“The office needs to stay open a while longer,” Meg said. “You go ahead and get started.”
“You’ll be okay here on your own?”
“Arooeeooeeoo!Arooeeooeeoo!”
Meg sighed as Skippy’s yodeling arroo sounded just outside the sorting room’s delivery doors. “I’ll be fine. I’ll walk out with you.”
“Aren’t you going to let him in?” Merri Lee asked.
“Not until I’m sure he’s not trying to sneak a mouse into the office,” Meg replied. “Especially since Nathan isn’t here to sniff them out.”
Her human friends hurried to the back door of A Little Bite. The juvenile Wolf, sans any furry toys, came into the office.
As Meg carefully filed the photos Ruth had taken for their experiment, she thought about the tone of the other girls’ voices when they talked about the Guide. Not a dismissal of whatever bad thing was happening to the other cassandra sangue, but a distraction, an effort to help.
And that was a different kind of reference. A Life Reference.
Meg labeled that audio memory “cheering up a friend.”
* * *
Standing at the upstairs window that gave him a view of the paved area behind the stores, Simon watched Merri Lee and Ruthie hurry toward A Little Bite while Steve Ferryman yapped at him over the phone.
“They didn’t say you had to remove the wallpaper from the rooms, just the extra things that make the room look too busy,” he said when Steve stopped for a moment. And why did humans put paper on walls anyway?
“Are the girls sure removing everything but essentials from the rooms won’t cause more trauma?” Steve asked.
“No, they’re not sure. But telling the blood prophet pups what to expect should help. I have to go. More calls to make.”
“Thanks for this. Really.”
Simon ended the call, then walked to the desk in HGR’s office. Pointless to write e-mail. The packs would be out searching. Probably pointless to call and leave messages on the phones. But some Wolves did put on a collar that had a leather pouch attached in order to carry a mobile phone or some other human item. A howl carried for miles and didn’t depend on poles and lines or metal towers to carry messages. A howl would travel from Wolf to Wolf, providing information to everyone within range. But police wouldn’t recognize an “I found something!” howl; they would need a phone call.
He called Jackson first and condensed everything Meg’s pack had told him into one sentence: treat the blood prophets like puppies who don’t know anything and are afraid of everything.
Wasn’t likely any of the girls would be found near Sweetwater, an area in the Northwest that contained an Intuit village and the terra indigene settlement where Jackson lived. A few weeks ago, a simple roadblock had been set up across the road leading to that area after a human village had been contaminated with gone over wolf, a drug made from the blood of cassandra sangue. No one could have left girls along that road without the Others knowing about it.
The phone rang under his hand, startling him enough to snap at the person on the other end. “What?”
“Simon?”
“Joe?” Something wrong. Terribly wrong. Kicked by a bison, ribs caved in wrong.
“We found . . . We didn’t know . . .” Joe’s howl of grief had Simon leaping to his feet.
“You found some of the girls?” Roadkill. Not all of those girls would have Meg’s strength and desire to survive. Was that why Joe was grieving?