LEVIATHAN
“Ready?” Rainier asked as he stepped into my cabin.
“Just about,” I said as I stuffed the last of my sandwich into my mouth.
He adjusted his coat and glanced around my living room. “I don’t see June. Did you speak to her?”
“I did,” I said. “I think we’re good. I apologized about earlier today and told her we were leaving.”
“And?” he asked, giving me a probing look.
I shrugged, doing my best to keep from smiling. “And we’re…fine.”
Grinning, Rainier slapped my shoulder. “Ah, makeup sex. Love it.”
“You really are the worst beta, you know that? I need to get a yes-man who kisses my ass and never talks back,” I growled.
Rainier waved me off. “That’d be no fun. You’d get bored with a guy like that, and you know it.”
Ignoring that, I nodded at the door. “You ready?”
“I am. Do you want to bring any supplies? Food? Water?”
I shook my head. “We travel light. We can hunt and in our wolf forms if need be. Even if it’s a couple days, I can fast that long. Not a big deal.”
“Speak for yourself,” Rainier grumbled. “My wolf will love munching on some squirrel or racoon, but…ugh. Not my favorite.”
“You’ll be fine. Let’s get going.”
We headed into the forest. Within minutes, we found additional tracks with the Red Maw’s scent on them.
“Son of a bitch,” Rainier hissed. “These smell fresher than the last ones. Maybe a day old.”
I nodded, staring into the trees around us. “It’s right on the farthest edge, which means we wouldn’t catch their scent in the village. They were probably staying downwind too. You’re right. We don’t have enough people to patrol the area the way we need to.”
“It’s like the other tracks. Just one person, from what I can see.”
“Yeah. Scouts, most likely. Let’s get going. We need to figure out what they’re up to.”
We shifted. Rainier’s shaggy, black wolf stood a little less than a head shorter than mine, but he was still imposing and powerful.
I gave the village one last look; the streets were quiet, the few tiny streetlamps glowing orange in the night.
My eyes lingered on the bunkhouse, where June was probably already asleep.
The last thing I wanted to do was leave her, but I was the alpha.
I had to keep my pack safe, and whether it was official or not yet, she was part of my pack. My mate.
I chuffed at Rainier—a signal to move—and sprinted ahead, following the tracks.
I was faster than any other wolf in Hidden Grove, but Rainier was a close second, and he managed to keep up as we traversed the forest. Keeping my nose low, I only stopped to make sure I still had the scent, moving on as soon as I was sure I knew where I was going.
The trail followed a circuitous route, winding in and out of the vegetation, uphill and then back down, circling certain areas multiple times. It was maddening.
After around three hours of this, Rainier shifted back to his human form, taking a seat on a dead tree trunk to rest. I joined him.
“What the fuck were these guys doing?” he asked. “Were they drunk?”
“No,” I said grimly. “They knew we’d eventually find their tracks. They did this on purpose to make sure it was as difficult as possible to track them back to their base of operations. If I had to guess, we’ll come to a creek crossing soon. They’ll have tried to use water to make it even harder.”
“Shit,” Rainer cursed. “These guys are a pain in the ass.” He glanced over his shoulder to the south. “I bet we’re only five miles from Hidden Grove, but we’ve been going for over three hours.”
Something about all this didn’t sit well with me.
The Red Maw had always been predictable.
Harsh and quick to anger. The all-male pack was made up of rejects and lone wolves, men who could barely function and only stayed together due to the strength numbers gave them.
This scouting wasn’t like them. Never had been.
As dangerous as they were, they typically kept to themselves.
Other than June, no one in town had ever had any dealings with them, at least not in recent memory.
What had changed? Why push us like this?
And why were they being sneakier than usual?
I’d always known them to operate more like a baseball bat than a scalpel.
Clumsy and brutal rather than stealthy and clandestine.
“Let’s keep going,” I said.
Eventually, the path evened out and became easier to follow, though we did lose the trail at a creek crossing as I’d anticipated.
It took us both nearly an hour to find it again on the other side.
By the time the sun began to rise in the east, we were almost twenty miles from Hidden Grove and approaching the edges of Red Maw territory.
I stopped and shifted back into human form.
Rainier joined me, wiping a slight sheen of sweat from his head. “What’s up?”
“I want to make sure we’re downwind as we approach. I think we’re getting close. Look.” I pointed at the ground.
All around us, the vegetation had the look of having been walked on. Leaves torn, sticks broken, and dirt upturned. A few feet ahead of us, I could make out an outline of a boot print.
Rainier’s voice dropped to a whisper. “If they’re walking around in their human forms, we must be right up against their encampment. Have you ever been this close before?”
Shaking my head, I peered into the forest around us. “No. Never had the need. I’ve only ever encountered them in the deep forest. Come on. I think I heard something.”
I led him to the west, making sure to move in a way that kept us downwind.
The closer we got, the more the sound of voices grew clearer.
Something about it didn’t sit right with me.
It sounded like a lot of voices. Frowning, I moved up a hill, circling closer to the sound and scents of the encampment.
At the crest of the hill, deep in the undergrowth, Rainer and I lay down on our stomachs and inched toward an opening in the brush so we could look out at the forest below. I froze, my eyes growing wide at the sight.
The Red Maw, as far as I’d ever known, was a small pack of roughly two or three dozen men at any given time, since they picked up and lost members over the years.
They were a threat and a nuisance, but nothing to be truly worried about.
What I saw below tilted that view on its side.
At least a hundred men roamed the small village below.
Similar to Hidden Grove, it was rustic and not fully implemented.
Rather than wooden buildings and log cabins, the buildings were all pole style-tents, made with waxed canvas, some large enough to house ten or twelve people.
Off to the side, there were a few buildings in various states of construction.
This was far bigger than I ever anticipated.
“There are so many of them,” Rainier whispered beside me, looking down in fear and awe.
How had I gotten it this wrong? How could I have not realized how large the Red Maw pack was?
“We can’t fight this,” he hissed, leaning in close.
He was right. Every person I could see was a man of fighting age and ability.
Over a hundred male shifters? We didn’t have nearly that many fighters.
We had perhaps two dozen men, the others all being women and children.
A single male shifter could take on at least two untrained female shifters simply due to the greater strength and size of a male wolf, and very few of our women had ever been trained to fight.
If this group decided to launch a full attack on us, our town would be overrun in an hour or less, no matter what Rainier and I did.
Fear of a kind I’d never experienced before swelled in my chest, my heart thudding way behind my ribs. My mouth went dry. All I could picture was the devastation of my home if this force marched on it. We needed answers.
“Come on,” I said, crawling back the way we came.
“What?” Rainier asked, looking confused. “Where are you going?”
“To introduce myself to whatever asshole is the alpha of this group,” I said. “Time he knows exactly who he’s fucking with.”