Chapter 20
Merric
Briar finds the trail in under four minutes. Boot prints heading northeast from Cameron’s bedroom window. He climbed out onto the porch roof and dropped to the ground. Smart. Avoided every sightline from the yard.
“Two hours old,” Briar says, crouching at the base of the house. “Maybe a little more. He was moving fast.”
“Direction?” Brenna asks. She sounds controlled, but her hands are fisted at her sides, transmitting a fear so concentrated it takes effort to separate her panic from mine.
“Northeast ridge. The old logging road.”
“That leads into unmonitored territory,” Brenna says. “Past the ward line.”
Past the wards. Into ground we haven’t scouted, haven’t secured. Ground that may still have purist watchers or worse.
“I’m going,” Brenna says, already moving.
“We’regoing.” I fall in beside her. “Briar, stay on the trail. Rook, hold the ranch. If Bern asks—”
“I’ll tell him Cameron went for a walk and we’re fetching him back.” Rook’s voice is calm. “Go.”
We go.
Brenna sets a pace that would kill a normal person. She’s running on fear and magic, and I match her because the alternative is falling behind. That’s not happening. The stitches in my side protest. I ignore them.
The trail leads up the northeast ridge through heavy timber—oak, hickory, the thick Ozark underbrush that grabs at your legs. Briar marked the track before peeling off to cover our eastern flank, and the boot prints are clear in the soft ground. Cameron wasn’t trying to hide. He was just trying to get away.
Brenna doesn’t speak. I don’t either. We sense each other; the fear, the guilt, the shared understanding that whatever drove Cameron to climb out a window and run had been building since before Bern arrived, and we were both too consumed with our own personal shit to see it.
The trail hits the logging road and turns north. Older growth here, the canopy thick enough to block the fading light. We’ve been running for twenty minutes, and we’re well past the ward line. I can feel its absence, the protective hum gone, replaced by the open, unguarded quiet of unclaimed ground.
“There.” Brenna stops. Points.
Through the trees, maybe two hundred yards up the ridge—a glow. Faint copper-gold, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Cameron’s magic. Active. Uncontrolled.
We sprint toward it.
The clearing isn’t a clearing; it’s a blowdown, a patch of ridge where a storm knocked down a dozen trees and left a tangle of trunks and root balls. Cameron is in the center. Sitting on afallen log with his forearms on his knees and his head bowed over them. Fire is crawling over his skin in slow, rolling waves.
The trees nearest to him are smoking. The air shimmers with heat. He’s been here a while. Burning.
Brenna makes a sound. Not a word. Something deeper. The sound a mother makes when she finds her child and the relief is too big to hold in. She starts forward.
I catch her arm. “Wait.”
“Let go of me—”
“Look at the radius. He’s running hot. If you push your magic against his right now—”
“I know what happens.” She shakes my hand off. But she stops. Breathes. Her rational mind overriding her maternal instincts through sheer discipline.
“We go to him together,” I say. “Your fire won’t calm him, but mine can get through. Let me anchor him first, then you go in.”
She looks at me. Within her, I can feel a complicated knot of emotions: resentment that I’m right, gratitude that I’m here, fear for the boy in the clearing, and underneath it all, something that might be trust if she’d let it be.
“Do it,” she says.
