Sought, sought, the wind whispered.

Ghosteater lifted his head.

Run, the wind sighed.

How long had it been since the wind said such a thing?

He opened his mouth, smelling, tasting. He didn’t know the one seeking him, but it was a creature of power. Male. Young.

How strange. No one sought him any longer.

Interested, he rose to seek the seeker.

The wind brushed through his fur, mumbling its warnings.

The wolf crouched in the silence, watching a dark-haired man walk down a street in the place the humans called Dorf. He didn’t know the man but recognized him for what he was: a power, an émigré. An equal.

Equals were dangerous. His hackles lifted.

Ghosteater had not encountered many dangers of late. The great predators of this continent had vanished, and truth be told, such creatures had stopped posing a meaningful threat when he learned to walk in the silence. Even the cats. How easy it had been to step out in their midst and destroy a whole pride. It had quickly ceased to interest him.

As for humans, despite their strange machines, they were absurdly easy to kill. Soft, blind — it was hard to believe they had multiplied so swiftly, driving so many other creatures from the face of the earth. One day they had appeared, roving in a few spare bands, curious and inventive, but often starving. The next they had overrun vast stretches of the continent. Now even the land they didn’t occupy bore their mark in one way or another.

The same thing had happened in the other world, to a lesser degree. There were still places there where humans didn’t go.

The other world. Unwelcome memories rose. Not many years earlier, enmeshed in the affairs of others, he had shed his blood there. He had met with true danger, in those days. But now those ties were gone.

Sometimes he felt the lesser for it.

He told himself it was good to be free.

The wind agreed, murmuring the word back to him. Free.

As though he too heard the wind, the émigré paused, looking slowly up and down the street. The man had been seeking Ghosteater for two days. He had driven slowly through the countryside, stopping and looking. He had walked all the streets of Dorf several times, wearing different human faces.

For much of that time, Ghosteater had stalked the stalker, mystified by his actions, intrigued by his persistence.

It had been hard to go unseen. The man’s sight was sharp.

He crouched now at the moment of decision: should he turn back into the silence and forget the strange things the wind had shown him in this place, or should he bite the matter and wrestle it down until he understood it?

The wind shifted, blowing from the north. Sharp and pungent, it tempted him with a taste of the boreal forest — the quiet of the deep woods, the sensation of late snow beneath his once-paws, the hot blood of a wolverine in his mouth.

The wind had brought him here, and now it wanted him far away.

He didn’t understand it. The wind didn’t lie. It didn’t jest. It had no mind for such things.

Ghosteater shifted his weight, uncertain. He should probably heed its latest advice. In his experience, the wind didn’t speak of danger lightly.

And yet, what he had seen in this place intrigued him: the woman Justine, who smelled like nothing he’d ever encountered; the pup, Beth, who seemed insignificant, and yet walked all the paths; the golden-haired man; and now, a human émigré, walking alone in the first world.

Ghosteater’s curiosity ate at him.

Coming to a decision at last, he slipped forward, showing himself. “Émigré.”

“Elder beast,” the man replied, stopping and bowing. “You honor me with your presence.”

Ghosteater cared nothing for honor. “You seek me.”

“I do. I have come to ask your assistance.”

Ghosteater cocked his head, waiting.

“One of my people, the woman Elizabeth Joy Ryder, has disappeared from my home. I believe she has been taken by a traitor, but my trackers cannot follow him. I know you met Miss Ryder, spoke with her. I ask you to help me find her.”

Ghosteater sat down, tucking his tail over his once-paws. He studied the man for some time.

These human émigrés weren’t like him. They made rules, played games. They spoke words they didn’t mean. They fought with subterfuge and indirection, not tooth and claw.

Until they did fight with tooth and claw. Then they destroyed everything. Repugnant.

The she-pup, though — she had interested him. She who walked all the wind’s paths.

The wolf inhaled, tasting the agitation beneath the émigré’s calm demeanor. He wanted the she-pup back very much. Why?

The wind whispered past him, offering no answers.

“A man was here,” Ghosteater said. “A marrow-worker. Slender, golden hair, your smell.”

The émigré nodded. “The traitor.”

“He went to an ancient place. He found a carven strait.”

The man stared at Ghosteater. He smelled astonished. Finally he gathered his wits.

“I had not thought any of those devices were still at large, in this world or the other.”

Ghosteater chuffed with annoyance and said nothing. This species thought itself all-knowing. Many such workings were lost and forgotten eons before his own source species appeared, much less this man’s.

“Elder beast, do you know where the companion strait is located?”

“No.”

The man stood silently, thinking.

“Would you be willing to track the traitor for me?”

Ghosteater tilted his head. Becoming entangled with the émigré was dangerous. The wind had said so. A thrill ran through him, a pale echo of his first hunts, of his last battles.

The émigré seemed to sense his excitement. “The man is exceedingly dangerous. Any who track him will be struck down, unless their strength exceeds his. None of my trackers is strong enough.”

A hunt. A true hunt.

“If it is as you say, I will track him.”

The man nodded. “The debt is mine.”

Ghosteater was not, by nature, a keeper of accounts. He would help the émigré because the situation interested him, not out of benevolence or because he wanted a favor in return. Nevertheless, he said nothing. His long life had taught him some caution.

“The trail begins near the eastern edge of this continent,” the man said. “We can get there most quickly in my airplane.”

The great beast rose and came forward. The émigré stepped back, watchfulness and caution evident in his posture.

That was as it should be.

Ghosteater looked out the small window. The man, whose name was Cordus, had warned him of the airplane’s fragility, so he kept his once-paws carefully silent. He stared down at the tiny lights beneath, clusters connected by slender strings, sprinkled all over with single stars. Small pools of darkness marked bodies of water, and then a long darkness came as the airplane crossed one of the great freshwater seas the ice had left behind.

He sat back on his haunches.

How strange to pass over the land from far above. How deeply strange.

The aircraft struck him as insubstantial, ephemeral. He could have destroyed it with ease. Yet for all its frailty, it did something he would have thought impossible.

He felt unsettled. He had paid little mind to the humans who came to these lands mere millennia ago, thinking them a passing blight. Perhaps they deserved greater attention.

Outside, the violated wind howled by, its voice muted by the plane’s walls.

Danger, it said. Run.