But nobody picked up.
Her panic rose with every failed call. Her breath came fast, sharp, uneven. She looked at the books scattered across the floor, all that power, all those warnings, and felt a surge of pure, useless fury.
Her vision might have been magic, or madness, or something between, but it had feltreal.Too real.
And she couldn’t stay here.
Layla shoved her phone into her pocket and bolted for the stairs. Her bare feet slapped against the cold floor, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She pushed open the door to the upper floor, the scent of dust and ink and old paper flooding her senses.
Outside, the world was still dark and frozen, the town silent beneath a film of fog.
Something was wrong.
Something wascoming.
She didn’t know what, only that she couldn’t waste another second.
She grabbed her coat from the back of a chair, yanked on a pair of boots, and ran.
The streets were too quiet. As Layla sprinted through the mist toward the edge of town, the silence pressed against her like a weight.
She could hear only her own footsteps and the wild thud of her heart.
The cold bit through her coat, cutting down to the bone. Each breath came out in gasps that curled in the air like smoke. She clutched her phone in one hand, trying again and again to call Dominic, Theodore,anyone, each attempt met with the same dead silence and flicker of static.
She turned the corner onto the road leading to the Old Sawmill, where pack troops always gathered before a fight, her boots slipping on frost. Her lungs burned as she ran.
When she reached the clearing, her heart nearly stopped.
The Sawmill stood open, its heavy doors yawning into darkness. A few footprints marked the snow, faint, already half-frozen.
Layla stumbled to a stop, chest heaving. “Dominic?”
No answer.
She stepped forward, her shoes crunching on gravel. The echo of her own movements filled the empty hall. The long table at the center, where the warriors met for council, was overturned, chairs scattered like the aftermath of a storm. The fire had burned itself out, leaving only the faint, acrid scent of charred wood.
They had been here. Recently.
Layla’s pulse quickened. “Theodore? Anyone?”
Her voice cracked in the emptiness.
She snatched her phone from her pocket again, hands trembling. Dominic’s name lit up on the screen. She hitcall.It rang once. Twice. Then silence.
“Please,” she whispered, pressing the phone against her ear. “Please pick up….”
The line stayed dead.
Something inside her began to unravel.
She backed toward the doorway, her eyes sweeping the abandoned room one more time.
A sound behind her made her flinch, the crunch of snow, faint but distinct.
Layla spun.
A shadow loomed through the fog at the edge of the clearing, tall and moving fast. She stumbled back, ready to run, but then the mist parted, and she saw his face.
