Chapter 59 CHAPTER 061
Stone POV:
It was Mara. One of Elder Dorin's family. His daughter-in-law.
She reached the inner edge of the crowd and her voice came through clearly now.
"Cian." She was looking around, turning in a half-circle. "Has anyone seen Cian — Dorin's grandson, he was just — has anyone—"
Her eyes found me.
The crowd had gone quiet the way crowds did when the wrong person heard the wrong thing.
I moved toward her. "When."
"An hour ago, maybe less, he was playing near the east gardens and I went inside briefly, I was only inside for — he was right there—" Her voice broke and steadied and broke again. "He's six. He knows not to leave the grounds, he wouldn't just—"
"Harry."
He was already beside me.
"East gardens. Expand from there — outer perimeter, all access points. Full sweep." I looked at him. "Quietly. I don't want this becoming a panic."
"I'll take four teams." He was already turning. "Give me forty minutes."
He was gone before I finished nodding.
I turned to Mara and kept my voice even and measured, the voice that was meant to communicate that everything was still within the bounds of what could be managed.
"We're looking," I told her. "Stay here.”
Forty minutes became an hour.
I stood near the central fire and watched the festival continue around me. The festival had to continue, because stopping it would confirm that something was wrong, and two hundred panicked people in a contained space was going to be its own kind of emergency.
I decided not to drink anything, even though my throat itched for something harsh. I spoke to people who approached me and maintained the necessary conversations. I also kept my attention on the edge of the grounds where Harry would return.
“Alpha, I heard the economy is barely doing okay due to the growing security issues. How do you intend to work on that?” One of the guests I had invited from a nearby pack had asked, sincere curiosity painting his face.
I clenched my fists. Thankfully, they were behind me. “I am working on it.”
Mara had been taken to a quiet corner by one of the older women. I could see her from where I stood. She was sitting very still, which was worse somehow than if she'd kept moving.
The tournament had resumed. The fire was still burning. Someone was playing a stringed instrument somewhere behind me and the notes kept arriving pleasantly and incorrectly.
Harry appeared at the eastern edge of the grounds.
His face told me before he reached me.
"Nothing," he said quietly, arriving at my side without breaking stride so that we were both facing the same direction and the conversation looked, from a distance, like nothing more than two people standing near a fire. "We swept the east gardens, the outer path, both gates, the northern ridge line. Called in all four teams. We walked every inch of the ground's perimeter."
"And."
"No sign. Nothing disturbed at the gates. No scent trail beyond the wall that the trackers could pick up cleanly." He paused. "It's like he was just — gone."
I turned this over.
A six-year-old didn't simply leave no trail.
"Keep two teams on rotation," I said. "Don't pull them back in."
"Already done."
I was about to respond when the second voice reached us.
A different direction this time. The western side of the grounds, near the tables.
Another woman, younger than Mara, her voice higher and less controlled — not the careful desperate searching of someone hoping to be wrong, but something rawer, something that had already reached a conclusion it couldn't accept.
The festival noise continued around us, oblivious and warm and completely wrong for the moment.
"Two children," Harry said quietly.
"Two children," I said.
The fire burned in the center of it all, high and steady, throwing its light across the faces of two hundred people who did not yet know that something had come onto these grounds tonight.
Something that could take a child and leave no trace.
By the third child, the festival was over in everything but name.
I shut it down after the fourth. No announcement — I told the elder nearest to me and word moved through the grounds the way bad news always did. The torches stayed lit because everyone had more important things to do. The food went cold on the tables.
Every eyes remained fixed on me, some cast side glances, whilst others murmured something
By the fifth, the grounds were empty.
Five children. Three hours. No trail, no witness. Mothers who had looked away for sixty seconds. Fathers who had been ten feet away and seen nothing. The search patterns kept coming back empty and the guards kept returning with the same expression wearing thinner each time.
I stood at the edge of the eastern grounds and let the night air do what it did.
Then it arrived. Faint, low, underneath the smoke and crowd-smell. Something foreign. Something that had been here and moved and thought it hadn't left anything behind.
It had.
"Harry."
He appeared at my shoulder and went still in the same moment I had — his chin lifting slightly, the tell he'd had since we were young.
"East," he said.
"East," I confirmed.
We moved.
The trail held all the way to the tree line, where the town dissolved into scrubland and the kind of nothing that collected abandoned things.
The house sat at the edge like something the landscape had misplaced. Old timber, one window with the board hanging loose. No light inside.
We stopped.
The scent was dense here. Multiple sources, layered, and underneath it something that made the back of my neck tighten with a recognition that had nothing to do with thought.
Then the sound.
Small. Thin. A child trying not to cry too loudly and failing.
Harry's hand came to my arm for exactly one second. Then dropped.
We went in.
The sound was clearer inside — coming from the back room, close, through the open door. I moved through the dark with Harry covering the left—
The room was empty.
Not a child. Bare boards and moonlight through a gap in the roof. The sound was coming from outside the walls, through them. Designed to arrive here and sound exactly like what it wasn't.
I turned.
They came through the walls on three sides simultaneously.