Chapter 2
Merric
Two days later, we cross into the Ozarks just before dawn.
The highway gives way to two-lane blacktop, then county roads, then gravel that hasn’t seen a maintenance crew since the last century.
Rook’s truck bottoms out twice on the same pothole.
Dane’s going to give me hell about the suspension later.
Cameron’s hardly slept since the nightmare. He hasn’t mentioned it. Neither have I. But his hands haven’t stopped trembling, a fine vibration he hides by shoving them under his thighs or folding his arms tight. He thinks I don’t notice.
The land changes around us. Flat highway country gives way to dense hardwood hills, hollows choked with oak and hickory, creek beds running silver in the early light.
Old country. Ground where magic settled into the rock and the root systems a thousand years before wolves ever found it.
I can feel it through the truck’s chassis…
a low hum, like standing too close to a power line. My wolf lifts his head.
Cameron feels it too. He sits forward, hands on the dash, nostrils flaring. “We’re close.”
“How close?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe less. Take the fork left after the creek bridge.”
He knows the land by smell. That’s pure wolf. Human GPS can go to hell when your nose maps the world in layers of soil and water and animal musk. I take the fork. The road narrows to a single lane hemmed by trees so thick the headlights barely cut through.
Then the trees open up, and we drop into a river valley, and I see it.
The Ravenclaw ranch.
“Jesus Christ,” I mutter.
It must have been something once. A sprawling timber-frame house anchoring a spread of outbuildings: barns, workshops, a long bunkhouse with a porch that wraps the full length.
Cleared pastureland runs down to the river, and beyond it, forested hills climb into morning mist. The bones are good. Beautiful, even.
But the bones are about all that’s left.
The main house’s roof is patched with blue tarp and corrugated tin.
One of the barns has collapsed on its south side, timber splayed out around it.
Fences are down or sagging. The bunkhouse porch has a section rotten through.
Solar panels on the workshop roof, half of them cracked, the rest rigged with wiring that looks like a fire hazard.
There’s a vegetable garden near the house. Ambitious in scale. Desperate in execution. Somebody’s been trying to feed the people here from soil that’s only half-cooperating.
I pull into the yard and kill the engine. Rook and the others pull in behind me. The sound of three trucks in a place this quiet carries, and before I’ve got my door open, they start appearing.
An old woman first, stepping off the porch with a shotgun balanced easily in the crook of her arm.
White hair. Spine like a fencepost. Behind her, a man my age with one arm and a limp, then two teenagers who can’t be older than fifteen, then a woman carrying a toddler on her hip.
They come out of the house, out of the bunkhouse, out of the trees where they’d been on watch or foraging or whatever the hell passes for morning routine in a place that’s been under siege for years.
Elders. Children. A handful of fighters who move like they haven’t slept a full night in months.
I count as they gather. Twenty-eight. Thirty, if there are a couple I can’t see.
This isn’t a pack. This is a refugee camp.
“Shit,” I say, low enough that only Cameron hears.
He’s already out of the truck, moving toward them. The change in him is immediate. His shoulders settle. His stride opens up. He’s still too thin and still carrying those tremors in his hands, but he’s home, and the difference shows in every step.
The old woman with the shotgun sees him, and her face comes apart.
She hands the gun to the one-armed man without looking and crosses the yard with a speed that shouldn’t be possible at her age.
She pulls Cameron into her arms and holds on like she’s trying to press him back together through sheer force.
He lets her. His face goes into her shoulder, and he stays there while a dozen Ravenclaw wolves close around him, touching his arms, his back, his hair. Soft welcomes. Some of them are crying. Nobody makes a sound louder than a murmur.
My wolf wants to go to him. The anchor sense—that thread that shouldn’t exist and won’t cut—tugs toward the boy. I stay by the truck.
This isn’t my moment. This is theirs.
Rook comes up beside me. He takes in the ranch, the broken buildings, the hollow faces. “How long have they been living like this?”
“Too long would be my guess.”
“They need everything, Merric. Food, shelter, medical, security—”
“I know.”
“—and there’s thirty of them and five of us.”
“I know, Rook.”
He falls quiet. Behind us, Sienna steps out of the third truck and stops dead when she sees the settlement.
Briar lands beside her. Even Dane, who doesn’t react to much, stands for a long second before he turns his back and starts unloading the supply crates I’d picked up on the trip in anticipation of what we’d find.
Dane’s always been that way. See a problem. Fix the part you can reach. Don’t ask questions.
I’m about to cross the yard when the crowd around Cameron parts and she comes through.
Young. Mid-twenties, maybe. Dark auburn hair pulled back tight, moving with the coiled alertness of a wolf who’s been running on threat assessment for so long it’s become her resting state.
Lean and wiry, built for speed, and she carries herself like she’s the one holding this whole thing together by her fingernails.
She probably is.
She stops ten feet from me. Sharp amber eyes take my measure—boots to face, truck to pack, the whole picture—in about three seconds flat.
“Merric Rourke.” It’s less of a greeting and more of an identification. Like she’s confirming a target. “We heard you were on your way.”
News travels fast.
“That’s right,” I confirm.
“I’m Willow Corvus. I run things here.”
Corvus. She’d be related to Brenna.
“I can see that,” I say.
Wrong answer. Her chin comes up a notch. “Can you? So you can see the collapsed barn and the busted fences and the wolves eating rice and squirrel because nobody in the whole goddamn southern wolf community could be bothered to pick up a phone.”
I open my mouth. Behind her, the old woman looks up from Cameron and locks on me.
“I see all of it,” I say. “That’s why I’m here.”
“You’re here because you had to bring Cameron back.
Don’t dress it up as something noble.” She takes a step closer.
She’s a full foot shorter than me, and it doesn’t matter one bit.
“My aunt trusted you. She said you were different from the other alphas. That you’d come through when it counted.
” Her voice drops. “She died waiting for that to be true.”
That lands. She means it to.
My wolf wants to bristle. I hold him back. This woman has earned the right to take shots at me. Every hollow face in this yard has earned it.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m late. I’m sorry for that. But I’m here now, and I brought people who know how to work. Whatever you need, we’ll do.”
She eyes me for a long time. Not deciding whether to trust me; she’s already decided she doesn’t. She’s deciding whether my usefulness outweighs the risk of letting a Frostbourne alpha onto her territory.
“Sienna,” I say, without turning around. “What’d we bring?”
Sienna’s already at the tailgate. “Three weeks of dry goods, canned protein, medical kit, two generators, fuel, tools, and lumber. Plus whatever Dane’s got in his truck, which, knowing Dane, is ammunition and more lumber.”
“Also rope,” Dane says from somewhere behind me. “Lots of rope.”
Willow glances past me at the supplies. At Sienna looking on calmly.
At Dane already hauling a crate on his shoulder toward the collapsed barn like he’s lived here his whole life.
At Briar, who has somehow already disappeared into the forest, doing what Briar does, which is making sure the place is secure.
The hostility doesn’t leave her face, but something underneath it gives.
Just a fraction. The faintest crack, and beneath it, something close to exhaustion.
She’s been carrying this place. All of it.
Every mouth to feed, every wall to patch, every night watch to cover.
And now five strangers just showed up, offering help, and she’s not sure she can take it.
She needs to.
“The bunkhouse has empty rooms,” she says.
“Roof leaks in the south end, so take the north. Water pump works but the pressure’s garbage.
Breakfast is at six. We eat together. Don’t waste food.
” She looks at me directly. “And if any of your people disrespect mine—their traditions, their magic, any of it—I’ll put them off the property myself. Alpha or no alpha.”
“Fair,” I say.
“It’s not fair. It’s the bare goddamn minimum.
” She turns and walks back to Cameron, who’s been watching the whole exchange with a tense look that tells me he wasn’t sure this would go well.
She puts her hand on his arm—gentle, automatic, the touch of someone who’s been anchoring this boy for years—and steers him toward the house.
Rook appears at my side again. “She’s fun.”
“Alpha she-wolf. They’re tougher than most.” I think of Brenna. “And she’s been holding this place together with no resources and no backup. She gets to be whatever she wants.”
“Didn’t say otherwise.” He pauses. “She reminds me of someone.”
I know who he means. The stubbornness. The sharp tongue. The way she holds her ground and doesn’t give an inch.
So much like Brenna.
I push that thought down and turn my attention back to what’s important right now.
The morning fills with work. Sienna takes inventory with the Ravenclaw elder.
The old woman’s name is Greta, and she runs the kitchen, the supply chain, and probably the weather, knowing that type.
Dane is already framing repairs on the barn with two Ravenclaw teenagers trailing him, handing him tools, watching how he works.
He doesn’t talk to them, but he doesn’t chase them off, which for Dane is practically an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner.
I walk the property. The ranch is bigger than it looked from the road.
Eighty, maybe a hundred acres of cleared land before the forest takes over.
The river forms a natural boundary to the west. The hills rise steeply to the east and south.
North is the only easy approach, and that’s the road we came in on.
One way in. One way out. That’s either a fortress or a trap, depending on who’s controlling the high ground.
My wolf doesn’t like it. Too enclosed. Too many blind spots in those hills. A handful of shooters on the eastern ridge could pin this whole property down, and these wolves wouldn’t have anywhere to run except the river.
Fuck.
They’ve been sitting in this fishbowl with the most rudimentary system and no escape plan. The fact that they’re alive is either luck or something else keeping the threats at a distance.
Brenna kept them safe. That’s what Cameron said at Aurora. She held the line until she couldn’t.
“Goddammit, Brenna,” I say to the empty air. “What the hell went wrong?”
Nobody answers. The trees just stand there, old and patient and full of shadows.
Briar finds me at the south fence line. She moves out of the brush without a sound, and I barely catch her scent before she’s beside me. I swear the woman’s half wolf, half smoke.
“Security’s shot,” she says. “Some human systems in place. Couple of old wards surrounding the main areas.”
“Anyone taking advantage of it?” I ask.
“Maybe,” she says. “Southeast ridge. Old tracks, human boot prints, but a pattern. Same approach three times over the last couple weeks. Someone’s been watching the property from the high ground.”
My hands close into fists at my sides. “Syndicate?”
“Can’t confirm. But they knew exactly where to stand to avoid the sight lines from the house. That’s not amateur.”
Son of a bitch.
Watched. They’ve been watched. Willow and her wolves going about the business of not dying, and somebody’s been sitting on that ridge with binoculars—or worse—taking notes.
“Don’t tell Willow yet,” I say.
Briar tilts her head.
“She’s running on fumes. I want to know what we’re dealing with before I drop that on her. Get me details: how many, how often, what direction they came from, and where they went. I need a picture before I need a panic.”
Briar nods and ghosts back into the trees like she was never there.
I stand on the fence line with the morning wind carrying oak pollen and river damp against my face.
Below me, the ranch spreads out. The house, the barns, the garden, the wolves who are all that’s left of a pack that used to run these hills without fear.
Cameron is sitting on the porch steps with Greta, and even from this distance, I can feel him through the anchor sense, calmer now, the tremors fewer, his wolf settling into familiar ground.
At least one thing’s going right. I’ll take it.
The ring presses warm against my chest. I wrap my hand around it through my shirt as a breeze carries a sound that could be the murmur of trees. Could be a voice. Could be her.
“I’m here,” I mutter. “I’ll do what you asked.”
The hills swallow the words. Somewhere out there, past the ridge where boot prints mark the dirt, something is watching.
And now I’m watching back.