It’s #bookqw and our hero is ‘deep’ into a hunt.
More of the excerpt from The Unraveling, Volume One of The Luminated Threads:
Wellspring Collective, Blighted Basin
Daeryn Darkcoat’s paws carried his polecat form in a weasel’s rolling leaps along a dirt road. The setting moon, just past half, lit Wellspring Collective’s rows of plants in the sharp grays and blacks of his nocturnal vision. Butternut squash on the right and a late planting of beans to the left. Nothing amiss.
And yet squeaks, pitched higher than the thrum of crickets, carried across his assigned patrol section. Perking his ears, Daeryn caught the stray sound again. There. Homing in, he slunk his long, brown body down the hill to the open front of an equipment shed.
Scritch…scritch, scritch.
Not calls, but scratching. Claws on metal. Deep shadows hid one of the pests they’d been hunting for days, but it was there. Somewhere. Daeryn padded closer to the row of tillers and raised his snout.
No scent but engine oil. He hesitated. This animal’s actions were different. What farm pest entered a rain shelter full of equipment when hundreds of acres of vegetables lay available for the taking?
Scritch…
Daeryn charged through the tillers.
A shadow shifted at the back wall. The forest of metal legs stuck out everywhere, the low water tanks blocked his leaps. He twisted and—
—slammed into an inches-wide crack, nose tickled by disappearing fur.
Damn. He scuttled back, skirted machines and tore out of the shed. Behind it, he jumped on a crate and paused on his toes, ready to spring. Broad squash leaves covered the still field.
Nothing. Nothing.
At least his teammates’ fleeting glimpses had gained them clues: The pest ran versus hopped, had black fur, no tail on a low body—shorter even than his polecat height of eleven inches on the paw, Jac had taunted.
He couldn’t justify more time here. Bunching his hindquarters, Daeryn sprang. He hit the dirt road with a bound and raced it to a crossroad on a hummock. Along the farm boundary, up and down the tree line beyond the fields, only the autumn leaves stirred.
Maraquin should have been visible. Where was that wolf?
~~~
Want to read more? Buy this first book, The Unraveling, and the next two in the series singly or as a box set!
The trade paperbacks are also available.
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