Chapter 7
Brenna
The house smells wrong. Not bad, just different.
Greta’s cedar oil is here, and woodsmoke, and the iron tang of a stove that’s been burning hard all winter.
But underneath it, something is missing.
A layer that belonged to my mother and was maintained by her.
That faded after she died. The sweetgrass she used to hang from the kitchen beams, the warmth of a house held together by magic that ran through the walls.
The warmth is gone. What’s left is the shell of it.
Wolves file past me into the front room.
Some of them touch my arm as they go; quick, confirming, as if checking I’m solid.
Others can’t look at me at all. A woman I don’t recognize herds two children toward the stairs, angling them away from the blood on my clothes with the care of a mother who’s gotten used to shielding her kids from things they shouldn’t see.
I step into the kitchen while the front room fills. I need sixty seconds before I stand in front of them. Sixty seconds to be a person instead of a commander.
The kitchen hasn’t changed much. Same scarred pine table where I ate every meal of my childhood.
Same cast-iron hooks on the ceiling beam.
Same window over the sink that looks south toward the herb garden and the hills beyond.
But the table has a new gouge down the center—deep, deliberate…
a mark made by a knife driven hard into wood during a bad night.
The hooks are bare. The ceiling beam has a water stain spreading from the corner where the roof leaked, and nobody had the materials or the time to fix it.
I was gone for two years, and the house didn’t stop needing things just because I wasn’t here to give them.
I put my hands on the table. Feel the wood grain under my palms. The same table where Cameron took his first solid food.
Where my mother spread her maps and planned ward rotations.
Where Cormac would sit after a long day of tending, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, the smell of rosemary and earth on his hands, telling Greta about the progress of some herb he was coaxing through a stubborn growing season.
My head comes up.
I look through the kitchen doorway into the front room, where wolves are settling onto the floor, the stairs, against the walls.
I count faces. Some I know: Arlen near the back, leaning on his cane.
The Dunbar boys, taller than I remember.
A woman named Rose, who used to tend the chickens.
Others I don’t know… newer arrivals who came after I left.
I count again. More carefully this time.
Cormac isn’t here.
He wouldn’t miss this. Cormac, who was at every pack meeting I ever called, who sat in the same chair by the window and listened with that careful attention of his, weighing each word before he spoke.
Cormac, who held the pack’s health in his hands for years.
Who could diagnose a sick wolf by the way they carried their weight and could ease a difficult shift with nothing but his voice and a hand on the wolf’s shoulder.
He wouldn’t be somewhere else. Not for this.
“Greta.”
She’s at the stove, already moving a kettle to the heat because Greta’s response to a crisis is to make sure there’s tea. She turns at my voice, and the look on her face tells me she’s been waiting for this question. Maybe since the moment I walked through the gate.
“Where’s Cormac?”
The kitchen goes quiet. Not the front room—just this small space between the stove and the table where Greta stands with the kettle in her hand, me at the counter, and the answer hanging between us.
She sets the kettle down. Carefully. The way she does everything now—measured, deliberate, conserving energy.
“Gone,” she says. “Six months after you went. His heart.” A pause. “He was in his chair by the kitchen window. The one he always sat in. I came in from the garden, and he looked like he’d just sat down to rest.”
Six months after I left. Close enough that I might have come back for him, if I’d known.
I didn’t know, because dead women don’t receive messages, and the intelligence network I built to save the pack couldn’t tell me that the pack’s healer had died in his kitchen chair while I was sleeping in a ditch outside Shreveport.
Greta watches my face. She doesn’t need comfort from me.
She’s had eighteen months to do her grieving, and she did it the way she does everything: privately, completely, and without asking anyone to carry a single ounce of it for her.
What she needs is for me to understand what his death meant for the pack, and she can see me working through it.
“The herb garden,” I say.
“Went to seed. Nobody else had his touch.” She folds her hands over her apron. “Nobody had his magic, either.”
No. They wouldn’t have. Cormac’s gift wasn’t dramatic.
Not fire, not force, nothing the outside world would recognize as power.
He fed the land. Drew his magic up through his hands and pushed it back into the earth, slowly, steadily, season by season.
His work maintained the ward system at a root level that I couldn’t reach because my magic was different.
Bigger, more forceful, but less patient.
Cormac was the one who tended the foundation while I built the walls.
Without him, the foundation started to crumble. And without the foundation, the walls I’d built began to thin.
I look at the south wall through the kitchen window.
The herb garden. Or what was the herb garden.
The wooden stakes have rotted to stubs. The careful rows Cormac maintained for decades have dissolved into green disorder, his rosemary and thyme and rue tangled together and fighting for light.
Some plants are dead. Others have gone wild, pushing out of their beds, reaching for ground they were never meant to occupy.
It looks the way everything looks when the person who loved it stops being there.
“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s nowhere near enough. Greta knows that and doesn’t need more.
“He’d be glad you’re home,” she says. “He worried about you. All those months before his heart— He’d sit in that chair and look toward the hills, and I’d know he was wondering.
He never believed the fire took you. Said your magic was too stubborn to burn.
” She picks up the kettle again. “He was right, as usual.”
Something tightens in my throat. I swallow it.
“I need to brief them,” I say. “In a minute.”
“Take your minute.”
She goes to the front room with the kettle, and I’m alone in the kitchen.
I close my eyes and push my awareness downward, through the floorboards, through the foundation, into the earth.
The ward lines meet me like an old friend with a wasting disease.
I can feel the structure—my grandmother’s deep work laid down sixty years ago, the bedrock layer, holding because she built it to outlast her.
My mother’s refinements threaded through the middle, more intricate, more responsive, designed to flex with the pack bond.
My own maintenance, added in the years before I left—tighter, more aggressive, built for the threats I saw coming.
My grandmother’s work holds. My mother’s is fraying. Mine is gone entirely. Without a magic-user strong enough to feed the system, the upper layers have starved to nothing. What’s under my feet is the memory of protection.
And I understand something that’s been true my whole life but that I’ve never felt so clearly, standing here with my hands on my mother’s table and the diminished hum of the wards running through my bones.
This magic was never what they think it is.
The purists with their edicts and their fear.
The Syndicate, with their labs and their extraction teams. Every wolf who’s ever looked at Cameron’s fire and seen a threat, a weapon, something to be controlled or destroyed or harnessed for someone else’s purpose.
They are so completely, catastrophically wrong that it should be funny.
It should be hilarious, the scale of the misunderstanding.
What we have is the earth and each other.
That’s all it’s ever been. Magic that lives in the connection between wolves and the ground they stand on, that strengthens when the pack is whole and thins when the pack is broken.
Not an arsenal. A web. And you can’t weaponize a web without tearing it apart, which is exactly what they’ve been doing: pulling out threads, scattering families, killing healers, driving out the magic-blooded wolves.
They fear us for the very thing they’re destroying. And we’ve been too busy surviving to explain the difference.
I open my eyes. The kitchen is the same. The stain on the ceiling. The gouge in the table. Cormac’s empty chair by the window, where he sat and watched the hills and believed I was alive because my magic was too stubborn to burn.
Movement outside.
Through the kitchen window, past the ruined herb garden, I can see the bunkhouse.
Merric’s people have stayed in the yard—giving us space, or holding position, or both.
The big blond wolf is by the barn with the prisoners.
The dark-haired scout has materialized near the treeline, watching the ridge.
And on the bunkhouse steps, Merric.
He’s sitting, which is wrong. Merric doesn’t sit after a fight. I remember that—the way he’d keep moving after a confrontation, burning off the adrenaline through pacing, prowling, refusing to hold still until his body had processed the last of it.
He’s sitting now. On the bunkhouse steps, bare-chested, the gouge in his flank dark against his skin. And the auburn-haired woman is crouched beside him with a needle in her hand, working on the wound with the competence of someone who’s done this many times before.
He’s letting her.
That’s the part that stops me. Not the closeness. Not the efficiency of her hands. The fact that he’s motionless. That something in his body trusts her enough to let her work without resistance, without the restless, stubborn refusal to be tended that I remember as fundamental to who he is.
He changed. Or she changed him. Or time did what it does and wore away the edges that used to make him impossible to reach, and she was the one standing close enough to step into the space that opened up.
I watch her tie off a stitch. Watch him turn his head slightly, toward her voice, I think, though I can’t hear what she’s saying. I watch the ease of it. Two people who’ve been through enough together that the distance between them has been closed.
She was there. For the years I wasn’t. For the mornings and the injuries and the conversations after hard days, she was there. And being there is its own kind of claim.
The thought arrives without drama. That’s the worst of it. Not a wound, just a fact, filed alongside everything else I’ve been carrying.
She was enough when I wasn’t.
I turn away from the window.
Cameron is in the kitchen doorway. He’s been watching me. I don’t know for how long, and I don’t know what my face was doing while I watched the bunkhouse porch. I decide not to think about it.
“They’re ready,” he says. “Everyone’s in.”
I look at my son. His serious eyes. The set of his shoulders—carrying tension from the fight, from the reunion, from the sheer overwhelming weight of a day that started with his mother dead and is ending with her standing in the kitchen.
“Okay,” I say.
I walk past him. Through the hallway. Into the front room, where thirty wolves are waiting for a dead woman to explain herself.
Cormac’s chair by the window is empty. Greta has set a cup of tea on the table beside it, as though he might come in from the garden and sit down.
I stand in front of the cold hearth and look at my pack.
“I know you have questions,” I say. “I owe you some answers.”