“I have some thoughts. Henry knows for sure.” He’d found and read some of those old stories, but he hadn’t told anyone what he knew about Tess’s kind of terra indigene. Not even Henry. Safer that way for all of them.
“And yet you let her stay.”
“My choice,” Simon said in a tone that would have warned anyone else that the conversation was done.
“Did you know they’re called Plague Riders in some parts of the world?” Charlie said.
He did know. In contrast, calling them Harvesters made them sound more benign—until you saw what they could do.
“You would be wise to keep that information to yourself,” Simon said. “Especially while you’re here.”
A beat of silence. “Wasn’t intending to share it with anyone but you.”
They walked into the office. The girls had taped maps on the walls and then pinned notes on the maps. Spread out on the table were photos of trains and buses and pictures Theral must have printed off the computer of signs that read WELCOME TO … some town or other.
Seeing the images, Charlie grinned, then said in a conductor’s voice, “All aboard! Next stop, Wheatfield!”
Meg spun around so fast she stumbled into the sorting table. “What did you say?”
Charlie backed up. “I don’t know. I was just—”
Merri Lee leaped at Charlie and held up a list. “Say the names of these towns, just like you did that other one.”
When Charlie looked at him for some explanation, Simon just shrugged, too busy trying to keep his ears from shifting. His human ears hadn’t heard whatever Merri Lee and Meg had heard, but the Wolf ears wouldn’t do any better because it was the tone that had significance. Human ears could hear that just fine. His brain understood but his instincts weren’t convinced.
Charlie obliged, saying the town names the way a conductor would. Meg shook her head or nodded. Merri Lee wrote in that damn notebook while Ruthie made notations on the map. When Charlie called out the last name, the girls sagged, and Simon realized Tess was right—they needed to rest.
“That’s it,” Merri Lee said.
“What’s it?” Simon asked.
“That’s what I remember of the journey to Lakeside,” Meg said, sounding too weary. “It’s broken up, and there are too many possibilities of how I got to the first town name I remember hearing. I’m sorry, Simon. I don’t think I can get closer than that.”
He looked at the map. “Nothing to be sorry about. We started with the whole continent this morning. You’ve narrowed it down to a region.”
“That’s still a lot of towns and cities,” Ruthie said, sounding uneasy.
“It’s fine.” He tried a smile. When Ruthie and Merri Lee paled, he ran his tongue over his canines. Damn. Those were definitely not human anymore.
“We should take a break,” Meg said. “Get some air. And I could use another sandwich.”
There was something too deliberate about the way the girls set their notebooks on the sorting table before heading out.
“Can we look at these?” Charlie asked, reaching for Merri Lee’s notebook.
“I don’t know,” Simon replied, wishing he knew either more or less about human females. <Henry? Gather our guests and bring them to the Liaison’s Office.>
While they waited, Simon studied the map. Either Meg had been scared witless or she’d been attempting to hide her trail from a hunter. She’d been right to assume the Controller had sent men after her, but he’d seen rabbits with a Wolf on their tails zigzag less than she had. And since the bus station and the train depot were both in the downtown part of Lakeside and south of the Courtyard, how had she ended up north of the Courtyard in order to head back down until she reached the Liaison’s Office and Howling Good Reads the night she applied for the job?
She may have been a brainless female for being out in a storm that night, and she probably arrived on the last bus or train that had reached Lakeside, but she’d gained enough time to escape capture and find the terra indigene.
The room usually felt like it had plenty of space, but with so many earth natives crowding around the map, he was glad he didn’t have a tail right now that could get stepped on.
“So, the enemy is in the Midwest,” Joe Wolfgard said. “That’s confirmation enough for us. We know what we need to do.”
“That can be the last choice,” Simon said. “First, we’ll try to narrow the search for the prey.”
They didn’t want it to be a last choice. He saw that truth in the eyes of the Midwest leaders. Humans were causing too much trouble. It was time to seriously thin the herds. He wasn’t opposed to thinning if it needed to be done, but that would mean abandoning everything humans made in that part of Thaisia or asking terra indigene to take up those tasks. Which meant more of the Others staying in human form for hours a day in order to do the work.
Maybe the Midwest leaders were also considering what they would have to ask of their own because Cheryl Hawkgard finally said, “How do we narrow the search?”
He bared his teeth in a smile. “Now we get the police to help us.”
CHAPTER 25
When Simon walked into A Little Bite the next morning, he found Meg, Merri Lee, Ruthie, and Theral sitting at a table scribbling in notebooks and talking in voices so low he’d have to shift his ears to hear them.
But it was Tess who caught his attention. Her hair was solid red and curling wildly—a sign her temper had turned savage but not yet lethal.
“Something wrong?” he asked, going behind the counter to stand beside her.
“The bakery truck didn’t make a delivery this morning, and when I called to find out why …” Tess stopped speaking. Black threads appeared in her hair.
Simon resisted the urge to take a step back. As leader, he couldn’t. As a sensible Wolf who now knew what kind of predator he faced, he wanted something more than air between him and her.
“Call that bakery in Ferryman’s Landing,” he suggested. “See what they can provide.”
“Having some baked goods to sell here is not the point and you know it,” Tess snapped. But she kept her voice low enough not to attract the girls’ attention. “If humans aren’t going to keep their side of the agreements, they shouldn’t be allowed to live in Lakeside.”
They shouldn’t be allowed to live is what you really mean, Simon thought.
It was a sentiment he’d heard too many times yesterday as the leaders from other regions talked about their increasingly unsuccessful dealings with humans. Was Lieutenant Montgomery’s arrival in Lakeside Namid’s way of maintaining balance? If the lieutenant wasn’t making an effort to work with him and keep relations between humans and the Courtyard as cordial as possible, would the businesses who refused to provide goods or services have tipped the scales sufficiently that he would have been voicing the same anger and hostility as the other leaders? Probably.
Unlike those other leaders, he did have humans like Montgomery making an effort to understand how their kind fit into the world. And he had employees like Merri Lee, Lorne, and Ruthie. Even Heather hadn’t given him anything to snarl about. All of them had, in fact, given him reason to feel obliged to protect them as he did his own kind.
And then there was Meg with her strange skin and underlying sweet nature that made her not prey.
Could a few humans keep a city balanced enough to avoid a serious fight when the rest of the humans seemed to want to start trouble that would end with many of them dying? Or would these ordinary humans who wanted to live in harmony with the terra indigene become the next group who was persecuted by the rest of their kind? Would the Wolf lovers become like the Intuits and form their own small communities in order to survive?
Did those prejudiced humans understand what would happen if they drove out the very people who were making their presence tolerable?