Prologue Part 2
612 Words
Sage’s POV
I read the briefing file on the flight.
Heath Blackwood, thirty-five years old. Alpha of the Bull Mountain pack for nine years. Appalachian eastern territory, one of the largest and most defensible pack holdings on the eastern seaboard. His father, Rowan Blackwood, had been Alpha before him — by all accounts one of the most respected pack leaders of his generation. The son had inherited the territory at twenty-six after Rowan's death and had held it without a formal challenge ever since.
The Council's file characterized him as erratic. Increasingly unstable under the pressure of an ongoing rogue crisis that he had failed to contain. Multiple surrounding packs had suffered incursions. His resource requests had been denied — repeatedly, the file noted, because they did not meet the threshold for emergency Council intervention.
I read that three times.
Emergency Council intervention has a threshold of roughly two dead wolves and a pack in active collapse. Whatever was happening on Heath Blackwood's eastern border had apparently not yet crossed it, despite fourteen months of documented attacks.
I looked out the plane window at the dark below and thought about thresholds.
Then I pulled up the incident reports.
The rogue attacks on Bull Mountain's eastern boundary followed a pattern. Not random. Not the chaotic violence of a wolf who had broken from their pack and lost their mind in the wilderness — which is what rogue violence looks like, which is what the Council's file called it. These attacks came in clusters. They hit the same section of perimeter within a four-minute window between patrol overlaps, every single time. Even when the patrol schedules were adjusted.
A rogue wolf doesn't know your patrol schedule.
A rogue wolf doesn't hit the same four-minute window across fourteen months of attempts.
I closed the file. Opened it again. Read the incident reports from the beginning, this time mapping them against each other.
The pattern held. Worse than I'd thought — there were three separate attack sites, all miles apart, all different pack territories. And the timing across all three was identical. Like someone was running the same operation across three different locations simultaneously.
I sat with that for a long time.
There was something else. Something that didn't have a clean explanation.
Two of the incident reports contained witness accounts from Blackwood's patrol wolves who had engaged the rogues at the tree line. Both accounts described the same thing, in different words, written by different wolves, filed months apart.
The rogues weren't behaving like rogues.
Not in the way that mattered. They fought with pack coordination. They covered each other's flanks. They retreated in formation, not in panic. One patrol wolf had written, in the flat language of someone trying to describe something they didn't have words for: they moved like they were still taking orders. Like someone was still in there, but it wasn't them anymore.
I put the file down.
Outside the plane window, the dark had given way to the first gray light of dawn, the eastern sky bruising purple and orange at the edges. Somewhere below, mountains I couldn't yet see were holding a territory I was being sent to compromise.
The wolf in my chest stirred.
"I know," I told her.
Something was wrong. Not with Blackwood. Not the way the Council had described it.
Something else entirely.
And I was flying east to walk into the middle of it.
My wolf pressed against my ribs, low and urgent, the way she does when she's trying to tell me something I'm not ready to hear.
"Don't start," I said.
She went quiet. But she didn't look away from the dawn.
- Writer
