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I stare at the grainy night-vision image on the screen displaying playback of the video feed. “I don’t see anything,” I mutter.
“That’s because the cameras didn’t pick it up,” she says, clicking on another window. It brings up a list of several motion alerts, each of them timestamped. “We didn’t think much of it until ten minutes later, when there was another hit on the north side of Norbury, then the west.”
I furrow my brow, studying the list. “But nothing on the cameras?”
“Nothing,” she confirms. “Whoever or whatever it was didn’t get close enough, but from the way they were skirting around the border like that…”
Lo clicks the mouse a few more times, bringing up a map and moving her cursor over red dots indicating the site of each alert. “Here, here, and here.”
“It’s almost like they’re testing our security,” Avery murmurs, swiping a hand over her chin. “Like they know where our borders are located, and they’re looking for a way in.”
Lo looks over her shoulder, meeting Avery’s eyes. “Exactly.”
“What about the patrols?” I ask. “Has anyone checked in with them?”
“Already done, and they said everything’s quiet,” Lo provides. “Nothing out of the ordinary. I told them to stay back a hundred feet like usual and keep a lookout, but they haven’t reported any activity.”
My whole body vibrates with uneasy energy as I stare at the screen, eyes pinging between each point to map out the pattern along the northern border of the territory. Sloane sidesteps closer to me, her hand finding mine, and when she laces her fingers through my own it instantly calms the raging tempest in my chest, my pulse slowing to a normal rhythm and my turbulent thoughts slowly dissipating.
“We’re going on lockdown,” I growl, my eyes still trained on the screen. “No shifting, no full moon run…” I glance down at Sloane. “No initiation. Nothing in the forest until we know it’s safe.”
She sinks her teeth into her lower lip, nodding back at me in agreement.
“If we get another hit, I’m going out there,” I add.
“I’ll go with you,” Avery says quickly.
Lo swivels her chair around to face us, shaking her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea…”
“We’ll play it smart,” Avery cuts in before she can finish. “The last two hits were by the road, so if that pattern continues, we can take the Jeep to go check it out. No shifting, just a little recon.”
Lo glances between the two of us nervously, but she doesn’t raise another objection. She just swivels back around to face her laptop, bringing up the map of the motion detectors again.
There’s always the chance it could be an animal. The sensors we have only pick up things over a certain size or weight, so it’d have to be a large animal, but it’s possible.
Though in my gut, I know it isn’t. Not after that vision Sloane had and what we’ve been preparing for.
I pull out the nearest chair, flopping down into it and pulling Sloane onto my lap. I need her close to me right now more than I need oxygen in my lungs- she’s the only thing keeping me together.
It doesn’t escape me what that likely implies. The way our wolves react to one another is a telltale sign of our potential as fated mates, though Sloane and I have avoided talking about the M-word since we rekindled things. The moon doesn’t matter much to me, anyways- I already know what I want, and there’s no way I’m letting this full moon pass without marking Sloane as mine one way or another. It’s the last thing we need to do to finally set things right again; to put us back on the path we were meant for.
Being with her again is already changing me. Before she came back, my knee-jerk reaction to this situation would’ve been to go charging straight out to the border to investigate the threat, regardless of the consequences. But Sloane’s presence brings a sense of calm and clarity that I often struggle to find, allowing me to consider how reacting to the alerts would only draw attention if there’s truly someone out there testing us.
She doesn’t even know it, but she’s helping me become the Alpha that I’ve always wanted to be. The one my father hopes I can be. The one my pack deserves.
Sloane settles back against my chest, my fingers tracing patterns on her bare thigh as I stare at the screen, waiting for an alert to pop up. All four of us are silent as we wait. And wait.
Ten minutes pass.
Twenty.
An hour.
But another alert doesn’t come.
32
After hours of staring at the screen in the IT hub, waiting for an alert that never arrives, Madd and I head to my dorm room to try to get some sleep. I crash out right away, completely exhausted from the events of the night. Thankfully, my sleep isn’t disturbed by any visions, and I wake to the pale glow of the morning sun peeking through the curtains, dappling the room in patches of light.
