The transition from prisoner to employee was jarring, mostly because the pack had absolutely no idea what to do with her.
Two days after the incident in the courtyard, Gwen stood at the edge of the armory wearing thick oiled leather pants and a heavy wool tunic that actually fit. She was running a whetstone down the edge of her skinner.
Across the yard, Declan and three other wolves were watching her. They weren't hiding it. They glared with open, naked hostility. To them, she was a walking contradiction. A fragile human who smelled like valley soap and silver death.
Bram walked out of the keep, strapping a thick leather bracer to his forearm. He looked at Declan, then at Gwen.
"We lose daylight in four hours," Bram called out, his voice easily carrying over the wind. "Declan, Finn, Una, you're with me. We track the rogue's path back up the ridge. We find out where it crossed our borders."
Declan spat into the mud. He walked over to Bram, not bothering to lower his voice.
"You're bringing the human. She'll slow us down in the snow. And if she trips and cuts one of us with those silver toys—"
"If she wanted you dead, Declan, you'd be bleeding out in the snow right now," Bram said, his tone dangerously flat. "She tracks better than you do."
Declan's jaw clenched. He looked like he wanted to argue, but he knew better than to challenge the alpha in front of the gate. He turned on his heel and marched toward the tree line.
The deep woods behind the Iron Crag were not meant for humans. The trees were ancient towering pines with needles so thick they blocked out the sun, plunging the forest floor into perpetual freezing twilight. The snow here wasn't the slush of the courtyard. It was deep, powdery, and treacherous.
The wolves moved through it with infuriating ease. They didn't sink. They glided, their senses expanding into the dark woods. Gwen trudged behind them. She was working twice as hard to keep up, her boots breaking through the crust of the snow. But her eyes were scanning everything.
An hour into the trek, Declan stopped. He knelt, pressing his face close to the snow, taking a deep, shuddering breath.
"Scent trail is gone," Declan grunted, standing up and brushing the snow from his knees. "The wind shifted, wiped it clean. We're chasing ghosts."
"No, we aren't," Gwen said.
She walked past him, ignoring his sneer. She didn't look at the snow. She looked at the bark of the pine trees. She walked ten paces to the right, stopping by a massive twisted trunk.
"It didn't go straight," Gwen said, pointing to a tiny, almost invisible snag of coarse gray hair caught in the hardened sap about four feet off the ground. "It was staggering. Favoring its right side. It bumped into this tree."
She dropped to a crouch, brushing the top layer of fresh powder away with her gloved hand. Underneath, the older packed snow was fractured. Not a paw print, but a disruption in the ice crust.
"It dragged its left hind leg. Here." She pointed to the fracture. She moved three paces forward, brushing the snow again. "And here. The stride is short. It was turning toward the ravine."
Bram walked over. He looked at the snag of hair, then down at the disturbed ice. He looked at Declan.
Declan stared at the evidence, his mouth a hard, tight line. He couldn't smell it, but he couldn't deny the physical proof.
"Lead the way, hunter," Bram said softly.
They pushed deeper. For three hours, Gwen dictated the pace. She read the woods like a scholar reads a rare manuscript. She found broken twigs, crushed lichen on rocks, and drops of frozen black blood that had been buried under fresh snowfall. She didn't rely on magic or enhanced senses. She relied on ruthless, exhausting attention to detail.
The wolves watched her. The hostility in Una and Finn's eyes slowly morphed into wary fascination. Humans were supposed to be blind and deaf in the woods. They were supposed to be prey. But Gwen wasn't prey. She was a predator operating on a completely different frequency.
By late afternoon, the light began to fail, rapidly turning the forest shadows from blue to bruised purple. The temperature plummeted.
"Hold," Gwen suddenly hissed, raising a fist.
The wolves froze instantly. Gwen pointed toward a narrow rocky defile ahead. The snow there was heavily trampled.
The scent hit them a second later, carried on a sudden downdraft of wind. It wasn't just rot blood. It was the stench of an open slaughterhouse.
Bram drew his broadsword. Declan readied his axes. They advanced silently, slipping through the rocks.
In the clearing beyond, the source of the rot was clear. It was a massacre.
A small herd of mountain elk lay scattered across the blood-soaked snow. But they hadn't been eaten. They had been mutilated, ripped apart in a frenzy of pure violence and left to rot.
"Waste," Finn whispered, horrified. To the pack, killing for anything other than survival was a sin.
"Not just waste," Gwen said quietly, kneeling by the nearest carcass.
She examined the bite radius on the elk's neck. She pulled a dagger and dug a large jagged tooth out of the frozen muscle. She held it up. It was massive, stained black with rot.
"The rogue in the yard didn't do this," Gwen said, her voice grim. "Look at the size of the bite marks. Look at the spacing of the tracks."
Bram knelt beside her, his face inches from hers as he examined the tracks in the mud and snow.
"There wasn't one rogue," Bram said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper.
"No," Gwen agreed, wiping the tooth on her leathers. "There's a whole pack of them. And they're heading straight down the mountain, toward the valley."