Chapter 30
Noa
Iknow immediately this isn’t a normal dream.
It has that same warped glass feeling as the rest of them, the same wrongness in the static-filled air, the same sense that something old and long-buried is fighting to the surface.
Another memory bleeding through the binds of Mom’s spell work.
The mist, inky and restless, curls around my ankles as I once again stand in the clearing with the Fallamhain Pack’s helicopter pad.
My plaid pajamas cling to my skin, the same ones I wore the last time I dreamed of this place—the ones that belong to a life I lost nearly eight years ago.
As expected, the wind isn’t warm or cold.
It just is. It carries a metallic hum, a trembling distortion, as if the world is being filtered through old speakers that can’t properly hold sound.
This time, instead of staring at the old supply shack from a distance, I stand before the doorway.
The wood of the weather structure, as if it’s a breathing thing, groans with each gust of wind. I search the dark, shadowy interior, but no matter how hard I try to focus on the little details, they keep dissolving like wet paint.
Then, from somewhere inside that dark abyss, a whimper echoes out. Small. Frayed. Soaked in fear and exhaustion. It’s the kind of sound a person makes when they’ve already given up.
It’s the memory of someone screaming from this same blackness the last time I woke up here that has prickles growing under my skin and my pulse crawling higher.
I inch forward, shoulders squared and breath held tight.
It’s like some delusional part of me believes if I trap the air in my chest, that I can hold my courage there too.
The second my bare foot lifts to step inside, I’m ripped away. Not by someone’s hands, but by some unseen force that hooks under my ribs and catapults me backward through the air.
The dream blurs. Spins. Reforms entirely.
When my feet finally find steady ground again, I’m thirty yards from the small building, positioned in the middle of the clearing as though the building never let me near it. It’s jarring, a violent kind of relocation that makes the earth feel unreliable beneath my feet.
Before I can recover, a voice cuts clean through the dream.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
The hairs on the back of my neck rise. The voice is the same dark, heavy echo as before.
It slithers into my ears and rises from the ground all at once, a chorus from all different directions that make head spin.
I can’t pinpoint its source, I’m not sure I want to, but before I can fully process the familiar warning, the dream skips again.
And another voice joins, spoken as if made of the wind itself.
“I know what you want most.”
My lungs seize as I jerk toward the achingly familiar sound just as the twirling gray mist at the edge of the clearing splits open.
Mom steps out of it as if she’s crossing a veil into a different plane of existence.
Her long hair lifting in the breeze, her gaze sharp and fixed on something only she can see.
My body reacts before my mind can catch up.
I shift toward her. Or try to. The sudden, desperate ache to reach her, to touch her, to feel her arms around me again is overwhelming in its intensity.
But my feet never close the gap. The dream tilts and glides beneath me, keeping her at the same unreachable distance no matter how many steps I try to take.
“Mom!” I shout, or I think I do, but the wind swallows my voice whole. The sound eaten alive, chewed up into nothing before it can reach her.
She doesn’t look at me. Not once. Even when my grief-filled heart is actively twisting itself into a knot inside my rib cage. It’s like my presence means nothing here.
I’m nothing more than a spectator for this part of the memory, not a participant.
It takes me far too long to realize that her attention is pinned on something over my shoulder. She watches like she can’t afford to look away.
My stomach drops.
I turn, and this time the dream doesn’t fight me. It wants me to see.
A massive beast made of shadow and smoke towers behind me.
The shape resembles a wolf, but it ripples and seethes like storm clouds forced to hold an unnatural shape.
Obsidian eyes, somehow both glassy and dead, stare back at me.
The attention has some old wound inside me pulling tight, threatening to split open all over again.
The fear that courses through me like ice water isn’t remembered by my mind, yet my body reacts like it’s lived this moment before.
Mom’s voice echoes again. “What you’re so desperate for…I can give it to you.”
The creature laughs. The sound drips with cruelty and scrapes at the back of my skull, needling with a familiarity I can’t place.
“Bargaining is beneath you, weaver.”
The deep, masculine voice from before, the one that’s told me twice I shouldn’t be here, belongs to this demon-like wolf.
Behind me, Mom’s answer shivers through the clearing. “I’ll do anything to keep my daughter safe.”
My breath hitches.
I barely register the gravity of her promise before the fog on the far side of the clearing splits open again, peeling apart in a violent rush. A silhouette surges through the breach, sprinting toward me with frantic, desperate speed.
Rennick.
But not the man I know now. The younger version I left behind years ago. He has the same gray irises that undo me, but this version of him is leaner, his beard little more than a dark shadow. It’s who he was before he grew into the pack Alpha I fell asleep with in my nest.
“Noa!” He calls for me, but his voice is muffled, like he’s shouting through water.
Even with the world rippling and warping around us, his eyes snap straight to mine and his relief is immediate.
It dies the second his attention shifts to the shadowed wolf at my back.
Horror that twists into fury scorches through his expression.
“What the hell is going on?” Rennick snarls, and there’s nothing timid about his approach. No hesitation. No fear. He’s ready to draw blood. His body coiled tight like he’s prepared to step between me and the creature looming like a wraith.
He doesn’t get the chance.
The memory whiplashes again, ripping the world out from under us.
And then I’m on my knees.
The earth beneath me feels damp, but these dreamscapes are always devoid of temperature. My palms sink into the dirt as tears spill down my cheeks, but even their warmth is gone. I occupy this place, but sensation no longer belongs to me.
I’m begging for something. For what? I don’t know yet, but the desperation in me is real. It belongs to me. It’s older than this moment, stamped into my bones like a scar.
“Please, Mom.” My voice cracks. My fingernails dig at the soil as I try to anchor myself to anything that won’t slip away. “Don’t do this. Don’t take this from me.”
My mother stands above me, her hands moving in a fluid pattern as luminous threads wind from her fingers.
She’s weaving, the movement familiar down to its smallest shift.
Her eyes are closed tight and her face flinches with every sound I cry out.
She’s hurting, but she’s choosing the hurt. And she isn’t stopping.
A roar shatters the air.
My head jerks toward it instinctively, and there he is.
Rennick thrashes against the glowing threads anchoring him to the ground, every muscle shaking as he fights a battle he has no hope of winning. The magic forces him to kneel in the dirt across the way from me, but he won’t back down. He strains for even an inch of freedom.
The beast made of smoke and simmering hate stands at his flank, those lifeless eyes brightening with an eerie glint as Rennick struggles. There’s something hungry in that gaze, as if the sight of Rennick forced to kneel pleases it.
“Noa!” my alpha roars my name, and it fractures the mist around us. Piercing streaks of light break through the inky fog as if the memory itself is cracking under the force of his terror. “No! Thalassa, please. She’s mine!”
The agony in his voice slices clean through me.
More tears fall uselessly down my face.
I look up at my mother.
Her eyes are already on me. Full of sorrow. Full of love. Full of something heavier than both.
“One day,” she whispers, just loud enough for me to hear.
“When you repair what I broke, I hope you can find a way to forgive me, my girl.” The threads in her hands glow brighter and she steps closer, wincing from her own magic as it twists and tightens in her palms. “Don’t fight it, Noa.
Resisting my magic will only make it harder on you. ”
Before I can move—before I can even choke out another plea—the threads lash out, serpentine and swift, curling around me and locking me in place. They cinch tight, shredding the air in my lungs, and my body convulses as the spell tears through me, rewriting every part of me it brushes against.
Blackness spills over the world, spreading like ink bleeding across wet paper
The last thing I hear as I’m swallowed whole by the dark is Rennick’s voice, broken with agony and visceral panic.
“Noa!”
I’m ripped free from the dream, surfacing from the darkness like I’ve been shoved.
I lurch upright, breath strangled, my lungs locked tight and burning from phantom pressure.
For several panicked seconds, I can’t breathe at all.
The echo of those damn threads clings to my ribs, squeezing, refusing to relax their grip.
I claw at my sternum on instinct, nails raking against exposed skin, half expecting to find those glowing restraints still biting into my skin.
Instead, there’s only my heart hammering violently beneath my palm.
It takes me a minute to remember where I am.
Closet. Nest. Rennick’s house. Not the clearing. Not the shack. Not trapped in a dream.
No, it wasn’t a dream. A memory.