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.
Despite the difference in the ages of the two females, Jesse’s friendly, genuine interest in other beings reminded Joe of Meg Corbyn. In fact, he’d been chosen to be Prairie Gold’s new leader because he’d met Meg during his visit to the Lakeside Courtyard and had seen how humans and Others could work together. Since his arrival a couple of weeks ago, he’d made an effort to visit the general store once or twice a week just to interact with Jesse Walker while a couple of other terra indigene who could pass for human hung back and observed. This was a first step in learning more about the Intuits who had received permission to build a community within terra indigene land three human generations ago. Along with the businesses in town, the Intuits ran a farm for produce, a dairy farm, and the ranch that raised the horses they needed as well as cattle for meat.
“Looks like we’re not the only ones who got word of this,” Tobias said.
Some of the Ravens, Hawks, and Eagles had spotted the carcasses early that morning and sounded the alarm, and Joe, in turn, had gone to the Prairie Gold ranch to fetch Tobias and his men, as well as the equipment needed to deal with the available meat. But the men who worked on the human-owned ranch adjacent to the terra indigene’s land must have been warned as well, because Joe saw three trucks and a dozen men standing near dead cattle.
“Pull up here,” Joe said. “We don’t want to be muzzle to muzzle with them.”
Tobias pulled over and stopped the pickup. Joe got out and lowered the tailgate for the three Wolves who had been riding in the back. They jumped out and immediately began checking the area for scents. So did the Coyotes who were in the back of the second pickup. Their third vehicle was the town’s hauler because it had a winch and could carry heavy loads—like big carcasses. And the last truck had a two-horse trailer attached to it, carrying the horses that would help them drag some of the meat to the hauler.
“Damn,” Tobias said when he and Joe studied the dead bison. “Has to be a hundred of them. That much meat would have fed the town and settlement for a year or more.”
“More,” Wyatt Beargard said, joining them. “Even with someone like me feeding off the available meat now.”
The Grizzly was also a newcomer to the settlement. His scent was enough to dissuade human-owned cattle from “getting lost” on the Others’ land, and his presence was now a fair warning to the human ranchers that any cattle that “escaped” through a break in the fence and were found grazing on land not leased to humans were considered edible game.