Page 56 of Secrets and Ruin

I wasn’t the first to Dirk. Landon was grabbing Dirk’s arm.

“You’ve got that right,” Landon snarled, pushing Dirk toward me as I broke free of the trees.

“You have three hours, one for each of you,” Rainer said as I grabbed my nephew and pulled him to follow me back into the trees. “Then I start hunting. You better hope my brother comes to me first.” As we started to run, I heard Rainer’s bitter laugh. “You better hope he loves you more than he did his first family! His real one!”

23

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ididn’t need a second warning. The hair on the back of my neck rose at the thought of being hunted by Rainer Brandt. Something about him made every animal instinct in me want to get the fuck away from him and stay out of his territory.

“Dirk, I’ve got you,” Landon said from behind us, me pulling Dirk as quickly as he could go. “If you need to slow or stop—”

“Fuck that,” Dirk groaned, keeping up with me now that we’d gotten moving. I let go, seeing he was doing fine with this, at least. He was clearly in pain, but he was moving mostly normally. “We need to find a safe spot.”

“He’s a wolf. We need to be slow and trick up his nose,” Landon fired back.

Dirk didn’t reply, groaning as he pushed himself to get ahead of me. When we reached a game trail, he skidded to a stop.

“What are you doing?” Landon asked in a frantic growl. “We keep running.”

“No,” Dirk said, shaking his head. “I need to…,” He started looking around, but he didn’t finish his explanation for us. He wandered down the game trail a little too slow for my comfort, his eyes scanning around us.

“We didn’t see Niko moving around,” I said, wondering if he was hoping for signs of his father or would see him in the darkness. “He would have caught up or picked the fight with Rainer by now if he was close enough to hear all of that.”

Dirk looked up at me, pale under his bruises.

“Don’t say his name,” Dirk said softly. “Don’t.”

“Yeah, names have power and all that,” Landon said, grumbling at Dirk. “Why are we slowing here? A game trail is too easy. We’ll get caught, and we’re not making enough ground.”

“I need to find something.” Dirk went back to his search.

“What?” I dared to ask. No matter what direction we went, we would eventually leave the forest. That was geography. “And why?”

“I can explain later. Just let me do this,” Dirk said, shuffling through bushes around the game trail. He wasn’t using his sense, at least not the way I knew most moon cursed did. He wasn’t sniffing for a trail. He was looking, his eyes darting around the forest, not at the ground but into the distance of the dark place.

“Explain now so we can help,” Landon said, his growl telling me he was ready to pull rank when Dirk didn’t say anything. “Damn it, Dirk!

“It sounds ridiculous. I need you to trust me,” Dirk snapped. “And I’ve never done this before.”

“You grew up here.” Landon’s agitation was a little reasonable, but I was beginning to find it hard to bite my tongue as the werewolves got snappy.

“Yeah, I did. As ahuman,and Ineverwent this deep into the forest. I’m a werewolf now. It’s….” Dirk shook his head finally. “Niko knows how to explain… can try, though. It sounds ridiculous. I haven’t even seen it before, so I’m not even sure if it’s real, but I have to try.”

“We trust you,” I finally said, giving Dirk an even look. When he nodded, I turned to Landon and slashed my hand, a warning to cut that shit out, or I would be the one he could get snappy with. Looking a bit shamed, he bowed his head slightly in respect. Dirk missed the exchange to continue his search.

We followed the game trail for some time, Dirk setting the pace.

“There,” he whispered, his voice full of awe.

“What do you see?” Landon asked softly, mollified by my interjection and warning.

“The werewolves, the Black Forest Pack, left their own magical trails in places they ran repeatedly. Their own safe paths, Niko said. When he became a werecat, he would feel them but not see them. I hadn’t seen it before, but,” Dirk ran up to a point and stopped, looking at something I couldn’t see, his hand dancing over it. “He was right. I thought he was bullshitting me.” Dirk looked over his shoulder. “He said he never heard of a werewolf getting lost when they stayed on the path.Thispath. The others are for everyone else. We reached the game trail and I figured game trails change over the years, but perhaps one of the wolf trails might be nearby, evidence it was always a good hunting area or something.”

“A different path,” I said, almost not surprised. I stepped closer but couldn’t see or feel anything. When I looked at Landon, he sniffed, shaking his head as he got nothing.

“There’s only one problem with this.” Landon crossed his arms as we started following Dirk, leading the way down his invisible trail. “He’ll know these, too.”

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