I don’t bother with anything besides brushing my teeth. I throw on some shorts and a T-shirt and jog halfway to the crone’s cottage, working out the kinks in my muscles still lingering from a night on the ground. The morning sun has burned off the dew, but there’s a mugginess to the air.

When the woods thicken, I strip and shift, hanging my clothes from a branch. Immediately, my wolf scents Nuria. It’s stale. Days old. Disturbing.

It’s too faint for a human’s sense of smell, but to my wolf, it’s a neon arrow.

He follows his nose, up a mossy bank, through oaks with trunks wound in ivy,...