Chapter 4 #2
The distillery door banged open, and Shaw walked in stamping mud off his boots. "You guys hear about the north shore?"
Gray straightened. "What now?"
"A bunch of generators we use for the festival shorted out overnight.
Some tools corroded too—rust came on fast, like they'd been sitting in salt water for months instead of hours. Everything’s going to have to be replaced.
" Shaw grabbed a rag to wipe his hands, oblivious to the tension in the room. “That’s the same place where people have reported strange sounds too.”
Cal and Gray exchanged a look. Then both glanced at Ryker—still flushed, still clearing his throat, the ash taste thick on his tongue. He could see them weighing whether to say something about his episode.
Shaw looked between them. "I miss something?"
"No," Ryker said. His voice came out rough. "Where exactly on the north shore?"
Shaw gave him an odd look but let it go. "Near the witches. Third incident this month if you count that fishing boat turning around for no reason."
"Could be weather," Gray said. "Salt air eats everything eventually."
"Could be." Shaw didn't sound convinced. "But three things in one area? Might be worth a closer look."
"I'll take it myself." Ryker was already reaching for his jacket. "Cal, finish the pressure check, I'll be back before the afternoon run."
Cal raised an eyebrow. "Since when do you do site inspections personally?"
"Since three incidents clustered in the same area. That's not coincidence, that's a pattern." He zipped his jacket and headed for the door, grateful for something that required his hands and his brain pointed in the same direction.
Shaw looked at him again, frowning. "You okay? You sound like you've been gargling gravel."
"Allergies."
Cal snorted. Shaw looked confused. Gray's mouth twitched.
"Right," Shaw said slowly. "Well. I'll leave you to it." He headed back out, still looking like he knew he'd missed something.
Ryker followed him into the cold.
The fog had lifted enough to see the harbor, boats knocking against the dock in a restless rhythm.
He turned north and walked, hands shoved in his pockets, breathing air that tasted clean and sharp after the warm closeness of the distillery.
His throat still ached, and the ash flavor clung to the back of his tongue no matter how many times he swallowed.
The north shore trail wound through a stand of Sitka spruce, branches heavy with moisture, bark dark and rough against the low clouds.
He moved at a good clip, scanning the ground out of habit.
There were two sets of boot prints on the trail heading south, the maintenance crew who'd found the damage.
He also found deer tracks crossing the path at a sharp angle, the spacing wide. Moving fast. Spooked by something.
He crouched to look closer. The deer had come from the direction of the cove, and whatever startled them had done it hard enough to send them crashing through the underbrush instead of following the game trail. A branch hung broken at shoulder height where they'd bolted through.
Could be anything. A coyote, a loose dog, a tourist making too much noise. But coyotes didn't spook deer this badly on familiar ground, and the tourists usually stuck to the south beach this time of year.
He kept walking.
The generator sat in a concrete housing near the trailhead that served the north cabins. Shaw hadn't exaggerated. The metal casing was crusted with white salt deposits so thick they looked painted on, corrosion eating into bolts and hinges that should have been weather-resistant.
He pulled the access panel open and studied the interior.
The wiring had gone green at the connection points, copper oxidized to a degree that should have taken months of direct ocean exposure.
These units sat fifty yards from the waterline, behind a windbreak of shore pine. Salt spray alone couldn't do this.
He ran his thumb along a corroded bolt and the metal flaked apart, crumbling like chalk. The tools in the maintenance box were worse, wrenches fused shut with rust, a screwdriver handle pitted and warped.
Whatever had done this wasn't weather. Weather was gradual, predictable, something he could plan around. This was fast and concentrated, hitting one specific area while everything fifty yards south looked untouched.
He closed the panel and pulled out his phone to photograph the damage for Diego. As far as he was concerned, there was too much happening in one area to be a coincidence.
He followed the deer tracks back toward the cove, moving off-trail where the animals had bolted.
The underbrush was thick and wet enough to soak his jeans to the knee within twenty yards.
He found where the deer had bedded down before something flushed them—two shallow impressions in the duff, still holding shape.
Whatever startled them had come from the water side, not the trail.
The shoreline below the bluff was rocky and exposed at low tide, tide pools glinting between dark stone.
He picked his way down to the beach and searched for tracks, scat, anything that would explain what was spooking the wildlife and eating through weather-resistant steel.
Nothing. No prints in the wet sand except his own.
No debris, no animal sign, no dead fish washed up.
The cove itself looked empty with dark water lapping against the rocks, unremarkable except for the current moving in a pattern that struck him as off without being able to pin down why.
He crouched at the waterline and touched the rocks. Cold. Colder than he thought they should be. There was also a faint white residue on the stone, it looked like the same salt crust as the generator, thinning the farther he moved from the center of the cove.
He straightened, scanning the cove one more time. The water gave him nothing. No movement beneath the surface, no shadow, no shape. Just that odd current and cold rock and the concentration pattern pointing at a source he couldn't identify.
Then the sound reached him.
Low. Threading through the wind and the crash of surf. Not a voice, not the wind. Something in between, with a resonance that vibrated in his chest the way a bass note does when you stand too close to a speaker. He stopped walking and listened, trying to isolate it, pin down the direction.
It came from somewhere close. Further up the beach. Or from the water itself.
His wolf stirred.
Not the idle flicker the cat had triggered before subsiding into nothing.
This ran deeper. His wolf pressed forward with something that felt like recognition, or warning, and his skin prickled with the sudden awareness of being watched.
The hair on his arms lifted beneath his jacket.
His pulse climbed without any reason he could name.
It stopped as quickly as it came on. His wolf retreated, and the retreat hit harder than the moment of contact.
He waited. Counted to sixty. Scanned the water, the rocks, the tree line above the bluff. The sound didn't come back. And his wolf offered nothing more.
No tracks. No visible source. No evidence he could bring to Diego beyond photographs of corroded metal and his own gut feeling that something was wrong with this cove. He'd recommend a night patrol rotation on this section and a proper sweep with more bodies. For now, the trail was cold.
He climbed back up to the bluff path, legs burning from the scramble over wet rock. There was something wrong on the island, and he didn’t yet know how to protect the pack from whatever it was, and that kind of helplessness had a way of pulling old wounds open again…
His hand found the poker chip in his pocket. The edges were wearing smooth from years of handling, grooves pressed deep by his thumb over countless hours, and the matte surface warmed fast against his palm.
He'd won it from Ash on a Thursday night years ago. Gray's younger brother had been losing badly at poker, cards spread in front of him in the chaotic arrangement of someone who played on gut feeling instead of strategy. He'd shoved the chip across the table with a grin that took up half his face.
"Double or nothing, you bastard. I'm getting that back."
Ryker had pocketed it and told him to bring better cards next time.
"Next Thursday," Ash had said, pointing at him like it was a threat. "And I'm bringing beer, because you play worse when you're drunk and I need every advantage I can get."
Gray had watched them from the couch with that quiet half-smile he used to wear more often, the one that said he knew his brother was ridiculous and that was okay.
Ash had knocked over his chair getting up because he never just stood—he launched, all restless energy and limbs going in different directions.
He'd grabbed his jacket, punched Ryker's shoulder hard enough to leave a mark, and headed for the door.
"Next week," he'd called back just before the door slammed behind him.
Next week never came. Not for Ash.
By Tuesday, Cara had asked about the mainland supply runs.
She’d been curious about who went, what route, and when they'd be traveling alone.
The questions came wrapped in pillow talk that had felt like intimacy instead of intelligence-gathering.
He'd answered because he trusted her. Because she'd spent six months being warm and real and interested in him, and he'd mistaken performance for connection.
Gray sent Ash to the mainland for supplies on Wednesday. The hunters were waiting. They knew the route, the timing, the fact that he'd be exposed—details Ryker had given Cara. Gray's younger brother, loud and funny and incapable of sitting still, never made it home.
Cara vanished the same night. They searched for months and found nothing. No explanation, no apology, just the hollow space where his ability to trust used to live.
He pressed his thumb into the chip's center and stared at the dark water.
His wolf had shut down after that and rarely made an appearance.
Apparently, he had assessed the damage and decided that the part of him that relied solely on instinct couldn’t be trusted anymore.
It was too dangerous. His human side understood.
He might not have liked it, but he’d accepted it because it felt earned.
Then Willow had walked onto the island with her flour-dusted sleeves, sharp tongue and her soft brown eyes that drew him to her, and despite every wall he'd built, his body had started paying attention.
Not his wolf, that stayed dark and quiet, but the man.
The man who noticed things he had no business noticing.
The stubborn set of her jaw when she refused to back down.
The low warmth of her voice when she talked to her friends and didn't know he was listening.
The attraction should have been a red flag. Hell, it was a red flag. However, knowing that didn't make it stop.
He turned away from the cove and started back along the trail. Through the trees, maybe two hundred yards east, warm light glowed in the windows of the fisherman's cottage where the sanctuary witches lived. Smoke curled from the chimney, and faintly, carried on the wind, the sound of laughter.
He didn’t slow down. He had no business there either.
By the time he reached the main road, the afternoon light was going flat and grey, and his body felt off in ways he couldn't catalog.
His throat had started to ache again and the ash taste invading his mouth had settled into permanent residence.
His skin ran too warm for January, heat sitting just beneath the surface with nowhere to go. He rolled his shoulders and kept going.
Behind him, faint enough to dismiss, that sound drifted up from the cove one more time and followed him longer than it should have before the road curved south and the trees swallowed it.
Unease settled over him. Whatever this was, he didn’t like it and he was damned sure going to figure it out. Even if that meant ejecting one brown-eyed witch from his island himself.