Page 77 of Shifter's Homecoming

“Khain’s kind of poison.”

Grey changed position. He got up off the truck. He moved around a little bit. Then he went back to Soren. “Work with me here, man, tell me what is going on, would you?”

Soren looked at him. “Yeah, ok. You know the poison that Khain used thirty years ago?”

“Yeah.”

“One drop of it has been coming through dimensions each day for thirty years and dropping into that pool down there—see it, the one that is separated from the reservoir with the fence around it? Rex is pretty sure Khain didn’t even know it was happening. He’s also pretty sure the wolves knew he didn’t know it was happening and they’ve been keeping it all hush-hush so we wouldn’t find out. That’s why there’s no guards or anything down there.”

“That we can see,” Grey said.

Soren nodded. “Right. No guards that we can see. So Rowan is a chemist or something and she was hired by the environmental company to find an antidote for the poison, and in order to do that, she made it stronger. Rex is all excited because there’s a vahiy sign about a second poisoning, and now we’ve got the poison.”

It all made sense to Grey. “And he’s going to try to pull that off,” he said flatly. It was a statement, not a question. “Even though there’s no females left to poison.”

“Yeah. It’s stronger, so who knows what kind of damage it can do. Maybe it can poison humans, or the males.”

“Except he can’t get it into the water supply,” Grey said. He went back to the truck and pulled out his binoculars and trained them on the dam at the south side of the reservoir. “This is all dammed off, and you know they’ve got fail-safes and shut off valves everywhere else.”

“He thinks he can figure something out.”

Grey put down the binocs. He bet Rex did. And maybe he thought he didn’t have to actually poison anyone, just trigger the sign.

“What does the sign say exactly?”

Soren picked a flower from the grass under their feet and started pulling the petals off it. “I don’t know. Something about poison.”

Grey tried not to show his irritation with Soren. The guys heart just wasn’t in it. Grey couldn’t blame him.

“Are there any wolves down there?” Grey asked.

“Yeah, Trent and Troy and their mates.”

That knocked Grey on his ass for a minute. “I thought you said Trent was up north.”

“He’s back, and he’s shifted and Rowan is his mate.”

Shit. He and Trent went way back. Trent had always had a hard-on for him, and he would be especially dangerous now. Grey didn’t want to go down there and help with whatever fucked-up plan Rex was scheming up. What he wanted to do was sneak away…

“What are they doing down there right now?”

“Trent is sleeping. Rowan is working. I don’t know what the other two are doing, they are out back in the tree house.”

“Tree house?”

Grey lifted the binocs again and looked hard, finally seeing it. It gave him the creeps that the female, Reed, could make the forest move, but he had to admit that was a pretty cool-looking tree house.

“If Trent is sleeping why don’t you just pop inside and grab his mate?”

Soren gave him a look like he was stupid. “It’s hard whenever anything is up off the ground. Basements are easiest inside, or flat on the ground outside. Plus Trent and Troy being so close throws us off. Theirrenquasmess with our navigation. We can’t guarantee we would show up exactly where we want to be.”

Grey hadn’t known that. He touched his own shoulder. “Myrenquadoesn’t do that?”

Soren gave him a look that Grey could not interpret and then he shook his head.

The smell of the Pravus hit Grey’s nose. Rex appeared a few feet away then walked to them, his entire manner excited. “Get ready, children. The big boss is coming, he’s got plans, and it’s going to be a wild ride,” he said. “But first, we need ideas. How do you fight a tree?”

Grey shook his head. “I don’t know. Chainsaws?”

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