Sex: MaleSomething was wrong.
It was not difficult to notice a change in the female members of the pack – there were so few in Grizzly Hollow to begin with. Jaysek came and she went, as fleeting as her mate’s sense of time and space, but the others were generally fixed figures. And then she was gone. Not the Queen, but Cinder – the other side to the one coin. He’d never met the other Attaya sister personally, but knew her in passing as often as he puttered through the territory to become aware of her absence once her scent began to fade.
While he was no scout, and certainly no tracker, Veho did not hesitate to put his dark nose to the ground once he did find a passable trail. It was faint at best – perhaps a more trained wolf would have been able to discern more than a direction, but the man was left to do his best, going as quickly as he dared without crashing into a tree trunk or tripping over roots. The further he got from Grizzly Hollow, the more erratic the path became – there were other scents he did not recognize, and if the man were perhaps more intuitive or more cynical, he might have been alarmed before he’d reached the small drips of blood.
Pale eyes widening, the male stuttered to a halt and put up a howl, urgent in his call for any of the other adult members of the Hollow. This was not a task he could see through on his own. What had happened here? Where had Cinder gone? Heart pounding, Veho released a second howl – the wolves of Grizzly Hollow could be in danger.