Tobias slipped into the driver’s seat and started the truck. Nyx slipped out and flowed over the side of the truck, settling in back next to Joe, while Tolya sat up front with Tobias.

<The humans in Bennett are the concern of the Prairie Gold pack,> Joe told Tolya. <We’re supposed to keep watch and collect the payment for the land the humans leased around here. That includes the ranches as well as that town.>

<If they break the agreements, the Others can reclaim the land and force them to leave—isn’t that so?> Tolya countered.

<Yes.> Joe didn’t like the trail the Sanguinati was following.

<Perhaps you should allow them this kind of petty meanness, let the humans’ own actions prove they should not be allowed to remain here.>

<But the Intuits have been promised protection from other kinds of humans in exchange for skills we do not wish to learn but know are needed,> Joe argued. <Letting those humans raise the price of gasoline until Intuits can’t afford it isn’t protecting them.>

Tolya said nothing for a minute. <I have always lived around larger human cities, so this part of Thaisia is very new to me. I felt something in Bennett that I recognized as terra indigene but had never encountered before.>

<Elders. The terra indigene who live in and watch over the wild country. They don’t usually come that close to a human town.>

<If that is the case, perhaps you shouldn’t depend on Bennett for the supplies needed in Prairie Gold.>

There was a warning in those words.

But Tolya had a point, Joe thought with a sigh. He’d learned enough about his new territory to know that the humans living in Bennett hated the Others for setting the boundaries of what humans could and couldn’t have, and they resented the Intuits because Prairie Gold had something the human-owned ranches didn’t have: water that flowed down from the hills and followed natural channels to watering holes that made it easier for the Intuits to run their dairy farm and produce farm and the ranch that raised cattle and horses. And a few men, over the years, had gone into the hills and come out again with gold. But what one man might be able to do, a dozen could not. Believing there was untold, and unclaimed, wealth in the streambeds that could make a man rich beyond his wildest dreams but couldn’t be reached was becoming a different kind of sickness in some humans. They wanted what they couldn’t have because something already claimed that land and that water, not for wealth but for life.