Page 29 of Burning Secrets

Or maybe God’s voice.So do not fear, for I am with you. I will strengthen you and help you.

Funny, she used to wake up often with a verse in her head. She couldn’t remember the last time, however.

“Do you see anything?” Crew, standing behind her, his scent raking off him, mingling with the wind, stirring inside her.

She’d watched him sleep last night, just for a moment, his dark lashes whispering against his cheekbones, his a sort of restlessness even in his repose.

They mess with you, they mess with me.

“I don’t know. We might need to get closer to the river, see if we can find some scat. Wait—” Her view stopped on carrion near the water’s edge. Dark gray fur…oh no. “I think I found Cleo.” She handed him the monocular. “By the water, next to that trio of birch trees.”

She moved the monocular for him.

“Yeah, I see it.”

“Can we get down there?”

He lowered the glass. “Let’s go.” Then he held out his hand.

She took it, held on.Two are better than one.

He led her down the slope, grabbing on to tree limbs, bracing his feet on rocks, tiny pebbles shooting down before them. Her own personal Pulaski.

They reached the flatter terrain, worked their way to the creek bank, and she let go when she spotted the carcass. Flies lifted from the remains, and she covered her nose with her handkerchief, kneeling by the body. “Yeah, it’s Cleo. She still has her tracking collar. It seems she hasn’t been dead for long. Not a lot of decay. And she wasn’t attacked. No blood.”

“Disease?”

“Maybe.” She stood up. “Hopefully the pups are still alive. I don’t think she’d go far from them, especially without Brutus to protect them. But where’s the pack?” She studied the shoreline opposite the creek bed. Rocky, with shallow overhangs and caves.

“Maybe they got scared off. Dogs can smell death and disease, so…Although, if she ate poisoned fish, wouldn’t she have smelled it?”

She nodded, started walking down the riverbank. “Unless it smelled like something she might be familiar with…like nightshade.”

“Do wolves eat dead fish?”

“If prey is scarce. They’re predators, but they’re also scavengers.” She’d stopped, seeing another mound of fur farther up the shore. “Oh no.”

He followed her and confirmed her fears as they came closer. “It looks like a pup.”

“Yeah.” She knelt beside this one too. Not as many flies. “He looks more recent.”

Crew put a hand on her shoulder. “Hear that?”

She stood, listened over the rush of the creek. A tiny, high-pitched moan. “Whining.”

“Hungry puppies?”

She studied the creek, searching the rock.

“There,” he said, pointing upstream. “See the pup?”

Indeed, a gray mound of fur lay on the stream bed, outside the mouth of a recess.

She ran down the riverbed, toward the animal. The creek here ran maybe a foot or two deep, and she splashed out, nearly fell save for Crew’s hand on her elbow, and then she almost pulled him down.

He hooked her hand, steadied her as she crossed the deepest part and over to the other side.

The pup lay as if sleeping but didn’t raise its head, the wind raking through the fur. She knelt and put her hand on its body.

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