Chapter 13 The Hedge Witch
The Hedge Witch
Roan
My phone has seven notifications by the time I wake on Sunday morning.
Two voicemails from my father about the patrol rotation.
A text from Rebecca that simply says: “Who is she?” Three messages in the pack group chat about last night’s bonfire, none of which I read.
And a photo from Tom of the fire’s remains with the caption Someone left a chair. Claim it, or it becomes firewood.
I ignore all of them.
This is what I do. This is what I’ve always done. The pack reaches for me, and I step sideways, let the hand close on empty air, carry on as if the expectation was never there. It used to feel like freedom. This morning, it feels like something closer to cowardice, and I don’t like the distinction.
I make coffee, stand at the kitchen window, and think about last night.
Phoebe at the bonfire. Phoebe with firelight on her face and her hair down, and that blue jumper that made me forget how to form sentences.
But also: Phoebe hearing conversations she shouldn’t have been able to hear.
Phoebe reading the pack hierarchy through body language alone, categorising dominant and submissive without knowing those words applied.
Phoebe standing in the middle of twenty wolves in human skin and saying I belong here with her posture even while her mouth said nothing of the kind.
And the others noticed. Tom’s pause when she walked past. The way Arthur tracked her across the field with his nose slightly raised.
Rebecca, who misses nothing, holding Phoebe’s hand a beat too long and then watching her for the rest of the evening with an expression I know well: the Beta assessing a newcomer’s place in the hierarchy.
Rebecca’s text sits on my screen like a lit fuse.
Who is she? Not “who was that?” or “who’s your friend?
” Who is she? Rebecca smelled it too. That thread in Phoebe’s scent that doesn’t belong to a human, and Rebecca wants to know what I know, and if I answer that text, I’ll be having a conversation I can’t control.
Which is exactly how the pack works. One person notices.
They tell the Beta. The Beta tells the Alpha.
The Alpha makes a decision, issues a directive, and sets the machinery in motion.
And somewhere at the end of that chain, a woman who came to Mistwood for a quiet life finds herself the subject of discussions she was never invited to and decisions she never agreed to.
I’ve watched my father do this my entire life.
Manage people. Position them. Make choices about their futures with the calm certainty of a man who believes the pack’s interests and the individual’s interests are always the same thing.
He’s not cruel about it. He’s not even wrong, most of the time.
But the assumption that he has the right, that the role gives him the right, is the thing I’ve been pushing against since I was old enough to push.
I’m not going to let that happen to Phoebe.
So I don’t answer Rebecca’s text. I put on my boots and my jacket, and I walk to Maggie Henderson’s house, because Maggie is the one person in Mistwood who exists outside the chain of command.
Maggie’s cottage sits next door from Phoebe’s, separated by a neglected hedgerow and a garden that looks wild until you realise every plant is exactly where it’s meant to be.
Rosemary by the gate. Lavender along the path.
Something dark and woody climbing the south-facing wall that I’ve never been able to identify, and Maggie has never offered to name.
She opens the door before I knock, which she always does and which I’ve stopped finding unsettling.
“The fence?” she says, looking at the toolbox in my hand.
“The fence.”
“Lovely. I’ve just put the kettle on.”
Maggie’s kitchen smells the way it always smells: herbs and beeswax and the faint, earthy undertone of whatever she’s got drying in bundles above the stove.
The room is warm and cluttered with purpose rather than chaos.
Jars line the shelves, labelled in a handwriting so precise it looks printed.
Books are stacked on every surface, their spines cracked and pages marked with scraps of ribbon and dried leaves.
She makes tea in a pot, not a mug, because Maggie has standards. She sets out mismatched cups, a plate of biscuits that taste of ginger and something herbal I can’t place. Sits down across from me. Waits.
Maggie is good at waiting. She’s been in Mistwood longer than I’ve been alive, a fixture of the village who exists in the space between the human community and the supernatural one without fully belonging to either.
She’s not pack. She’s not human, exactly, though she passes for it well enough.
She’s Maggie, which is its own category, and she’s the only person in this village who’s never once told me what I should be doing with my life.
That’s why I’m here instead of at the main house.
“I brought someone to the bonfire last night,” I say.
“I know. Phoebe Clarke.” She sips her tea with the unhurried calm of someone who already knows where this conversation is going. “Nice girl. Good hands. My tabby didn’t scratch her once, and Biscuit scratches everyone.”
“You sent me to her cottage with a welcome basket.”
“I did.”
“Your note said ‘you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.’”
“It did.”
I wait for more. Maggie drinks her tea.
“What did you mean by that?” I ask.
Fuck’s sake. Conversations with Maggie are like trying to nail fog to a wall.
“What did you think I meant by it?”
This is the other thing about Maggie. She answers questions with questions, not because she’s being evasive but because she genuinely believes people learn better when they work things out for themselves.
It’s maddening under normal circumstances.
Right now, with Phoebe’s scent still lingering in my memory and my wolf pacing restlessly beneath my skin, it’s almost unbearable.
“Her scent,” I say. “There’s something in it. Something that doesn’t read as fully human.”
Maggie sets down her cup. “Go on.”
“I noticed it the first time. In the forest, when she was treating me. I thought it might be the blood loss distorting things. But it’s been consistent. Every time I’m near her, there’s a thread underneath the surface. Something dormant. Something that’s getting stronger.”
“And at the bonfire?”
“Other pack members reacted to it. Tom. Arthur. Rebecca.” I pause, choosing my words carefully.
“Her senses were heightened. She was picking up conversations from across the field. She read the pack hierarchy through body language in under an hour. And when she stood in the middle of the group, she didn’t feel like an outsider.
She felt like someone who’d been missing and had come back. ”
Maggie is quiet for a long moment. She looks at me over the rim of her teacup with those sharp grey eyes that see more than they should, and I can feel her weighing how much to say.
“You’re asking me if she’s one of yours,” she says.
“I’m asking if she’s an Omega.”
The word changes the air in the room. Maggie sets down her cup carefully, which tells me I’ve landed on something she’s been thinking about too.
“You’ve been paying attention,” she says. “Good.”
“The scent. The way the pack reacted to her. The way she read the hierarchy without being taught. It fits.”
“It does fit.” Maggie folds her hands around her cup. “I smelled it on her the day she got out of the car. Faint, buried deep, but there. I’ve lived long enough to know what Omega smells like, even dormant.”
“And what would you do with the answer?”
The question stops me. Not because I haven’t thought about it, but because the answer puts me in direct conflict with the pack.
If she’s carrying latent wolf heritage, pack protocol is clear.
My father should be told. The Beta should be told.
Phoebe should be brought in formally, and the pack should manage her transition under the Alpha’s authority.
It’s how it’s always been done. It’s how my father would insist it be done.
And it would turn Phoebe into a project before she’d had a chance to be a person.
“I’m not going to hand her over to the pack like she’s a problem to be managed,” I say. “That’s not what this is.”
Something shifts in Maggie’s expression. Interest, maybe. Or recognition.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” I say. “But I know what I won’t do. I won’t let my father treat her the way he treats everything else: as pack business to be handled through the proper channels. She’s a person. She has a right to understand what’s happening to her before anyone else gets a say in it.”
“That’s a choice that will cost you.”
“I know.”
“Your father will see it as a challenge to his authority.”
“It’s not a challenge. It’s a line.” I set down my cup harder than I intend.
“He can lead the pack however he wants. I’ve never tried to take that from him.
But this, Phoebe, what’s happening between us, that’s mine.
Not the pack’s. Not his. And if he can’t tell the difference between protecting someone and undermining his authority, then that’s his problem, not mine. ”
Maggie studies me for a long moment. Then she nods, as if I’ve confirmed something she already suspected.
“I’ve been in this village a long time, Roan.
Long enough to know that some things arrive when they’re meant to, and not a moment before.
I put herbs in that welcome basket. Lavender for calm.
Rosemary for clarity. Hawthorn for protection.
The kind of bundle you’d give someone who might need grounding in the weeks ahead. ”
“That’s not an answer to what she is.”