CHAPTER 45: AMBUSH ON THE RETURN
MARCUS'S POV
I smelled them before I heard them.
That was the thing about trained soldiers — they were good at covering scent, good at silence, good at positioning. What they couldn't cover was the specific chemical compound of ashroot smoke that had been used as an anti-tracking agent, because ashroot had its own smell underneath the masking, bitter and faintly metallic, and I had been in enough situations where people were trying to kill me that my body had learned to recognize it before my brain finished the thought.
I said one word. "Down."
Everyone moved. That was the thing I noticed first and filed away for later — they moved before questioning it, all of them, including Hazel, which told me something about how the last weeks had changed things even if nobody was going to say it out loud.
