Caleb exhaled through his nose. “We do.”
“How?” I asked.
He hesitated, then cleared his throat. “Malore had mentioned her from time to time, but the way he spoke of her led me to believe that she was more myth than reality.”
“And are you feeling a shift where you live?” I asked softly.
“Something is wrong in our forests.”
Every instinct in me sharpened.
“Wrong how?” I pressed.
Caleb’s gaze grew distant, as if he were seeing something layered over the present moment. “Shadows where there shouldn’t be any. We have patches of land that refuse to hold magic or listen to our pleas. We have places where the sun shines down, and the moon spills silver, yet nothing answers.”
Dead magic.
The phrase echoed in my mind, cold and ominous.
“Animals won’t cross those areas,” he continued. “Wolves feel it first, followed by the trees, and the ground itself. It’s like rot, but not natural. It’s not decaying, it’s suppression. It makes it harder for our hunts, for our…feeding.”
My chest tightened. “That sounds like Shadowick’s work.”
He nodded grimly. “It feels adjacent to it as if someone is trying to stitch Shadowick’s influence and shadows into places they don’t belong.”
“That’s exactly what she’d do,” I murmured.
Caleb’s gaze snapped back to me. “You sound very certain.”
“I’ve seen her work,” I said. “Up close.”
Silence stretched between us again, but it was different now. He wasn’t evaluating my authority anymore. He was weighing my experience against his own.
“That’s why we’re here,” he said finally. “Not to challenge you. Not to reclaim anything. But to understand who else sees what we see.”
My pulse slowed just a fraction.
“And the vampires?” he added, glancing toward the Academy doors. “They see it too?”
“They feel it,” I said. “In different ways. Old magic doesn’t discriminate about who it unsettles.”
Caleb let out a breath that sounded almost like relief, though his shoulders stayed tense. “Then maybe this isn’t as foolish as it sounded.”
I allowed myself a small smile. “I’ll take that.”
He didn’t smile back, but something in his posture eased.
“You’re walking on very rocky ground, Maeve Bellemore.”
“I know,” I said. “But if we don’t walk it together, it’s going to collapse under all of us.”
He studied me for a long moment, as his gaze intensified, “You don’t speak like someone who wants control.”
“No,” I said softly. “I speak like someone who wants to survive and wants a better place for the next generation.”
That seemed to land.
Behind him, the pack shifted, not forward, not back, but closer together, like a unit recalibrating.
