“How long?” Jonas asks. The practical question. The one nobody wants to answer.
“Weeks,” Merric says. “Maybe longer. Viktor needs time to coordinate. Edda needs time to build bridges. Brenna’s contacts need to be approached carefully.”
Weeks. The word sits in my stomach. Weeks at Frostbourne, while Ravenclaw sits hundreds of miles south with thirty wolves and wards that won’t last forever.
The meeting breaks. Edda leaves first, folder under her arm, already composing the approach to Margaret Cope in her head. Jonas follows, heading for the patrol rotation. Rook and Merric stay to organize the evidence files.
I walk back to the cabin in silence. The compound is settling down for the day. The south gate—rebuilt, solid, the timber still pale—catches the last of the light. Wolves move between buildings. Somewhere, a hammer rings against metal. The ordinary sounds of a pack putting itself back together.
Cameron is in the cabin kitchen with Lena. They’re sitting across from each other at the table with a chessboard between them, and from the look on Cameron’s face, she’s winning. Lena glances up when I come in and has the good sense to look slightly guilty, though I suspect the guilt is about the chess demolition rather than being in the alpha’s cabin.
“Dinner’s in twenty minutes,” I tell them. “Lena, your squad’s on evening patrol.”
“Yes, Alpha Corvus.” She stands, tips Cameron’s king with one finger, and leaves with the cheerful efficiency of a young wolf who knows she’s gotten away with something.
Cameron resets the board. “She’s really good.”
“At chess?”
“At everything.” He lines up the pawns. Doesn’t look at me. “Ma. When are we going home?”
The question I’ve been waiting for. The one I don’t have an answer to.
“There’s work to do here first,” I say. “The situation with Bern—”
“I know about the situation with Bern. I know it’s complicated and political and dangerous. I know it takes time.” He sets the last piece in place. “But the wards at Ravenclaw aren’t going to hold forever. You said so yourself. And Willow’s got no magic-user.”
He’s not wrong. He sounds like me… and that’s the part that scares me.
“We’re working on it,” I say.
“Okay.” He picks up a knight. Studies it. “I just don’t want to wait until something happens to find out we waited too long.”
He goes to his room. The door closes. A deliberate, quiet click that seems louder than any slam could.
I stand in the kitchen. The chessboard is on the table, pieces aligned, ready for a game nobody’s playing. The evening lightthrough the window is cold and blue, nothing like the amber warmth of Ozark sunsets. My son’s voice rings in my head:I just don’t want to wait until something happens to find out we waited too long.
I pull out my phone and call Willow.
She answers on the second ring. “Hey.” Her voice is steady. Bright. The brightness that means she’s working hard to sound fine.
“How’s the ranch?”
“Good. Quiet. The barn roof is done. It’s solid. We’re running double patrols. The wards are holding.”
“Holding how?”
A pause. Fractional. The kind of pause Willow gives when she’s deciding how much truth to share and how much to carry alone. I know it because I taught it to her.
“Holding,” she says. “The north boundary is strong. South and east are thinning. Nothing critical. I’m monitoring.”
Thinning. The wards I poured everything into before I left, strong enough to last months, I’d told myself. It’s been weeks, and they’re already thinning. Because wards aren’t walls. They’re living systems that need a magic-user’s connection to the land, to the pack bond. Without someone to feed them, they starve. Slowly at first. Then all at once.
“Willow. Tell me the truth.” I’m silently cursing the fact that I let her send Sienna and the others back to Frostbourne, adamant they could manage without them
There’s another pause. Longer. I hear her breathe. Hear the ranch sounds behind her: a door, a voice, the wind.
“The south boundary dropped a full grade yesterday,” she says. “I didn’t want to worry you. It’s functional; anything crosses it, we’ll know. But it’s not going to hold off a coordinated push. Not the kind you described.”
