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“In my eleven years as your deputy,” Pike said, clearly enjoying himself and fully invested in the outcome, “I’ve never seen you let anyone near a wound in the field. Maelin tried once, and you redirected him to a patrol report.”

“The situation was different.”

“The situation was that you’d taken a claw to the ribs from a Rift creature, and you sent Maelin to do paperwork instead of letting him help. Yes. Very different.” He capped the pen. “I like her.”

“You’ve said that.”

“I’m saying it again. She stayed on a cliff path during a Rift engagement, then walked straight to the bleeding sheriff, assessed the damage, and didn’t make it weird.” He tucked the notebook away. “I was already in her corner. Now I’m taking notes.”

“The pattern’s confirmed, isn’t it? Three engagements, same location logic.” He looked out at the ward line, the phosphorescence fading as the boundary settled.

“Yes.”

“So, whatever’s directing them is reading her surges like a map.”

Pike didn’t answer right away — the thinking kind of silence, not the kind that pauses. The ocean moved below them, the strange cross-current pattern it made when the ward ran hot.

“Completely.” He pulled the notebook back out and wrote something. “I’m also noting it in the other record for completeness.”

Drayce looked at him.

“It’s color-coded.” He tucked the pen away. “Bexley would approve.”

The debrief ran late. Pattern confirmed. The creatures had gone to the section that thinned whenever her magic discharged — every time. Not toward Drayce. Toward her trace. Not random. Not ambient. A map they were reading with increasing accuracy.

He filed the report.

By the time he got back to the department, his shoulder had sealed. Clean, new scar tissue — the signature of shifter healing. His wolf was still running hot, cataloging the cliff path, the engagement, and the ward line holding.

And her. Her hands not shaking. Her staying when she didn’t have to. Her walking across open ground toward a man with gold eyes and a bleeding shoulder because she’d assessed the situation and decided she was the one to handle it.

His wolf had known exactly what to do with all of that since the moment it happened.

He was finding his way to it.

He had a patrol schedule to restructure, a ward vulnerability report to finish, and a founding-line witch whose emotional surges were confirmed to be what the Rift was using to find its way in from the other side of the boundary.

He needed to be where she was.

He wrote it into the patrol report, exact and careful, then closed the folder, picked up the ward monitoring log, and kept working.

SEVEN

ALTHEA

The Cauldron and Cup at seven o’clock on a weeknight had a different personality than it did at eight in the morning. The espresso machine was at rest. The chalkboard had gone to bed after one last attempt at poetry about fog, which the barista on duty had covered with a cloth and refused to acknowledge. The front half of the café had been reduced to two tables. The back section — the round table, the fireplace, worn soft by a great many honest conversations, all of them kept — was entirely the coven’s.

Fiora brought a cheese board of frankly unreasonable ambition. Bexley arrived with her notebook already tabbed. Garnet brought the wine and offered no information about the bottle’s provenance, suggesting it was good enough that nobody needed to ask questions about it. Valene brought the snack mix, the enchanted wine glasses, and an unconvincing display of innocence.

“They’re going to refill when someone says, ‘I’m fine,’” Valene announced, setting the glasses down like a woman presenting a gift she was proud of. “We all say it and never mean it, and at least this way, the glasses will be honest about what’s happening.”

“Did you test this?” Bexley said, not looking up.

“I tested the enchantment.”

“The enchantment, or the application.”

“The principle is sound.”