Page 115 of Claimed

“It was bad, but this makes it sound like it’s worse. Locked from the outside? Wyatt must have locked everything down before they came here. People have been leaving, running away. Maybe he’s trying to stop whoever is left?”

“People sick when you left?”

“I mean… sort of.”

“Wanna help me make sense of what you’re sayin’, sweetheart?” I ask.

“We’d been losing our elderly,” she whispers. “Losing them faster than we should. They seem to take a turn and go downhillfast. It wasn’t like… a lot at once but it was more than seemed normal.”

“No pack healer?” I ask.

She scoffs.

“I take that as ano. I don’t know exactly what Linc’s catching with his nose, but he says it smells like something he came across once where a pack was being poisoned.”

She stares at me with pain in her eyes.

“Talk to me.”

“Like I said, the water… it’s bad. He’s got so much junk and nobody’s ever taken care to protect the soil. He says he can’t afford to dig another well. Not that there’s likely anywhere left on that land that’s not affected. We’re on our third in ten years. He sold part of the land to developers with windmills or something and they didn’t put anything in yet, but it felt like our territory has shrunk to the size of the junkyard, but it’s more like our whole village has become the junkyard.” She shrugs. “I haven’t been gone that long, so I don’t know if it’s worse than it was. If more people ran off. And… I might be desensitized to that smell.”

“Need to throw a bag together with a couple days’ worth of clothes and get down there quickly. Do you think you can do that for us?”

She nods, but she looks utterly broken. And I hate it.

“We’ll help,” I tell her.

“What could you do, though?” she asks, looking perplexed and also hopeful.

“We’ll see what we’re lookin’ at when we get there and make a plan from there. I promise, I’ll do whatever I can do to help.”

“I know,” she says softly, like I’ve said the right answer, given her what she was hoping for. “And I’m so, so grateful for that, Greyson.” She loses it and starts to cry.

I kiss her while holding tight, adding, “We’ve got Dr. Blakely from the SCC coming with us and Catrina Savage, Ty’s mom, pack healer. They’re rounding up first aid supplies, bringing jugs of water and food since we don’t know what we’re looking at. Let’s get there as soon as we can, yeah?”

“Okay.”

“I’m gonna go talk to Luke. Get him to answer some questions, see if he’s got any info about the state of things when he left that’d help us know what we’re lookin’ at. If you can throw that bag together for us, that’d be good.”

My phone pings with a text and it’s Riley.

Brody called. He wants to help out. He’ll meet you there.

Brody, Riley’s brother, is a year younger than we are. He hasn’t been home in months. He’s alpha, used to work with us at Savage Construction, but has been away a lot the last ten years. He tends to come back three or four times a year.

I reply with:

Perfect.

Turning to Stacy, I say, “It’ll be me, Riley’s brother Brody, a couple guys from the pack, the doc, Cat, you and Luke. We’ve got Jase, Linc, and Jared already there. Joel, Mase, Ty, and Rye will hang back and look after things here.”

“Wow,” she says, pulling away, drying her tears on her sleeves. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

I quickly pull her back to me and kiss her head.

“I hate my brother,” she mutters into my chest.

I kiss her head again and give her a squeeze, feeling the same.

---