3. Jasper
Chapter three
Jasper
Alive.
Jasper pressed at the bond and got it back. The dark brindle frequency that had been Callum for as far back as Jasper could remember. The connection he shared with his brother from the womb, was now buried under something cold and unnatural.
But there.
He pressed at it again. And again. Alive each time.
His brother was somewhere hurt, and Jasper was in his mother’s kitchen about to lose his mind. The only thing keeping him somewhat steady was the confirmation that Callum was alive.
It was not enough, but it was not nothing.
It was the only thing that had kept him from putting his shoulder through the back wall of the house when the bond had first gone wrong; that and their mother.
She was still the only thing that kept him from running northeast on four legs until he found who or what had taken Callum.
He was going to tear their throat out with his teeth.
He pressed at the bond again.
Alive.
His hand came down on the kitchen counter hard enough that the dishes in the rack rattled.
He had not meant to smack his hand down.
The wolf was so close to the surface his vision kept doubling.
He had been moving between the counter and the window and the sink, the same twelve feet of floor in a circuit he could not break.
His charm had gone offline the second the bond had lanced fire through his chest. They’d all caught it.
Mom. Eli. The whole house had felt the pain, followed by the terrifying sense of loss as the connection with Callum thinned to almost nothing.
They’d run into their share of problems before. Nothing like this one.
The grin, the easy storytelling, bartender voice he had spent a lifetime building into a weapon you could not see coming were all somewhere else tonight, packed in a drawer he could not get to even if he wanted to. What was at the surface instead was the wolf, and the wolf had no jokes.
Eli sat at the table with a stack of dead women.
He hadn’t stood. Hadn’t eaten. Hadn’t blinked, as far as Jasper could tell. Just turned pages. Moved photographs around. Worked through whatever system he’d built in his head that Jasper couldn’t see.
He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with one knuckle.
That was a tell. Jasper knew that motion.
He had been watching Eli make it his entire life, the small tell that came just before his brother answered a question whose answer he did not like.
He pushed those dang glasses so many times in the past few hours that he was going to blister the bridge of his nose.
Catherine Reyes. 2019. Atlanta society page, smiling at a charity dinner six weeks before she walked out of her apartment building and never came back.
Miranda Chen. 2015. Local news. Restraining order paperwork signed, submitted, and ignored. Disappeared from a parking lot in Savannah on a Tuesday in June.
Four other names. Four other faces. None of them were ever found.
A 1987 newspaper clipping at the bottom of the stack; the photograph yellowed and brittle.
A man at a hotel bar with a young woman whose name Jasper had stopped trying to read because the man’s face was the face of the man he believed had taken Serena, and was no doubt the reason his brother was out there somewhere injured and hurting.
Same jaw. Same mouth. Same cold ease in the set of the shoulders.
Age twenty-five was where the paper trail started. Before twenty-five, there was nothing: no driver’s license, no high school, no birth record. Twenty-five years old, fully formed and walking into a hotel bar and walking back out with a woman who would be dead in three weeks.
“Forty years,” Eli said. He had not looked up. His voice had the flatness it took on when something cost too much for inflection. “At least. Eighty-seven is the earliest paper. It is not the earliest he existed.”
“I know,” Jasper said.
He did know. Eli had walked him through every page on the table, methodical and quiet, while the day turned to night. Neither of them had said the thing they were both thinking.
Forty years of the man’s pattern.
Serena in his hands for hours now.
His wolf wanted to rip the kitchen apart: the cabinets, the walls, anything within reach. He pressed both palms flat against the counter and did not let it.
Alive.
He pressed at the bond again. Found it. Buried. There.
Callum was the one who never moved without purpose. The brother Jasper had measured himself against his whole life. Without Callum at the table, everything was wrong. The kitchen was wrong. The night was wrong.
The familial bond with Callum was something Jasper rarely had to think about. They were brothers. The bond had existed as an essential part of him since they’d been three boys in the same womb. It had never gone this quiet before. Ever.
Tonight it had been quiet for a long time.
Quiet, not as in absent. Quiet, as in muffled. Wrapped. Smothered. The way you can hear a heart through a wall but cannot tell whose it is or how fast it is beating, only that something on the other side of the wall is alive.
A binding, he assumed; or Sigil work, maybe. Jasper had never seen sigils strong enough to reach into a pack bond from outside, let alone the familial bond between brothers. Eli would have a term for whatever it was. A term wouldn’t bring Callum back.
Eli had not asked what they would do if Bodie came back empty-handed.
The question sat between them anyway, heavy and waiting.
The answer lived in the part of Eli that knew the rune journals by heart, the part that had been quietly preparing for the day the pack would need something no wolf was supposed to ask for.
Jasper wasn’t ready to hear that answer yet. Not yet.
Serena was a different kind of quiet.
They had an incomplete bond with her. Hell, as far as they could tell, Serena didn’t even know what bonds were.
She hadn’t grown up exposed to the supernatural world.
That had been clear from day one. It was a complication.
A big one. The mating recognition had hit them on the back porch the night she’d arrived, the three of them undone by her scent in a single shared second.
The weeks since had been weeks of careful distance and slow approach, of letting her come to them in her own time.
A bond that took months to root and had only just begun to grow.
Then she had left them.
Callum had been tracking Marcus since the night he had walked into The Muddy Boot intent on harassing and intimidating Serena. They had set up a town watch on him after that, with Callum personally verifying reports and tracking Marcus’ movements in the area.
The morning Serena drove out, Callum had suspected Marcus would be on the move, and he was right.
The last pin Jasper had gotten from him was somewhere just outside of Tuscaloosa.
Jasper should have gone with him. He couldn’t let go of the thought. But it had never occurred to him that Callum might need backup. Callum was the strongest of the three of them by a long shot. Hell, even Dex couldn’t take Callum in a wrestle, and Dex didn’t lose to anyone.
The familial bond had gone wrong in the afternoon, somewhere east, not long after Callum’s last check-in.
The mating threads, the ones that held the potential for the most sacred of bonds, had flared and gone numb in the same moment.
That they’d flared at all was the only proof Jasper had that Serena was still alive.
He held onto it. The gap in his world where she should be a hollow void beneath his ribs.
The Beaumonts. The Thornwoods. The Devereauxs.
Bodie hadn’t said any names on the phone, but Jasper had learned to read between the lines a long time ago.
Supernatural politics were never a straightforward thing.
The Vosses had a strained alliance with the Thornwoods.
The Beaumonts had been gunning for the Thornwood seat for centuries.
The Devereaux played a careful game, walking whatever line they needed to walk to stay in favor with whoever the current powers were.
They’d all somehow missed the part where the triplets were bastards unclaimed by any pack.
Still. Jasper had grown up listening for the names in every silence his mother left in a sentence.
He’d grown fairly adept at it. Eli was better.
Jasper rolled his neck. The wolf rolled with it.
“Bodie called back,” Eli said. He had not looked up.
“When.”
“While you were trying to destroy the sink.”
“What did he say.”
“The same.”
“Wait.”
“Wait.”
A silence.
“He didn’t give you anything.”
“He gave me wait.”
“Eli.”
Eli looked up. The eyes were the gray-silver they went when he had been in the journals long enough that the line between archivist and wolf had gotten thin.
“Don’t,” Eli said. “Not yet.”
Jasper did not ask, not yet, what.
He went back to the window. The yard was dark. The preserve rose beyond the fence in a wall of shadow, still and thick the way it was every night before dawn. The magnolia tree out front cast a wide soft shape that meant nothing.
He pressed his hand flat to the window glass and watched his own breath fog the pane.
The bond sat dead and muffled in his chest.
Eli turned another page.
***
The air in the kitchen changed.
That was always how Jasper had known. The air in any room his mother walked into shifted enough that it captured attention, the way a room changes when a barometer drops, the way the light goes thin before a storm.
He had been acknowledging that small shift his whole life and had never quite stopped marveling at it.
She did not speak when she entered the kitchen. She had never been a woman who spoke before she had decided what to say.
She poured coffee. She came to stand at the counter and read the papers on the table without putting a finger to a single one of them. Her expression did not change.
“Bodie,” Eli said.
“Yes.”
“What did he say to you that he did not say to me?”