“Gone,” she says. “Six months after you went. His heart.” A pause. “He was in his chair by the kitchen window. The one he always sat in. I came in from the garden, and he looked like he’d just sat down to rest.”
Six months after I left. Close enough that I might have come back for him, if I’d known. I didn’t know, because dead women don’t receive messages, and the intelligence network I built to save the pack couldn’t tell me that the pack’s healer had died in his kitchen chair while I was sleeping in a ditch outside Shreveport.
Greta watches my face. She doesn’t need comfort from me. She’s had eighteen months to do her grieving, and she did it the way she does everything: privately, completely, and without asking anyone to carry a single ounce of it for her. What sheneeds is for me to understand what his death meant for the pack, and she can see me working through it.
“The herb garden,” I say.
“Went to seed. Nobody else had his touch.” She folds her hands over her apron. “Nobody had his magic, either.”
No. They wouldn’t have. Cormac’s gift wasn’t dramatic. Not fire, not force, nothing the outside world would recognize as power. He fed the land. Drew his magic up through his hands and pushed it back into the earth, slowly, steadily, season by season. His work maintained the ward system at a root level that I couldn’t reach because my magic was different. Bigger, more forceful, but less patient. Cormac was the one who tended the foundation while I built the walls.
Without him, the foundation started to crumble. And without the foundation, the walls I’d built began to thin.
I look at the south wall through the kitchen window. The herb garden. Or what was the herb garden. The wooden stakes have rotted to stubs. The careful rows Cormac maintained for decades have dissolved into green disorder, his rosemary and thyme and rue tangled together and fighting for light. Some plants are dead. Others have gone wild, pushing out of their beds, reaching for ground they were never meant to occupy.
It looks the way everything looks when the person who loved it stops being there.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s nowhere near enough. Greta knows that and doesn’t need more.
“He’d be glad you’re home,” she says. “He worried about you. All those months before his heart— He’d sit in that chair and look toward the hills, and I’d know he was wondering. He never believed the fire took you. Said your magic was too stubborn to burn.” She picks up the kettle again. “He was right, as usual.”
Something tightens in my throat. I swallow it.
“I need to brief them,” I say. “In a minute.”
“Take your minute.”
She goes to the front room with the kettle, and I’m alone in the kitchen.
I close my eyes and push my awareness downward, through the floorboards, through the foundation, into the earth.
The ward lines meet me like an old friend with a wasting disease. I can feel the structure—my grandmother’s deep work laid down sixty years ago, the bedrock layer, holding because she built it to outlast her. My mother’s refinements threaded through the middle, more intricate, more responsive, designed to flex with the pack bond. My own maintenance, added in the years before I left—tighter, more aggressive, built for the threats I saw coming.
My grandmother’s work holds. My mother’s is fraying. Mine is gone entirely. Without a magic-user strong enough to feed the system, the upper layers have starved to nothing. What’s under my feet is the memory of protection.
And I understand something that’s been true my whole life but that I’ve never felt so clearly, standing here with my hands on my mother’s table and the diminished hum of the wards running through my bones.
This magic was never what they think it is.
The purists with their edicts and their fear. The Syndicate, with their labs and their extraction teams. Every wolf who’s ever looked at Cameron’s fire and seen a threat, a weapon, something to be controlled or destroyed or harnessed for someone else’s purpose. They are so completely, catastrophically wrong that it should be funny. It should be hilarious, the scale of the misunderstanding.
What we have is the earth and each other. That’s all it’s ever been. Magic that lives in the connection between wolves and the ground they stand on, that strengthens when the pack is whole and thins when the pack is broken. Not an arsenal. A web. Andyou can’t weaponize a web without tearing it apart, which is exactly what they’ve been doing: pulling out threads, scattering families, killing healers, driving out the magic-blooded wolves.
They fear us for the very thing they’re destroying. And we’ve been too busy surviving to explain the difference.
I open my eyes. The kitchen is the same. The stain on the ceiling. The gouge in the table. Cormac’s empty chair by the window, where he sat and watched the hills and believed I was alive because my magic was too stubborn to burn.
Movement outside.
Through the kitchen window, past the ruined herb garden, I can see the bunkhouse. Merric’s people have stayed in the yard—giving us space, or holding position, or both. The big blond wolf is by the barn with the prisoners. The dark-haired scout has materialized near the treeline, watching the ridge.
And on the bunkhouse steps, Merric.
He’s sitting, which is wrong. Merric doesn’t sit after a fight. I remember that—the way he’d keep moving after a confrontation, burning off the adrenaline through pacing, prowling, refusing to hold still until his body had processed the last of it.
He’s sitting now. On the bunkhouse steps, bare-chested, the gouge in his flank dark against his skin. And the auburn-haired woman is crouched beside him with a needle in her hand, working on the wound with the competence of someone who’s done this many times before.
He’s letting her.
