Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
FERAL
Worn at the corners, the book looked like it had been handled daily for years. Age had darkened the leather.
“I found it behind a small wolf carving,” she said, pointing to the bookshelf on the side of the room I’d been ignoring. My father’s side, as I’d started to call it in my mind. “I was looking for texts that might contain herb lore, though I didn’t find any. This was tucked behind the wooden wolf.”
I’d carved the wolf when I was ten. It was clumsy, asymmetrical, and the proportions were all wrong. My father had loved it anyway and kept it on display in his office like it was something precious.
When he died, I’d stuffed it into his desk drawer and forgotten all about it.
“You were inside his desk,” I said, keeping my voice neutral.
Her gaze shot to the floor. “Um… yes. I was…”
“Snooping, but I don’t mind.”
She looked up. “You don’t?”
I shrugged. “I doubt there’s anything worth noting there.”
“Except this.” Victoria nudged the book my way.
I didn’t take it immediately. I wasn’t sure what it might be or what I’d find inside, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know.
She waited without pushing.
Finally I took it from her. The leather felt soft, warmed from her hands. I opened it to the first page and found my father’s neat handwriting.
“It’s a journal,” Victoria said.
I hadn’t known my father had kept one. In all the years of watching him work, I’d never seen him write in anything like this.
Victoria returned to her desk, giving me space without making it obvious that was what she was doing.
I sat at my father’s desk for the first time in thirteen years and it felt… alright.
Victoria bent over her notes at my mother’s old writing desk across the room. Both of them present in this space now, in their own way. I wasn’t sure what to do with that.
The chair was the same. The desk still held piles of papers and odds and ends, unchanged from when my father last sat here. I’d sat across from this desk a thousand times as I grew into a young alpha who thought he knew more than he did.
I’d never sat behind it.
Laying the journal on the smooth wooden top, I opened it to the first entry, dated thirty-two years ago, the year I was born.
The writing was spare and direct. I found daily logs. Details about pack business. Border notes and weather observations. Normal things. My father’s voice in written form.
Then my name started appearing, again and again.
Feral shifted for the first time today. Perfect form. He’ll be faster than me by the time he’s grown.
He’d noticed? My father had never ignored me, but he’d been busy all the time. All alphas were.
Border patrol with my boy. He spotted the scent marker I missed. But he didn’t gloat about it, which showed more maturity than I had at his age.
I remember finding the marker, the way his hand had landed on my shoulder, the proud look in his eyes.
Feral ran the ridge today. Three hours without stopping. He has the heart of a king.
I turned the page.
He argued with me about the eastern boundary markers for forty minutes, and he was right. I didn’t tell him, though I will soon.
He hadn’t gotten the chance, though I guess I could say now that he had—in this journal.
Another page.
My son doesn’t know yet what he’s capable of. I’m not sure I should tell him. He’ll figure it out himself and it will mean more that way.
The words blurred. I blinked, and they cleared.
For thirteen years, I’d carried the weight of being nineteen and unprepared to take on this role. I’d wondered all the time if I was doing anything right, if my father would be disappointed in how I’d handled things.
And he’d written all of this. Page after page of ordinary days and observations and love I hadn’t known how to look for.
My throat had gone so tight I could barely breathe. Emotion sat in my chest like it had been locked in a small room for too long and was now testing the walls.
I didn’t cry, but I came close.
I sat there for a while, stroking the pages of the journal, these chapters of my past I’d thought gone forever.
I wasn’t sure how long I remained there, though the light streaming through the tree opening shifted.
The sounds of Victoria moving and doing things, plus the scratch of her pen on paper prodded me to look up.
I found her staring at me, watching with the careful attention she gave things she didn’t want to disturb.
The office didn’t feel like a tomb anymore but a place where my father had actually lived.
I closed the journal and left it on the desk in front of me. I wouldn’t return it to its place behind the carving again. I wanted it here, where I could reach for it. Where it belonged.
Victoria got up and dragged a stool over to the cabinet. She climbed on top of it and tried to reach the uppermost shelf in a cabinet, stretching up on her toes. Her fingers came just short of something pushed far back.
Rising, I went over and pulled down the small wooden box she was reaching for.
“You could’ve asked for help,” I said.
“This is how I work.” She hopped off the stool and took the box from me. “You’re not always here.”
“I’m here now.”
She glanced up at me, and I sensed she was deciding whether to argue. But she nodded and carried the box to her desk.
I pulled my father’s desk chair over near her and sat. This way I’d be close enough to reach the shelves and hand her things if she needed them.
Now she wouldn’t fall without me being here to catch her.
She slanted me a long look but didn’t comment. Just opened the box and started examining the contents that looked like old correspondence. Nothing relevant to what she was researching as far as I could tell.
We established a rhythm of her dictating observations into her notebook. Me occasionally handing her books from high shelves before she could climb up for them. Getting her tea when her cup was empty. Adding wood to the fire when the room got cold.
She resisted my help at first, though in small ways.
A slight frown when I refilled her tea. An “I can get that myself” when I reached for a book she was eyeing.
But when the help was genuinely useful, like when I could get something she couldn’t or noticed she needed something before she had to ask, she accepted it.
Progress. I’d take it.
Acorn provided commentary throughout, short chirps and chittering sounds that Victoria would listen to, then translate with varying degrees of editing.
“What did he actually say?” I asked after one particularly pointed chirp.
“You don’t want to know,” Victoria said.
I raised an eyebrow.
She sighed. “He said you’re hovering like a mother wolf with only one pup.”
Acorn chittered again, sounding pleased with himself.
“And now he’s saying at least you’re not bringing me a half-rotten bird egg. Which he has done in the past.”
I looked at the squirrel. The squirrel looked at me.
“Tell him there will be no bird eggs inside this room, half-rotten or not,” I said.
Victoria’s mouth twitched, but she relayed my demand. Acorn’s tail flicked in what I was fairly certain was a rude gesture.
I decided not to ask for translation to that.
Victoria worked for another hour, making notes and cross-referencing things with the books she’d pulled from my father’s collection. I watched her build a theory piece by piece, the same way I’d watched her work in the clearing yesterday.
Finally she set down her pen and turned to face me.
“I found something yesterday,” she said. “I was going to tell you at breakfast, but the patrol reports were more urgent.”
“Tell me now.”
She organized her notes. “I spoke with Helen.”
I nodded.
“She remembered your father performing ceremonies at specific locations. She couldn’t recall the exact purpose, just that he went alone.
” Victoria pulled out my father’s old territory map, the one I remember seeing in my father’s top desk drawer.
She’d marked it with small annotations in her neat handwriting. “She saw him head north once.”
I stood and moved closer to see the map better. “He never mentioned ceremonies other than regular pack functions.”
“Helen didn’t know much about them. She said he took them seriously, that he needed duskburst for them.
” Victoria traced one of the marks on the map.
“If the duskburst is growing at these sites, and your father was performing regular ceremonies there, then the plant isn’t random.
It could be related to some sort of ritual. ”
My wolf paced in the back of my mind. This felt important in a way I couldn’t articulate.
“What did he call the seal sites?” Victoria asked. “Did he have a specific name for them?”
I met her eyes. “The bones of the pack.”
She went still. Then she wrote it down in her notebook, underlining it twice.
“Did he explain what that meant?”
“No.” The admission felt like failure. “I was supposed to have time. He was going to teach me, and then he was gone.”
Victoria nodded. “The metaphor is interesting. Bones as structure. As foundation. The thing that holds everything else together.”
“Or the thing that gets left behind when everything else is gone,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Both can be true.”
A buzzing sound interrupted whatever I might’ve said next.
A sprite zipped in through the opening, trailing sparks, holding a scroll. Victoria held out her hand, and the sprite deposited it into her palm. It immediately expanded—magically—into a full-sized letter.
“Thank you. Please wait.” Victoria rose and hurried to the other room, returning with a nut and a few pieces of fruit.
Acorn’s scowl made it clear he knew she’d raided his bowl.
“For you, little one,” Victoria said, holding the treats toward the sprite, who took them.
The sprite perched on the window opening and delicately ate the offering before vanishing out into the late-day sunshine in a shower of silver sparks.
Acorn huffed.
Victoria opened the letter, her expression moving from surprise to concentration, followed by satisfaction.
She read it through again before she lowered it to her lap. “I wrote my grandmother yesterday, asking about pack rituals and duskburst, and she’s written back. She sent what reads like a small history lesson.”
Victoria’s eyes moved over the page. “Duskburst has appeared in old wolf pack ceremonial records dating back hundreds of years, though its specific ritual function varied by region and pack. Some accounts associate it with boundary rites. Others with healing ceremonies. A few with what she calls ‘territorial memory.’” She paused, lifting her head to stare out the window.
“She doesn’t define that term further. Just notes that the old packs considered certain plants to have an affinity for magic already present in the land. ”
“There’s more,” she said. “Duskburst doesn’t seed naturally.
It requires specific soil conditions and doesn’t spread on its own.
But it turns up in unexpected places throughout recorded wolf pack history, often near sites of significance.
My grandmother found this botanically interesting.
” She said the last part with a slight smile, the kind that suggested she knew exactly how interesting her grandmother found it.
Victoria folded the letter and set it on the worktable with the same care she gave everything else.
Rising, I went over to Acorn’s basket, nudging his soft, warm body gently to the side to expose the duskburst sprigs I’d seen there the other day.
Small purple flowers with delicate stems that were struggling to grow at the seal sites.
The same place where my father may have performed ceremonies and where my pack members had lost their ability to shift.
Boundary rites. Territorial memory. Sites of significance.
The bones of the pack.
“Are you going to reply?” I asked.
Victoria picked up her pen and pulled out fresh paper.
“I’ll tell her what I’ve discovered at the seal sites and ask if she believes there could be a ceremonial connection.
I’ll also ask her if she thinks this could be related to the shifting problem.
” She started writing. “I’ll also ask her what the boundary rites were actually for. ”
I nodded. Restless energy moved through me, and I felt like I needed to act. To do something with all of this.
But I didn’t leave the office.
I picked up a duskburst sprig from Acorn’s basket and examined the flowers. After setting it back carefully, I stepped back.
Acorn chittered.
Victoria paused in her writing.
“He said wolves who remove boxes from shelves and gather flowers aren’t fooling squirrels of woodland powers,” she said.
I struggled not to smile at his wit.
He gazed at me with black eyes that seemed to know entirely too much.
“Tell him I’m not trying to fool anyone,” I said.
Acorn’s response was a dismissive flick of his tail.
I turned back to Victoria, who was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“I need to do something about this,” I said. “I’ve thought of sending Kirk north. He could track Bastian’s movements quietly. See if his pack is experiencing the same problems.”
Victoria nodded.
“And Victoria? Don’t go back to the creek alone.”
Her eyebrows rose. The request hung between us.
“I’ll tell you first,” she said.
It wasn’t a promise that she wouldn’t go or a concession to my authority. Just an acknowledgment that she’d give me the choice to come with her. It was more than I’d expected.
I nodded and left before I did something like tell her what this meant to me. Before I crossed the room and pulled her against me the way I’d wanted to all morning. I was determined not to make this into something more complicated than it already was.
She returned to her letter.
I walked across the room.
The office had two people’s work spread across its surfaces now. Victoria’s notebooks and plant samples. My father’s journal and my mother’s desk and the wooden wolf I’d carved when I was ten.
It didn’t feel like a tomb anymore.
It felt like it was waking up.