The Hunter's Mark

Chapter 5: Forty-Eight Hours

Headlights washed over the porch before anyone inside had time to breathe.

Three vehicles, no sirens, the kind of quiet approach the Vigil only used when they wanted to catch a pack with its guard down. Around Zoey, twenty wolves who'd been herding her toward the door a moment ago snapped into something else entirely — shoulders dropping into fighting stances, a few already losing the fight against a partial shift, claws sliding free at their sides.

"Stand down!" Dane's voice cracked across the room like a whip. "Nobody shifts. Nobody moves. Let me handle this."

Zoey was already past him, out the door, down the porch steps into a yard lit white and merciless — and the first thing she registered wasn't the convoy.

It was that only one man had gotten out of it.

Kelvin Blake stood alone in the gravel, hands loose at his sides, a full two vehicle-lengths ahead of backup that hadn't caught up yet. He'd outdriven his own unit to get here first. She didn't know whether that should terrify her more, or less.

"Hunter," Dane said from the porch, every syllable a warning. "This is pack land."

"I'm not here for the pack." Kelvin didn't look away from Zoey. "I'm here for her, and I'd rather not do it in front of twenty wolves with their claws already out."

"She's not pack anymore." Dane's voice had gone flat, final, a man already closing a door he'd opened himself an hour ago. "Do whatever you want with her. Not our problem."

Something in Zoey's chest cracked clean through.

Twelve years, undone in two sentences.

"Move," Kelvin said to her, low and fast, already turning toward the treeline at the edge of the yard. "Now, while there's still a gap between me and the rest of my unit."

She didn't trust him. She'd told him as much in an alley two hours ago. But the alternative was standing in a yard full of wolves who'd just watched their Alpha call her nobody's problem, waiting for someone — Vigil or pack — to decide what happened next.

She moved.

They hit the treeline at a run, gravel giving way to wet leaves, the pack house floodlights shrinking behind them into a smear of white. Kelvin's radio crackled once against his hip — a dispatcher's voice, tight and urgent, reading off his own call sign — and he reached down and switched it off without breaking stride.

"That's the second time tonight you've gone dark on your own people," Zoey said, breathing hard. "They're going to notice."

"They already have."

"Then why are you still doing this?"

He didn't answer right away. They slowed at the edge of a drainage ditch, deep enough to swallow sound, and he turned to face her with something in his expression she hadn't seen on a hunter before — not certainty. The absence of it.

"Forty-eight hours," he said.

"What?"

"That's what I'm giving you. Forty-eight hours to find proof this isn't you — a real lead, something I can put in front of someone who isn't already compromised. If you can't, or if you run, I finish what I was sent here to do tonight. Myself.

No hesitation, no second chances."

"You're threatening to kill me as a favor."

"I'm telling you the truth instead of a kill order." His jaw tightened. "Vane upgraded my orders to terminate on contact six minutes after I let you go the first time. I am already finished if anyone finds out I'm standing here instead of finishing the job. So don't waste the forty-eight hours arguing about whether the offer is generous."

Zoey studied him in the dark — soaked sleeves, a gun he still hadn't drawn on her even once since the warehouse, eyes that kept doing something complicated every time they landed on her that had nothing to do with a hunter sizing up a target.

"Why," she asked quietly, "does it feel like you need me to be innocent more than you need to follow orders?"

His silence answered before his mouth could.

Behind them, far off through the trees, the pack house floodlights suddenly multiplied — not three vehicles anymore. Six. Then eight, swinging in formation up the long gravel drive, and a voice over a bullhorn crackled out across the property loud enough to reach the ditch where they crouched.

"Agent Blake, this is Vane. Report your position. Now."

Zoey's whole body went still.

"They know you're not with your unit," she said.

"Yes."

"They're not searching the pack house anymore." Her ears had already found it — the particular cadence of boots fanning out in a search pattern, not a raid pattern. A hunt pattern. "They're searching for you."

Kelvin's radio, dead at his hip, buzzed once with a text override loud enough to vibrate through the silence between them — the kind of priority alert that overrode a powered-down unit entirely.

He looked down at it. Zoey watched his face change.

"What," she said. "What does it say."

He turned the screen toward her without a word, and in the white light of eight approaching vehicles, she read it herself.

Confirmed: Blake in contact with target. Authorization for backup hunters to engage both. Effective immediately.

Both.

Not just her anymore.