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"The one who gave you her number an hour later?"

"The initial rejection still counts."

Kieran set his mug down with the particular care of a man choosing not to laugh. "What's her name?"

"Doesn't matter. She's not interested and I'm not pursuing. I've got enough complications in my life without chasing some woman who looks at me like I'm a survey anomaly she doesn't have time to investigate."

Crickets and the distant lap of the lake and the wind moving through pines filled the silence as Criss leaned back in his chair and stared up at the sky where stars were punching through the last of the cloud cover, bright and indifferent.

He could still smell her. That was the part that dug at him. Not the rejection, not the way she'd walked out without a backward glance, not even the surgical efficiency with which she'd dismantled his best opening line. It was the scent. His tiger kept circling back to it the way animals circle something they don't understand but can't ignore.

"You're quiet," Kieran observed.

"I'm contemplative."

"You're never contemplative."

"Maybe I'm evolving."

Kieran looked at him for a long moment, and Criss could practically see the gears turning, his cousin filing this conversation away in whatever mental cabinet he kept labeled things to watch. Then Kieran picked up his mug and stood.

"Goodnight, Criss."

"Night."

The screen door closed behind Kieran with a soft clap, and Criss sat alone on the porch with the stars and the crickets and the ghost of a scent that didn't belong to him and wouldn't leave him alone.

So what? A beautiful woman, a bruised ego, a tiger acting strange because spring did weird things to shifters. By tomorrow he'd have forgotten her name and her face and the way she'd said this is where the introduction ends with the calm authority of someone used to drawing lines and enforcing them.

By tomorrow, Stephanie Ward would be irrelevant.

7

STEPHANIE

Steph had been on her knees in the mud for three hours, and she had never been happier.

The morning had started clear, one of those bright April days where the sky looked scrubbed clean and the woods smelled like they'd been rinsed and hung out to dry. She'd left the inn before dawn with her field pack loaded and a thermos of Diana's coffee tucked into the side pocket, hiking the eastern trail with the steady pace of someone who knew exactly where she was going and couldn't get there fast enough.

The storm had done her a favor she couldn't have paid for. The carved patterns she'd sketched from under the oak were only the beginning. With the topsoil washed away and the sediment loosened, the entire western face of the ridge basin was exposed in a way that would have taken her weeks of careful excavation to achieve by hand. Stone surfaces that hadn't seen daylight in decades, maybe centuries, now lay open to the morning light, and what they showed made her fingers shake as she unpacked her brushes.

Ward foundations. Not one layer, but at least three, possibly four, stacked on top of each other in a pattern she'd only ever read about in the center's oldest texts. Each layer used a different magical signature, different era, different practitioner, each one sealing whatever lay beneath with increasing urgency. The oldest carvings were cut deep into the limestone with a precision that predated modern tools, angular symbols in a language she recognized from fragments but couldn't fully translate. The newer layers, relatively speaking, were cruder, faster, the work of someone patching holes rather than building something meant to last.

Someone had sealed this place. And then someone else had come along later and sealed it again. And again. Each generation adding another lock to a door that kept trying to open.

She grabbed her journal and started documenting everything. Measurements, symbol tracings, photographs with the waterproof camera she'd bought after ruining two phones on a dig in the Scottish Highlands. Her handwriting got smaller when she was excited, cramped and fast, and right now it was practically illegible.

This was why she did this. Not the lectures or the publications or the professional respect, though she'd worked hard for all of it. It was this. Kneeling in the dirt with her hands on something ancient, feeling the hum of old magic against her palms and knowing she was the first person in a very long time to ask this ground what it remembered.

She'd had the sensitivity since childhood, though she hadn't known what to call it until college. Her mother, a thoroughly practical woman who sold real estate in suburban Virginia, had taken her to three different doctors when young Steph kept complaining that certain buildings "felt loud." It wasn't until a folklore professor at UVA recognized the signs and pointed her toward supernatural studies that things clicked into place. She wasn't sick. She wasn't making it up. She was just tuned to a frequency most people couldn't hear.

Grant had found it interesting at first. He'd asked questions, listened to her field stories, even visited one of her dig sites during their first summer together. But interest had a shelf life with Grant, and by month eight he'd started calling her sensitivity "that thing you do" with the particular inflection of a man who'd decided his girlfriend's career was a quirky hobby she'd eventually outgrow. When she'd been offered the Hollow Oak project and told him she'd be gone for several weeks, he'd given her the look. The one that said she was choosing wrong, that a normal woman would prioritize the relationship, that he was keeping score and she was losing.

She'd found out about Rachel three weeks after that conversation. An interior designer. Someone who made Grant's life prettier instead of more complicated.

Steph pressed her brush into the groove of the deepest carving and traced its path. The symbol was a spiral, tight at the center and widening outward, intersected by straight lines that could have been boundaries or could have been fractures. It was beautiful and deliberate and old enough that touching it felt like reading someone's handwriting from across a thousand years.

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. She ignored it. If it was Grant again, and it had been Grant for the last two weeks of unanswered calls, he could keep talking to her voicemail until the battery died. She had nothing to say to a man who'd replaced her with someone more convenient and then had the nerve to call and check in like they were friends.