4. Nash
NASH
Caleb and Wyatt meet me at the culvert crossing at two a.m, already shifted, and we run the shoreline back from the gravel bar.
The boats are gone. Whoever they were left behind a scent line along the willow flat that shouldn't exist, old marker, laid down by something that hasn't come this far inland in my lifetime.
Deep water, cold and mineral and faintly electric, like the air before a strike.
Wyatt drops his head and circles it twice, hackles up his whole spine, and I have to put a shoulder into him to get him moving again.
We find three more scents before dawn. All within a half mile of one of her campsites.
"They're being driven in," Caleb says when we're back on two legs and pulling clothes out of a dry bag. His hands aren't steady. "Something's pushing them out of the deep channel and up into the shallows. No animals want to be down there anymore."
"Or something's fishing them out." I sit to lace my boots. "You saw the tarp on the second hull."
"I saw a shape."
"I saw restraint hardware."
Wyatt hasn't learned to sit on a thought yet. "So we go get it back. Tonight. There's four of them and eleven of us and I've been waiting…"
"You've been waiting twelve days," I say. "Some of us have been at this since before you could hold a shift through a full moon. We don't move on four boats and a guess. We move when I know where they take them."
Caleb gives me the flat, unimpressed look he's been giving me since middle school. "And in the meantime?"
"In the meantime we sweep her sites."
The first camera is stuck to a cedar forty yards off her cabin's back deck.
It's the size of a matchbook, cellular, magnetic mount, painted bark-brown by somebody that takes their job seriously.
There's a second on the utility pole at the head of her driveway with a sightline down the whole gravel run.
A third is inside the woodshed, aimed at her truck.
Wyatt wants to smash them. I make him stand there while I photograph each one in place, note the orientation, and check the SIM tray with a knife point.
"You're not taking them?" he says.
"I'm taking all three. Then I'm putting the mounts back exactly where they were, empty, and if somebody comes to service them I want to know what he drives." I peel the third one loose and drop it in the bag. "And Wyatt, she doesn't hear about any of this, not a hint. She's already sleeping badly."
"How do you know how she's sleeping?"
Caleb coughs into his fist. I hand Wyatt the bag and tell him to run the ridge line and check the two eastern sites, and he goes, because he's a good kid underneath all that noise.
When he's out of earshot Caleb says, "Nash."
"Don't."
"You put wolves on rotation around a state contractor. You've slept maybe nine hours since she arrived. Isla asked me straight out last night and I told her I didn't know, and I've never once lied to my mate, so I'd appreciate it if you'd make me an honest man."
The pines are dripping. Somewhere out on the water a loon is calling and getting no answer, which is its own small horror.
"It happened when I saw her," I say. "Before she'd finished saying her own name."
Caleb lets out a breath. He doesn't whoop or grin, which is how I know he understands what it costs. "Does she know?"
"She knows a game warden keeps turning up. That's all she gets."
"Nash—"
"What do you want me to hand her? She came here with her career in pieces according to the records I found about her and she's holding it together with tape and stubbornness.
If I tell her the truth I take her science, her job, her whole understanding of the world.
" I sling the bag over my shoulder. "She's a scientist. She's earned the right to be given evidence, not asked for this world.
When I can put something in her hands, I will. "
"And if she finds it herself first?"
I don't answer that, because I've been chewing on it since the collar on the stump.
She catches me at the woodshed at seven a.m., barefoot, coffee in both hands, hair loose for once and doing something to my chest I intend to ignore.
"You didn't go home," she says.
"I checked the road."
"For six hours."
"It's a long road."
She comes down the steps and hands me one of the mugs. She's put milk in it without asking, which means she noticed how I drank it at the station. That lands harder than anything the mercenaries did last night.
"I've been replaying last night in my head," she says.
"The part where your hand came over my mouth should be the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
And instead I lay awake thinking about how I'd have been standing in the line of sight of that light when it came around.
" She looks away instead of at me. "He photographed my boot prints, Nash. He documented me."
"I know."
"Thank you." It comes out rough, like she had to drag it up. "I'm not good at that. Ask anyone I've ever worked with. But you keep showing up just before I need you and I've decided to stop being insulted about it."
"You could be a little insulted."
"Oh, I'm still deeply insulted. I've just triaged." A tired half-laugh gets away from her. "How do you keep showing up?"
There's the question, wide open, no trap in it, and she'd probably believe me if I told her.
"Small county," I say. "Bad radio. I drive a lot."
She studies me over the rim of her mug. She knows it's bullshit. She doesn't push me, and I feel that mercy like a hand supporting my back.
"Six loaner cameras," she says. "You promised."
"They're in the truck."
Wyatt's voice comes over the radio at nine-forty, and it isn't the noisy version anymore.
"Nash. East wetland, the far pool." A long pause with breathing in it. "There's a drag furrow out of the water. Twenty feet, straight up the bank to a vehicle track. There's blood and there's… Nash, it's not wolf blood, or human, it doesn't smell like anything I've ever…"
"Don't touch it," I say. "Photograph it and get off the ground."
"Somebody took it," he says. Whatever it was, it must've been alive when they captured it.
I look at the porch where Erin's gone back inside, humming, sorting camera straps on her kitchen table like today is a workday.
Whatever they're doing I need to find out. And every hour I decide whether to gently give her the truth is an hour somebody else decides what to do about the woman taking pictures of their boats.