THE ROGUE: HUNTED BY THE ALPHA

Ghosts in the Green (cont)

She backtracked the boot prints along their approach line. They came from the southeast, from the direction of the pack territorial boundary she had been careful to stay clear of for the past two months. She had drifted, in the course of the previous week, a little farther south than her usual range; there was a wild herb she used for the scent-masking compound that only grew in the southern drainage, and she had needed to replenish her supply. She had been cautious. Apparently she had not been cautious enough.

She stood at the furthest point the prints reached, which was a slight clearing where two of them had stood and faced northwest, toward the center of her territory, before turning back. Scouts. Checking whether the territory was occupied. The fact that they had retreated rather than pressing forward meant they had not found definitive evidence of habitation. But they had been close enough to the outer ring of her trap system to potentially notice the disturbances in the soil around the pressure boards.

The cold, clean calculations began immediately. Move the camp: yes. How far: depends on whether this was a routine patrol expansion or a directed search. How to determine which: wait and observe versus relocate immediately. Her wolf, the part of her that was all animal instinct and almost no human deliberation, said move. Her mind, the part of her that had kept her alive when pure instinct would have gotten her killed three times over, said gather more information first.

She compromised, because she had learned that the two halves of herself argued better when they were given equal consideration. She would spend one more full day in the current territory, observing. If the scouts returned, or if she detected any additional indicators of directed search activity, she would break camp and move.

She did not love the camp. Loving things you might have to leave behind was a habit she had broken early. But it was functional, and functionality was what she was made of now.

* * *

The camp was not much to look at, which was intentional.

She had built it into the northeastern face of a limestone outcropping, using the natural overhang as a roof and supplementing it with woven branches she had replaced three times since spring to keep them fresh and scent-neutral. The floor was packed earth covered with a layer of dry moss that she aired out twice a week. She had a bedroll, military grade and stolen from a Hollow Fang raider she had relieved of his equipment and his consciousness eighteen months ago. She had a pack, a cookfire ring of stones set back deep enough under the overhang that the smoke dispersed through the rock cracks rather than rising in a visible column. She had a water collection system running from a notched branch to a clay pot. She had a weapons rack: two hunting knives, a short blade she had made herself from scavenged metal, and a short bow with a quiver of twelve arrows.

She had a book.

It was the only thing she carried that had no survival value. A battered tactical manual from her father's library, its cover worn soft as cloth, its margins filled with his handwriting in the tight, precise script he had used for everything; grocery lists, field notes, letters that he revised seven times before sending and sometimes did not send at all. Aldric Voss had been a meticulous man. Careful. Thorough. He had been careful and thorough right up to the night that carefulness and thoroughness had not been enough.

She did not open the book every day. Some days it was enough to know it was there.

She ate breakfast alone, as she ate every meal: dried venison, a handful of the wild grain she had foraged and dried earlier in the week, water boiled over a fire she kept low and fast. She ate efficiently, without pleasure or complaint. Food was fuel. This was one of those shifts that had happened so gradually she had not noticed the exact moment of it; somewhere in the first year of exile, eating had stopped being something she enjoyed and started being something she managed. She was aware of the loss. She did not have the luxury of grieving it properly yet.

Yet. She kept that word like a coin she planned to spend eventually.