Drake fell onto the bed face first with a groan. The sun had set and taken with it a considerable amount of energy. “Three of them!” he growled into the sheets. “There’s three of them!”

Someone patted his shoulder, and a quick sniff said it was Slick. “With three, chances are pretty good we’re not dealing with kidnappers,” Slick pointed out. “It’s too much trouble. There’d be no sense to it.”

“No dead bodies either,” Lydia said as she propped her axe against the wall. “Not gonna complain about that.”

“Ohhh! I wanna cuddle!” Rudy practically jumped on the bed, changing into his fur before he was out of his clothes and tangling himself in the sleeves. Drake turned to avoid the bundle of fur while Slick smiled and helped the wolf shed the fabric.

“Do you think it’s him?” Lydia asked as she tied back her hair.

Drake glared at her. “I thought we already established that Black Fox wasn’t the damned bastard.”

“The first two weren’t,” Lydia countered as she slipped off her pants and threw them in the corner with the rest of the laundry. “This is a new one.”

“He acts different too,” Slick commented, brushing out Rudy’s fur. “The first two made my skin crawl. I wouldn’t mind ripping them apart and sending them back where they came from. This third one, though…” His hand slowed, and Rudy looked up with a small whine. Slick smiled down at the red wolf. “He’s different from the other two.”

“The other two have the same personality,” Drake guessed. “They’re arrogant know-it-alls. The new guy has to make himself be an arrogant know-it-all.”

Slick nodded. “Gives it a different flavor when it’s forced.” It also added a lot of strain mentally.

“Where’s Trace?” Drake asked, twisting and sitting up. “And the captain?”

“The captain wants some way to track the new guy. 24 hour monitoring. Unfortunately the new guy is a bit better at spotting it than his brothers so getting a tracker on him is going to be hard,” Lydia said as she stretched. “Or so I was told.”

“Think there was something behind the mask?” Slick asked. “A display, tracking system, or a monitoring system?”

“Nothing so advanced as that,” Drake laughed. “Trace would be all over it if he even suspected someone could fit one of his tablets in a mask. I’d be finding creams for chafe marks on his face.”

“Don’t laugh about chafe marks,” Lydia bit back with a playful tone. “If I remember correctly, you were the one with the nasty rash in unmentionable places.”

“You displease me.” Drake made his voice deeper and ominous with just a bit of effort. “There were never rashes, and if there were, they would not be mentioned even after death.”

With a laugh and a blown kiss to the fox shrine, Lydia skipped to the bed. “Drake’s got a sec-ret.”

“And it better stay that way. Slick! You’re the super-brain behind behavior,” Drake grumbled. “You’d know better than any of us. What’s the mask for? And forget super-tech. Forest Fox can’t afford decent cameras, much less fancy shit.”

“All that talk about eyes; he wanted to seem homesick,” Lydia said. She crawled into bed with them dressed only in her shirt, yawning widely and settling herself across Drake’s shoulders. “Too much of a fuss for that to be the real reason. And too obvious.”

“Maybe there’s something under there that is distinct from the other two. Something he can’t hide,” Slick said. He ran his hand through Rudy’s fur in a soothing scratch that had the wolf almost purring. “Maybe he can’t show the right expressions to match the others, or maybe there’s a scar?”

“He’s still not our fox, though, right?” Drake asked. “I mean, he’s the wrong breed, still. You all saw the black ears and that black tail with a white tip. That’s about as far from a desert fox as you get.”

“You are right there. These three are weird, but not our little one,” Lydia said. “We should just ask what we need to and then kick them out. A lot less work that way.”

“We’d need a way to get all three of them,” Slick pointed out. “And they’re being very careful to not be in the village at the same time.”

Drake went rigid. “That means they’re staying outside the wall,” he said slowly. “If a simun burst through…” A simun could be both brutal and deadly. They popped up suddenly and scoured the desert with winds faster than any creature, filled with sand that could literally rub the skin off - and more. And if that didn’t take a wolf down, the bits that got in your lungs and eyes (and into your blood through those raw cuts, damn them) could strike days or weeks later.

“Hopefully they’re smart enough not to stick around unprotected,” Lydia drawled. “They must be working on some sort of shelter. I’d be more worried about scorpions and snakes. Slip into your bedroll easier than sand while you slept. Do they even know how to get water without going back to the forest?”

“Probably not. A patrol of the perimeter should help find a shelter if they made one, and beefing up wall security might catch them. They must be getting in and out somehow,” Drake muttered. “That’s more Trace’s area than ours.”

“The captain will have a plan,” Slick said. “And tell us what action is needed. The easiest route would be to determine the one member they would return for, then make sure he can’t leave or get word to them. It'll take time to figure out which one that is, though.”

“At least one would come searching for their missing member, and we could catch them with their pants down. Figuratively,” Drake was quick to add when Slick raised a suggestive eyebrow.

“Do we know what they want?” Lydia asked. “I mean, this sort of complicated mess of a setup no one does for fun. Are they just testing out their skills? Or are they actually trying to accomplish something?”

“My guess is they actually want something and didn’t realize the act doesn’t work on wolves,” Slick said. “Or it’s a suicide mission.”

“Well, it probably is that anyways.” Drake shook Lydia off and pulled off his shirt. “They tried to trick our Lord; at least one of them is going to die.” He yawned and slipped into his fur, stepping out of his pants and using his tail to flick them off the bed.

“More than one of them, most likely,” Slick said with a smile as he pulled the sheets up over his packmates.