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I'm out. She's already reversing, and the passenger door swings and slams itself. The Honda backs hard down the bend with gravel spitting out from under it and turns and is gone. The sound of it fades out past the mailbox and then there's nothing.

I turn around.

There's nothing behind me. Just four hundred yards of frozen road and the toppled scarecrow in the ditch and the trees on both sides going up into the fog.

Sid is standing in the middle of the gravel with every hair on his spine lifted, looking at a spot ten feet to my left where there’s nothing at all.

I reach out with the part of me that would have known.

The sound is off. There's no seam, no line, no hum, no warning, nothing anywhere in the world. I'm standing alone on an empty road with no way to feel what's coming.

39

GAGE

STILL ONE DAY UNTIL HALLOWEEN

The Honda comes back around the bend doing forty in reverse, and Maren is still standing in the road.

I'm off the porch in an instant.

Four hundred yards. I've run it in my head about nine hundred times this morning. Cass shouts something behind me. The car's gone by the time I'm halfway, taillights around the trees, and Maren hasn't moved.

She's facing the woods on the west side, and the cat's in the gravel with his back up, and she's got both hands open at her sides like she's waiting to catch something.

I put myself between her and the trees.

Nothing comes.

I stand there in the cold with my heart beating fast and I pull the whole road into my lungs for a scent and all I get is frost. Wet leaves. Diesel off the county truck that went through yesterday. Her.

That's it.

No rot. No smoke. No burned rosemary. No human being who’s stood there recently, which is a thing I can smell whether I want to or not.

Nothing at all.

My nose never fails me. What’s going on?

Same, my wolf says.

"Gage."

"I'm here."

"Is it still there?"

"No." I turn around. "There's nothing there."

She nods. She's very calm. That surprises me. Her mouth is doing something and the rest of her face has gone blank. I've seen that once before, on my second day of being an Alpha, in the face of a man who'd just identified his brother.

"Okay," she says. "Can we go inside?"

I clear the house.

Cass understands in about two seconds and takes everyone down to the tree line. No one says a word to Maren on the way out.

Maren sits on the end of the couch with her grandmother's quilt over her knees and starts talking.