easily, although they didn’t seem inclined to fight once the witch disappeared into the darkness. He made a mental note that the girl had been their objective for whatever reason, and chalked that up to the strange happenings around witches.
He didn’t know how she did it, since she wasn’t moving particularly fast, but it was like she faded into thin air the second she started running. Not even the sound of her footsteps gave him a clue to where she went. Frustrated at the fight and not understanding who the hell she was and why she was on his territory, Henry wanted to confront her. Not that she waited to be held accountable for kicking up so much trouble.
There was no telling what the coyotes wanted with her. They’d been quiet for some time after the defeat of their leadership and the ass-kicking they got from Evershaw after siding with the BadCreek pack outside the city. Henry had been glad to see the end of all that nonsense, with the final defeat of the rich but evil pack conducting experiments on shifters and setting wolves against wolves in their fucked-up games. All the shifters in the city came together to defeat them and eventually kill their leaders. Everything had been quiet.
Maybe too quiet.
He clenched his jaw and sniffed the air, searching for a hint of her scent. The girl could be a danger to his pack, to SilverLine, and to his family—whether that was Deirdre or Evershaw or his adopted siblings didn’t matter. She was a stranger and was too powerful to be running around causing trouble on her own. She had to be working for someone or in the city for a reason. From what Deirdre said, not many witches worked by themselves.
The last thing the city needed was an evil coven of witches or a rogue witch making trouble on her own. It was bad enough Deirdre dealt with her aunt and a bunch of old crones in her old coven who hated shifters and thought themselves better than everyone else.
Henry growled in irritation and put his nose in the air, sniffing and searching for which direction she went. He needed to at least know where she’d gone to ground. Maybe Deirdre could handle her the next morning, witch to witch, and Henry wouldn’t have to deal with the girl again. His side still ached from where she’d used her magic against him.
He trotted in the direction he thought she’d gone and tried to figure out exactly what she smelled like. It wasn’t perfume or the herb-y scent that swirled around Deirdre after the witch worked magic, but the strange witch… It was something else. Something appealing, something that clung to him and worked its way into his brain. Something sweet but flowery, a little wild and untamed.
Wandering through the city gave him time to reflect on the conflict with the coyotes and what made a young woman flee through the city on her own, on foot, in the middle of the night. Particularly in a dodgy neighborhood. Maybe she’d run afoul of the new coyote alpha, a hard-ass woman named Daisy, though it didn’t seem likely that the witch would have gone out of her way to confront a full pack.
He didn’t like mysteries. At all. Henry moved faster as he caught another hint of her scent—something like honeysuckle and jasmine, sweet and tropical and wild. The wolf wanted a lungful of the scent, not just the hints and threads that teased him on the breeze. He growled in irritation as the trail brought him into the bears’ territory. Kaiser’s bears were mostly allies, although Henry had his hesitations about being around grizzlies and polar bears and their mates. Bears were unpredictable and massive enough they could fight off a full wolfpack without too much effort. Trespassing on their territory was looking for trouble when he was on his own and neck-deep in a mystery.
Maybe the witch knew the bears after all, and there was something else going on between the bears and the coyotes. Henry grumbled and shifted back to human as he approached a certain alley near the bears’ den. An ice chest abandoned near a dumpster actually contained spare clothes that were available for all shifters to use, since Kaiser and his mate grew tired of naked shifters stumbling around in their neighborhood, particularly as their young cubs grew up and knew enough to ask questions about naked people.