**Blood guilt .**
Bearclaw staggered. His hands clamped the sides of his head. He plunged sideways into Strongbow, who had followed him through the forest at a slight distance.
"Bearclaw!" Woodlock caught the chief's elbow.
Something was in his mind. Bearclaw knew that for certain now. "Stay back," he choked, wrenching away from the others and stumbling to the center of the clearing.
**Dangerous. **
Grimacing, his teeth bared again, he forced his hands down and willed himself to relax. Something was trying to overpower him—or contact him. There on the mossy mound in the clearing, he stood still.
Strongbow and Woodlock shared an uncomfortable glance-almost an embarrassed awareness of each other—and immediately looked once again at Bearclaw's back. He turned away from them. They couldn't see his face at all.
Bearclaw no longer fought the invasion. He gave himself to the impassioned sending as it overwhelmed his thoughts and replaced them. He felt nauseated, disoriented. Pictures of carnage flooded his mind—images of mutilation, of blades or teeth chiseling through bone while on the run—panic— splattering flesh—blood.
Were they images of madness? Or intent? —And which was worse?
"There's something out there."
The others stiffened behind him.
**Humans?**
"Not humans. Something else."
Woodlock unconsciously moved closer to Strongbow. "And it's sending? What could do that?"
**Animal?**
"One of our wolves?" Woodlock offered.
Bearclaw frowned. "Our wolves don't send like ... like what I'm getting."
"What are you getting?"
"Images ... no—feelings. Like the hunt and the kill."
"Something out there means to kill?"
"Or has already," Bearclaw concluded.
Woodlock scanned the forestscape with new apprehension. "And the humans are blaming us ... Bearclaw, what can we do? Reason with them?"
**Invite them home for a game of stones,** Strongbow sent on a sting of bitterness.
Woodlock's anxiety made him face the archer boldly now. "But I don't want to die fighting a cause that's not ours! The Wolfriders shouldn't pay for something we didn't do."
Insulted, Strongbow pushed past him and confronted Bearclaw. **What is it? Can you tell?**
The night became a bodiless enemy, its silence like an animal's throaty growl. The three Wolfriders stood alone in its midst. Even Woodlock and Strongbow imagined they felt something—perhaps only because Bearclaw did.
"A bear," the chief murmured, "or a big cat ... a longtooth—maggots! I don't know. Maybe something we've never seen before. It's out there, hiding or waiting. ..."
"But how can it be sending?" The tremor came out in Woodlock's words no matter how hard he tried to steady it. He forced himself to unclench his fists, loathing the images of Rainsong's beautiful face crumpled in fear when she learned of this. He longed to have the problem solved and finished before he had to go back to the holt and tell her what was going on. Bearclaw would surely order him home when things got bad—he always did. Woodlock knew he was nothing with a blade and only fair with a bow, but he shuddered at the idea of waiting at the holt to see if death was coming tonight. "If it killed humans, how can we defeat it? And if it hurt them, why would they head toward our trees?"
"Maybe they don't know what it is either," Bearclaw said. "If you were human and you didn't know what animal hurt you, what would you think?"
Woodlock stared at him and tried to put it together. Bearclaw waited, hardly even breathing, forcing his tribe-mate to piece out the problem. It was hard for a Wolfrider to think like a human, to imagine life among the animals and trees while not really a part of them. The humans hid from the night— usually—and they either hunted or feared all the creatures of the forest. Woodlock's task was a strain. Bearclaw continued to wait.
"No ..." Woodlock's eyes drifted closed. "Our wolves!"
**Our wolves?** Strongbow hadn't put it together yet, either. **What do you mean? What do the humans want with our—** He stopped suddenly, and nearly choked on his own sending. His eyes glazed with sudden knowledge.
Bearclaw looked at him. "Now you know. And Woodlock's right. We shouldn't pay for another beast's kill. And neither should our wolves. We've got to get the humans off our trail. Woodlock, go back to the holt and tell our pack to move into the hills and stay away for a few days."
"But if we have to fight—"
**We can't fight the humans without our wolves!**
"Swallow it, Strongbow! We'll fight them on squirrel-back if I say we will. Get going, Woodlock."
"All right ... Bearclaw?"
"What?"
This time Woodlock's message was sent rather than spoken, excluding Strongbow as he gazed at his chief. **We'll follow you, no matter what happens.**
Touched to calmness, Bearclaw breathed deeply and squeezed Woodlock's shoulder. Then he gestured him off into the woods toward the holt.
He and his archer stood in the core of their home forest, between their holt and the encroaching humans, whose torchfire they could now smell strongly as it wafted through the trees.
"We've got to find the longtooth," Bearclaw said.
**First sensible thing you've said all night.**
Bearclaw hovered a moment before leading the way in the direction the poignant sending had come from. "Let's hope it's not the last."
The images of fear and hurt and flesh flayed to the bone led Bearclaw unerringly to the area of forest where the beasts lay together in their thicket. As he came nearer, he moved more slowly, trying to piece together more and more of the images as they came to him. They no longer caused him pain, but something was touching the deepmost parts of his being—even his soulname fluttered toward the surface now.
And that frightened him.
Could he be so much beast himself that a longtooth or a demon-beast or something with thoughts so horrible could actually reach his soulname? Joyleaf knew his soulname, as a Recognized lifemate must. And Crest had known it before she died. She had been his wolf for moons uncounted, and when she saved his life during an attack by enraged waterbirds in the far lakes, Bearclaw had given her his soulname in gratitude. It was part of the Way, as Strongbow would have insisted, but it was also a matter of choice.
Now, though, he had no choice. His soulname floated near the beast's sending star at the top of his mind, swimming in and out of the kill-thoughts, ready to jump into one of them and be taken freely by the invader. All at once he had something else to guard besides his holt and his tribe. The barriers to his personal self were being clawed down. Only constantly reminding himself that he was chief and had responsibilities kept him from fleeing in the opposite direction, farther and farther from the distressing thought waves gushing over him now. Behind him, Strongbow was still apparently unaffected. This sending came only to Bearclaw. So close now, he ached to know what beast this was who stirred his soulname and almost caught it.
Before them, still many paces away, lay a giant fallen tree, sheathed in vines. Its plate of roots rose high out of the ground. Evidently some cataclysm of the earth had pushed it out, and it had collapsed, sacrificing itself to the nourishment of other life. Now it hid the source of Bearclaw's shredded perceptions. He stopped. Behind him, Strongbow stopped too.
"There," the chief said quietly. "It's there."
**Will it attack?**
"If it has to," Bearclaw whispered.