Gone To Ground

William Draven Yarrow owes a favor he didn't ask for. Now Zane Spencer is calling it in. A wolf pack in the Davy Crockett National Forest has gone dark. Six weeks of silence from ninety years of steady contact, though the boundary markers are still fresh, still tended, like nothing's wrong. Yarrow doesn't believe nothing's wrong. He's never once been sent somewhere that actually was. What he finds isn't a pack gone feral. It's a pack that traded its own pups for silence, and an alpha who's been buying that silence one specimen sample at a time. North of the den, a timber operation is cutting old growth it has no lease to touch, and the forest itself is dying by degrees, slow enough that no one filed a report, fast enough that something ancient and rooted in that ground doesn't have much longer to wait. Yarrow doesn't do rescues. He executes warrants, closes files, drives home. There's no warrant for what's happening in Davy Crockett, and the pups don't have time to wait on him to write one. Yarrow knew the price would be high. He didn't know it would be blood.