Chapter 10
Merric
“Absolutely not,” Brenna says, her tone thunderous.
“The wards need walking,” Greta says, unmoved. “You need someone on watch while you work. He knows the ground.”
“I can take Willow.”
“Willow is organizing the watch rotation with Rook. Your big friend is rebuilding the south fence after yesterday’s mess. And the scout is tracking the retreat path of those purist wolves. Merric’s the only one available.”
Brenna looks at me like she’s been told to carry a dead animal.
“I’ll keep up,” I say. “Try not to enjoy it.”
Greta hands Brenna a canteen and gives me a look over her shoulder that says, “Behave yourself.” Then she walks back toward the house, leaving us standing at the yard’s edge with about as much enthusiasm as two wolves headed for a bath.
We start along the northern boundary. Brenna walks a half step ahead, which could be about setting a brisk pace or could be about not wanting me beside her.
She keeps one hand extended toward the ground, palm down, fingers spread.
The ward lines respond, faint threads in the soil that I couldn’t see before, now flickering into visibility as her magic passes over them.
Like running a blacklight over invisible ink.
I watch the borders. That’s my job. Eyes open, senses extended, covering the angles while she works.
Neither of us speaks for the first quarter mile.
The wards are worse than I expected. Even I can feel it: thin spots where the energy flickers, dead zones where the lines have gone dark entirely.
Brenna stops at each one, crouching, pressing both palms to the earth.
The white fire traces her fingers and sinks into the soil.
Feeding. Mending. The ward brightens, holds, and she stands and moves to the next weak point.
It’s slow work. Draining, from the look of it. By the fifth repair, there’s a sheen of sweat on her forehead, and her breathing has changed.
“You need water,” I say.
“I need to finish this section.”
“You need water first. You’re burning through energy, and you’ve got three more miles of boundary.”
She straightens up and looks at me, clearly calculating whether the advice is worth taking purely because it came from me.
“Fine.” She takes the canteen. Drinks. Doesn’t thank me.
We walk.
The eastern boundary follows the ridge line through heavy timber.
The ground is uneven, thick with root tangles, and loose shale.
Brenna navigates it without slowing. She grew up here; these hills are imprinted in her muscles.
I keep pace, but it costs me. The leg wound is stiff, the butterfly strips pulling with every step.
“You’re limping,” she says without turning around.
“I’m walking.”
“You’re limping and pretending you’re not. Typical.”
“I’ll take medical advice from someone who’s eaten a full meal in the last forty-eight hours.”
She stops. Turns. The look she gives me could strip paint. “Excuse me?”
“You haven’t eaten. Not properly. I watched you at dinner last night. You moved food around your plate and gave half of it to the kid next to you when you thought nobody was looking. You’ve been running on adrenaline and bad attitude for two days, and it’s starting to show.”
“Don’t presume to know—”
“I’ve managed wolves for two decades, Brenna. I know what deprivation looks like. I know what it looks like when someone’s been running too long on too little. And I know what it looks like when they’re too proud to admit they need help.”
The forest goes quiet around us. Not the dangerous quiet from yesterday. The loaded quiet of two people standing three feet apart with too much between them.
“You don’t get to manage me,” she says. Her voice is low and even and dangerous. “You don’t get to walk onto my land, eat at my table, and start telling me how to take care of myself. You lost that right.”
“I’m not trying to manage you. I’m trying to keep you vertical long enough to finish the wards.”
“And what a hero that makes you. Merric Rourke, always looking out for someone. As long as it’s convenient.”
That one hits. She means it to.
I take a breath. Hold it, and then let it go.
“That’s a fair shot,” I say. “Take as many as you need. But eat something first.”
I hold out a protein bar. Sienna packed them in every pocket I own before we left this morning, because Sienna thinks of these things.
Brenna frowns at the bar like it’s a personal insult. Then she takes it, tears it open, and eats it in three bites while staring at the trees with the focused intensity of a woman who refuses to acknowledge that her enemy just did something kind.
We keep walking.
The wards along the eastern ridge are in the worst shape.
Long stretches of dead line where the magic has simply given out, exhausted by years of neglect.
Brenna works each section, crouching, feeding, and I can see what it’s costing her.
The white fire comes slower each time, her hands trembling with the effort.
“Whoever maintained these before you left,” I say, “they had help.”
“My mother. Before she died.” Brenna’s voice is flat. Factual. “She and I walked the wards together every full moon. Took a whole night. She’d feed the eastern lines, and I’d feed the western. After she passed, I did both.”
“Alone?”
“Who else?”
“Cameron. His magic—”
“Cameron was twelve when my mother died. He could hardly light a candle without setting the curtains on fire. I wasn’t going to put ward maintenance on a child.
” She stands. Sways slightly. Steadies. “These lines need a full restoration. Not patches. The foundation work has degraded. The original magic my grandmother laid down is barely holding structure. I need a week of sustained work to rebuild it properly.”
“What do you need from us?”
She looks at me. Something flickers behind her eyes, the same quick calculation from the yard this morning. I know what she’s thinking. Can she use me without trusting me?
“I need uninterrupted time on the wards. Which means I need someone else handling the ranch operations, the watch rotation, the repairs, and the daily logistics of feeding everyone. Willow can’t do everything. Not anymore.”
“I can do that.”
“I’m not handing you authority over my pack.”
“I’m not asking for authority. I’m offering labor. You tell Willow what needs doing, Willow tells me, I do it. Your chain of command stays intact.”
She considers this. I can see her testing it for traps, looking for the angle, the leverage, the way this could be used against her later.
“Why?” she asks.
“Why what?”
“Why are you doing any of this? The supplies, the repairs, bringing Cameron home. Don’t tell me it’s the right thing. I want the real answer.”
The real answer. I think about that for a second. What the real answer is and how much of it I can give her without either of us combusting.
“Because I owed a debt,” I say. “Not to you. To myself. I made a choice that I knew was wrong the second I made it. I’ve been living with that since, and living with it was starting to look a lot like dying with it.
Then Cameron showed up at Aurora with your name and your eyes and asked for my help. So here I am.”
“Guilt,” she says. “You’re here because of guilt.”
“Partly.”
“What’s the other part?”
“The other part is that I walked through your front gate and saw a pack of wolves living in a ruin, and I thought, ‘This is what happens when good people get abandoned by the ones who should have stood for them.’ And I was one of the ones who should have stood.”
She’s silent. The forest holds its breath around us.
“You’re saying the right things,” she says finally. “You always did. Right up until the moment you didn’t.”
“I know.”
“So you’ll understand if I don’t trust the words.”
“I’d think less of you if you did.”
Her expression shifts. A reassessment rather than a softening. She’s adjusting a calculation she’d already made, factoring in details she didn’t expect.
We start walking again. The tension hasn’t broken, but it’s changed shape. Less brittle, more elastic. Two people who know they’re going to have to work together and are grudgingly testing the strength of whatever this is between them.
Brenna crouches at another dead section. Presses her palms down. The white fire flows, and the ward flickers to life. I watch her face while she works. The focus, the strain, the set of her mouth when she’s concentrating.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” I ask.
She doesn’t look up. “Tell you what?”
“About the boy. About Cameron.”
Her hands stop moving on the ground. The ward light stutters. She lifts her head and looks at me, and whatever was elastic in the air between us goes taut as a bowstring.
“Cameron is none of your business.”
“He asked me for help using your name. He looks at me like he’s searching for something in my face. He’s seventeen years old, and I left you eighteen years ago. You want to tell me that’s none of my business?”
“I don’t owe you anything, Merric. Not explanations. Not access. Not a single thing.” She stands. Her voice hasn’t risen, but the temperature has dropped to somewhere below freezing. “You gave up every right you had when you walked away. You chose your council and your reputation over—”
“Over you. I know. I was there.”
“Then stop acting like the choice didn’t have consequences. You don’t get to leave and then come back wanting answers.”
“I’m not asking for answers. I’m asking you to look me in the face and tell me I’m wrong.”
The air between us is vibrating. Three feet of space and eighteen years of ruin.
Her eyes are blazing, furious and alive in a way that makes something dangerous move within me.
She’s angry. I’m angry. And underneath the anger, there’s something older, something that has nothing to do with politics or packs or the reasonable decisions of rational adults.
Her lips part. She draws a breath.
“Brenna! Merric!”
Greta’s voice carries through the trees from the direction of the ranch. Brenna steps back like she’s been stung. The heat—whatever was building in that impossible three feet of air—dissipates immediately.
Greta appears on the trail with Arlen behind her. She’s moving faster than a woman her age should, and her attitude says this isn’t social.
“Water pump’s dead,” she says. “Properly dead this time. The motor’s seized, and the backup bladder’s got a crack the length of my arm.”
“When?” Brenna asks. Her voice is calm. Commander mode, just like that. The switch so fast, I’d admire it if I weren’t standing in the fallout of the last thirty seconds.
“Arlen just noticed. We’ve got what’s in the storage tank. Maybe two days’ worth if we ration.”
“The river’s a quarter mile,” I say.
“The river’s a quarter mile downhill,” Greta counters. “Hauling water uphill for the pack, the garden, and the animals is a full-time job for four wolves. We don’t have four wolves to spare.”
She’s right. The pump wasn’t a convenience. It was infrastructure. Without it, the ranch’s daily operations grind to a halt within forty-eight hours.
“Can Dane fix it?” Brenna asks. She asks me, which is the first time she’s acknowledged my people as a resource without it being dragged out of her.
“Dane can fix anything with moving parts. But a seized motor might need replacement parts we don’t have. I’ll get him to look at it.” I turn to Arlen. “Show me the pump house?”
Arlen nods and starts down the trail. I follow.
Behind me, Greta says something to Brenna that I don’t catch.
I glance back and see the old woman’s hand on Brenna’s arm, her face tilted up with amused patience.
The look of a woman who’s been alive long enough to recognize what she just walked into and is choosing to say absolutely nothing about it.
Brenna doesn’t look at me. Of course she doesn’t.
The pump house is a concrete shed near the river, half sunk into the hillside.
The motor is ancient; twenty years old, maybe more, patched and rewired so many times it looks like a medical experiment.
Arlen shows me the seizure point and the cracked bladder and the collection of improvised fixes that have kept this thing limping along.
“Dane,” I say into the radio. “Need you at the pump house. Bring the heavy toolkit.”
“Copy,” Dane says. One word. Sufficient.
While I wait, I lean against the pump house wall and press my hand to the stitches in my side. They’re holding, but the skin around them is hot. Probably should have let Sienna check them before a five-mile hike.
The morning light comes through the trees in slats. The river runs below, silver and bubbling. Somewhere up on the ridge, Brenna is finishing the wards alone, and I’m standing in a concrete shed trying to figure out how to keep a small community in drinking water.
This is what reality actually looks like. Not the romance. Not the grand gestures. Not the dramatic confrontation in the forest where two ex-lovers almost… What? What were we about to do?
This is where the real work lies. Pumps and postholes and protein bars and the daily, grinding business of keeping people alive. And she asked me to handle it, which means something, even if she’d never admit it.
I hear Dane’s boots on the trail. He appears in the doorway, toolkit over one shoulder, assesses the dead motor in two seconds, and gets to work without a word.
I leave him to it and walk back toward the main house. The morning is getting warm.
On the eastern ridge, I can just make out a figure crouching, hands pressed to the earth, white light pulsing faint against the green.
She’s finishing the wards. Alone. The way she’s done everything for too long.
Not anymore. Whether she likes it or not.
I turn toward the house to figure out the water situation, and I carry the heat of that unfinished moment in the forest like a coal that I don’t know what to do with and can’t seem to put down.