I think about that. A tourist takes the marked trails. She doesn’t navigate along a pack compound’s eastern approach with enough skill to ghost past a sentry.
“So one’s asking about work in town, the other’s walking our perimeter,” I say.
“And you spent the evening with the first one.” Garrett doesn’t inflect it. Doesn’t need to. “I need to know who they are and why they’re here. Watch them. Quietly. Don’t confront.”
“You think they’re a threat?”
Garrett takes a moment, and when he speaks, the political alpha voice drops into something older. Something that lives closer to the bone.
“I think two strangers showed up in my territory, one of them asking questions and the other scouting my boundary, and thelast time I ignored something that looked like coincidence, I buried our sister.”
The room goes quiet.
He doesn’t talk about Maren often. None of us does. But Garrett carries her differently than I do. I carry the memory of her last breath. He carries the weight of being the oldest. Twenty-one when it happened, old enough to have been watching her, old enough to have kept her off that trail. The guilt ate him alive for a year. When he took the alpha seat, he built the policy around it: no magic-blooded wolves in Forrester territory. Zero tolerance. Not out of hatred. Out of the specific, terrible knowledge that magic kills, and it killed the person he was supposed to protect.
“I’ll find out who they are,” I say.
He straightens. The alpha slides back into place over the brother. “Do that. And Conner… whatever happened at the Railhead, keep your head clear. I need my enforcer on this, not a man thinking with his—”
“I hear you.”
He lets it go. Not finished with it—Garrett is never finished with anything—but done for now.
“One more thing. Dawes spotted drifters in the Brennan hollow. Family, unaffiliated, camped by the creek. Check them out when you get a chance.”
“Tomorrow work?”
“Tomorrow’s fine. They’re not going anywhere.”
I stand and walk out before anything else shows on my face.
The morning round helps. Fence lines, watch logs, the physical rhythm of checking a territory that I know in my bones. Muscle memory takes over where my mind won’t cooperate, and by the time I reach the eastern watch post, I’ve almost gone five minutes without thinking about her.
Almost.
Tate’s at the trail junction, pacing. Eighteen years old, three months on watch duty, and the look on his face when he sees my truck tells me he’s been dreading this conversation.
“Walk me through it,” I say.
“I was on the eastern loop, standard sweep. Didn’t catch anything on the first pass. Found the scent on my return. Female, wolf-blooded, already hours cold. Two partial prints on the rock shelf.”
“That’s it?”
“She stayed off the soft ground,” he says. “Moved clean. I didn’t find much else.”
The embarrassment is eating him. His ears are red, and he won’t quite meet my eye.
“You found the trail,” I tell him. “That’s the part that matters.”
“I should’ve caught it sooner.”
“Maybe. But you caught it. Plenty of wolves with more time on rotation would’ve walked right past it.” I let that sink in. “Keep your eyes open on the eastern stretch. Run it twice today if you can.”
He nods. Steadies a little.
I leave him to it and walk the rest of the ridge myself. Her prints are sparse. Light footfall, careful placement. Whoever this woman is, she’s had training, or she’s spent years in rough terrain. Either way, she knew she was near the compound, and she moved like she didn’t want to be found.
I make a mental note and keep the assessment open.