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“Goodnight, Pike.”
“Yes, sir.” He stood and mock saluted. Then, tucked the notebook under his arm and headed for the door. He stopped in the doorway. He always stopped in the doorway. “For the record — she looked at you too after you walked away.” He knocked twice on the doorframe. “Multiple witnesses. Sleep well.”
He left.
Drayce told his wolf to settle down. His wolf settled for smug instead.
He went out at midnight because his wolf had been pacing for four hours and had made its opinion about the general direction of town extremely clear.
The cliffs ran north along the shoreline — basalt, narrow paths, the Atlantic dropping twenty feet to the left without apology. He let the partial shift settle over him as he moved. Speed. Sharp eyes. The clarity that came from letting his wolf have a little freedom.
His wolf wanted to turn south.
Toward town. Toward the bookstore apartment where she was, probably not sleeping, probably staring at the ceiling, cataloging the evening she’d had.
Drayce turned north.
His wolf ran anyway, with no choice. It sulked about it, low and insistent, and pushed images at him the whole way — dark eyes, steady hands, the dry set of her mouth when she said something funny. His wolf had been collecting these images since the festival and showed no signs of stopping.
The ward line offshore was palpable — pressure in the air, salt and something metallic at the back of his throat, the low hum he felt in his chest before his ears caught it. Under normal conditions, it ran steady. Tonight it was fractionally off, the hum slightly uneven where her surge had thinned it.
He stopped at the northern marker stone and pressed his palm against the rune-carved face, worn smooth by thirty years of this exact contact. The ward line pulsed once. Holding.
His wolf went quiet.
Then it didn’t.
The wrongness reached him before he could name it — a displacement at the northern dock approach, a presence his wolf sensed before he did. Not the ocean. Not the wind.
Something in his territory that didn’t belong there.
He shifted fully and moved.
Three of them at the ward boundary. Small — scouts, not fighters. Moving along the weakened section with a focus that was anything but random. Wrong weight distribution, wrong angles, the wrongness of Rift-touched creatures that made his wolf lock in and go cold.
They were at the section that had thinned because of her surge.
Testing it. Probing it. Working the thin place she’d made.
His wolf wanted to cross the boundary after them and make the message permanent. Drayce overrode this impulse with professional judgment, deciding that following them through was tactically inadvisable, a decision his wolf found extremely frustrating.
He drove them back in two minutes. He wasn’t gentle about it. The scouts scattered before he could press the attack, retreating in a formation too coordinated for creatures supposed to run on ambient chaos instinct.
Directed. Organized. Not random.
He shifted back at the shoreline and stood with the spray cold on his face and his wolf still vibrating, wanting to go back through and pursue.
The surge occurred at 7:47. The ward boundary thinned within the hour. The scouts were at that exact location within two hours of her surge. His wolf had already figured out what that meant.
The Rift was reacting to her. Something was watching where her magic had thinned the wards, and it knew exactly where to look.
His wolf did not like this. Drayce didn’t like it either. They were, for once, in complete agreement.
She was his mate.
His wolf knew it the moment it locked onto her on the boardwalk — a door slamming home, instant and absolute. His wolf went from restless to completely certain in a single heartbeat. It settled into the recognition, relieved, like something that had been looking for a long time and had finally found it.
Drayce had been managing that certainty for four hours.
