He didn’t move. “Let me do it with you.”
Her laugh ripped out, ragged as her breathing. “Left of me. The seam.” She pointed. “Press your palms down. Even pressure. Don’t let your pulse race.”
“My pulse is—never mind.” His palm found granite, fingers spreading. Heat rolled off him; it steadied, like laying a heavy book on a restless page. The ward’s flicker evened.
She pressed her brow to the rock. It was slick, cold, braced with the memory of mountains. She gave it the thing the Peaks always understood: grief. Not the immaculate version she offered polite company—oh yes, he passed in his sleep, he was old, it wastime—but the feral thing. The stubborn, ugly anger that he had left her with a shop that creaked and a town that judged and a heart full of knives. She didn’t shape it; she let it be. And the stone took it like dry earth drinking rain.
The ward-web flared. Light spidered outward in furious lines, humming against her bones.
Maude’s body shook with the effort. Her stomach hollowed as if she’d bled half her insides into the stone. But it was working. The wolves reeled back, hackles snapping flat. The air changed—the scent of snow and ash blowing through the glade, as though she’d opened a door to somewhere older, colder. A few shadows shredded outright, dissolving like paper in a storm. The rest skulked back a pace, repelled by that raw, ancient thing grief became when someone reckless enough—or desperate enough—let it out.
She tried to push herself up, but her legs trembled uselessly beneath her. Her vision stuttered at the edges.
Wesley’s hand closed over hers. He didn’t crowd her, just fitted his palm so their fingers wrapped the little curve together. “Breathe on the count,” he said softly, not looking at her face. “In—two—three. Out—two—three.”
She wanted to snarl. She breathed.
“In—two—three.”
She hated him. She followed his count.
Her lungs steadied. The web held.
“Now,” he murmured, and together they shoved the last of her magic into the ward.
The ground jolted beneath them. The alpha flattened, black shadow pressed razor-thin, eyes gleaming red as hot coals. It surged forward anyway, aiming for the seam where ward met stone.
“Hold,” Maude rasped, throat raw.
“I’m not letting go.”
The alpha hit the seam and punched through with its muzzle. Cold slammed into the circle. Maude’s teeth clattered. Wesleydropped her hand, flung himself forward, and—idiot, absoluteidiot—caught the alpha’s jaws with his forearm.
The world went white.
He didn’t make a sound. His body bowed, every muscle pulled taut in protest. Frost bloomed across his skin in a lacework sleeve where the mist touched—instant rime, glittering and lethal. Still, he held the creature’s head in a wrestler’s lock, using the sheer solidity of his body to keep the nightmare from pushing farther in.
“Finish it,” he grated out.
Maude couldn’t let herself think about the frost gnawing at his arm, the way his skin was blooming with crystalline lace.
There was almost nothing left. No iron. No salt. She dragged a nail across her palm, hissed, and smeared a bright, human line over the place the alpha’s muzzle wanted to be.
Blood recognized truth. The web surged toward it like a tide.
The ward caught, edges gleaming like broken glass, locking the wolf’s head in a vise of old magic. The alpha convulsed violently, shuddering between ribbon and beast, shadow and flesh. Every shift poured more winter into Wesley’s arm. The ice climbed higher, flowering up his veins, every tendon strung in frozen fire, starbursts glittering under his skin.
“Let go!” she shouted, the command tearing from her throat.
“If I let go, it comes through,” he ground out, jaw clenched, every word bitten between his teeth. “Do it.”
Maude slammed her bloodied palm against the wolf’s not-there skull, shoving her magic deep, up to the wrist, reckless and feral. The alpha shrieked in silence, soundless and terrible, as the web blazed brighter than fire. It didn’t break—it cut.
The wolf sheared in two, split clean down some line only magic could see, and evaporated, sucked backward through the world like smoke through a keyhole. The glade roared empty. The rest of the pack broke like mist in wind, unraveling into nothing.
“Ha,” she said, baring her teeth, pleased and vicious and only slightly unhinged.
Silence fell. Not the listening kind, but the kind that comes after a miracle or a catastrophe, when the world takes a breath and decides which way to tilt.
