Page 49 of The SnowFang Secret


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“Hi,”I told the trespasser.

He barred his teeth.

I wagged my tail as my hackles rose and I splayed my front legs in a mock play-bow, ready to go in either direction. He charged, I dodged, spun around and bit his hock. He twisted. I tumbled, and bolted. He lunged right into Searle’s waiting maw.

The wolf yelped. Searle lifted him, twisted his neck, and bit down through the trespassers ruff. I darted and bit down on the wolf’s lower hind leg, crunching on bone and piercing tendons. The wolf yelped and tried to wrestle free, but Searle wrangled him to the ground and blood splattered and spurted.

I released the hind leg. Searle was still chewing his way through the wolf’s neck.

“Stop, stop!”I barked at Searle, jumping on his shoulders and biting his ear. “Stop!”

Searle broke from the wolf, his maw dripping blood. He pulled his lips back and growled at the trespasser, who groveled on the ground, reeking of defeat and fear. Searle barked at me.“Stay back!”

“Don’t kill him.”Fuck. Was the wolf’s throat torn, and he was good as dead? His hind leg was wrecked. He wasn’t dragging himself anywhere.“He’s no use to us dead.”

Searle huffed.“He’s no use alive.”

“He didn’t know a thing about being a scout.”I lowered my head and sniffed the wolf, who took a swing at me and got a face full of Searle’s claws for his trouble. I snorted blood out of my snout. He’d marked me. Blast. Too slow. I didn’t know the wolf, but he smelled of asphalt and car fumes andnot from around here. But he also didn’t reek oflone wolfeither. This wasn’t some random interloper. This was a clumsy spy.

Searle twisted into war-form: a thick, hulking brute of a wolf. He reached down and grabbed the spy by his ruff and tossed him over his shoulders. He marched up the hill on three legs, the fourth claw securing the wolf to his shoulders. The wolf flailed and barked and did his best to escape, up to and including biting Searle.

Searle then just dragged the wolf by his bad leg up the hillside. The wolf howled in agony.

I trotted up the hillside, limping on my silver-marked shoulder and around the pain in my belly. Not so fully healed after all.

Searle, halfway there, leaned back and howled.

“Gaia’s Ass.”I muttered. Was that really necessary? We weren’t supposed to be out here at all, and here he was, announcing to the entire damn pack we’d been naughty. One sorry excuse for a scout wasn’t going to make it a right.

He howled a challenge to any of the wolves that had come with this one—because wolves almost never came alone to scout, and there was probably a van-load of equivalent idiots on the hillside—and a song to the AmberHowl he’d taken care of the threat.

I slicked my ears down.

Before we even arrived at the house, a couple of the scouts had torn through the tree routing out the stragglers (who were now in full retreat, being forced to accept they’d be leaving a packmate behind), and Demetrius and Henri were out on the lawn while other wolves watched from the shadows and house. I didn’t see Marcella or her pups, but they were no doubt nearby.

Searle tossed the wolf in front of Demetrius.

Demetrius looked at me, then back at Searle. “Go change.Now.”

Searle contorted himself back into wolf form and placed himself on my left side, blocking the view of my shoulder. I’d left my robe on the stairs. Scooped it up and wrapped it around myself as Searle did the same with his flannel robe. Then we went back outside to report. Someone inside the house flicked on the flood lights that illuminated the entire back yard.

In the brighter light, the captured wolf turned out to be a smallish, slender, gray-brown wolf with large ears and a shaggy pelt. Blood soaked his ruff and his hind leg.

“Did I tell you to speak?” Demetrius growled. He glared at Searle. “Where did you find him?”

Searle told him.

“Shift,” Demetrius snarled at the wolf. The wolf flinched but tried to growl. Demetrius barred his teeth and grinned. “Shift.”

A few of the younger wolves present hit the ground under the weight of that command.

The wolf howled in agony as he obeyed. The bones in his injured leg popped and crunched as the torn muscles didn’t support them properly, and the shifting left bone exposed as the skin twisted like a loose sock. His neck was bloody, but Searle had ripped off the skin on his chest and taken pieces out of his shoulder, skillfully missing the critical blood vessels.

Henri crouched down and examined the wolf’s palms and bottoms of his feet. “Chapped.”

He removed the wolf’s collar and opened the pouch. Inside was a folded map, a compass, and a phone. Demetrius unfolded the paper map. Virginia. He tossed that to a wolf nearby, along with the compass, and then turned his attention to the phone.

A terrified, nervous spasm sent the wolf looking right at me, then he caught himself and looked back at Demetrius.

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