Chapter 1 #2
Inside the diner, through the smudged window, I can see Sienna sitting across from Cameron in a booth.
She’s talking. He’s listening. At some point while I wasn’t watching, she got him a plate of fries.
He’s eating them with the same careful precision he eats everything, but faster than before. Less measured.
Sienna catches my eye through the glass and gives me a look I can’t quite read.
Part question, part warning. She’s already figured it out, too, or she’s close.
She was there all those years ago, when I came back from that field, wrecked and silent, and wouldn’t tell anyone why.
She was little more than a kid then, but she’s always been too sharp for her own good.
My whole pack is too sharp for their own good. That’s why they’re mine.
“Twenty minutes,” I call to Rook. He lifts a hand in acknowledgment.
I lean against the truck, drink bad coffee, and watch the light fail over the mountains. Somewhere south of here, a pack of wolves is living in the ruins of what used to be a settlement. No alpha. No protection. No future, unless somebody decides they’re worth fighting for.
Brenna decided that. With her life.
Least I can do is decide it with mine.
We load up and get back on the road. Cameron comes out of the diner with Sienna walking beside him, and something has loosened in the way he carries himself. Not much. But enough that I notice.
He climbs in. Buckles up. Glances at me once and away.
“Sienna says we’re not going to Frostbourne.”
“Did she now?”
“She says you’re taking me straight to Ravenclaw.”
“She’s right.”
He’s quiet for a while. Then: “The others are okay with that?”
“Wouldn’t be following if they weren’t.”
He turns that over the same way he’s turned over everything I’ve said: slowly, testing for traps. “Why?”
“Why are they okay with it?”
“Why are you doing any of this?”
Because your mother asked me to. Because I owe a debt I can’t calculate. Because you might be my son, and even if you’re not, no seventeen-year-old should carry this much damage and have nowhere safe to land.
“Because it’s the right thing,” I say. “That enough for now?”
He watches me for a moment. Weighing whatever he sees against whatever his mother told him. Then he nods, turns back to the window, and lets it go.
The sun drops behind the mountains, and Cameron watches it. He falls asleep around dusk. One minute he’s watching the road, the next he’s out, his body surrendering because it can’t hold the line anymore. His head drops against the window. His breathing goes deep and ragged.
I drive. The road winds south through deepening pines. Headlights cut through early dark. Rook and the others follow closely.
Then Cameron makes a sound. Small. Strangled.
I look over. He’s twitching. His hands are curling in on themselves, fingers hooking like claws. A bad dream. I’ve seen enough of those in my own pack to recognize the signs.
Then the heat hits.
Not gradual. Not building. Just there, flooding the cab with dry, scorching warmth that has no source. The air shimmers above his skin. The window where his forehead rests starts to fog from the inside.
Fuck.
It’s magic. His. Raw and uncontrolled.
“Cameron.” I keep my voice level. “Cameron, wake up.”
He doesn’t hear me. The heat intensifies. The dashboard creaks, plastic warping. A copper-gold light starts bleeding from his skin, tracing the scars on his arms in thin, burning lines.
My wolf reacts before I can think. Not a conscious decision, just pure instinct. The anchor sense opens up, that part of me that tracks emotional resonance in my pack across miles. It reaches for Cameron the way it reaches for Rook, for Sienna, for any wolf who carries my bond.
It shouldn’t work. Cameron isn’t pack. He’s Ravenclaw. Different bloodline, different bond structure, different everything.
It works anyway.
How?
Yet, I feel him. The boy’s terror, sharp and blinding, a nightmare of concrete rooms and needles and hands that hold him down.
Six months compressed into a single looping horror that his sleeping mind can’t escape.
The magic is a defense mechanism, his body trying to burn its way free of a cage that isn’t there anymore.
I push calm through the connection. Not words. Not commands. Just the solid, heavy assurance of an alpha who isn’t going to let anything touch him. Safety. Ground. Anchor.
The heat wavers.
Cameron gasps. His eyes fly open, wild with reflected light. He stares at me, at the heat warping the air between us, at his own glowing hands.
“Easy,” I say. “You’re in the truck. You’re safe. Breathe.”
The light recedes. Slow. Reluctant. The temperature in the cab drops back to normal in slow degrees. Cameron’s breathing goes from ragged to rough to something approaching even.
He looks at his hands again. Then at me.
“I’m sorry.” His voice is choked. “I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t apologize for something that isn’t your fault.”
He turns away, pressing himself against the door. Ashamed. Scared of what he just did.
I give him a minute. Then: “Nightmare. Happens after trauma. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget. It’s not weakness.”
“It’s not just dreams.” He’s talking to the window. “It’s the magic. I can’t always control it. Ma used to help me. She’d—” He stops. Starts again. “She had a way of calming it down.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. She’d put her hand on my chest, and the fire would just… ease. Like she was telling it where to go.”
I think about what I just did. The anchor sense finding him, connecting, settling the blaze. Same function. Different mechanism.
I think about why it worked when it shouldn’t have.
The answer is right there. I don’t look at it directly.
“Try to rest,” I tell him. “We’ve got a long drive.”
He nods. Doesn’t close his eyes. Stays awake, watching the dark pines roll past, one hand pressed against his own chest where his mother used to put hers.
I drive.
The ring burns warm against my sternum. My anchor sense is still connected to the boy, a thread I didn’t create and can’t seem to cut. It pulls between us, steady and certain, and my wolf knows exactly what it means.
My eyes stay on the road. South. Toward Ravenclaw.
In the side mirror, Rook’s headlights follow without hesitation. Their decision’s been made.
And I’m leading them all to an uncertain situation that my past created for me.