Chapter 30

Dominic

The tracks are a day old, maybe less.

Shane found them at dawn, on our side of the river, a mile north of the ford where the old logging road crosses the border. One wolf, shifted, coming over the ice where it’s thickest. Big. Moving fast. The prints go straight up the bank and into the trees and then circle wide, the way a wolf circles when he’s getting the lay of the land, before they turn back and head for the river again.

I crouch beside the clearest print and breathe in.

Cold. Pine. Snow. And under it, faint but unmistakable, a wolf I don’t know. Not one of ours. Not the sour, unwashed reek of a rogue, either. Clean. Groomed. Like someone who’s never spent a night outdoors in his life.

Rogues don’t smell like that.

Shane is watching me. “Silvercrest?”

“Silvercrest.”

“Rogue, maybe? One of theirs gone loose?”

I look at the way the tracks circle. Careful. Deliberate. Never coming within a mile of any house, never