Chapter Seven
Tuck
T he storm starts like a warning.
Crack.
Then—
Boom.
I wince as the thunder rattles the old glass in the library’s windows, the kind of antique panes that look pretty and historical but weren’t exactly built for durability. Maren’s curled up on the window seat, knees to her chest, chin tucked down, gazing out into the dark forest like it’s gonna offer answers. Or swallow her whole.
Which it won’t. Because she’s not out there.
It all pulled together quickly. I barely got all the details at first, only that Rob, Will, LJ were doing a perimeter sweep and patrol—check the security stuff, see if they could get a visual on anything suspicious—and that I’m supposed to stick here and protect Maren in the meantime, just in case anyone does get through to the house.
Which I can do. Absolutely. I mean, I’m a wolf. I’ve done it before, back at Gisbourne’s house.
And I know she knows that.
But the fact remains, they’re out there, in the dark of the forest, and she...
She’s in here.
With me.
“Hey,” I say, nudging the door fully open with my elbow. “I brought some—uh...”
She turns.
Shit. Her face.
That quiet, distant look she gets when something’s gnawing at her. And okay, yes, I brought cheese and wine and a tray that could’ve fed Henry VIII and all of his wives, but suddenly that feels about three levels too festive.
“You okay?” I ask, gentler this time.
She shifts, gives me a smile that doesn’t quite land. “Yes. I’m fine.”
That, I can tell, is at least partially a lie.
I set the tray down and try not to hover. “You sure? You looked kind of...pouty.” I wince even as I say it.
Not helpful, Tuck.
But she doesn’t snap at me. Just exhales like she’s trying to unclench something inside. I take it as a sign to press forward with Operation Distract Maren from Existential Dread and/or Guilt Over Not Being on Patrol.
Unveil the cheese.
Okay, yes, I may have gone overboard. Three kinds of brie. A chèvre log rolled in cranberry. A smoked thousand-day gouda. Nuts, crackers, a tiny dish of olives, a crusty baguette, and a full bottle of Pinot I absolutely did not smuggle from Will’s private stash.
“I know this isn’t the same as going out there with them,” I say, trying not to sound like I’m apologizing for existing. “But they’re right. We can’t all be out there— you can’t, certainly, and then of the four of us, well...I mean, it makes sense that I’d be the one to stay back, even if—”
“It’s not you.” Her voice cuts in, firm.
“Thanks. I, um. I wasn’t worried.” Lie. I grab the bottle and the corkscrew. “But that...means a lot.”
“I love being with you,” she goes on, softer. “I love...you, Tuck.”
Oh.
I pause, mid-corkscrew.
I knew that. I did—didn’t I? Hadn’t she said that before? Did I just memory-hole the most important three words I’d ever been told?
My ears go hot. Like, scalding. I focus very intently on arranging the tiny cheese knives.
I genuinely can’t remember. But hearing her say it now— I love you, Tuck —God, it’s amazing. Unbelievable.
I really, truly, never dreamed I’d be so lucky.
“I love you too.” My hands go all clumsy on the bottleneck and I grin like an idiot. “Like, a lot.”
She smiles. “Okay, glad we cleared that up.” A little laugh. “No, it’s more that...” Her eyes drift toward the window again. “It’s hard to not have the rest of them here, I guess?”
“They’re big boys, Maren,” I say, sitting on a footstool and finally uncorking the wine, suddenly feeling quite manly. “We all are. I’d like to see the bounty hunters that could take down a fox, a bear, and a dragon.”
It’s supposed to be encouraging. Instead, she shivers. I catch the look in her eyes. Yeah. She’s thinking about the tranqs. The cuffs. The literal wanted poster that’s apparently covering half the county—or at least the seedier parts of it. I can’t really blame her for feeling a bit stressed.
So I pass her the glass of wine. Big enough to bathe in.
“Here,” I say. “Take the edge off.”
She takes it and downs a mouthful, and my eyebrows shoot up.
“Sorry,” she mutters. “Long day.”
“No, no,” I say. “By all means. Cheers.” I clink her glass, take a sip of my own.
She drinks again. I try to read her face. It’s got that glazed-over quality of someone too in their own head. Legs bouncing now, like she’s got a jackrabbit under her skin.
“Maren?”
She looks up like she just came back to herself.
“Any preference?” I ask, gesturing at the cheese.
“Sorry,” she says, rubbing her forehead. “Um, no.” Her eyes flick toward the window. “Did they say when they’d be back?”
“I, ah...” I glance at the empty doorway like the answer might be hanging there. “No. But probably not for a while. Like... a long while.”
Her mouth twists. She mutters something that sounds like “Sorry,” and I hate this—hate that she’s stuck here and feeling like she has to apologize for being worried.
“I just need a distraction,” she finishes. “Is all.”
“More than just cheese?” I ask, handing her a chunk of baguette spread with brie.
She nods, accepting the food anyway. “Probably.”
“Well,” I exhale, rubbing my palms on my jeans. “I think I felt something... coming today. Almost.”
She nearly chokes on her wine. “You...did?”
I nod, scratching the back of my head. “I think we all did. Didn’t you?”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head.
“Pretty sure Will did, anyway,” I say. “He mentioned it when they were suiting up just before they left.” I glance down. “Everything okay?”
“I...” She grips her glass like it might anchor her. “Just a lot of pent-up energy. I guess training with LJ got me wired.”
I nod slowly. “I see.”
“You were saying?” she prompts. “To distract me?”
“Oh, right.” I grin, trying not to look too overeager. “Wanna hear about what I learned today?”
She nods. I catch the faintest flicker of amusement in her eyes. It makes my chest unclench.
“Okay,” I say, sitting forward, energized. “So at first I was thinking maybe Guy was full of shit. Because he lied about, well—”
“Fucking everything?”
“Exactly.” I laugh. “But then I realized... well, you can’t just make that up out of thin air—ley lines, that kind of thing.”
“Hang on.” She lifts a hand. “You know what those are?”
“I didn’t ,” I say, “until a little while ago. I mean, I’d heard the term, but I had to do some digging...”
I gesture to the desk, now stacked high with hardcover books, post-it flags, and a few ancient-looking tomes that smell like a wizard’s basement and have made their way to my personal collection after the occasional museum job. But what I’m really looking for is—
The map. I grab it, roll it out beside the cheese board.
“Basically, they’re these kinds of”—I draw lines in the air—“channels of power that run around the world. Wherever they overlap, there’s more power. So the more of them overlap”—I layer my fingers over each other—“the stronger the connection, and the more powerful the vibes of that place become.”
“Vibes?” she echoes, arching a brow. “Is that the technical term?”
“Well... no,” I admit. “The Latin term is potentia loci . The power of a place,” I translate. “The more nodes in the network, the better the... signal.”
“So, like Wi-Fi for magic?”
I laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
I lean in, realizing too late that I have fully jumped into geek mode with both feet, talking a mile a minute and gesturing wildly. “And what’s wild is that these places—convergences, they’re called—turn up everywhere. Like...” I stop myself, pushing up my stupid glasses that have slid down my nose again .
“Like?”
I sigh. Guess there’s no going back now. And if I was going to spend long enough on this stupid thing to get a crick in my neck and double vision, I might as well show it off.
“Here. I took the liberty of marking all the ley lines out, and...”
I smooth the map out fully, red Sharpie lines crisscrossing it like some conspiracy theory wall.
“...and I’m starting to realize this actually looks kind of insane,” I finish, leaning back and running a hand through my hair.
Cool. The other guys are out there in tactical gear and I’m in here with a stupid little treasure map. It feels like middle school all over again.
But Maren seems fascinated. She looks at the map, then up at me. “This is incredible. How did you...” Her eyes dart back and forth across the coordinates, the lines connecting them.
“Um.” I scratch the back of my head. “Do you really wanna know?”
“No, I’m just asking to be polite.” She rolls her eyes. Gives me a little smack. “ Yes, I want to know.”
“Okay, okay!” I can’t help but smile. Then panic, inwardly, because I’m not even sure how to explain what I did. “Um, okay. So...did you ever take differential calculus?”
Maren blinks at me. “At Nottingham Senior High School? We were lucky to get a functioning graphing calculator.”
“Right. Okay.” I blow out a breath, trying to think of the most beginner-friendly version of this. “How about this: do you know what a quant is?”
“It’s...a not very nice term for female anatomy?” she ventures.
Oh God. “No, no, no, quant. Like, a quantitative analyst. At a hedge fund or investment bank.”
“Oh.” She shakes her head. “I have no idea what that is.”
“That’s okay. No one does.” I barely could articulate my own job description to my family back when I’d had the one internship, and I hadn’t even used the words derivative securities. “A quant’s job basically involves taking a ton of data that seems completely unrelated and running it through advanced models to predict how the markets are going to move.”
There’s a pause, during which I hate myself for even bringing this up. But Maren doesn’t look... totally bored to tears. “I see,” she says, although her voice tells me she doesn’t. And definitely doesn’t understand what this has to do with magic. “And they do this to...?”
“Well, make money, mostly.” I chew my lip. “But my theory is—okay. Let me put it this way. You know how ice cream sales go up in the summer? Because it gets hotter, right? You can pretty safely say that warmer temperatures equal more people buying cones.”
She nods.
“So...quant work is like that, but assuming that there are contributing factors that we don’t even know about and with effects in areas we may not realize are out there. Like how a slight fluctuation in relative humidity in southwestern Nebraska for three days can drive oil prices through the roof.”
Maren raises her eyebrows.
“Because...there’s a pipeline running down from Canada and the weather conditions in that area have an outsize effect on flow rate.” I close my eyes, hating myself for saying these words out loud to her and praying for sudden, painless death.
“Oh.” Maren frowns. “That’s actually kind of cool.”
It is. But not worth spending fourteen-hour days under fluorescent lighting. Or having to wear a tie to work.
“The point is, there’s all this stochastic modeling—er, modeling of things that happen, um, sort of randomly?” I glance at her. “That you can do to figure out underlying patterns of movement in big, chaotic systems.And this power—like the kind you can feel in ley lines—it’s a kind of energy. It moves, pools, reacts.”
I rub my forehead, because this is where it gets a little...weird.
“So I ran a Black-Scholes model—because basically my theory was that the channels of power might be forming in accordance with a kind of similar Wiener motion—”
Maren nearly spits out her wine. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Er.” My ears go nuclear hot. “That’s just what it’s called. Named for a guy named Wiener. Anyway”—dear Lord, how am I going to land this plane—“I treated the terrain like a volatility surface, right?Plugged in things like seismic anomalies and magnetic field disturbances from the USGS datasets, migration paths of apex predators, unusual weather patterns. But also less, um, concrete data.”
“As in?”
I grimace. “Fairy rings, thin places, feng shui dragon lines, Aboriginal songlines, Icelandic elf paths, paths of the dead, corpse roads—”
“Whoa.” Maren holds up a hand. “I get it. I think. And that’s...”
She looks back at the map.
“And that’s...how I drew these lines up,” I finish. “Now, I could be wrong. I mean, modeling is just modeling, right? It’s theoretical. Unless the outcome can be externally confirmed. And in this case...you see how the lines overlap in all these places?”
I point to one cluster in particular.
She follows my finger. Her eyes light up.
“Sherwood County, Virginia,” she says. “A convergence.”
“Exactly,” I say.
Outside, lightning crackles, right on cue. I almost jump.
“Tuck,” Maren says, shaking her head slowly. “This is incredible. I mean, who else would have thought to combine all this stuff, let alone know how... ”
“Oh, it’s not that impressive.” I grab my elbow, hanging back. “Anyone could have done it if they knew what inputs to—”
“Absolutely not,” Maren interrupts. “Fixing a car, that anyone can do.”
I draw my eyebrows together. “I beg to dif—”
“You could,” she interrupts, finger in the air, “if I showed you. But this? No.” She smiles, and her smile is so lovely and warm that I think I’m actually...proud of myself. Somehow. “This is beyond.”
“Thanks.” My face feels like it’s on fire. “I’m glad it worked. Or...well, proved Guy wasn’t lying, anyway. There really is something about this place.”
Maren nods again, eyes back on the map, wine clutched to her chest. “But...so what? What does that mean?”
I sigh. “Yeah, see, I don’t know. That’s the frustrating part. I know there’s one here. A convergence of ley lines. Supercharging things, somehow. A bunch of other ones in various places. And...that’s sort of it.”
She traces the map again, meandering over to other clusters—down south, up north, zigzagging along the coast.
“Fun fact,” I say, watching her route. “That’s right near where I grew up.”
“Really?” she asks. “You’re from...Paterson, New Jersey?”
“Just outside, yeah.” I nod, a little sheepishly. “It was just another suburb. Nothing remarkable. But yes, there’s some deep Tuck lore for you. And make all your Jersey jokes now. I’ve heard them all.”
“Hah.” She tips her head. “You know what, Tuck? I’m distracted.”
“Really?” I smile. “Glad to be of service.”
“Or mostly, anyway.” She grins wickedly. “Better have more wine, just in case.”
I pour her another glass.
The storm growls against the windows as Maren settles into one of the armchairs. I plop onto a footstool and mainline some cheese. Talking about differential equations makes me hungry, I guess.
I’m about to suggest a game of Scrabble or something when Maren speaks up suddenly.
“So, wait, wait, wait. What’s your theory, then?”
I swallow my cheese. “About? I have lots of theories.”
She waves a hand, sloshing her glass just a tiny bit. “About us. You. Why people like you guys...exist.”
“Shifters?”
She nods. “Yeah. I mean, you must have wondered, right? Besides all the stuff we read about before we lost all Guy’s books. Is it... genetic or something?”
“Not so far as I can tell,” I say. “I actually had all the guys do those mail-order kits a while back—you know, spit in the tube, figure out what percentage Swedish or North African or whatever you are?” That was a fun ask. Will almost looked excited when I told him I need him to spit for me. “Got the source code of all our sequences and uploaded it to a reader program.”
“And?”
“Normal,” I say. “Or, well, fully human, anyway. Only revelations were that Will’s got a predisposition to cirrhosis and LJ’s got some Caribbean ancestry.” I look at my fingernails. “So it’s something that DNA doesn’t account for.”
“Mmm.” She runs her finger over the map again. “So it’s just random chance?”
“I don’t know if it’s that.” I glance at the storm outside, thinking.
Because I have thought about this a lot.
But never really talked about it with anyone.
“I think we were made to adapt,” I start. “I mean, literally, that’s what we do, right? So it stands to reason. But the when and where of it all...” I look at the map. “That part I’m still fuzzy on.”
She slows down. The thunder gives her cover to think.
“You said you guys aren’t genetically different,” she says slowly. “So it’s not inherited. But what if it’s environmental? Like...they put in a nuclear power plant and then all the fish end up with three eyes.”
I tilt my head at her. “I think that’s just in The Simpsons. ”
She waves me off. “You know what I mean. Guy’s books. All those historical accounts. The ones about shifters in the Scottish Highlands. In Istanbul during the Ottoman Empire. That clan in Mali that resisted colonization...”
“You remember all that?” I’m impressed. I’m a good student—kinda my thing—but memorization, or, honestly, expansive recall of things, isn’t necessarily my strong suit. Hence all the post-its.
But I frown, looking at the map. She’s right: there’s a convergence in Scotland. In Türkiye. In Mali.
But...
“But those are three areas with wildly different environments,” I say, peering closer. “I mean, we’re talking a span of over forty degrees of latitude, hugely varying amounts of sunlight and moonlight exposure—and the soil composition—”
“Tuck,” Maren says, just a little annoyed, and I shrink back. But she smiles. “You’re being too literal. I need you to think more in terms of—
“...vibes?” I offer.
“Vibes,” she agrees. “And what these places have in common is...things are fucked up. At least, going based on what we know about history, right? The...power is fucked up.”
I open my mouth, but she cuts me off, just as lightning flashes through the room.
“No, no, not as in literal electricity .” She looks up and around her, like nature was sending a lightning strike to prove a point. “I mean in terms of human power. Metaphorically speaking. Power structures. There’s...oppression. Injustice. People getting crushed by the system and no one’s stopping it. Maybe...”
She cuts herself off.
“No,” I prompt her. “What?”
“I’ve had too much wine,” she mutters. “I’m barely making sense.”
“Logic seems perfectly clear to me,” I say.
Maren breathes out. “Okay. Well, maybe that imbalance of power draws in the convergence,” she says slowly. “Like...I don’t know. A magnet, or something. The more the human power structures get out of whack, the more the supernatural powers get pulled to that place.”
Her words bring a quote to mind. One I always liked, from MLK: the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Of course, he was really speaking metaphorically.
I rub my jaw. Look back at my map. Trace my finger up north, past New York and into...
“Massachusetts?” Maren bends in over the map and squints. “Salem. As in, the witch trials place?”
“Yes,” I say slowly. “That too. But I was thinking more like our friend...” I trace just slightly south, to Boston. “...Will Scarlet.” I screw my eyes shut, trying to remember something. “He was born in Salem. Technically. Something about a family vacation to Marblehead, mom went into labor early...”
I open my eyes. Look back at the map.
At humble old Paterson, New Jersey.
“The silk strike,” I mutter, standing up.
Maren sits forward a little. “The what now?”
I shake my head. “Local history. The kind of thing they always made us do reports on in elementary school. Turn of the century, there were a ton of silk mills just running people ragged—losing fingers, child labor, the works—and so the workers organized a strike. Or, wait, maybe a few strikes.” It’s been a long time since Mrs. DiLuigi’s class. “Anyway, people got hurt. It was ugly.”
“Did it work?” Maren asks. “The strike?”
I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”
I blink at my madman scribblings, computing this new information. Me, Will, and Rob—and, I note, darting a glance down south, maybe LJ, too, at this convergence in Louisiana. It’s not conclusive evidence, but it sure seems like...like everywhere the lines cross, shifters show up.
Not because of the lines. Because the lines hum with need.
Maren slips to standing next to me, and my heart jumps.
“Holy shit,” I whisper. “The ley lines mark where the balance of power’s tilted too far. And the universe—or whatever it is—responds.”
“Right,” she says. “With you .”
“With you, too.” My voice is barely a breath. “Think about it. Historical precedent. The pressure on the people gets too great—there’s revolution. Resistance. A breaking point. But then things have to be rebuilt, too. Healed.”
Lightning flashes. We both jump. Then—
“God,” I say. “You’re brilliant, Maren.”
And I kiss her.
It’s instinct. Heat and wine and awe. And when she kisses me back, I lose the thread entirely.
She pulls back just a little. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m... kind of wound up. Like I said. I didn’t mean to jump you.”
“No,” I say, hoarse. “I mean, jump away. If you want. But I don’t...” I cough. “Never mind.”
“What?” A look comes over her face. One that’s less studious and more...sensual.
“But I don’t mind,” I finish. “Is all I was going to say.”
“Don’t mind?” Now she’s grinning. “What, is this not a romantic enough atmosphere for you?” She sweeps her arms around us, at the bookcases, the mess of papers, the plush furniture.
“No! No,” I explain hurriedly. “Actually, it’s...” I swallow. “If anything it’s the opposite.”
She cocks her head. “I’m listening.”
Oh, dear Lord.
“Well, you know. It’s just...” I can’t look at her. “I’ve always wanted to...you know. In here.”
“Library sex?”
I shrug helplessly. “I know. It’s stupid.”
“Not stupid.” She’s absolutely beaming. “It sounds fun.”
“Yeah?” I look up. Inch closer. Thread my fingers through hers when she picks up my hand.
“Absolutely.” She tugs at my hand, pulls us together, and instinct wins out as I sweep into her for a kiss. She hooks her fingers in my belt loops, pressing us together, hot and urgent, and as I bend down to tease her lower lip with my teeth I can’t help but feel like I might be having the best night of the four of us after all.