I needed to touch base with Thierry. Leaving an email trail was damning enough even if those were more difficult to track. Tempting as it was to dial up the anonymous number I felt certain was Thierry’s burner phone, I couldn’t be sure it didn’t belong to a friend of hers—or to Shaw—and adding phone logs into the mix would give someone looking in the right place a way to track her assistance to what some might consider a rogue agent. Me.

I imagined a cartoon light bulb flashing in the air over my head as I sat at the table, hands falling from my laptop’s keyboard.

Butler, Tennessee.

A clarion moment of recollection vibrated in my skull, and I knew why the name seemed familiar.

The divinations.

The Garzas.

Butler, Tennessee was the site where the witchy Garza brothers had predicted Charybdis would surface had we not stopped the kelpie at Sardis Lake.

The kelpie was dead. Their prediction was nulled. The paper trail leading from Wink to Butler was months old. Whatever Ayer had done there, whatever was meant to lure Charybdis there, those plans had been cancelled out.

Hadn’t they?

There was one way to find out. Time to invite myself over to the Garzas’. “This would be so much easier if you could talk,” I told the wolf snoring on the floor, his fur tickling me where his chin rested on my feet. “Wake up.” I lifted my toes, wiggled them. “We’ve got work to do.”

The wolf wasn’t impressed with my work nonsense and yawned to display sharp teeth.

“Save it.” I pulled on my shoes and grabbed my phone. “If you were going to eat me, you would have done it by now.”

He didn’t disagree, just hefted himself upright and shook out his fur. He was waiting at the door by the time I had my boots laced. I debated texting Isaac to let him know where I was going, but decided against it. He would want details, and I didn’t have time to give them to him.

This would go so much quicker if I could call Dell, but wargs didn’t carry cells. Why bother when they could tap into the pack bond to relay messages? Telepathy was far more dependable than phone service out here in the boonies, which meant Graeson and I were going for a walk.

Wolf on my heels, I set out for Silverback Lane.

Today the shade-dappled path bustled with activity. How so many people had remained hidden from sight boggled the mind. There weren’t enough houses here to accommodate them, so there must be other lanes yet unexplored.