Chapter 2
Willow
We hit Eldridge mid-morning. The town is barely a town: a post office, a farm supply co-op, and a feed store with a hand-painted sign that reads “Hill Country Feed one face is less memorable than two.
The bell over the door is the old kind, a brass bell on a spring.
The store smells like alfalfa, molasses, and dust. Shelves of supplements, stacked bags of feed, a wall of fencing supplies.
A woman behind the counter is pricing salt blocks with a grease pencil, working through a stack with the efficiency of someone who’s done it ten thousand times.
She looks up. Mid-forties. Broad shoulders, sun-weathered skin, dark hair pulled back with a clip that’s losing its grip. Hands that know work. Eyes that know more.
“Help you?”
“I’m looking for the twelve-percent sweet feed. The one with the beet pulp.”
She sets down the grease pencil. That’s the phrase. Brenna’s people don’t use codes that sound like codes; they use things a person would actually say in a feed store.
“I keep that in the back. Give me a minute.”
She flips the counter pass-through and walks toward the storeroom. I follow.
The back room is stacked floor to ceiling with inventory. Margaux pulls the door shut behind us and turns around and looks at me the way you look at someone you’ve been waiting for; not with warmth, exactly, but with the specific relief of a person who’s been holding information too long.
“You’re Willow.”
“I am.”
“You look like her. Around the jaw.” She means Brenna. People who know my aunt always see her in me. I don’t know if I like that or not. “You need water? Coffee? I’ve got both.”
“I’m fine. What do you have for me?”
She leans against a pallet of feed bags and crosses her arms. “Few days ago, a woman came through the co-op next door asking about day work. Ranch hand stuff—fence repair, stock work. She had a boy with her, maybe twelve. Paid cash for gas and didn’t give a name.”
My pulse picks up, but I keep my voice level. “What made you notice her?”
“She smelled like pack. Not local pack. Something different. Charged. And she was scared in the way people are when they’ve been scared for a long time and have gotten used to hiding it.
” Margaux’s expression doesn’t change, but her voice drops a notch.
“My husband’s a wolf. I know what hunted looks like. ”
“Where did she go?”
“East. The kid behind the co-op counter pointed her toward Cedar Falls. Said the ranches out there always need hands.” Margaux pauses.
“I wish he hadn’t. But the boy’s human and didn’t know better.
I asked around about her after. Quietly.
A buddy of mine hauls cattle through that part of the Hill Country.
He said he saw a woman matching the description working fence line on one of the properties outside town. Couldn’t say which one.”
Cedar Falls. I note the name.
“What do you know about the packs there?”
Her mouth thins. “Forrester territory. The family’s held that area for generations. Traditional wolves. They run the town, the ranches, most of the commerce.” She looks at me directly. “They don’t like outsiders, they don’t like questions, and they especially don’t like wolves they can’t place.”
“Purist?” I ask.
Her mouth sets in a grim line as she nods. “If your family went in there, they’re either hiding very well, or they’ve already been found.”
“Anyone else come through? Other families?”
“Not that I’ve seen. But I’m one woman with a feed store.
My reach goes about sixty miles in any direction, and it’s thin.
” She pushes off the pallet. “I put together a bag for you. Supplies and a map with the local pack boundaries marked as best I can figure them. It’s in a feed sack by the back door.
Load it like you’re loading a purchase.”
Good thinking. I nod.
“One more thing.” She holds my gaze. “I’ve been passing information for Brenna for two years, and in that time, I’ve learned not to ask questions I don’t need answers to.
But I’m going to ask you one.” She waits until she’s sure I’m listening.
“Those people… if they’re yours, and you go in after them, are you ready to face what might be after them? ”
I think about the three families who vanished. The silence where their bond-threads should be. The two years I spent holding Ravenclaw together while the world that was supposed to protect us looked the other way.
“I’ll manage.”
Margaux studies me for another second. Then she dips her chin briefly. Not like she believes me, but like she’s decided it’s not her job to stop me.
“Feed sack. Back door. Don’t come here again unless you have no other option. If you need to reach me, use a secure line.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Find them.”
I load the feed sack into the truck bed like I bought fifty pounds of sweet feed. Briar watches me settle into the driver’s seat and reads my face.
“East?” she asks.
“East. A town called Cedar Falls. One of the families may already be there.”
Briar folds her knife cloth, and tucks it into her jacket. “Then that’s where we go.”
I check our route on Google Maps, then I pull out of the lot. The dog on the porch still doesn’t move.
I can’t shake my growing sense of agitation, but now that we have a destination in mind, my sense of purpose feels clearer.
We drive the last stretch in the dark. The Hill Country is different at night.
The hills turn silver under a half-moon, and the trees throw shadows across the road that make my wolf twitch.
The cedar is thick and pungent, and the air through the cracked window has a dry warmth that’s nothing like the Ozarks.
I can smell animals, earth, something alive and old.
And wolf scent layered through the landscape so thoroughly it might as well be the soil itself. Not one or two wolves passing through. A population. A territory saturated with pack presence.
“You smell it?” I ask.
“Since the last junction.” Briar’s eyes are on the road. “This whole area is claimed.”
She’s right. The scent markers are everywhere; in the brush along the highway shoulders, on the fence posts, drifting from side roads that lead toward properties set back from the main route.
Whoever lives here, they’ve marked their territory so heavily that even a human would notice the dogs aren’t quite right.
We sit in silence, processing this until the lights of a motel come up ahead of us. I glance at Maps again.
“Looks like a good place to set up base,” I tell Briar. She gives another of her silent nods, and I glide off the road and park in front of the office.
The office smells like pine cleaner and old carpet.
A man behind the counter looks up from a hunting magazine, takes in my face, my out-of-state plates through the window, and asks no questions beyond the necessary ones.
Cash or card. How many nights. One bed or two.
I pay cash for a week, sign a name that isn’t mine, and take the key—an actual metal key on a plastic fob, Room Six, around the side.
We unload in silence. The room is clean enough; two twin beds, a bathroom with a shower that’ll run hot for about four minutes if we’re lucky, a window facing the parking lot.
Briar checks the sightlines, tests the lock, and positions her bag where she can reach it from the bed closest to the door.
I take the other bed and spread Margaux’s map across the mattress.
Briar looks down at it over my shoulder. “She did a good job,” she says, which is high praise coming from her. “I’ll go over it in more detail later.”
I glance at my watch. Early morning. “We should probably take a look around town.”
Briar doesn’t answer. The fact that she’s heading out the door tells me that she thinks it’s a good idea. It’s taken a few days, but I think I’m finally learning to “speak Briar.”
We get to town just after 6 a.m.
It’s not as tiny as Eldridge, but certainly no bustling metropolis.
One main street with the obligatory feed store, a diner, a gas station, a hardware shop, and a bar that looks like it’s been here since someone decided Texas was a good idea.
There’s a church with a white steeple at one end.
A water tower at the other, painted with the town name: CEDAR FALLS.
There’s a mechanic’s yard with trucks parked in rows, a post office the size of a garden shed, and a strip of storefronts that are clean and maintained in the way that means somebody takes pride.
No chain stores. No traffic lights. One blinking yellow at the only intersection I can see.
My wolf doesn’t like it. Too quiet. Too contained. The buildings are fine, and the street is fine, and the early-morning light on the limestone is fine, but underneath all of it, she senses the same thing I do: order. Control. A place where everything has a position, and everything is watched.
Briar reads me. “We eat. We listen. We don’t ask questions yet.”
She’s right. I park on the main street near the diner. The sign reads “Dutch’s” in faded letters. Through the window, I can see booths, a long counter, and a waitress filling coffee cups. It looks normal. It looks like every small-town diner in every state I’ve driven through.
We get out, and I lock the truck. Briar falls into step beside me, close enough to be together, far enough to move if she needs to.
The bell over the door chimes when we walk in.
The diner isn’t full. Maybe ten people are scattered across the booths and counter stools. Working men in denim and flannel. A woman with gray hair reading a newspaper. Two younger men at the counter, plates of eggs in front of them.
Every single one of them looks up when we enter.
Not the casual glance of people noticing a stranger. Something harder. An assessment that starts at our faces, works down to our boots, and back up again. I feel it the way you feel weather; a pressure change, an attention that has weight.
The younger men at the counter hold the look longest. One of them has the easy build of a wolf who shifts regularly. The other is bigger, wider, with hands that wrap around his coffee cup like he’s considering breaking it.
The waitress smiles. “Morning, ladies. Sit anywhere you like.”
We take a booth by the window. Briar sits with her back to the wall. I take the side facing the door, just like Brenna taught me; never let anyone get between you and the exit.
The waitress brings menus. The diner resumes its rhythm: forks on plates, low conversation, the clink of crockery. But the rhythm is different now. There’s a new note in it. An awareness that wasn’t there before we walked in.
They haven’t looked away. Not really. They’ve just gotten better at hiding it.
I open the menu and scan it without reading it. My skin is prickling. The wolf scent in here is so thick I could choke on it. Every person in this diner is pack. Every one of them knows we don’t belong.
Briar orders black coffee and toast. I order the same. We sit in a booth flooded with early Texas sun, surrounded by wolves who are pretending not to watch us, in a town that smells like territory and cedar and the closed ranks of wolves who’ve held this land for a very long time.
We’re behind enemy lines.
And every set of eyes in this room knows exactly when we arrived.