The village needs me. Not just as a vet. As someone who can work in both worlds, who can treat the injuries that come from living alongside the extraordinary without asking questions that the answers would only complicate.
It’s not what I planned. It’s better than what I planned.
I lock the surgery. Make a note to order more of the antiseptic that works best on accelerated-healing tissue. I walk through to the main house with my senses open, my notebook in my bag, the quiet growing certainty that I’ve found the work I was meant to do.
Chapter 25
Uncharted
Roan
I’m doingsomething I haven’t done in three years. I’m sitting at my father’s kitchen table of my own free will.
Not the long oak table in the main house where pack meetings happen. The small one in the private kitchen at the back, the one with the burn mark from when I was nine and knocked a candle over during dinner. My mother scrubbed it for an hour before deciding the mark had character. My father has never replaced the table.
He makes tea the way he always has. Slow, methodical, warming the pot first because his mother taught him that and he’s never unlearned it. I sit in the chair that used to be mine and look at the kitchen I grew up in and try to work out what I’m doing here.
“You look like a man who wants to say something but hasn’t decided what it is,” my father says, setting two mugs on the table.
“I want to change the patrol structure.”
He sits down. Doesn’t react. Doesn’t lean forward or narrow his eyes or do any of the things he does in meetings when someone presents a plan for his approval. He just sits, and drinks his tea, and waits.
“The current structure is reactive,” I say. “We run borders. We respond to incursions. We wait for them to come to us and then deal with what shows up. It worked when the rogues were disorganised, but they’re not anymore. They’re rotating scouts. They’re mapping approach routes. They’re gathering intelligence while we sit on our arses and patrol the same lines we’ve patrolled for decades.”
“Go on.”
“I want forward patrols. Small teams pushing beyond the boundary, running the ridgeline and the eastern valley. Not waiting for them to cross into our territory. Tracking their movements before they reach us. If they’re building a picture of our defences, we build a picture of theirs.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The kitchen clock ticks. Outside the window, two pack children are chasing each other across the yard with the shrieking energy of a Tuesday morning.
“That’s a significant escalation,” he says. “Patrols beyond the boundary could be read as aggression by neighbouring packs. The Greymoor territory starts six miles east. If they pick up our scent on the ridge?—”
“Greymoor’s been silent for years. They don’t patrol the ridge. They barely patrol their own southern border. I’ve been running that line for months, and the only scent I’ve picked up is rogue.”
His eyebrows lift. Not surprise. Something closer to confirmation. “You’ve been running beyond the boundary.”
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“Yes.”
“Without telling anyone.”
“If I’d told anyone, someone would have tried to stop me, and we’d be having this conversation without the intelligence that makes it worth having.” I drink my tea. It’s strong, too much milk, exactly the way my mother used to make it because my father never adjusted the recipe. “I’m not asking for permission. I’m telling you what I think needs to happen, and I’m asking for bodies to do it properly.”
He leans back in his chair. Studies me. I know what he’s seeing, because Rebecca told me last week in one of her characteristically blunt assessments:You’re doing the thing you swore you’d never do, and you’repretending you’re not.She meant leading. She meant stepping into the role I’ve spent a decade refusing. She was right, and I told her to fuck off, and she laughed in my face.
“How many?” my father asks.
“Four wolves for the forward teams. Two pairs, rotating shifts, covering the eastern approach and the ridge. I’ll brief them myself. I’ll run with them for the first few rotations until the routes are established.”
“You’ll run with them.”
“I know the terrain. Nobody else does. Not at the level I do.”
“Because you’ve been running it alone for months. Illegally.”
