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The first man grabs my jacket. I drive my forehead into his nose. Bone gives and he falls back with blood spilling over his mouth.

“Where are they?” I ask.

He laughs through it. “Already gone.”

I hit him again. One clean strike to the ribs that takes his breath and puts him on the ground.

Wes kicks the knife away and pulls a radio from the second man’s belt. Static cracks. Then a voice.

“West branch clear. Omega and beta moving toward the old channel.”

My vision narrows.

Wes presses the radio button. “Copy.”

The voice on the other end pauses. “Who is this?”

Wes drops the radio into the mud and crushes it beneath his boot. “They know where Pepper went.”

“Then we take the service branch.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

An old Saints path runs behind the caretaker shed, cuts through a stand of palmetto, and joins the higher ridge above the channel. If Hammer sent men after Pepper and Ezra, he will place blockers here to keep me from reaching them.

Wes retrieves cuffs from his belt and secures the two men to the iron fence around the Delaney family plot. “You boys sit tight.”

One spits near his boot.

Wes looks down at him. “You’re already having a bad morning. Don’t piss me off.”

We move.

The fog grows thicker beneath the trees. Sunlight reaches the canopy but can’t break through. It turns everything white and gray. Cypress trunks appear without warning. Roots lift from the ground like fingers. The land is wet without rain. Water presses up through the soil in places that were dry yesterday.

I hear Pepper gasp to my right. I turn, but there is nothing. Rosemary drifts through the fog. Too strong, as though she’s in heat.

The land is using her scent. I keep moving north.

Wes glances at me. “You hear something?”

“Her.”

“Real?”

“No.” I say it as if I believe it, as if my alpha isn’t clawing at my chest to go to her.

The sound comes again. A sharp breath. Then Pepper calling my name from deeper in the trees. Every alpha instinct in me tears toward it.

It takes everything I have to stay on the ridge path. The curse wants me to follow the strongest plea. I know that now.

“Not her,” I say.

The fog opens long enough to show two boys running ahead of us. One tall and broad even at seventeen. The other thinner, stumbling, one hand clamped over a bleeding shoulder. Ezra and me.

My insides riot at the image of those lost boys. Then the trees close and they’re gone.