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Crickets chirped through the windows and across the fields, a wild contrast to the storm ravaging Iris’s mind. As much as she tried, she couldn’t get Ava’s bloodied face out of her thoughts.
She marched up and down the floorboards in the kitchen, trying to maintain her composure as they waited for the pack to arrive for another meeting. This one would be even more urgent than the one that had been interrupted just a few hours ago.
Now, Cyrus was not just an abstract concern. No, the threat had gone from bad to worse. He had kidnapped the pack children, and who knew what he would do to them if they didn’t find them soon?
Exhausted, Iris tried pointlessly putting on a pot of coffee. Maybe it wasn’t going to help her much, but at the very least, the enforcers or Mason could get some use out of it.
Derek emerged several minutes later, Mason behind him. Mason had managed to gather the pack enforcers, who streamed into the large kitchen as best they could.
“Is that coffee I smell?” Mason asked. “Somebody must have bought some more because all our shit’s stale.”
Iris looked at the label, seeing immediately that it had expired two years ago.
Why doesn’t a healer check the expiration date?
She scolded herself quietly but remembered that even if the coffee tasted like crap, the beans only lost potency over time.
They could still drink it. They’d just hate it.
She waited for the coffee to brew, then poured the black sludge into nine different mugs. The rest of the shifters set up at the table, Derek at the head while Mason grabbed a notebook and sat beside them. She wondered if it was more for the sake of keeping his brain moving than anything.
Ava was nowhere near ready to join them on the mission. Momentarily, Iris wondered who would stay behind with her and the other elder pack members.
She sat at the table, placing a mug on a coaster in front of everybody there.
“I know we’re all fucking tired,” Derek said. “But that’s going to give us the advantage. We need to strike while the iron’s hot. It’s when they’re not expecting us.”
Iris confirmed that Mason was just doodling as she watched his pencil move over the paper. He sketched crude images of daggers and wolf heads with x’s for eyes, then grew self-conscious when he saw Iris peeking over his shoulder.
“Do we know where Cyrus is based?” Derek asked.
Receiving no response, he sighed to himself.
“Ava said she saw the assailants coming in from the northwest and leaving in the same direction. That could mean any number of things, but it’s at least somewhere to start.”
“With the sheer volume of attacks, they have to be based nearby,” Mason replied. “We’ll just need to keep our eyes peeled and use our noses.”
Iris sensed Derek’s growing frustration. “If we could have kept our scouts out looking, we might have found them by now,”he said. “But they’ve kept us busy, ambushing us whenever I think we’re getting close.”
He nodded, muttering quietly to himself. “That tells me they’ve got to be somewhere nearby, and they just want to throw us off their scent …”
An idea crossed Iris’s mind.
“Did they leave anything behind when they ambushed us?” she asked. “Because if we just had something of theirs, we could use that to catch their scent …”
That’s when she and Derek exclaimed at the same time.
“The dagger!”
If any of the same men who had attacked Derek were still under Cyrus’s employ, they could track the scent back to their base, locating them that way.
Fortunately, Derek had kept the dagger as a kind of morbid souvenir. But even if that hadn’t worked, they resolved they might be able to find them by following the scent of the missing children if they weren’t too well-hidden.
It was a bit of a long shot, and everything had to fall perfectly in place, but within about an hour, they had a working plan, at least as far as finding Cyrus’s base was concerned.
They just had to hope he hadn’t found ways to misdirect the scents they would use to follow him.
“Now, we need to figure out who’s going,” Derek said.
