Detective Zoe

The day my wolf died, nobody came to check on me. Not my pack. Not my so called friends. Not even my mother, who was too busy pretending she did not know me at the pack gathering that evening. I stood at the edge of the forest alone, seventeen years old, watching the other wolves shift and run and laugh, and I felt nothing inside my chest where my wolf used to live. That was three years ago. Now I am twenty, and I have learned something that most people in the Crescent Ridge Pack have not figured out yet: you can survive without a wolf. You just have to be twice as smart, twice as fast, and twice as stubborn as everyone else. I pulled my jacket tighter as I walked through the pack market that morning, keeping my head low and my steps quick. The market was busy, full of vendors selling herbs and meat and handmade tools, full of wolves who had real wolves inside them. I could feel the difference between us, the way you can feel the cold even when you are indoors. They had something I did not. I had nothing but my two legs and my sharp eyes. "Omega," someone muttered as I passed a fruit stall, and I did not look up. I used to cry when they called me that. Now I just kept walking. My name is Zoe, and I am the only wolfless Omega detective the Crescent Ridge Pack has ever had. I got the position not because anyone wanted to give it to me, but because I solved three missing person cases that the actual pack enforcers could not c***k in six months. The Alpha at the time, Alpha Gerald, gave me the job with a face like he was swallowing something bitter. He did not want to. He just had no choice. That was two years ago, and I had been solving cases ever since. I stopped in front of a small wooden building near the east side of the market. The sign above the door read PACK DETECTIVE UNIT, which was a fancy name for a tiny office with two desks, one broken chair, and a wall covered in case files. I pushed the door open and walked in. My partner, Riley, was already at her desk, chewing on a pen and staring at a photograph. "You are late," she said without looking up. "I am never late," I replied, dropping my bag on my desk. "The clock is just wrong." Riley finally looked up, and her expression was not the usual teasing one she wore. It was tight and a little pale. She was a Beta, Riley, with a sandy brown wolf and a personality that bounced between funny and terrifying. We had been partners for a year and a half, and I trusted her more than I trusted most people. "We have a new case," she said, sliding the photograph across the desk toward me. I picked it up. It was a young male wolf, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with a wide jaw and frightened eyes. He looked like someone had taken the picture in a hurry. "Missing?" I asked. "Dead," Riley said quietly. "They found him near the north border this morning. No marks, no wounds, no sign of a fight. He just... stopped." I set the photograph down carefully. "Cause of death?" "That is the problem." Riley leaned forward. "The pack doctor says his wolf was ripped out." The room went quiet for a moment. Outside, I could hear the noise of the market, the voices and footsteps, but in the office it felt very still. "That is not possible," I said slowly. "I know." "A wolf cannot just be ripped out. That kind of thing, that is old magic. Dark magic. Nobody has done that in decades." "I know, Zoe." Riley's voice was careful, like she was holding something fragile. "But that is what the doctor said. And the Alpha wants us on it immediately." I looked at the photograph again. The boy's eyes. The fear in them. I had lived without a wolf for three years, and I knew what it felt like to be empty in that particular way. Looking at that boy's picture, I thought about his last moments, feeling that emptiness rush in, and something cold settled in my stomach. "Who was he?" I asked. "His name was Callum. He was a pack member's son, a lower ranked family. Not many people noticed he was gone until this morning." Not many people noticed. Of course. That was how it always went with the ones at the bottom. "Alright," I said, standing up and grabbing my jacket again. "Take me to the body." The north border of Crescent Ridge was where the pack's land met the wild, a stretch of old trees and broken stone walls that marked the edge of our territory. The body was still there when Riley and I arrived, covered with a grey cloth, with two pack enforcers standing guard. They looked at me the way they always did, like I was something that had wandered in from somewhere else, small and out of place in my plain jacket and old boots while they stood in their official uniforms. "Detective," one of them said, his tone sitting somewhere between respect and reluctance. "Has anyone touched him since he was found?" I asked, crouching beside the covered body. "No." "Good." I pulled the cloth back carefully. Callum looked peaceful, which was the strange part. Most violent deaths left something on the face, some tension or pain frozen in the features. But Callum looked like he had simply fallen asleep in the grass. If it were not for the colour of his skin, the grey-white shade of someone who had been completely drained, I might have thought he was resting. I leaned in close, studying his hands, his neck, the area around his ears, and the base of his skull. I checked under his fingernails. I looked at the ground around him for any marks, any pattern in the flattened grass. There was something. It was faint, almost invisible unless you were right at grass level and looking for it. A ring, a thin circular mark in the earth around his body, like something had burned very lightly into the ground. Not fire, something else. Something precise. "Riley," I said quietly, "come look at this." She crouched beside me and studied the mark. "What made that?" "I do not know yet." I pulled out my small notebook and sketched the pattern quickly. "But it was not random. Whoever did this was careful. Practiced." One of the enforcers behind us shifted his weight. "Do you really think a wolfless Omega can figure this out?" I did not look up from my notebook. "I figured out the Riverside disappearances that your entire enforcement unit spent five months on. So yes, I do." He did not say anything after that. I stood up, looked at the tree line, and felt the weight of the case settle onto my shoulders. Somewhere in those trees or beyond them, something was strong enough to tear a wolf out of a living person. And now it was in my territory.