Hopefully the supplies would still be good when the people in Prairie Gold needed them.

Enough supplies to last until next spring, Tolya had told her after she’d mentioned her feeling that Prairie Gold might be denied access to other supplies, the same way the bookstore in Bennett had stopped her from buying new books for her store. Food. Medicines. What females need when they come into season and become snappish.

Somehow, having a vampire mention PMS and menses as part of the preparation checklist was more unnerving than having him push her to order food that could be cached for the coming months.

And not just food. Clothes too—everything from underwear and socks to jeans and T-shirts and sweaters and coats. Shoes. Boots. Anything that could be outgrown or worn out.

Something was coming. Everyone in Prairie Gold felt it. The terra indigene knew what they were preparing for, but they weren’t sharing specifics.

More bison had been shot—someone’s idea of malicious fun. The adult Wolves, especially those who were the hunters and guards, were away from their settlement, roaming to find the human culprits and put an end to this waste of food.

Food wasn’t the only thing being wasted. Someone had poured gasoline down prairie dog holes and set them alight. The fire spread over acres of grassland, coming within yards of the settlement’s food crops. Then the wind changed direction, blowing the fire back on itself, saving Prairie Gold’s fresh food for the coming year.

She and Phil Mailer, the postmaster and editor of the Prairie Gold Reporter, had driven to Bennett to report the incident, but no one had seen anything. What was the law enforcement in Bennett supposed to do? The fire didn’t happen in town or on any human land.

She had hoped she was wrong about preparing for isolation, but that isolation had already begun with frightening speed. The Intuits couldn’t make purchases in any of the Bennett shops. You had to show your residence card in order to buy anything. When Truman Skye and Billy Rider, two men from Prairie Gold’s ranch, had asked if that rule applied to people stopping overnight or visiting for a day or two, they were roughed up by a gang of men. After returning home, Truman had told Jesse and Phil—and Joe Wolfgard and Tolya Sanguinati—that the sheriff had been writing out a parking ticket within sight of the fight and didn’t notice two men being attacked by eight. As it was, Truman and Billy escaped with a few scrapes, some bruised ribs, and a couple of black eyes because a tree in the town square uprooted suddenly and crushed the cab of a pickup parked on the street.

The rumor was that something had hooked its claws into the tree and ripped it out of the ground.