It was the kind of dark you only got at two in the morning, somewhere out along the country’s southernmost border. Damian wasn’t actually certain which side of it they were on, but that wasn’t his job anyway. He was wearing fur tonight, tracking their target through the scrub and dust of the landscape. His crew were on loan to the DEA, which was pretty much all he knew about their current chain of command.

The men moved again, making their way down an easy hill into a valley. Damian followed behind, wary of being seen. There were wild wolves in the hills out here, or things that a wolf might pass for. He didn’t want to get shot.

Since the night Salem’s picture had disappeared from the Nevada Ashes website, he’d thrown himself head and shoulders into his work, to a degree that had driven Oscar to sit him down one day and ask him what was wrong. He still checked the pages, though, before going to bed, reading each description and watching each video. The drinking hadn’t gotten worse, but it hadn’t gotten better either. Mixed blessings, he supposed. It did let him sleep, though the quality of that sleep was questionable.

He trotted a quarter mile to the east of the little group, thinking to get ahead of them a little. So far, they hadn’t done anything unexpected and their likely goal was somewhere in the region north and east of their current position; it was a judgment call, but a reasonable one, he thought. As he tracked across the side of the hill, he listened for the sound of their targets’ feet as they crunched over the ground, and wondered how far behind him his team was. The darn thing about wolf form was that, while it was easier to sneak-follow someone, it was impossible to check that the tracker around his neck was working. He hoped it was—once he’d followed their quarry to their main den, the rest of the team was supposed to swoop in and clean it out.

The footsteps stopped. Damian hunkered down in a clump of scrub brush halfway down the side of the valley and listened. Seconds later, the sounds of truck springs and doors closing rang through the night and an engine started.

Shit. He bolted straight for the sounds, hoping like hell his team would get the message and scramble after him.

At the bottom of the hill, he slowed to a lope, trying to look like any other wild predator in the area. Headlights crawled away in the distance and he trotted after them, watching for any signs that they were going to turn off their current straight track. He’d let them get too far away from him, though, and the lights disappeared at a speed that he wasn’t going to be able to keep up with unless he ran until his heart burst. Still, he followed them with eyes and ears as far as he could, then began walking the pattern that would tell his team that he’d lost them.

This would be the second action he’d fucked up in the past month. And he didn’t care. Not a bit. He raised his head and watched the waxing moon above him, and wondered when it would be okay to just call it quits.

“How the fuck did you lose them?” their DEA contact roared at Oscar. “There’s fuck all out there! Sage and rocks. You’re telling me your crack tracker couldn’t follow them through that?”

“I’m telling you that unless he had a motorbike, he wasn’t keeping up with them.” Oscar’s voice was low and mean, but Damian could tell he was also holding back.

The two of them were arguing in a co-opted old abandoned quonset hut of indeterminate age, about the size of a one-car garage. Damian was sitting outside in the air with his back against the end wall, wondering if he should take up smoking for times like this and fighting the desire to just go back to his wolf form and disappear into the darkness.

Their squad was scattered around the building, killing time and shooting him dirty looks. He only caught the growl he was making when he turned his head and the echo bounced back to him from the building wall—he’d thought it was all inside his head.

Damian took a deep breath and got to his feet. Fuck this. Fuck it all. And stalked into the hut.

“I lost them because I didn’t want to get shot. In case they thought I was hunting them.” He spat the words out at the DEA guy. “You don’t get to put a value on my life, that’s my job.”

“Your job was to make sure they didn’t leave!” the human yelled, pointing a finger in his face.

Oscar grabbed for the man’s arm, but it was almost like watching slow motion. Damian was up in the man’s face before Oscar could even get a hand on him. “You do it then, since you’re so damn good at it,” he growled.

The stink of fear rolled off the man’s body, then was obliterated by a sharp, violent rage. “You fucking dogs are only good for one thing and you can’t even do that! We hired you because you’re supposed to know how to track and how herd a target!” the man reached for his gun, but Oscar got between them and the next thing Damian knew, he was being dragged backwards out of the hut, his heels scrabbling in the dirt.

They threw him to the ground in the moonlight and he lay there, letting the light soothe him. Father Lysoon, Guardian of Wolves, here this the prayer of your children… Any time he twitched, he heard the subtle clack of weaponry, and so he stayed still and listened for…what? An epiphany? He thought he’d already had it.

In the nighttime quiet, he had to borrow from his wolf to hear what was going on around him. Which was how he heard Oscar say, “We need to give him a break. Shifters are pack animals, they don’t do well on their own. I was looking at the records—”

Then, obviously coming in through the satellite phone, “We can’t have them coming and going and have the Bureau poking its nose in.”

“No, but Sir, if you look at the records, even the most successful ones have never made it past ten years. Not cut off from their packs. You can’t deal with them like humans.”

“If he goes feral, just shoot him. He can always be replaced. It’s not a pleasant part of the job, but far more pleasant than explaining to some nice suburban family why their son or daughter was mauled to death in their bedroom some full moon night.”

Damian stopped listening at that point and wondered if he was going lunar. Or if he was just so lonely it felt like it. Maybe they were the same thing.

He didn’t want to die. But after listening to that call, it didn’t seem like he was going to have much choice.