CHAPTER EIGHTEEN || LEE
For a long moment, we all stared at each other and none of us moved. My mind raced—Daniel’s family had come for him. I’d lived next to all of them for most of my life, but they seemed like strangers now. Dangerous ones.
The silver-haired man was Daniel’s father, Ash Henbane. The dark-haired woman was his mother, Carmellia. The young man—three years older than Daniel—was Micah, Daniel’s brother and the eldest of the siblings. And the younger dark-haired woman was Daniel’s sister. She was just a year older than him.
“Daniel,” Ash said, standing up. His voice was cold and clipped and his gray eyes narrowed. “We’ve been waiting nearly two hours.”
Beside me, Daniel’s breath hitched.
And through the bond, I felt something happening to him that was worse than fear. It was a total collapse. As if a vital load-bearing structure inside him was folding in on itself.
“D—Dad,” Daniel managed, his voice sounding way too small. “W—What are you guys doing here?”
“What we should have done two years ago,” Daniel’s mother said, before Ash could speak. “We’ve come to bring you home.”
Her dark hair was pulled back tight enough to stretch the skin at her temples, and her eyes—sharp, assessing, the same shape and color as Daniel’s but completely devoid of his warmth—locked with his. Then they moved from Daniel to Hunter, and finally to me.
Carmellia went very still. Her gaze flicked between Hunter and me. No doubt taking in the identical faces, the identical builds, the way we were positioned on either side of her son.
“So, then,” she said softly, her upper lip curling with open disdain. “This is why you ran away from home.”
The younger man at Daniel’s desk—Micah, the older brother—leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. His expression was openly hostile. “You left the family so you could have two boyfriends?” He let out a humorless laugh. “Jeez, even for you, that’s pathetic.”
Hunter went rigid beside me. I felt his fury spike through the bond—white-hot, instantaneous—and I put my hand on his forearm. When he shot me an outraged glare, I shook my head minutely. Not now. Not yet.
“Stop it,” Rowan said coldly, glaring at her elder brother. “That’s not why we’re here.” Then she turned to Daniel with a tremulous smile. “We’ve missed you. We want you to come back.”
She, at least, seemed glad to see him.
But Micah snorted at her words. Ash raised an eyebrow, his gaze flicking to his daughter and then away again, as if she’d said something only mildly interesting, hardly worth his notice. And Carmellia’s expression tightened with fury. Her cold gaze was still on me.
Daniel, however, didn’t seem to notice the rest of the family’s reactions to his sister’s words. Because when he turned to meet Rowan’s gaze, he wilted. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, wretched. “I should’ve said something.”
“Yeah, you should have. You let us think something awful had happened to you,” Rowan said softly, her eyes searching his. “Why’d you run away, Danny?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Micah demanded, gesturing in our direction. “He left because he’s selfish and a coward. He didn’t want us to discover what he’d done.”
“No. It wasn’t like that. I didn’t run away,” Daniel whispered. But the words lacked any conviction. His shoulders sagged, as if an invisible weight were settling onto them. “I left. There’s a difference.”
“No. You disappeared in the middle of the night without a word,” Ash said.
His tone didn’t change. He barely seemed interested in Daniel even long enough to get angry with him.
As if the words he was speaking were just convenient stepping stones from one end of the conversation to the other.
“And based on what we discovered in your room after you vanished, it seemed that you were performing forbidden spells.”
“Which you apparently performed with the intention of splitting your friend into two separate people,” Carmellia added tightly.
Her gaze slid away from me to Daniel and her eyes narrowed.
She, at least, seemed to care enough to get angry.
“We warned you not to get close to a mundane, Daniel. And you defied us. Didn’t you? ”
Our warlock’s gaze dropped to the floor. I could hear his heart hammering in his chest and the misery in his expression was total.
“Answer me,” Carmellia said dangerously.
“Yes,” Daniel whispered.
“Why would you do this?” his mother demanded. “You could’ve killed him!”
“It was an accident!” Daniel said, looking back up at her, his voice rising. There was a plaintive note in it that I hated. “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean for any of this!”
“What a surprise,” Micah scoffed, sneering at his younger brother with unmasked contempt. “Daniel Henbane messes with magic he doesn’t understand, and it backfires. Gee, who could’ve seen that coming?”
“That’s enough!” Ash snapped, glaring at his eldest son.
Micah fell silent, his expression mutinous. I could practically see the power crackling around him, but he dropped his gaze from his father to the floor. “Sorry.”
Ash turned back to Daniel. “You said it was an accident and I believe you. It doesn’t explain why you came here. And why these young men are now werewolves.”
“They were dying!” Daniel snapped. “And I couldn’t figure out how to reverse it! I didn’t have a choice—”
“No. You had a choice,” Carmellia cut in. “You chose to run to a pack of wolves in the mountains. And then you chose to hide for two years. You could have trusted us to help you undo your mistakes.”
“How was he supposed to trust you? Any of you?” Hunter demanded, his glare sweeping the room and settling on Rowan. Her lips parted and her eyes widened as though he’d startled her. “You placed a geas on him! All of you did it!”
“Your contribution to this conversation is entirely unwelcome,” Ash said coldly, locking eyes with my twin. “It won’t be tolerated again.”
“No, he’s right,” I said. “You violated his trust. His agency. He couldn’t have come to you—not in a million years. And you did that. All of you. If you want to know why he took his chances on a pack of werewolves in the mountains instead of his own family, look in the mirror.”
Rowan flinched at that, her eyes going glassy.
Ash’s face, on the other hand, stormed over. But he smiled as he met my gaze. It wasn’t a nice smile—more like the smile that came from contemplating all the awful things he could—and would—do to me.
“The geas was for the best,” Carmellia replied, her gaze cutting and merciless as it met mine.
Then she turned to Daniel. “And clearly, we were right to be concerned. Look at where your lack of discretion has landed you.” She gestured around the cabin—the scattered papers, the bare walls, the cramped space.
“Living in squalor with a pack of wolves, playing at being one of them.”
“I am one of them,” Daniel said, but the flash of fire in him was already guttering. I could hear it in his voice—the conviction draining out of him.
“No,” Ash said firmly. “You are a Henbane. You will never be one of them. These wolves will never understand you. They will never really accept you.”
“That’s not true,” Daniel protested.
But the damage was done.
Helplessly, I watched the thing I’d feared most happen in real time.
Daniel’s light… dimmed.
That was the only word for it. The Daniel who had stood between Hunter and me for the past week—the old Daniel, the confident one who faced down monsters and firmly insisted that he wasn’t choosing between us, who’d stood up for himself, who loved us both so fiercely—receded.
In his place was someone else. The Daniel who made himself as small and unthreatening as possible. The Daniel who used his smile as a shield, the Daniel who didn’t take up any space at all.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I know I shouldn’t have left like that. I should have explained.”
I hated it. The apology sounded rehearsed and reflexive, the product of years of conditioning. They were the words of a child who’d learned that the fastest way to survive his family’s disapproval was to give in and agree with it.
Micah snorted. “Sorry doesn’t begin to cover it. You cast a forbidden spell, you probably nearly killed yourself in the process, split a human being in half, and then vanished in the middle of the night without any explanation. And now you’re apparently sleeping with the wreckage.”
Daniel’s whole body contracted at that, as if he’d been struck.
“We could’ve helped you,” Rowan said softly, shooting Micah an angry glare, before turning to Daniel, her expression becoming imploring. “We would’ve helped. I would’ve helped you fix this.” She gestured at Hunter and me. “You know that.”
“There was no time!” Daniel protested, his eyes filling with tears. “They would have died while we were figuring out a solution!”
“Perhaps that would’ve been a kinder fate,” Ash said coldly. “Instead, you’ve subjected your friend to this… half-life.”
That voice in the back of my mind returned: Are you real?
In this moment, I wasn’t sure anymore.
“Fuck you,” Hunter growled, his eyes filled with rage. “You don’t get to show up after two years and judge Daniel’s choices! And you sure as hell don’t get to decide what’s good for us and what’s not!”
“This is a family matter and you, young man, are not welcome to interfere in it,” Ash replied. “I will not warn you a third time. Daniel is leaving with us, and that’s final.”
“Why are you here?” I asked. “Why now? Hunter’s right—it’s been two years and you obviously knew how to find him. So why are you here now? What’s changed?”
Every head in the room turned in my direction, but it was Carmellia who answered.
“Our magic has been disrupted,” she said.
“For the past few days—the better part of a week—our family’s power has been behaving erratically.
Spells have been misfiring. Our wards have destabilized.
We traced the disruption to its source.” She locked eyes with Daniel.
“The source is you. You’ve done something to defile our magic. ”