Taking a last deep breath, Jackson turned back to the room. Some blood on the sheet, but not as much as he’d thought when he first saw Hope standing there with blood dripping down her arm. Most of the blood was on the drawing, although he would check all the pages carefully to make sure there wasn’t a speck of blood on the rest of the paper.

She’d been doing so well since she’d come to live with them. She’d said she wanted to live. Hadn’t they done everything they could to help her do exactly that? So why...?

Jackson sucked in a breath as he stared at the drawing. A mound of bison, clearly dead. Bloody Wolf prints on all the carcasses. That didn’t make sense. Wolves wouldn’t drag their prey into a mound like that, and killing one bison was hard work and provided several days of food for the entire pack—for the whole terra indigene settlement. So why did Hope draw a slaughter? No recognizable landmarks. Was this going to happen around Sweetwater? Somewhere else?

Meg Corbyn—Meg, the Trailblazer—tended to see prophecies about the Lakeside Courtyard. But that hadn’t always been true. It seemed her abilities, her sensitivity, became refined to Lakeside and the nearby communities that were connected with her Courtyard after she’d been living in Lakeside for a few weeks. But Hope’s vision drawings ranged across the land.

He glanced at the drawing on the desk. Could these girls, these blood prophets, make connections that linked places because of their own connections to the people? Meg and Hope had known each other in the compound where they had been caged and cut so that wealthy humans could know about the future.

Meg was still struggling with her own addiction to cutting, but she was the Trailblazer for the rest of the cassandra sangue, and she might have the answers he needed right now.

Shifting his human hands into Wolf paws that had useful claws, Jackson tore the sheet, making a pad out of the clean linen. He placed the drawing pad on the linen. When the blood scent overwhelmed him to the point that he started salivating, he realized that the paper was more saturated with blood than he’d first thought.

More than a cut, he thought uneasily as he rolled up the part of the sheet that had blood on it. She’d been drawing with her own blood... because she needed that color.

The bathroom door opened. Grace led Hope into the bedroom, then stopped when she saw him.

<Jackson?> Grace said.

<We need help,> he said. <More than the human bodywalker.>