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Covered in mud, we finally reached what Margo had been looking for since the day we’d met. I’d been preparing myself for a body, but all we found were bags.
I opened up the closest bag to me. It had been stuffed with clothes. Some smelled like Alex. I kept going, looking through the bags. A small grey bag caught my eye. I’d seen it before. I opened it up and found Eric’s passport. He’d never left us.
I shivered, wanting to vomit, needing to run, trying to stay calm.
“Dorian?” Margo whispered, gazing at her muddy hands. “This isn’t it. This is the wrong place.”
“These are… Alex and Eric. It’s their things. Eric must be… I can’t think about that right now. How did you end up here?”
She screwed up her face. “I think I kept thinking about what the killer had already done. What you said about dominant wolves going missing and stuff. I should have been thinking about what hecoulddo. It’s hard to concentrate on one thing when there’s so much…” She waved a hand. “I don’t know how to do this!”
I took her hand and held it still. “You can figure it out. You have to. Where is he? Who is he after next?”
The pile of dirt next to us shot up into the air and rained down on us. The dog whimpered, and I gripped his lead a little tighter in case he ran off.
Margo touched her stomach, breathing heavily. “It’s here again, that spirit thing. I feel it, Dorian. It’s angry. Frustrated. Itknows. Maybeitled us here.”
“Think for a minute,” I said. “How doyoufeel? Where are you supposed to be right now?”
“This is so different,” she whispered. “I feel sick. Scared. Something tastes bad in my mouth. I can’tbreathe. We have to go back.” She stood and looked in the direction of Wolf Row. “I think… I think we have to go to the woods by your house.”
My stomach sank. Nobody would be searching there still. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t know. There’s this feeling. It’s socold. I think… I think something is wrong. Right now. Something is badly wrong. I have to find out what he’s doingnow. I have to—” Her eyes turned blue, and she was off, leaving me to catch up.
I called Perdita and Nathan’s phones as we jogged toward the houses, one hand on the dog’s lead. Nobody answered so I left messages. I was desperate to turn wolf, but if Margo suddenly woke up, she might be terrified. I sensed a presence with us that made my skin crawl. The wolfhound whimpered as we ran, unsettling my wolf, too.
Sweat trickled down my back. We should have stayed in the house. We should never have left. I grabbed Margo’s arm, jolting to a stop. She brushed me off and kept going.
The dog let out a sharp bark, and I upped my pace, realising I heard whining from somewhere nearby. Perdita’s car was parked outside my house.
“Perdita?” I called out.
The whining grew louder. We reached the car, and I opened the door. Perdita’s dog was inside, his back legs visibly broken.
“It’s okay,” I said soothingly, trying my hardest not to panic. “I’ll be back.”
The dogs both whimpered. I looked around. Margo had already disappeared into the woods. And when I chased after her, letting my dog off-lead, I distinctly caught Perdita’s scent.
Please, no.
I lost her scent almost immediately. A chemical in the air mixed up the trails, something far stronger than the scents I could follow. My eyes watered as bitterness invaded my nostrils, similar to the scent around the bags. I wouldn’t be able to track Perdita without my sense of smell.
I was blind, and a sleepwalker was the only person around who could lead me.
I caught up to Margo, but she kept moving, straight through the woods, her hands opening and closing into fists. She didn’t falter, looked as though she knew exactly what she was doing. But did she?
Doubt set in. We didn’t know anything about harbingers—or even if that really was Margo’s heritage. I had to trust I wasn’t bringing death to somebody I cared about. I had to trust in myself and my own instincts. Margo was the warning signal. I just had to pay attention.
I fell behind again, struggling to catch a scent and too afraid to go into my wolf form in case anyone needed a different kind of help. I vaguely picked up Perdita’s scent every now and then, and each time, the weight in my stomach increased.
The wolfhound howled then dashed forward, but Margo was somehow quicker. She lurched forward and onto her knees, her hands digging into a fresh mound of dirt. A grave. I froze to the spot, unable to move another inch.
Please. Not her. Please don’t be her.
A twig cracked. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. Somebody was walking toward Margo from the other side of the clearing, so arrogant that they didn’t even scout the area first. I ducked behind a tree then immediately stripped off.
“I knew there was something about you,” Dominic said in a voice I barely recognised.
