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On the laptop he’d called up a satellite map of the arctic. FrostFur lived in interior Alaska. They were so much in the middle of nowhere the closest road was two hundred miles away. Unlikely they had running water, on-grid electricity, or even a satellite phone. The only way in was by bush plane, the only way through was on foot, dogsled, or snowmobile. There was no way to sneak into FrostFur. Especially not in December.
If I’d drawn my boundary lines right, FrostFur contained two small airstrips. The one on the southwest corner was tiny, short, and required landing skis in winter. The other, on the eastern border, was maybe ten or twenty miles from the heart, and according to the FAA, was gravel and plowed in winter. I could make out a few structures clinging to the runway.
My father had done everything possible to obfuscate my mating, up to and including not bloody recording it. Jerron had a vested interest in not sending out announcement cards. Unless AmberHowl had told FrostFur, the odds were FrostFur was so isolated they wouldn’t know what had happened. If the arctic empire theory was correct, if the FrostFur knew I was a Mortcombe, I’d be dead within minutes of landing. But odds were damn good they wouldn’t know.
If I was going to do something, now was the time. It was a tiny window, but I wasn’t a very big wolf.
“So this is where you tell us what’s going on,” Jun said tersely. “This is why Burian gets pissed. You two just go off and do fuck-all and come back bitten up with some dramatic story.”
“Jun.” Cye picked at his sleeve.
“No, I’m serious.” Jun jerked his arm away from Cye. “Burian’s got that much right. You want things to go back to how they were, right? Then what the hell are we doing pretending to be Elders?”
I set the chocolate down. It tasted like battery acid foam.
“Walk. Away,” Jun told Sterling. “Whatever it is, just walk.”
Sterling’s response was a cool, distant stare. “There is no walking away. Demetrius wanted something for his help. He sprang it as a personal favor after the fact.”
Jun rounded on Sterling, “When were you going to tell us?!”
“When we knew what to tell you, and we still don’t know what to tell you, because we don’t understand this ourselves,” Sterling replied.
Cye gently entwined his arm with Jun’s and pulled the bigger wolf away from Sterling, murmuring something about trusting us, and the less they knew, the better.
“But he fucked you,” Jun said anyway.
“I didn’t say I was going to give him what he wanted. I want to know why he wants it, so I can beat him over the head with it.”
“Oh, shit,” Jun muttered. Cye eeped.
My dream had been so vivid. Those puppies. I shuddered and thought about the picture. Hundreds of copies of the picture, arranged in a flower with the safe deposit box at the center. I closed my eyes again and forced myself to remember the flower. All the petals had been folded inward a bit and stacked on top of each other in a big poof-like shape like a mum.
Mums bloomed in autumn?
That was no help. My mother’s name had been Autumn. Obviously she had left the deposit box.
What was it a picture of? A pond. A deep pond. A blue pond. A metallic pond. A pond that froze. A circular pond. A pond with no fish. A spring-fed pond.
Spring.
My mother’s older sister’s name was Spring. She still lived in FrostFur.
Holy crap, Mom… I stared at the photo in absolute shock.
“On the scent.” Sterling’s voice curled like smoke around me.
There was no chance I could get into FrostFur, but maybe I could get a FrostFur to come to me. I mentally indexed each of my vertebrae. I’d need my spine for my next trick. “I’m not going to tell you my plan, except it involves me being slippery like an eel. There’s only one way to do this and you won’t like it.”
Sterling shrugged. “As long as it’s not a bald-face lie. I am trying to keep some of my honor intact, but I’m ceasing to value it very much. Every other Alpha seems to be dirty and grimy, and I have no particular aversion to ratting when I’m hungry enough.”
“You ratted?” Jun asked.
Sterling gestured to the old scars on his face, tilting his head so the light revealed them. He was so pale that the pale slashes blended in except under specific lights. “It was rats or starve.”
I gave a hollow laugh. “Well, I’m not ratting, but I’m going to bait a trap, and see if the prey is curious, but not the sort of curious to ask the wrong questions.”
His gaze was a brewing storm. “I’m really not going to like this, am I.”
