Two days later, we cross into the Ozarks just before dawn. The highway gives way to two-lane blacktop, then county roads, then gravel that hasn’t seen a maintenance crew since the last century. Rook’s truck bottoms out twice on the same pothole. Dane’s going to give me hell about the suspension later.
Cameron’s hardly slept since the nightmare. He hasn’t mentioned it. Neither have I. But his hands haven’t stopped trembling, a fine vibration he hides by shoving them under his thighs or folding his arms tight. He thinks I don’t notice.
The land changes around us. Flat highway country gives way to dense hardwood hills, hollows choked with oak and hickory, creek beds running silver in the early light. Old country. Ground where magic settled into the rock and the root systems a thousand years before wolves ever found it. I can feel it through the truck’s chassis… a low hum, like standing too close to a power line. My wolf lifts his head.
Cameron feels it too. He sits forward, hands on the dash, nostrils flaring. “We’re close.”
“How close?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe less. Take the fork left after the creek bridge.”
He knows the land by smell. That’s pure wolf. Human GPS can go to hell when your nose maps the world in layers of soil and water and animal musk. I take the fork. The road narrows to a single lane hemmed by trees so thick the headlights barely cut through.
Then the trees open up, and we drop into a river valley, and I see it.
The Ravenclaw ranch.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.
It must have been something once. A sprawling timber-frame house anchoring a spread of outbuildings: barns, workshops, a long bunkhouse with a porch that wraps the full length. Cleared pastureland runs down to the river, and beyond it, forested hills climb into morning mist. The bones are good. Beautiful, even.
But the bones are about all that’s left.
The main house’s roof is patched with blue tarp and corrugated tin. One of the barns has collapsed on its south side, timber splayed out around it. Fences are down or sagging. The bunkhouse porch has a section rotten through. Solar panels on the workshop roof, half of them cracked, the rest rigged with wiring that looks like a fire hazard.
There’s a vegetable garden near the house. Ambitious in scale. Desperate in execution. Somebody’s been trying to feed the people here from soil that’s only half-cooperating.
I pull into the yard and kill the engine. Rook and the others pull in behind me. The sound of three trucks in a place this quiet carries, and before I’ve got my door open, they start appearing.
An old woman first, stepping off the porch with a shotgun balanced easily in the crook of her arm. White hair. Spine like a fencepost. Behind her, a man my age with one arm and a limp, then two teenagers who can’t be older than fifteen, then a woman carrying a toddler on her hip. They come out of the house, out of the bunkhouse, out of the trees where they’d been on watch or foraging or whatever the hell passes for morning routine in a place that’s been under siege for years.
Elders. Children. A handful of fighters who move like they haven’t slept a full night in months.
I count as they gather. Twenty-eight. Thirty, if there are a couple I can’t see.
This isn’t a pack. This is a refugee camp.
“Shit,” I say, low enough that only Cameron hears.
He’s already out of the truck, moving toward them. The change in him is immediate. His shoulders settle. His stride opens up. He’s still too thin and still carrying those tremors in his hands, but he’shome, and the difference shows in every step.
The old woman with the shotgun sees him, and her face comes apart. She hands the gun to the one-armed man without looking and crosses the yard with a speed that shouldn’t be possible at her age. She pulls Cameron into her arms and holds on like she’s trying to press him back together through sheer force.
He lets her. His face goes into her shoulder, and he stays there while a dozen Ravenclaw wolves close around him, touching his arms, his back, his hair. Soft welcomes. Some of them are crying. Nobody makes a sound louder than a murmur.
My wolf wants to go to him. The anchor sense—that thread that shouldn’t exist and won’t cut—tugs toward the boy. I stay by the truck.
This isn’t my moment. This is theirs.
Rook comes up beside me. He takes in the ranch, the broken buildings, the hollow faces. “How long have they been living like this?”
“Too long would be my guess.”
“They need everything, Merric. Food, shelter, medical, security—”
“I know.”
“—and there’s thirty of them and five of us.”
