But it had.
Now only the ruins of the Bartleby place remained, tumbled fireplaces and fire-blasted brick, charred lumber under nearly a century's worth of detritus. The estate had burned to the ground in 1904. The only human beings who had seen it in the past few decades had literally stumbled across it. Almost all had continued on, thinking nothing at all of it.
Almost all.
A few had poked around, even tried to camp there. Hikers, mostly, and mostly from out of town. Some of those had never made it home.
It was a sacred place to the Pack, for it was where Bartleby himself had been slain those many years ago. The Prowlers who had lived upon that land had been driven off, not to return for decades. Once they had returned, however, and created of Buckton a sanctuary where all Prowlers were welcome so long as they followed the rules, the ruins became their meeting place, the chapel within which they worshipped all that was wild.
If the Prowlers could be said to have a religion, that was it. The wild and the wilderness. And the blood of prey.
It was late afternoon that Thursday, nearly one hundred years after Bartleby's murder, that the Alpha bounded along paths human eyes would have missed, up the Pine Hill toward the ruins. Rain pelted from the sky and slicked back his fur. He barely noticed the storm, however. His blood raged with a fury that had been all too common in recent days, and yet this latest development had upset him more than anything else.
A steady, ululating snarl emerged from his throat as his claws tore at the ground, and he burst from the last stand of trees beside the remains of Bartleby's sanctum.
The others were already there. At times - particularly when, as now, they met during the day - some of them would choose to appear in their human forms. In the rain, especially, they might have opted to wear coats or hold umbrellas to protect them from the elements. Such things disgusted the Alpha. The elements were part of the Wild. The Prowlers were part of it as well.
Among the ruins, nine members of the Pack awaited his arrival, mostly elders. The rest were in the town, going about the business of their human lives in a community filled with people who had no idea that monsters lived amongst them. Other pack members were still far from home, wandering across the world, though they would return someday.
When the Alpha reached the ruins, he paused, then advanced slowly, head high, establishing his primacy within the Pack. The others approached cautiously, lowered their snouts in greeting. Even those in human form cast their gazes at the ground. He waited until all such proprieties had been dispensed with before he spoke a single word.
It rumbled from his chest like rolling thunder.
"Desmond."
The young Prowler, who had challenged him three years earlier for Alpha and lost, raised his head with a start and a barely audible whimper. Then Desmond slunk back a step from the circle they had made among the ruins of their history.
"You have much to answer for," the Alpha went on.
Defiantly, the other Prowler bared his teeth. "I did what I thought was right. If you had not written the book - "
With a roar, the Alpha rose up to his full height and slashed Desmond across the snout, tearing bloody gashes in his fur. The cur cried out in pain and clasped long talons to his face.
"What you did!" the Alpha growled. "Oh, what you did, you little bastard. That book is our legacy, our history, to be passed down to those who come after us, so that no one shall ever forget Bartleby and the principles upon which this sanctuary was founded."
Desmond sneered, blood dripping from his wounds. "That book is an abomination. You claim to despise human things, but you write this . . . this bible for the Pack, just like a human. Oral history has - "
"Silence!" the Alpha growled, and Desmond obeyed instantly. "Oral history is little better than mythology, particularly with the packs scattered and so many nomads drifting in the world. When they come to find sanctuary here, they need to understand what they have found."
The Alpha paced a moment, then leaped at Desmond, the sheer force of his presence forcing the younger beast to back down.
"Enough of this. I do not have to explain myself to you," he snarled in the guttural voice of the beast. You have put this sanctuary and everything it stands for at risk. The first law of our Pack - the law that has allowed us to survive so long when so many of the Great Packs upon this continent have died out or been hunted to extinction - says that we must never hunt at home."
"It was not hunting," Desmond replied, though tentatively, eyes downcast. "It was self-preservation."
The Alpha sat upon his hind legs and addressed the upper hierarchy of the Pack arrayed about him. "What he did, this foolish beast, was slaughter Foster Marlin and Phil Garraty, right here in Buckton."
"Marlin found the book. You didn't hide it well enough. He found it, and he read it," Desmond went on, voice tinged with pleading now. "Worst of all, he believed it. He had to die."
The Alpha growled low in contemplation. "There were other ways. You know the laws of this sanctuary. We have lived among the humans long enough to know there were other ways. Marlin may have read the book, but with him dead, we have no way to know what has become of it. And what of the postman?"
"Garraty brought the letters, the demands," Desmond reasoned, almost whining now.
At the young one's words, the Alpha reared back and slashed him again, this time long gashes upon his shoulder. "Garraty was the postman, you idiot!" he screamed. "It was his job to bring
