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She’d turned grim after they left Pillar Rock. He decided to yank her tail. “Delicious.”
“Seriously?”
“Mhm. Later on I’ll come back here and eat all of the deer babies. I’ll be big and fat.” No werewolf or human hunter would kill a pregnant doe or a doe with fawns. Do that often enough, and you risked your food supply. Then come winter, where would you be?
“If this is you trying to be funny, stop.”
He grinned at her. “You wanted jokes.”
“What kind of a joke is that?”
“Wolf kind.”
“You really need a girlfriend.”
Not that again.
“What about Celia?”
It took him a moment to figure out which Celia she was talking about. The Pack had four, and he interacted with three of them. It had to be the redheaded Celia. Before he separated from the Pack, she’d developed a persistent habit of thrusting herself into his daily routine. He could explain to her that every time Celia encountered him, he registered her noting his face with a calculated satisfaction. She scrutinized his scars and judged him to be disfigured enough to be desperate. Celia craved power and safety. In her head he was perfect because he would stay, and be faithful, and he would let her hold the reins, since nobody else would have him. The single time they’d spoken in private confirmed it. She’d told him that unlike most women, she didn’t mind the scars and that he didn’t have to be alone. That she would have him, even if other women wouldn’t. He’d stepped into her space then and held her stare. It was the dominating look of an alpha, and it communicated everything without words: He was neither weak nor desperate. She’d told him that if he touched her, she would scream, and she’d fled. He’d let her go. That had ended that.
“Celia is pretty.”
“No.” That was explanation enough.
“Then Lisa?”
He had to cut this short. Of all the topics she could’ve picked, this was the last conversation he wanted to have with her. He’d spent months learning to read people’s emotions. He knew exactly what to say. He forced a smile. “You’re a sweet kid, Jules, but don’t worry so much. When you grow up, it will make more sense.”
Her expression shut down, like someone had slammed a window into her closed. He’d drawn a line between a child and an adult and rubbed her nose in it. She would be mad at him for a while now. It was still better than discussing his love life.
The road took them deeper into Tucker. He smelled a skunk, raccoons, two roving bands of dogs, feral cats, and a big male bobcat that happily sprayed around. He didn’t smell humans. Nobody had passed this way for quite some time. If Caleb Adams had taken the rock into Tucker, he hadn’t come this way to do it or he’d had a giant bird carry him.
They traveled in silence for half an hour, when Julie turned off the road and steered her horse to the remains of a three-story building. She stood up in her saddle, grabbed the crumbling brickwork, and pulled herself up. He took a running start; jumped ten feet in the air; bounced from some rebar; ran across a narrow, half-rotten beam; and offered her his hand to pull her up. She gave him a look studded with broken glass. Right. Still mad.
“Come on,” he said. “You’re wasting time.”
She ignored his hand and pulled herself over the edge onto the rotten remains of the third floor. He gave her space.
She raised her hand and pointed to an area in the distance. “There. It’s in the center of that place.”
He peered at it. Remains of some industrial complex, and a large one—at least two dozen big buildings, maybe more, some almost whole, others down to broken stretches of walls connecting to nothing. An accidental urban labyrinth. The soil around it was darker, the texture of it different, rougher somehow. Odd shapes rose among the ruins, some glowing with pale pink and blue. He couldn’t quite make them out.
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His instincts told him the place was unlike anything he’d seen before. And it felt bad. Pillar Rock made him wary, but this place felt worse. He didn’t want to go in there, but most of all he didn’t want her walking into it.
Like the dark soil around the ruins, Adams was a blight, a corruption that had already cost the Iveses their lives. The blight had to be purged. Curran had told him once, “Every time you see a problem and walk away from it, you set a new standard.” The problem was right there, and letting Caleb Adams butcher a family to get his hands on a magic rock wasn’t a standard he cared to set. They would take care of it. It was time to cut the warlock’s little power trip short.
He still didn’t like it.
They circled the former industrial park, drawing a wide arc around it. Adams would expect them to come from the southwest. They approached from the north instead. The wind blew from the south, and he liked being upwind of his prey. They hid Peanut in the nearby ruins. With her backpack gone, Julie resorted to her backup bag, a small satchel she carried on her back.
From above, the walls looked shorter. Up close, some rose as high as ten feet. Giant mushrooms shaped like five-feet-high bay boletes, with pale blue caps the size of large umbrellas, clustered by the walls, their pores radiating a pale pink glow. The odd dark texture he’d seen from the top of the crumbling building turned out to be leaves—strange, purple-black plants no more than five inches tall, each a bunch of triangular leaves on short stalks. They blanketed the ground completely, spreading from the ruins like a puddle of spilled ink in an almost perfect circle, and they had to pick their way through thirty yards of them to get to the solid asphalt. He’d almost stepped on a rusty jagged spike sticking out of the dirt. Julie followed his footsteps, trusting his senses and another walking stick she picked up. Even so, they were barely ten yards in, and she’d stumbled once already.
The plants stank too. A heavy metallic scent that sat low, pooling near the ground. His nose would get used to it eventually, but for now he went scent-blind.
“Stop,” Julie whispered.
