Chapter 20
Merric
Briar finds the trail in under four minutes. Boot prints heading northeast from Cameron’s bedroom window. He climbed out onto the porch roof and dropped to the ground. Smart. Avoided every sightline from the yard.
“Two hours old,” Briar says, crouching at the base of the house. “Maybe a little more. He was moving fast.”
“Direction?” Brenna asks. She sounds controlled, but her hands are fisted at her sides, transmitting a fear so concentrated it takes effort to separate her panic from mine.
“Northeast ridge. The old logging road.”
“That leads into unmonitored territory,” Brenna says. “Past the ward line.”
Past the wards. Into ground we haven’t scouted, haven’t secured. Ground that may still have purist watchers or worse.
“I’m going,” Brenna says, already moving.
“We’re going.” I fall in beside her. “Briar, stay on the trail. Rook, hold the ranch. If Bern asks—”
“I’ll tell him Cameron went for a walk and we’re fetching him back.” Rook’s voice is calm. “Go.”
We go.
Brenna sets a pace that would kill a normal person. She’s running on fear and magic, and I match her because the alternative is falling behind. That’s not happening. The stitches in my side protest. I ignore them.
The trail leads up the northeast ridge through heavy timber—oak, hickory, the thick Ozark underbrush that grabs at your legs.
Briar marked the track before peeling off to cover our eastern flank, and the boot prints are clear in the soft ground.
Cameron wasn’t trying to hide. He was just trying to get away.
Brenna doesn’t speak. I don’t either. We sense each other; the fear, the guilt, the shared understanding that whatever drove Cameron to climb out a window and run had been building since before Bern arrived, and we were both too consumed with our own personal shit to see it.
The trail hits the logging road and turns north.
Older growth here, the canopy thick enough to block the fading light.
We’ve been running for twenty minutes, and we’re well past the ward line.
I can feel its absence, the protective hum gone, replaced by the open, unguarded quiet of unclaimed ground.
“There.” Brenna stops. Points.
Through the trees, maybe two hundred yards up the ridge—a glow. Faint copper-gold, pulsing like a heartbeat.
Cameron’s magic. Active. Uncontrolled.
We sprint toward it.
The clearing isn’t a clearing; it’s a blowdown, a patch of ridge where a storm knocked down a dozen trees and left a tangle of trunks and root balls.
Cameron is in the center. Sitting on a fallen log with his forearms on his knees and his head bowed over them.
Fire is crawling over his skin in slow, rolling waves.
The trees nearest to him are smoking. The air shimmers with heat. He’s been here a while. Burning.
Brenna makes a sound. Not a word. Something deeper. The sound a mother makes when she finds her child and the relief is too big to hold in. She starts forward.
I catch her arm. “Wait.”
“Let go of me—”
“Look at the radius. He’s running hot. If you push your magic against his right now—”
“I know what happens.” She shakes my hand off. But she stops. Breathes. Her rational mind overriding her maternal instincts through sheer discipline.
“We go to him together,” I say. “Your fire won’t calm him, but mine can get through. Let me anchor him first, then you go in.”
She looks at me. Within her, I can feel a complicated knot of emotions: resentment that I’m right, gratitude that I’m here, fear for the boy in the clearing, and underneath it all, something that might be trust if she’d let it be.
“Do it,” she says.
I open the anchor sense. Push it outward, slow and easy, toward the boy on the log. The calm settles into the space around Cameron’s fire, not fighting it, not smothering, just laying a foundation.
Cameron’s head lifts. The fire flickers.
“Cameron,” I say. Not loud. Settled. “We’re here.”
“Go away.” His voice is raw. He’s been crying. The fire pulses brighter.
“Not going to do that.”
“I said go away.”
“And I said no. Your mother’s here. I’m here. We’re not leaving.”
He looks up. His face is streaked with tears and lit by his own fire. The expression on it breaks something in me. Not a boy’s anger or a teenager’s defiance. Betrayal. Pure, uncomplicated, devastating betrayal.
“I heard you,” he says. “On the path. This afternoon. You were arguing about when to tell me.”
Fuck.
He heard us. Of course he did. The conversation about paternity, about timing, about Brenna not being ready.
He was there, upstairs, the window open, carrying every word back to his bedroom to add to the pile of evidence he’s probably been assembling since the day I put him in a truck and drove south.
Brenna makes a small, broken sound beside me.
“You’re my father,” Cameron says simply. He’s known for hours, sitting alone in his room while the adults in his life argued about when he deserved to know the answer. “Both of you knew. And neither of you told me.”
“Cameron—” Brenna steps forward. The fire flares, and she stops. The heat is real. I can feel it from fifteen feet, the air rippling.
“You lied.” He’s looking at Brenna now. “I sat in that room, and I gave you a chance, Ma. I looked you in the eye, and I gave you a chance to tell me the truth, and you told me to go eat something.”
The words hit Brenna hard. She sucks in a breath.
“You’ve been lying all along,” he continues. “Not just the two years. Not just the death. My whole life, Ma. Every time I asked about my father. Every time you said he was a good man who made a bad choice. He was right there. Within reach. And you didn’t tell me.”
“I was trying to protect you—”
“From what? From him?” He swings toward me. His eyes are blazing. “From the man who drove fifteen hundred miles to bring me home? Who sat with me through nightmares and calmed my magic when yours couldn’t? You were protecting me from that?”
The fire climbs. The fallen log beneath him is starting to smoke. The anchor sense is holding the floor, but his power is pushing against it, swelling with every word.
“I was protecting you from the pain of knowing your father chose to leave,” Brenna says. Her voice is stripped. No armor. No careful framing. Just the raw, awful truth. “I was protecting you from growing up knowing that the man who was supposed to love you walked away before you were born.”
The clearing goes quiet except for the crackle of Cameron’s fire.
“I didn’t know,” I say. “Cameron. I didn’t know about you. Your mother never told me she was pregnant. I left before either of us knew.”
He stares at me. The fire dims slightly. Confusion cutting through the fury.
“You didn’t know?”
“No.”
“But you—” He looks between us. Recalculating. “You left her. Before.”
“I left her because I was young and naive, and the men I trusted told me it was the right thing to do. They were wrong. I was wrong. And I spent all those years knowing I was wrong. But that’s not enough, and I’m sorry.”
The fire pulls back another degree. The anchor sense settles deeper. He’s listening. Not forgiving—nowhere close to forgiving—but listening.
“Your mother kept the secret because she was trying to spare you from exactly this,” I say.
“From knowing that your father failed before you were born. Every choice she made—including the ones that hurt you—came from wanting to protect you from the damage I caused. You can be angry at both of us. You should be. But don’t put her failure and mine in the same category. She stayed. I’m the one who left.”
Brenna turns to look at me. I feel her shock, something cracking open, the sudden vertigo of hearing someone defend you in a way you weren’t prepared for.
Cameron’s fire flutters, light receding down his arms, his hands, pulling inward. His shoulders drop. The rigid, furious posture crumbles into something smaller. A boy on a log in the woods who just learned his own history and doesn’t know what to do with it.
“Both of you lied,” he says. Subdued now. Exhausted.
“Yes,” Brenna says.
“Yes,” I say.
“And you were going to keep lying.”
“We were going to tell you,” Brenna says. “Together. When—”
“When you decided I was ready.” The bitterness is there, but it’s lost its heat. He’s running out of fuel. The magic has drained him… the scorched circle around the log, the hours of sustained burn. He’s shaking.
Brenna steps into the clearing. The residual heat washes over her, but she walks through it without slowing. She sits beside her son on the smoking log and puts her arm around his shoulders.
He resists. One second. Two. Then he leans into her the way he leaned into me in the yard. A few degrees of collapse, a surrender to the pull of the person next to him.
“I’m angry,” he says against her shoulder. His voice is muffled.
“I know.”
“I’m angry at both of you.”
“That’s fair.”
“I don’t know what to call him.” A pause. The tiniest crack of something that might be dark humor. “I’m not calling him Dad.”
“Nobody’s asking you to,” I say. I’m standing at the edge of the clearing because this moment is theirs, and I won’t intrude on it unless invited.
Cameron lifts his head. Looks at me over Brenna’s shoulder. His copper-flecked eyes—her eyes, Corvus eyes, but set in a face that’s half mine—are red-rimmed and searching.
“You really didn’t know?”
“I really didn’t know. If I had—” I stop. Because the honest end of that sentence is complicated. He doesn’t need complicated right now. “If I had, things would have been different.”
He holds my eyes for a long time. Then he nods. Not acceptance. Not forgiveness. Acknowledgment. The bare minimum that says, “I hear you, and I’ll decide what to do with it later.”
“I want to go home,” he says.
Brenna stands. Helps him up. He’s unsteady. The magic took everything out of him. She puts his arm over her shoulders and takes his weight.
I move to his other side. He flinches when my hand touches his arm.
Then he doesn’t. He lets me take the weight on his left while Brenna takes the right, and the three of us walk down the logging road through the darkening timber with Cameron between us, held up by the two people who failed him most and showed up anyway.
Nobody talks. There’s too much to process: Brenna’s exhaustion, my grief, Cameron’s stunned and fragile processing. The forest closes around us. The ward line hums as we cross back into protected ground.
Halfway down the ridge, Cameron says, “The man. Bern. He knew.”
“Knew what?” Brenna asks.
“Who my father is. He looked at me, and he knew. I could see him checking.”
Brenna and I exchange a look over Cameron’s bowed head. There’s a shared unease that neither of us has to voice.
“Maybe,” Brenna says carefully. “We’ll deal with it.”
“Together,” Cameron says. The word comes out dry, almost ironic, echoing what we said in the yard. But underneath the irony, there’s something else; a tentative, bruised willingness to test whether the word means anything when the people saying it are the same ones who’ve been keeping secrets.
We come out of the trees into the pasture. The ranch lights glow ahead. Figures on the porch. Willow, Greta, Rook. Waiting.
Bern’s campsite is dark, empty. His SUVs are gone.
“He left,” Rook says when we reach the yard. “Packed up an hour ago. Said he’d gotten what he came for and would be in touch.”
Gotten what he came for.
I file that away with everything else. The pieces are accumulating: the observer at the parley, Bern’s systematic tour, his aide’s tablet, the way he looked at Cameron. I don’t have the picture yet. But the frame is taking shape, and I don’t like what it’s going to hold.
Cameron is handed off to Greta, who steers him into the kitchen with the authority of a woman who’s been putting broken boys back together for sixty years. Soup. Blankets. The wordless care that doesn’t ask questions or demand explanations.
Willow grabs Brenna’s arm as she passes. “Is he—?”
“He knows,” Brenna says. “About Merric. He heard us talking.”
Willow closes her eyes. Opens them. Nods. “Okay. We deal with it.”
“Yeah,” Brenna says. “We deal with it.”
She goes inside. The screen door closes behind her.
I stand in the yard. The night is warm. Somewhere in the kitchen, my son is eating soup and processing the fact that his whole life has been rewritten.
The woman I love is standing on the other side of a screen door, trying to hold it all together.
And Nathan Bern has driven away with whatever he came here to collect.
Rook appears at my shoulder. “You okay?”
“No.”
“Good answer.” He pauses. “Bern took notes on everything. Every wolf, every structure, every defensive position.”
“I noticed.”
“Whatever he’s planning, he’s got the blueprint now.”
“I know.”
Rook nods. Heads for the bunkhouse. Stops. “For what it’s worth, the kid’s going to be all right. He’s got both of you now. That’s more than he had a week ago.”
He goes inside. I stay in the yard for another minute, feeling the dynamic settle into something new. Two people who’ve survived a crisis together and haven’t had time to figure out what that means.
I go inside.