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“There was a fight, screaming. Snarling too, I think. Words in a language I’ve never h-heard before.”
“Fuck me,” Knox whispered, mouth twisting.
“He told me to run, yelled it.”
“Who? Caleb?”
She nodded. “I tried to get away, but… they chased me down… like I wasn’t evenmoving.” She looked up at Knox, then back down to him, her eyes wide. “I mean, that can’t be true, right? What I saw? That’s… that’s notpossible, right?”
“Never mind about that now,” Dmitri said, looking out across the endless forest lands hugging either side of the road. Were they out there right that instant? Waiting? It was a chance he was going to have to take.
He turned his face toward the sky, breathing deep, scenting the air. All he picked up was the clean lodgepole pine, carrion somewhere upwind—too faint to be anything large—the oil leak in Caleb’s engine block, the girl’s garish, much-too-floral perfume, and the blood.
So fucking much blood.
But nothing else.
Dmitri rose to his feet, his fists clenched so hard, his nails had cut into his palms. If the assailants were still around, then they were well downwind, and nowhere remotely close. If they were who he was beginning to suspect they might be, then they were almost certainly many miles away already, even on foot.
But what they’d left behind was a truly nightmarish scene. Caleb hadn’t just been killed, he’d been butchered, slaughtered in a way clearly intended to do one thing.
Send a message.
Caleb’s body showed the horrific evidence of ghastly torture before he’d been murdered, his lifeless eyes staring up into the clear blue sky—
Katrina’s quavering voice broke into his thoughts. “While they were killing him they… they made me watch. Said there was something they wanted me to s-see.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “It was so horrible! And the men who killed him, they were… they werelaughing.”
Knox drew closer to him, turning partially away from the girl, who’d begun sobbing once more. “No human couldeverhave done this to a wolf. You know that, right?”
Dmitri took a deep breath, hating that his lungs filled with the smell of death—a death of one of their own. Knox was right, unfortunately. There really was only one plausible conclusion to make.
But he wasn’t ready to entertain it. Not yet. Not without more proof.
Because the implications of what that might mean were truly grave.
“I mean, you saw it back there,” Knox said, keeping his voice low enough that the traumatized female couldn’t hear him. “It’s…allof it points to the same thing. Fuck, I’ve never actually seen something like that, but I’ve heard about it. That that’s what they like to do. Fucking animals.”
Dmitri scanned the road, intentionally avoiding looking directly at the pick-up. “Where’s your crew?”
Knox hooked a thumb over his shoulder as he glanced down at the girl. “Sent them back to the clearing site we were working. Not doing any good standing around here gawking at the dead wolf.”
Katrina had rolled over onto her side in a fetal position. She only sniffled now, which was a blessing, but they’d need to get her to a hospital soon.
“Get them back here and have them transport her. They can clean her up at the lodge, but have them take her into town. She needs to be checked out.”
“I don’t think it’s her body that’s the worry,” Knox murmured. He tapped a fingertip against his temple. “Fixing what’s broken up there for her is going to be a much tougher nut to crack.”
“We’ve got much bigger problems, I’m afraid.”
Knox grunted grimly. “Yeah, like how to tell Kellen that his nephew’s just been carved up like a Christmas turkey—on Cold Ridge lands.”
“Or the fact that the enemy is operating further north than they have in decades.”
Knox was silent a moment, the only sound the low moan of the wind at their ears. “You can say it. You and I are both thinking it.”
Dmitri turned away then, walking back down the road, away from the carnage. Knox followed.
“Stay with the girl until the crew gets back. Then I need you to get his body back to the lodge.”
