I stood there for a long moment, staring at the spot where he'd disappeared. Everything about that encounter had been strange, from his careful warnings to the way he'd moved like the forest belonged to him. But strangest of all was the way my chest still felt tight, like I was coming down from an adrenaline high.
Like I'd just met someone important.
2
QUIET HEIR
EVAN
Dawn crept through my bedroom window like an apologetic thief, all hesitant gray light and whispered promises of another day I didn't want to face. My father's boots had already crunched down the gravel drive, his truck disappearing into the mist that clung to Hollow Pines like grief to bones. He left behind the ghost scent of coffee and determination, the kind that said duty came before everything else.
Including sleep. Including comfort. Including the luxury of lying in bed until the sun remembered how to shine.
I pressed my face into my pillow and counted heartbeats until the silence became unbearable. Ten. Twenty. Fifty. Each one echoing in the empty house like a reminder that we Callahans knew how to carry weight but not how to share it.
My bare feet hit the cold hardwood with a soft thud, and I padded through the house in boxers and a t-shirt that had seen better years. Everything felt too quiet, too heavy, like the air itself was holding secrets. Dad's bedroom door stood closed atthe end of the hall, just how he left it every night after his ritual of standing in the doorway for exactly thirty seconds before pulling it shut.
I paused outside the master bedroom, my hand hovering near the doorframe. Three years. Three fucking years since that night Dad refused to talk about, and he still couldn't bring himself to sleep anywhere else.
I'd glimpsed inside once when Dad forgot to close the door completely—Mom's books still stacked on her nightstand with bookmarks holding her place in stories she'd never finish, the quilt she'd been sewing draped over the chair where she used to sit and read while Dad worked on pack business.
Whatever had killed Mom, it hadn't been natural. Wolves didn't just die from illness or accident - we healed too fast, were too strong, too connected to the pack bonds that should have kept her anchored to us. But Dad's jaw went to granite every time I asked what really happened that night, and the pack elders suddenly found fascinating reasons to change the subject whenever Mom's death came up in conversation.
The not-knowing ate at me like acid, left me spinning theories in the dark hours before dawn.
I didn't go in. I never went in. But I stood there anyway, breathing in the faint scent of lavender and heartbreak that leaked from the crack under the door like a slow poison.
“Miss you, Mom,” I whispered to the silence, and hated how young my voice sounded in the empty hallway.
The forest called to me through the kitchen window as I poured coffee from the pot Dad had left warming. Dark pines pressed against the glass like curious fingers, and I could feel the Evernight Forest humming beneath my skin, ancient and patient and knowing. My wolf stirred restlessly in my chest, wanting to run, to hunt, to lose himself in the wild spaces where human grief couldn't follow.
Soon. But first, I had to survive another day of being Evan Callahan, heir to a legacy I wasn't sure I wanted and responsibilities that felt like chains around my throat.
I dressed in my uniform of anonymity—worn jeans that had molded to my body over years of wear, boots that could handle both hallways and forest floors, a flannel that had belonged to my grandfather and still smelled faintly of woodsmoke and pack gatherings. In the mirror, I saw what everyone else saw: broad shoulders that promised strength, a jaw that suggested stubbornness, eyes that held shadows too deep for seventeen years.
I looked like an Alpha's son.
I felt like a fraud.
My sketchbook went into my backpack last, hidden beneath textbooks and notebooks filled with half-hearted attempts at caring about trigonometry and American history. Drawing was my secret rebellion, the one thing that belonged to me instead of the pack. Dad didn't know about the pages covered in charcoal wolves and pencil forests, didn't know that sometimes I drew Mom's face from memory just to prove to myself I hadn't forgotten the exact curve of her smile.
Some things were sacred. Some things were mine.
Outside, the morning mist clung to everything like the forest was breathing slowly, in and out, in and out. I cut through the trees instead of taking the main road, letting my feet find the deer paths that led toward town. Here, surrounded by pine and cedar and the deep green silence of growing things, I could almost pretend I was normal.
Almost.
The forest whispered around me in voices only I could hear—not words exactly, but impressions that tasted like moonlight and felt like coming home. Ancestral spirits, Dad called them, the wolves who'd run these paths before us and left echoes oftheir passing in the roots and rocks. Most pack members felt them as distant murmurs, background static in the symphony of pack bonds.
I heard them like they were standing next to me, whispering secrets I wasn't old enough to understand.
Change coming, little Alpha. Change like winter wind, like wildfire, like the first breath after drowning.
I shivered and picked up my pace, my wolf pressing restlessly against my ribs. Change wasn't always good. Change had taken Mom, had left Dad hollow-eyed and silent, had turned our house into a museum of what we'd lost instead of a home where we could heal.
But the spirits kept whispering, and by the time I reached the edge of the forest, my skin felt too tight and my heart was beating too fast.
Hollow Pines Highsquatted ahead of me like a red-brick tumor, all narrow windows and chain-link fences. Students clustered around the entrance in their usual tribal formations—jocks flexing and preening, theater kids gesticulating wildly about whatever drama had consumed their lives this week, the eternal social ecosystem of teenage hierarchy playing out in real time.
