Chapter 8: What the Luna Says

I shifted at the foot of the north ridge with eleven patrol wolves around me and a decision to make.

"Which way, Luna?" Torben said through the pack link.

His voice sounded in my head, easy and warm, but the whole line of wolves had gone quiet to hear my answer.

In my first life I had never once led a hunt.

I had stood at the Alpha house with soup on the stove.

I put my nose to the snow and found the cedar-and-iron scent, thin and stale, and I followed it with my head low.

"Not up the ridge," I said. "Down."

"The tracks go up."

"They went up to be seen. Look at the second set, under the first."

They had walked back down in their own old prints, to hide the line.

I led the pack down to the river, where the ice ran thin under a stand of black spruce, and I stopped them a hundred yards from the bend.

"Two of you above the bank," I said. "Four at the culvert. Torben and I take the ice."

"You want to walk on thin ice?"

"I want them to hear us do it."

I went out onto the river alone in wolf form, my white coat bright as a lantern in the dark.

Behind me the others slid into the trees without a sound.

The rogue came out of the spruce fast, a lean tan wolf with a scarred muzzle, and he went for my throat.

I didn't dodge.

I dropped under his jaw and drove my shoulder up into his chest, and he flew sideways and skidded across the ice.

He found himself pinned under Torben, with four wolves in a ring around him.

We marched him up the bank on a chain of rope and shifted him back at the road.

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