Redhawk Caldera there'll be peace when you are done.

For each familiar old smell that Nightjar came across, there was a new one, as well. Redhawk Caldera had seemingly been inundated with a plethora of unfamiliar wolves in his absence. That wasn't entirely surprising at face value. He'd been gone for over a year, not that he was counting. Still, he thought it rather unusual. Peregrine and Fox had never been really open to outsiders in their home, and their first surviving son had inherited that mistrust as well but to a lesser degree. The scents he didn't recognise rivalled the scents of his family in number and he had to wonder what other changes the Blackthorns had affected in their rule.

He put those unfamiliar aromas aside for today, however, and followed a much more familiar scent trail in search of someone dear to him. It was laced with poignant hints of pregnancy, a smell Nightjar had come to know while he was away, and it made his tail beat at his hocks as he traced her earlier path. He wondered if her progeny this year would be riddled with issues as well. Unlike Fox, Nightjar had no designs on attempting to claim the Blackthorn matriarch as his own come spring because her first offspring had been so weak. Her womb, he privately thought, was unworthy of Redhawks. Elwood could keep her as long as he liked, he would find no challenger in Nightjar, only a willing participant in the cubs' growth.

(Another of his private thoughts as he closed in on her den site was that if he was more involved this time around with her cubs, if he was a better godbrother or whatever it was, he could chase the weakness from her brood before it had time to manifest into another Eljay. Speaking of which, where was that nerd...?)

In spite of his wilder instinctual opinion of Finley and her value as a breeding female, however, he still loved her deeply as his aunt and had utmost respect for her as his Alpha female. When he came upon her inspecting her den site, his face broke into a warm smile and he called out a gruff, "Aunt Flea!" while his tail wagged and his ears pressed back.