All the pups and juvenile Wolves in the Sweetwater pack. Dead. Mutilated. No wonder Hope wanted them to hide!

Then he looked at the intact drawing. Meg Corbyn’s face in one corner. A hilltop view of the Intuit village at Sweetwater, all the buildings on fire. And filling the center of the paper...

He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. It was like the drawing she did of the mound of bison except...

Joe.

Jackson tore out of the cabin and ran as if everything in his world depended on his speed... because, at that moment, it did.

<Help!> he called.

<Wolf? Wolf?> Replies from the Ravengard, Hawkgard, Eaglegard.

<The Intuits are going to be attacked. We’re going to be attacked. Watch the road. Give warning if any humans head our way.>

<Jackson?> That was Grace.

<Hide the pups! Warn the Wolves. Get away from the settlement!>

<Where are you?>

<Have to warn... > Who? How many?

Reaching the communications cabin, he flung himself inside, shifting to human as he walked to the table that held the telephone and the computer.

“Jackson?” The Hawk minding the cabin stared at him.

Jackson stared back, then picked up the phone and called the number he had for Prairie Gold. Getting a busy signal, he hung up and called Howling Good Reads. No answer.

As he stood there, he smelled Hope and urine.

“The Hope pup was here?”

The Hawk nodded. “She used the telephone. She said ‘Meg, run, hide, death,’ and then she ran away.”

Jackson wrote a phone number on the pad of paper next to the phone. “Call this number. Keep trying until someone answers. Tell whoever answers, even if it’s a human, that the Wolves have to hide. They have to hide or they’re going to die.”

“Where are you going?”

“To warn the Intuits. Hope saw their village burning.”

Shifting back to Wolf, Jackson raced down the road. It wasn’t just Intuits who needed help in that village. There were the four surviving prophet pups living there too.

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 35

Firesday, Juin 22

Joe pushed for all the speed he had. <Wolves! Wait!>

<They’re killing our meat!>

Too angry. Not listening. He’d been chosen as leader of the terra indigene settlement because of his contact with Simon and the Lakeside Courtyard, because they needed someone now to actively deal with the Prairie Gold humans. But being the leader of the settlement wasn’t the same as being the dominant Wolf. The pack had just proved that by ignoring his command. <The sweet blood says it’s a trap!>

That slowed the other Wolves who had been racing toward men so focused on shooting bison that they didn’t seem to notice the angry Wolves bearing down on them.

<Sweet blood?> The pack’s dominant enforcer slowed to a trot.

<Simon’s prophet, Meg, called Jesse Walker to warn us that this is a trap.>