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"Do you know who or what left these?" I ask.

He doesn't move.

"Say it."

She isn't...

Then he locks. Whole body, claws out on the boards, eyes gone flat and stupid, and it holds for three full seconds while I crouch there like an idiot with my hand out.

He sags. Shakes himself. Looks at the prints and then up the road.

Ask me something easier.

"Is she going to hurt Maren?"

He gives me nothing at all, and I don't know what to think about that.

Two trucks come up my road at eight forty.

Cass is off the porch before the first one stops. Tobin gets out of the second one slower, and doesn't knock on the door frame. Something’s wrong.

The man who comes out of the lead truck is a little shorter than me and about twenty years older, gray to the jaw, hands loose at his sides. Ansel has never raised his voice at me. He's never had to.

"Gage."

"You could've called."

"I did. Tuesday, Wednesday, and again last night." He looks past me at the six wolves in my yard, at the sacks of rock salt against my porch post, at the burned-out ring in the dirt by the fire pit. "You've got half my hunters standing in a witch's yard in the daylight."

"They're not your hunters."

"No," he agrees. "But, that's rather the problem."

Threat, my wolf says, and I put a hand on him and hold.

Ansel steps closer. Not aggressive. Worse. Reasonable.

"Marcy's girls are seven," he says. "They're going as ghosts this year, both of them, because they can't agree on anything else. Thursday night there were nine of those things standing on this grass. Do you want to tell me what happens when there are ninety and they're not standing on your grass anymore?"

"Nothing happens to your kids."

"You can't promise that."

"No."

"Then hand her to the Lantern." He says it gently. "There are thirty witches behind those gates. The walls are a century old. She'd be safer there in an hour than she's been in a fortnight out here, and this pack goes back to being nobody's business. Clean hands. Old rules."

Behind him, Cass shifts her weight, and I put two fingers up where only she can see them. She stops.

"She said no," I tell him.

"She's not pack."

"She's a person. She said no."

"And you'd let forty of us stand in front of that answer?" Ansel tips his head. "Or is it that you don't want her behind someone else's walls?"

The yard gets quiet.