CHAPTER FIVE || HUNTER
Daniel’s cabin smelled like him. Lemon verbena, old paper, and something underneath that was just Daniel—warm and clean and bright in a way that hit me right in the gut the moment I crossed the threshold, reminding me of all the years we’d had together, gone for good.
The cabin was tiny, with a sleeping loft accessible by a wooden ladder, a spotless kitchenette with a tiny table, a dumpy couch that dwarfed the room, a bathroom barely big enough to turn around in, a bookcase next to the door that had been crammed to the brim with a motley assortment of books, and a desk that was buried under a mountain of journals, loose pages, and tomes in various sizes.
Apart from a solitary armchair in the corner, heaped with books and piles of clothes, that was it.
No artwork. No photographs. Nothing that was truly his.
This cramped and cluttered shoebox was where Daniel spent his nights, his mornings, and almost every hour in between. And now Lee and I were going to be here too, apparently, all because I had opened my stupid mouth.
What the hell had I been thinking?
Dumb question. I’d been thinking about the fork buried two inches deep in solid wood.
And Lee in Harris and Reed’s cabin, saying it was going to kill him in such a shell-shocked way that I couldn’t help but believe him.
And most especially, I’d been thinking about the way Daniel’s face had gone white as bone and his hands hadn’t stopped shaking, to the point where he’d needed to basically sit on them so we couldn’t see how freaked he was. But I had and I couldn’t unsee it.
If something happened to Daniel and I wasn’t there to stop it, I’d never forgive myself.
So, here I was, standing in the doorway with my arms crossed over my chest, surveying the chaos that was Daniel’s living space. Something about the bareness of the walls got under my skin. It looked… temporary. Like someone living out of a motel room. As if he was expecting to leave at any moment.
“You live like this?” I said.
Daniel, who had stepped past us and was already at his desk pulling journals from a drawer, flushed red to the tips of his ears. “It’s organized. There’s a system.”
“What system? It looks like chaos.”
“The system is that I know where everything is.” Daniel pushed a lock of dark hair out of his eyes and gestured at the couch. “You can sit there. Or, um, wherever, I guess. There’s not a lot of room. Sorry.”
Lee stepped past me and busied himself by examining the bookshelf with interest, tilting his head to read the spines. “You still have a ton of books. That hasn’t changed.”
“Uh, yeah.” Daniel gave a little half-shrug. “I keep buying them, whenever I go into town. I’m probably keeping the bookstore afloat single-handedly.”
Lee chuckled. “That tracks.”
He seemed perfectly at ease, which made one of us. My twin had relaxed completely the moment it had become clear that we weren’t going to be leaving Daniel’s side anytime soon. I tried not to think too much about what that meant.
Still eyeing Lee, I plopped down onto the couch.
It was old, sagging in the middle, and barely long enough for three.
The cushions smelled faintly—and maddeningly—of verbena.
Just like everything else in the cabin. I would have bet money that Daniel had fallen asleep here more than once, too tired to climb the ladder to his loft.
Lee plucked a book off Daniel’s bookshelf and began flipping through it, still standing. I didn’t miss the way he kept glancing over at the warlock, as if to reassure himself that Daniel was still there and still whole.
Lacey arrived twenty minutes later with two cardboard boxes full of journals and reference materials from the pack’s collection. She set them on the kitchen table with a thud.
“Emma says these are all of the books we have that might be relevant.” She looked at the three of us, packed into Daniel’s tiny cabin, as far away from each other as we could get, and her lips pursed into a thin line.
“Let us know if you find anything.” Then, to Daniel, she said, “Call me any time. I don’t care how late it is. If they step even a toe out of line—”
Lee shot me a warning glare before I could open my mouth and make things worse. I scowled back at him and made a gesture as if zipping my lips shut.
“Thanks,” Daniel said, ignoring us. “I will. But it’s going to be okay.”
“I don’t like this.” Lacey cast a wary look at Lee and me, her icy blue eyes filled with unease. “This was a bad idea.”
“Daniel will be safe with us,” I assured her.
“Physically, maybe.” Lacey gave me a dark look. Then she turned back to Daniel. “I’m only three cabins down. I’m serious, if you need anything, you call me. Got it?”
Daniel nodded back at her, chewing on his lower lip. “Got it.”
Reluctantly, casting hard looks that were filled with the promise of murder at me and Lee, she left. And it was just the three of us again. The silence in the cabin was thunderous and crackling, a live wire none of us seemed willing to touch.
Daniel handled the awkwardness by immediately burying himself in work so thoroughly that he seemed to forget anyone else existed. Within an hour, he had his desk covered in open journals, occasionally scrawling things into his notebook, his brows furrowed adorably.
Or, it would have been adorable if anyone else had been watching him. It definitely wasn’t adorable in the least to me.
Absolutely not.
Daniel muttered to himself while he worked, too—half sentences murmured under his breath, the occasional quiet “no, that’s not right”—and he chewed on his pen cap when he was lost in thought. A habit he’d had growing up, too.
In truth, I used to love watching him like this, back when Lee and I were one person and Daniel was our best friend and basically the center of our universe.
We’d spent countless evenings sitting on the floor of my bedroom, working on schoolwork together, or while I played video games and Daniel worked on whatever other project had captured his attention at the time, content just to be near him, even if we weren’t talking.
I caught myself staring at him.
I looked away immediately, cursing myself, and picked up a grimoire from the box. It was handwritten, dated 1952, and the author had terrible penmanship. Perfect. Something mind-numbingly tedious to focus on.
Lee, meanwhile, had settled into the armchair in the corner—he’d had to remove the clothes and what turned out to be stacks upon stacks of books before sitting down. Daniel badly needed to curb his book-buying habit, get more shelving to hold them, or more likely both.
My twin was working through a bunch of the older volumes Lacey had brought over with methodical—and what looked like endless—patience.
He read quickly, occasionally scrawling notes in a blank notebook he’d borrowed from Daniel, seeming totally absorbed.
Every so often, he’d ask Daniel to clarify a magical term, his tone perfectly neutral and ordinary, as if what we were doing right now was the most normal thing in the world.
Meanwhile, what I was reading might’ve been written in Greek.
It was actually English, but only barely.
The author had a strong interest in alchemical transformations and wasn’t shy about taking up as many pages as possible describing, in ever-expanding detail, the theory behind merging opposite elements to create something greater than the sum of its parts.
I got a third of the way through the text before I realized it probably wasn’t going to help our current circumstances.
Though, if I’d had any idea what I was even looking for, that would’ve been just swell. Daniel and Lee both seemed to know. Or, at least, they were supremely confident they’d know it when they saw it.
Irritated, I finally set the book aside and grabbed another.
“There’s an entry here from nineteen twenty-three.
It mentions a ‘magical resonance’ following a binding ritual,” Lee said a while later, interrupting the silence.
“The author was the witch queen of her coven at the time, in Eugene, Oregon. She describes the rest of the members as experiencing”—he skimmed the page—“something called ‘sympathetic manifestations’ after a new member had been initiated into the circle. They used a binding ceremony involving blood oaths. Just like the initiation ritual we did.”
Daniel crossed the room to look over Lee’s shoulder, leaning in to read the text. Their heads were close together, dark hair almost touching, and Daniel’s hand rested on the back of the armchair, inches from Lee’s shoulder.
“That’s—yeah, this could be relevant,” Daniel said, his voice quickening with excitement as he read the page.
“Her coven was relatively small—only nine witches—and they were all magically linked together. That’s kind of dangerous to do, but it also makes the group’s magic way more powerful.
” He paused, frowning. “Huh. The theory is kind of the same, right? The pack is magically linked together, too, I mean.”
Lee nodded. “It says here that the new member possessed the power of”—he broke off, frowning—“Aequatis Vitae. Whatever that means.”
“Wait—what?” Daniel’s eyes widened. “Huh. That translates roughly to ‘balancing of life.’”
“What does that power do?” Lee sounded genuinely curious. He was way more fascinated by magic than I was.
“It allows the witch to heal or harm at will by altering the flow of vitality in another person’s subtle body. It’s not exactly a common ability.”
“Powers aren’t standard across witches and warlocks?” Lee asked. “Isn’t it all just spellcasting?”
Daniel snorted. “Not even witchcraft is standardized across witches and warlocks. There are a bunch of different types of witches out there. There are the ones who started off mundane and taught themselves. And the ones who ended up with magic through dealing with something more powerful—”
“Like a pact with the devil?” I prompted, interested despite myself. “Is that actually a thing?”