Zero had followed the same cold trail for eleven years, and tonight the trail ended at a stone he had already visited twice. The monument stood at the foot of a redwood wider than a longship. Moss covered its base. Old carvings marked its face. Five hundred years ago, a woman matching Eilidh's description had been seen here. That was the last real word he had of her. He set his hand on the stone the way another man might touch a door he could not open. He kept his base in the broken cathedral a half night's walk east. The roof was gone. Colored glass still held in some of the high windows, cracked but bright when the moon came through. He slept in the crypt when he slept at all. On the altar he kept a map, a knife, and a candle burned almost to the holder. The wax had pooled and hardened around the base in thick brown layers. He had lit that candle over every failed lead for six years. Tonight he lit it again and watched the flame lean. He touched the round bead in the second braid from the left of his beard. Eilidh's. He always knew where it sat. He could still see her face clearer than any city he had burned or any century he had crossed. He had chosen his sire on purpose, knowing what he would become, because a man could search longer than a mortal could. He had not expected to find her fast. He had expected to find her. The shadows around the altar shifted before he heard the wolves. Six of them came through the empty doorway, dark-coated, eyes lit like coals. Dire wolves, bigger than any hound. They did not attack. The lead female walked to within an arm's length of him and dropped something at his boot. A strip of cloth. Old linen, stained dark, the weave the kind Eilidh's people had used. He lifted it. Under the smoke and years, he caught a scent he had not caught in five centuries. Faint. Real. Northwest. The wolf turned and waited at the door. Zero pinched the candle out between his fingers. He did not bother to pack the map. He followed the pack into the trees, and for the first time in eleven years he was moving toward something instead of circling a stone. The scent was thin. Cold air would thin it further before dawn. He had learned once, hard, the difference between moving fast enough and being close enough. Tonight he needed both, and he did not yet know who had sent the wolves, or why they had come for him now.