel room, and he could leave personal items there when he needed to travel back to Hubbney and report to Governor Hannigan. “Were you expecting someone else?”
“No, but I’d heard that, during the job fair, a few people had been poking around where they didn’t belong—and I thought I heard someone testing the back door late last night. Just wanted to make sure no one was trying to bother Ms. Corbyn.”
A different kind of watch Wolf, Simon decided as he studied O’Sullivan. Not an unattached male sniffing around his Meg, but a member of the larger pack committed to protecting the territory that sheltered all of them—which meant O’Sullivan needed to be warned about the Courtyard’s guests.
Simon hadn’t seen them, had been too busy dealing with humans to even sense their presence or catch their scent. But Kowalski had called Blair last night, and after the dominant enforcer had sniffed the ground around Kowalski and Ruthie’s den this morning, Blair told Simon that two of the Elders had returned to Lakeside. That was the reason he had asked Henry to delay going to the Market Square—so that Meg wouldn’t be walking alone. And that was why Henry had been there when Meg found the bunny backbone.