Chapter 22 - Layla
Layla sat hunched over the table in her basement, her hands gripping the edge so tightly her knuckles burned white.
Her breathing came shallow and uneven. The ache in her chest had settled into something constant and sharp.
Not physical, not entirely, but as if the bond itself had turned against her.
Dominic’s voice still echoed in her mind. His anger. His betrayal.
She shut her eyes, shaking her head, but the words wouldn’t leave. They circled her thoughts like vultures, picking clean what was left of her resolve.
She’d thought she was past shame. That after all these years, hiding her magic, living in the cracks of her brother’s world, she couldn’t be humiliated further.
But hearing it from Dominic, from the one man she had trusted to see her, truly see her, broke something she hadn’t realized was still whole.
He had looked at her like she was something filthy.
And maybe she was.
Layla pushed back from the desk, the chair screeching against the stone floor. She began to move through the shelves, her fingers skimming the spines of old grimoires and notebooks, searching. She didn’t know for what exactly, only that she couldn’t bear this anymore.
If her magic had brought her nothing but pain, then she’d cut it out.
The thought made her stomach turn, but it stuck. Desperation made it feel like clarity.
She yanked books from the shelves, stacking them on the floor, searching for that book she’d opened weeks ago. The one that displaced her magic. Scraped it out of her, leaving her hollow and human. And this time, she’d make sure it stayed gone for good.
She gathered the materials on instinct: chalk, salt, a cord, a vase. The motions were automatic, jerky and instinctive.
As she began to draw the circle on the stone floor, her thoughts fractured into fragments. Memories blurred, her mother’s voice, Theodore’s warnings, the nights she’d practiced in secret by candlelight, terrified someone would smell the magic on her skin.
And Dominic. His warmth, his touch, the way he’d once looked at her like she was something precious.
A sob tore from her throat, but she kept drawing.
When she finally stood, the circle was complete, crude but stable. The symbols carved into the floor seemed to shimmer faintly, though she wasn’t sure if that was her vision or the magic itself.
She stepped into the center.
Her voice came out raw and hoarse as she began to recite the words from the page. The language was old, the syllables jagged, slicing her tongue as she spoke them. Her heart slowed, her hands heating.
At first, nothing happened.
Then the air shifted.
The candle flames bent inward, flickering blue. The walls seemed to stretch, the shadows lengthening, reaching toward her. A low hum filled the room, the sound of something ancient waking up.
Layla’s chest constricted. She tried to keep reading, but the words slipped away, her breath catching on each syllable. The light from the circle brightened, searing white, and suddenly she couldn’t feel her hands.
The pain hit next, not in her body, but deeper, like her magic itself was being dragged out through her ribs.
She gasped, clutching at her chest. “No—wait—”
The floor swayed under her feet. The light swallowed the room. Her heart pounded once, twice—
And the world broke open.
The basement was gone.
She stood in the snow. Endless, blinding snow.
Wolves howled somewhere in the distance, hundreds of them, their cries of rage and terror echoing through the air.
She turned, spinning, trying to see, but the storm swallowed everything.
Then a shape took form in the white, a pack of wolves, their eyes gleaming gold and silver, fighting against things that weren’t wolves at all.
Monsters.
Gray and twisted, their eyes white as bone, their claws like knives.
They moved in jerks and shudders, half-shadow, half-flesh.
They were spilling from a great maw cracked open in the mountain, spilling out as if from the bowels of hell itself.
The shifters rose to meet them. Layla’s pulse raced as she recognized some of the wolves.
The white, blue-eyed Nordan. The dark, shadowy Volkhov. Theodore. Dominic.
The hybrids were winning.
Blood stained the snow, vivid against the white.
She screamed Dominic’s name.
He was in the thick of it, his dark wolf form slick with blood that wasn’t all his own. His movements were a blur of precision, brutal, efficient, but there were too many of them. For every monster he struck down, two more appeared from the fog.
She could feel his exhaustion. The rage was burning under his skin. The raw, desperate instinct to protect his own, even when he was bleeding out.
“Stop,” she whispered, though he couldn’t hear her. “Please, stop—”
Her voice was swallowed by the wind.
The snow deepened, rising to her knees, then her waist. It pulled her down, heavy and cold. The harder she fought it, the more it took. She tried to reach for Dominic, her hand stretching through the storm, but her fingers passed through him like smoke.
The hybrid behind him moved too fast.
Layla screamed again as it leapt, jaws unhinging, claws outstretched.
Then the world cracked like glass.
Everything slowed. The snow frozen midair, the wolves’ howls suspended in their throats. The sound of the battle twisted into something low and guttural, vibrating through her bones.
When she looked up, the sky had turned the color of ash.
And through it came light.
Not sunlight. Not moonlight. Something else.
A blinding flare of green and gold, the shimmer of the Aurora. It stretched across the clouds in ribbons, silent and terrible, and as it pulsed, the storm itself seemed to shudder.
Layla’s heart lurched. She knew this place. The jagged outline of the mountains. Looming above her was Aurora Peak, at the summit of Nanuq Mountain.
But this wasn’t her vision from before. This wasn’t the right side of the mountain.
This was something worse.
The snow above her shifted, the slope trembling. She heard the first crack of ice—distant, echoing, and then another.
She turned, eyes wide, as a sheet of white detached from the mountainside.
The avalanche came like a roar.
It was so loud it wasn’t sound anymore, just pressure, force, the raw will of the mountain descending. Wolves scattered, their cries lost in the thunder. The hybrids screamed, too, a sound that didn’t belong in nature. The snow swallowed everything, all light, all sound, all life.
And in the final second before it hit, she saw a pair of eyes, icy blue, familiar and furious, lock on hers through the storm.
Dominic’s.
Then darkness.
***
Layla’s body jerked violently.
She gasped, air tearing into her lungs like knives. The world was spinning, the dim walls of the basement blurring into view, the shelves half-toppled, the candle burned down to a puddle of wax. The chalk circle beneath her feet had been smeared away, the marking gone.
Her chest heaved. Her pulse was a drumbeat in her throat. Sweat clung to her skin, freezing in the basement air.
For a moment, she just sat there, her head in her hands, the vision still flickering behind her eyelids like an afterimage burned into her mind.
Wolves. Blood. Snow. Dominic.
And the avalanche.
Her hands shook so badly she could barely breathe. “No,” she whispered, voice cracking. “No, no, no—”
She staggered to her feet, catching herself against the desk as a wave of dizziness hit her. The room tilted. Her legs felt like water.
“Oh God.”
Layla scrambled for her phone, her fingers slipping on the screen. Her reflection stared back at her in the black glass, wild-eyed, pale, streaked with tears. She unlocked it, and the time stared back at her. Four in the morning.
Her vision had taken place just after dawn.
She had to tell them.
Her brother. Dominic. Someone. Anyone.
But nobody picked up.
Her panic rose with every failed call. Her breath came fast, sharp, uneven. She looked at the books scattered across the floor, all that power, all those warnings, and felt a surge of pure, useless fury.
Her vision might have been magic, or madness, or something between, but it had felt real. Too real.
And she couldn’t stay here.
Layla shoved her phone into her pocket and bolted for the stairs. Her bare feet slapped against the cold floor, her heartbeat loud in her ears. She pushed open the door to the upper floor, the scent of dust and ink and old paper flooding her senses.
Outside, the world was still dark and frozen, the town silent beneath a film of fog.
Something was wrong.
Something was coming.
She didn’t know what, only that she couldn’t waste another second.
She grabbed her coat from the back of a chair, yanked on a pair of boots, and ran.
The streets were too quiet. As Layla sprinted through the mist toward the edge of town, the silence pressed against her like a weight.
She could hear only her own footsteps and the wild thud of her heart.
The cold bit through her coat, cutting down to the bone. Each breath came out in gasps that curled in the air like smoke. She clutched her phone in one hand, trying again and again to call Dominic, Theodore, anyone, each attempt met with the same dead silence and flicker of static.
She turned the corner onto the road leading to the Old Sawmill, where pack troops always gathered before a fight, her boots slipping on frost. Her lungs burned as she ran.
When she reached the clearing, her heart nearly stopped.
The Sawmill stood open, its heavy doors yawning into darkness. A few footprints marked the snow, faint, already half-frozen.
Layla stumbled to a stop, chest heaving. “Dominic?”
No answer.