The alley seemed to tilt. The city had teeth. The night had become something older than light or law. He had always thought of himself as a person who kept accounts of it. Now the account had a balance that could not be set right by signatures and sealed warrants.
He felt the eyes of the city press upon him and knew, as if he had read it on a page, that answering would be the harder part. The box was open, the brand marked on his skin as well as the wood, and something that had slept inside him like a coiled promise had woken with a soft click.
"You should leave," the scarred man said, voice weak. "This ain't for you."
Brendon looked at the hooded woman. She had no answer in her eyes but neither had she the intention of leaving.
"Not tonight," she said. "Not you. Not me."
The alley swallowed the phrase. In the distance a siren wailed like someone singing the wrong hymn. Brendon had the feeling they had just stepped into a ledger line no one else had yet read. The city was a book and the next pages were wet with ink. He had a choice: to close the crate, walk away, and file it neatly under a heading that would get him awards and terrible silence, or to pry it open and see what grew in the dark.
He touched the etched bone, feeling the chill through the burlap and through his glove. The mark looked back at him like an accusation.
Sofie's voice was a small, urgent thing. "You need to get out of there."
He did not move immediately. He wanted, stubbornly, to look back one more time at the brand: the circle, the three lines. He had a sense — not proof, only that low, dangerous thing called instinct — that the brand belonged to those who dealt in myth and the consumption of it. If there were people who trafficked in charms made from living things, and if those charms required bones and etchings and the kind of rituals that cut more than skin, then the city had deeper roots than he had supposed. He touched the brand again as if to find a thread and then, finally, let go.
They left the crate and the men and the meat. Brendon did not know yet whether he had taken a step toward light or into a deeper dark, but the alley would not let him go back the same. Things had names now. Names have the bad habit of calling people to action. Ninja Fox slipped into the shadow like a thought and watched him go with eyes that knew the price of curiosity.
When he turned the corner toward the street, his reflection in a rain-slick window looked at him and did not quite belong. The name stamped on his chest by the city — detective, sheriff, wolf — felt less useful than the quiet whisper rising under his ribs. He had kept it like a wound.
Sofie's voice asked him, suddenly and carefully, "You sure you're okay?"
He allowed himself a very small smile that did not reach his eyes. "Yeah. I'm fine. Stay on the feed. Don't go anywhere else."
He did not tell her that a piece inside him had answered the brand as if it were a call. He did not tell her that the alley had given him the wrong kind of treasure. He folded the knowledge into his chest like a page he had to read again. The city walked ahead — smoke and neon and the scent of meat — and he followed, because that was what he always did. Questions changed to plans in the small, steady furnace of his mind.
Behind him, in the mouth of the alley, the hooded woman watched the crate like a sentinel. When Brendon glanced back once, the shadow rose and bowed its head in a gesture that might have been respect, might have been measurement. He could not say which. He had the sense, unbidden and cold, that this encounter was only the first of many evidences.
The city kept coughing smoke. He breathed it in because he had to. It tasted like the beginning of something that would not let him go.