Detective Zoe

Chapter 3

I did not sleep well.

By four in the morning I gave up trying and sat at my small kitchen table with a cup of tea that went cold before I finished half of it, staring at the note my mother had brought. I had read it so many times that the words had stopped meaning anything, the way a word does when you say it too much out loud.

Stop looking at the border. What you want is already inside.

At six, Riley knocked on my door with two fresh cups of tea and a look on her face that told me the day was already complicated.

"Something happened," she said, walking in without being asked, which was normal for us.

"Sit down and tell me," I said.

She sat, wrapping both hands around her cup. "There was another one."

I went still. "Another body?"

"Found at dawn. Near the pack hall, not the border this time. Young female wolf, seventeen. Same thing, no wounds, no struggle, wolf gone." Riley's voice was quiet and controlled, but her knuckles were white around the cup. "The Alpha is furious. He is calling an emergency gathering for this afternoon."

"Near the pack hall," I repeated. What you want is already inside. "They moved closer."

"Or they were never at the border at all and Callum was just the first one we found in an obvious place," Riley said.

I nodded slowly. She was right. We had been assuming the killer was working outward from the border. But if the second body was near the pack hall, right in the heart of our territory, then the border had nothing to do with it.

I was wrong. That stung, but I pushed the feeling aside and focused.

"I need to see the second scene before the gathering," I said, already standing.

"I knew you would say that. I have a pack runner waiting outside."

The second girl's name was Nadia. She was seventeen, the daughter of a mid-rank pack warrior, and she had been found curled on her side near the stone steps at the back of the pack hall, the same peaceful expression, the same grey-white skin, the same faint ring burned into the earth around her.

But this time there was something extra.

In the centre of the ring, scratched faintly into the dirt, was a symbol. Small, precise, like it had been drawn with a fingernail or a thin tool. I crouched close and studied it, pulling out my notebook and copying it exactly.

It looked like an eye, but not a normal eye. The pupil was a downward triangle, and around the eye were four small curved lines, like rays of a sun, but bent inward.

I had never seen it before, but looking at it gave me a feeling under my skin, like static electricity, like the air before lightning.

"What is that?" Riley asked behind me.

"I do not know yet," I said, "but I will find out."

We straightened up and I turned to find one of the pack enforcers watching me with a strange expression. Not the usual reluctance. Something more like nervousness.

"Detective Zoe," he said.

"What is it?"

He stepped closer and lowered his voice. "The Alpha's guests. The ones from the Northern Region. They arrived last night with six more people. And the rumour is"

He stopped.

"Say it," I told him.

He exhaled. "The rumour is that the Alpha King is among them."

The wind moved through the trees behind the pack hall, and somewhere far off a bird called once and went quiet.

The Alpha King.

Every pack in the entire werewolf world answered to one ruler at the very top, the Alpha King, the one whose bloodline carried power that made regular Alphas look like they were standing at the bottom of a mountain looking up. The current Alpha King was someone whose name I had heard in whispers and reports but had never seen. His name was Ren. That was all most people in small packs like ours knew: just the name, and the fact that where he went, things changed.

I had not heard he was coming here.

"Why?" I asked.

The enforcer shook his head. "Nobody is saying."

Riley grabbed my arm gently as the enforcer walked away. "Zoe. If the Alpha King is here and there are dead pack members with their wolves ripped out, this is no longer just our case."

"I know," I said.

"They will take it from us."

"I know," I said again, quieter.

The gathering was at two in the afternoon, in the main hall, which was a large stone building in the centre of the pack grounds. By the time Riley and I arrived it was already crowded, bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder, the air heavy with tension and the mingled scents of wolves who were all anxious at the same time.

Alpha Gerald stood at the front, and beside him, slightly separate, stood a group of people who were unmistakably not from Crescent Ridge. They stood the way the two strangers from yesterday had stood, straight and deliberate. But these ones had an additional quality, a kind of gravity, like the air around them was slightly thicker.

I scanned them carefully from where I stood near the back of the room.

And then I found him.

I did not know how I knew. I had never seen a photograph of the Alpha King, no official image was ever shared with small packs. But there was one man standing just to the left of the group who was different from the others the way a fire is different from the lamps around it. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair and a stillness about him that was not calm, exactly, it was more like he was choosing very deliberately not to move. His eyes were scanning the room slowly, systematically, the way I scanned crime scenes.

And then those eyes landed on me.

I held the stare for exactly two seconds before I looked away.

My pulse was doing something odd and I told it firmly to stop.

Alpha Gerald began to speak, something about the deaths, the investigation, the safety of the pack, but I was only half listening because something was happening at the back of my mind. A feeling. The same feeling I got when I was on the right track of a case and did not know it yet.

I looked back at the group of visitors once, just briefly.

The man I thought was the Alpha King was not looking at the Alpha anymore.

He was still looking at me.