But Dane’s barn is taking shape. The generators are holding. Greta made biscuits this morning from Sienna’s flour supply, and for about ten minutes, the whole ranch smelled like something other than dust and rot.
Cameron comes off the porch looking better than he has since Aurora. The dark circles are fading. He’s put on a couple of pounds. Not much, but enough that his face has lost the skull-tight look that made my wolf want to hunt down every Syndicate scientist who touched him. He’s wearing a flannel shirt two sizestoo big, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and when he sees me, he lifts his chin in a greeting that’s starting to feel habitual.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning.” He falls into step beside me. “Briar said you might check the south fence today.”
“Briar has loose lips.”
“Briar says about four words a day. For a while, I thought she was mute.”
I smile at that. “You want to come?”
He shrugs. Studied casualness. “I could use the walk.”
We grab tools from the workshop and head south through the cleared pasture. The morning is warm, humidity already building, and the grass is shin-high and wet with dew. Two of the Ravenclaw teens—the red-haired kid whose name is Warrick, and a girl with braids who hasn’t said a word to anyone from Frostbourne yet—tag along at a distance. They’ve attached themselves to the work crews over the last two days, cautiously, the way stray dogs approach a campfire.
Cameron walks easily beside me. He’s learning the land again, reorienting after months in a concrete box. His eyes flit to the trees, the creek banks, the ridge above. Wolf habits reasserting themselves. He needs this: the ground, the air, the space to let his senses extend without walls throwing them back.
“This was my favorite part of the property,” he says. “The south pasture. Ma used to bring me here to practice.”
“Practice what?”
“Control. When my magic started coming in, it was all over the place. She’d take me out here, where there was nothing to burn, and teach me to channel it. Grounding exercises. Breathing. She’d put her hand—” He stops. Swallows. “Anyway. It worked. Mostly.”
I let the silence hold. He’s circling again, dealing with the grief. Talking about Brenna in fragments, testing whether the wordsstill hurt, learning the loss that’s been carved deeper by six months of captivity.
“She was a good teacher?” I ask.
“The best. She never made me feel like the magic was wrong. Everyone else—the other packs, the elders, even some of the Ravenclaw wolves—they looked at me like I was a problem. She looked at me like I was exactly right.” He kicks a stone into the grass. “I miss that.”
“Yeah.” I turn back to the fence wire, give a join that doesn’t need checking a second check anyway. “I bet you do.”
We reach the south fence line, where it borders the forest. The posts are old, but the wire Dane strung yesterday is solid. I start checking the joins while Cameron walks the line ahead of me, testing tension on the wire. The two teenagers hover back near the pasture, not helping but not leaving either.
Cameron’s about sixty yards ahead when my wolf stops me cold.
Not a thought. Not a warning. Just every hair on my body standing up, and a silence in the forest that wasn’t there three seconds ago.
The birds have stopped singing.
I drop the pliers. “Cameron.”
He turns. Sees my face.
“Get behind me. Now.”
“What—?”
“Now!”
He moves. Good kid. Doesn’t argue, doesn’t freeze, just reads my tone and acts. He’s halfway back to me when the forest erupts.
Six wolves. Full shift. They come out of the brush in a spread formation: two on the left flank, two on the right, two straight up the center, driving toward Cameron with a coordination thattells me this isn’t a random attack. They’ve been positioned. They’ve been waiting.
Purists. I can tell from the way they move—no magic, no tech, just muscle and teeth and the righteous fury of wolves who believe they’re cleansing corruption. One of them—a big gray with a torn ear—snarls something guttural that might be a word or might just be hate given voice.
I shift.
