Chapter 6 - Layla
Layla had entered the basement, hopeful. The shop was closed up, the door locked tight against any nosy alphas that might try and barge their way in.
And she was feeling confident.
It had been a week since her last attempt, a week since Dominic’s intrusion had thoroughly spooked her out of trying the ritual again. But some habits died hard, and in her restless curiosity, an idea had come to her.
Funnily enough, it was Dominic himself who had sparked the idea.
Wolves were aggressive by nature. She’d considered more violent spells in the past, reasoning that whatever it was suppressing her wolf must be able to counter that innate raw strength, and would therefore need raw strength to destroy.
All those spells tended to tap into blood magic, or other such dark arts, things she was loath to turn to.
By all accounts, there was always a price for those kinds of spells. One she wasn’t willing to pay.
But Dominic hadn’t used his strength when he faced her down. If anything, he’d shown incredible restraint, especially as she insulted him so readily. Which had gotten her thinking. Perhaps she needed the opposite of strength.
Perhaps she needed to find a way to make herself weak enough that the barriers would also weaken, unable to sustain themselves from her diminished state.
It was a dangerous idea, but she’d found just the spell to avoid physically having to injure herself.
It was old, hundreds of years old, from around the times of the witch burnings by the humans.
In the sudden, aggressive trials, some witches had found ways to temporarily expel their power from their bodies, rendering them weak and feeble when faced with the human tests.
The problem was, power couldn’t simply cease to be.
It had to go somewhere. And that somewhere tended to be unpredictable and often dangerous.
Caved-in ceilings, churning rivers, that sort of thing.
But Layla figured, with practice, she could siphon her power into a carefully controlled space within a salt circle for long enough that perhaps her wolf would be able to break free of its restraints.
And so she found herself, yet again, having dared to venture down into the basement, sitting before a simple clay pot surrounded by a thick circle of salt.
So far, it was going well.
Warmth prickled under her risen hands. Not heat exactly, but the idea of it, moving up through the chalk into the thin skin at the base of her thumb. She kept her shoulders down and her jaw unclenched. Don’t force it. Let it come.
She exhaled, long and slow, and the power flickered.
The shelves to her left creaked.
She held still. The shelves sometimes creaked.
Her skin fizzed with a harmless static. The thrum deepened.
Her gaze flicked, unhelpfully, down to her notes. She had them near memorized, but this was new. Uncertain. She needed to be sure she was doing it right.
She reached carefully out and drew another rune onto her slate tablet with jerky movements.
The room answered like a breath taken too fast.
The candles flared with an angry buzz, and the scent of ozone cracked open the air. Her palm burned, then cooled, and her stomach swooped in fear.
“Easy,” she whispered, as if talking to a temperamental stallion.
The shelves creaked again, louder, a long splintering sigh, then a small cascade of dust tumbled down over the spines.
She kept her attention on the runes, sweat beading on her brow.
Inside her skin, her energy roiled. Beyond blood and bone, something fundamental to her was awake and thrashing.
Her heart pounded. She touched the chalk to the slate, hoping beyond hope.
The thrum within her turned skittish, then sharp.
“Stop,” she said, pulling her hand back from the slate as if burnt.
It was the wrong move.
The flare snapped outward, not towards the clay pot, but sideways, tilting off course. The candle flames sputtered out with an angry hiss, and darkness elbowed in. A glass cracked somewhere. Wooden beams shrieked in protest.
“Wait—”
She threw her arms over her head as the first shelf tore loose.
The books came down first, a rush of paper, thuds like bodies, a sharp corner clipping her shoulder.
Then the ancient brackets sheared free with a squeal, and the whole unit cascaded down in sections.
Dust billowed, gritty and thick, catching in her throat.
A few tins skittered, the sound too sharp against the stone, before falling silent under an avalanche of pages.
Layla coughed, eyes streaming, mouth full of chalk, and the taste of old sawdust.
“Okay,” she said hoarsely to the ceiling, to the floor, to the pile of fallen books.
She stayed crouched until her heartbeat slowed, taking stock of her body. Her left shoulder would bruise. Her knees were scraped up by the stone floor. Her chest ached, as if struck, where her power had snapped back inside.
Blindly, she groped forward for a candle, whispering a spell to light it. The words hurt, like trying to run mere minutes after finishing a marathon. The candle flickered, hesitant to obey her, before settling into a steady, golden glow.
The wall was a ruin. Three shelves had ripped out in a staggered collapse; two others hung at mean angles as if daring gravity to finish the job.
Books were everywhere, splayed open, stacked by accident, spines cracked from impact.
Some had landed mercifully on others, but others had nearly ripped apart.
The remaining shelves groaned, and a few trinkets rolled to the floor.
“Right,” she said, one hand on her forehead. “Right. This is fine.”
One plank of wood juddered and scraped down the wall, unable to take the weight of the few remaining books on it. Layla darted forward with a squeal, catching it before it snapped fully. In the process, several splinters embedded themselves in her palms.
“Ouch, ouch, ouch,” she hissed, tears welling at the sudden bloom of pain.
With a frustrated cry, she released the corpse of the shelf, instead sweeping the books off and placing them on the floor. A few specks of blood landed on their old covers.
“Great,” she muttered, fists clenching, “those better not be any of the darker grimoires.”
She wouldn’t cry. This was fine. She had tried something; it had gone wrong. It happened. She would just have to be more careful next time.
Her head fell back, and she released a long, pained breath.
The sting of failure never seemed to diminish.
“Right,” she said again, “let’s get this sorted out.”
The words had barely left her mouth when a sound split the quiet. It was a long, low howl that rolled in from outside, distant but unmistakable.
Her spine went rigid.
It wasn’t a hunting call. Not a patrol signal, either. It was the formal cry, the one reserved for summons and death.
A few seconds later, her phone vibrated violently in her pocket. She didn’t need to read the message to know what it was.
Still, she climbed the steps fast, heart thudding, pulling her phone out as she went. The screen glared white in the dim shop light:
EMERGENCY ASSEMBLY. ALL PACK MEMBERS REQUIRED. OLD SAWMILL.
Her first instinct was denial. The pack didn’t call emergency assemblies without reason. War, border breaches, or the Alpha’s direct decree. Whatever it was, it would not be good.
Ignoring a summons wasn’t an option. Not for anyone who wanted to stay in the pack’s good graces. Not for her, especially.
She muttered a quick healing spell, wrapping her injured palms in a cord, healing the small hurts.
Then she washed her hands quickly, scrubbing the last traces of chalk from beneath her nails.
The basin water clouded white, swirling away into the drain.
She tied her hair back, buttoned a clean blouse, and pulled on her coat, the plain gray one that made her look as forgettable as possible.
Half the pack would already be there. She needed to get a move on.
Her heart stuttered in her throat.
It was fine. Whatever it was, it was pack business. She only needed to be there as a formality, and then she could go back to pretending she truly was an outcast.
She just needed to stay out of Dominic’s way.