“We need more information,” I said.
“Yeah.” Frowning, he rubbed his neck.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “You seem . . . uncomfortable. Is it the paw scratching?”
There was laughter in his eyes. “No. It was a good idea, but your delivery sucks. Something is . . . strange out here. Something . . . off.”
“Magic?”
He looked back at me. “I don’t know.”
“Hold on,” I said. His was the only magic I could feel, but I’d let myself be ensconced by it. So I closed my eyes and tried to filter it out, along with all the other scents and sounds that wove through the woods.
Connor and I had left trails of magic along the path, shimmering ribbons of power that wove through the trees. But there was another trail, and this one was . . . different. Still shimmering, but not a ribbon. Not fluid or continuous, but sharp and broken. Angular, like a fork of lightning.
I opened my eyes, looked at him. “There’s magic, but I’m not entirely sure how to describe it. I think it’s broken.”
“Broken,” he said, staring deeper into the woods as he considered. “Yeah. I see that. But why?”
“I have no idea. I don’t know what would make someone—or their magic—leave a trail like that. Illness? Or the effect of some foreign magic?”
He looked back at me. “Like magical sabotage?”
“Or magic by choice. Because someone in the Pack tried magic, and it did something very, very bad. I didn’t detect anything like this with Beth.”
He rubbed his temple. “I was just thinking that. But it was windy last night, could have dissipated faster. The air is still tonight. Let’s check this area,” he said. “If the magic is strong enough to detect it here, maybe that’s not all they left behind.”
We nodded and split up. He moved back to the bank of the creek, and I moved to the edges of what passed for the trail, looking for broken branches or other signs someone had passed through.
It took only a moment.
I was moving away from the water when something flagged my attention. I wasn’t sure what I’d seen—something different enough to have my brain clicking to alert—so I stepped back, looked around. Then crouched in front of a boulder on the edge of the path.
There was grass around the base, and it was trampled flat as if someone had moved near the rock—stood or sat on it—and flattened the grass in the process. They also left a set of footprints that definitely weren’t human.
The marks had the general look of paw prints—toe impressions atop a central pad. But the impressions were elongated, as if the pads were longer and more narrow than a standard wolf’s. And they were massive.
“Connor,” I called out, and heard footsteps behind me a moment later. “Tracks,” I said, pointing toward them. “And I don’t think they’re yours.”
He studied them.
“They look canine, right? But they aren’t shifter.”
“No,” he agreed. “They aren’t. Too wide, too long.”
I held back the obvious joke and was inordinately proud of myself.
“Whatever made them was very large and very heavy,” he said. “That’s what she said.”
I couldn’t help but grin. “I’m glad you said it. I was trying to be serious. So what could make them? A really big dog? A wolverine?”
Connor stood. “There’s been no canine in North America big enough to do this in tens of thousands of years. I don’t know any living creature that makes prints like that—Supernatural or otherwise.”
“What about a cryptid?”
He gave me a dry look.
“What? The Beast of Owatonna is the best lead we’ve got.”
“That’s not a lead. It’s ignorance disguised as science.”
“Okay, then let’s add some science into it. Maybe we don’t need to figure out if this is the Beast. Maybe we just need to figure out what the Beast actually is.”
He blinked. “That’s not bad.”
“I’m feeling very intellectually spry today.”
“Then riddle me this,” he said, turning back to me. “What looks like a cryptid, but smells like Pack?”
“Like Pack,” I said, leaning around him to look at the track. “That’s all you smell?”
“That’s it.”
“Then I have no idea, unless you’ve got a Pack member with a really unusual podiatric condition.”
“I’m not aware of any. Take photos, will you? I don’t have my screen.”
“Because you’re naked,” I said and, reminded of that, had to work very hard to focus on his face.
His smile was wide, cocky. “I am, yes.”
I pulled out my screen, took pictures of the footprints. “How about I send these to Petra?”
“The conspiracy theorist?”
I smiled. “She’s not just a conspiracy theorist.” She was an aeromancer and led the OMB’s technology squad. “She’s also into cryptids.”
Connor’s gaze went flat.
“She’s very good with research,” I added. “And Theo and Yuen are there, too. Maybe someone has an idea.”
Connor sighed. “Send away.”
I did, sending the photos to Petra and Theo and giving them both an update about Loren, Cash’s reaction, and the search, and I asked Petra to check out the pictures and let us know if she found anything interesting. Then I put the screen away again, looked up.
At his face, obviously.
He glanced at the sky. “Let’s get back to the cascades, see what everyone else found.” He grinned at me. “Assuming we can make it back by dawn.”
“If that’s a dig at my speed, you have four legs, and I only have two.”
“At least you acknowledge that’s a weakness, vamp.”
“You wanna test me?”
“At the moment, I can think of many more things I’d rather do to you, Elisa.”
My heart quickened at the knowing look in his eyes. The wolfishness. “I think at the moment we’d better concentrate on the search.” But I put a hand against his bare chest, felt his heart pulse beneath my fingers. Want and need rose up so quickly, they nearly swamped me.
Connor smiled, and there was nothing pleasant in it. Just the harsh acknowledgment of the need. “Maybe I better shift again.”