Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
VICTORIA
“How dare you come into my territory and make unfounded accusations!” Bastian roared. He rose to his feet, doing his best to loom over us.
Feral bristled. The heat coming off him said he was close to shifting. I stepped forward before he could.
I watched Bastian’s face as he continued to berate Feral instead of listening to the words coming out of his mouth.
Bastian’s anger didn’t match with the guilt I’d expected.
His reaction appeared to be offended pride, the kind that came from someone who believed they’d done everything right and was being accused of the opposite.
I’d seen enough people caught in lies to recognize the difference. The guilty ones went still first, their minds racing to come up with explanations. Bastian’s anger was the kind that didn’t need to think before speaking, because it believed itself in the right.
His face showed exhaustion, and there were shadows under his eyes.
I didn’t miss the subtle slump in his shoulders.
It felt like depletion, as if something had been draining out of him for a long time, and he’d kept going because stopping wasn’t an option.
This kind of tiredness often came from fighting a losing battle alone.
The wolf who rages at the wrong, Acorn said, mistakes the note and blames the song.
It was time to study this as a researcher would. Observation first, hypothesis after.
“I’ve been holding this territory together since your father died and left a boy in charge,” Bastian snapped. His pack enforcers tensed but didn’t move. “Yet you accuse me of sabotage? I’ve been doing your job for thirteen years while you learned how to be alpha.”
The word *holding* snagged in my mind. Why not use the words protecting or managing? This suggested something was trying to fall apart and required constant pressure to keep it together. I filed it away with the other details that didn’t quite fit.
Bastian’s gaze cut to me, contempt clear in every line of his face. “The seals need an alpha’s magic, not witch’s potions. This is pack business, not something you can solve with your notebooks and pretty vials.”
An alpha. One. I wasn’t sure why I noted that detail among all the rest, but it struck.
Feral stepped forward, his wolf rising so close to the surface I could feel the heat of it beside me. He’d shift and violence would erupt between the two males.
I put my hand on his arm.
Feral went still at my touch. His head turned, and he read my face. Whatever he saw there made him pull back. His aggressive posture turned into something more controlled.
He’d seen me do this before in our laboratory when I was building toward something and needed space to work. He trusted it even when he didn’t understand it.
I was grateful to have that trust.
I kept my notebook in my pocket.
“When did you last sleep a full night?” I asked Bastian.
Bastian’s jaw clamped shut. His enforcers exchanged a look that told me everything I needed to know before he could answer.
Silence stretched through the hall, broken only by the soft crackle of the spelled lights overhead.
Bastian’s expression told me he hadn’t expected me to ask the question, which meant he hadn’t prepared a defense for something that went straight past politics into the personal cost he may have been paying.
Feral stilled beside me as he watched me work. He could see I wasn’t confronting Bastian. I was studying him in the same way I’d examine anything else.
“How long have you been going to the seal sites alone?” I asked. This was a guess on my part, but again, I was trusting my instincts.
Bastian’s eyes sharpened, but he didn’t answer.
I took that as confirmation and filed it with the rest. A pattern was forming in my mind, the edges becoming clearer even if I couldn’t see the whole picture yet.
“You’ve been performing the rituals since my father died,” Feral said softly, hitting the idea on the head.
Bastian’s growl rumbled through the hall, though I didn’t sense aggression.
“Your father kept those seals alive from the time he became alpha,” Bastian said in a much lower tone of voice. “You inherited a kingdom and didn’t even know what you’d been given.”
I heard weariness beneath his harshness, bone-deep exhaustion that had been collecting for years with no relief in sight.
“I watched him do it before he died,” Bastian said. “I saw the ritual and understood that it mattered. When you showed no sign of knowing what to do and instead spent your time on politics and dominance challenges instead of the old magic, someone had to step in.”
He believed Feral had been too young and untested to understand what mattered. Perhaps he hadn’t been trying to destroy the pack. He’d been trying to prevent its collapse while waiting for Feral to prove himself capable of taking over.
We may have read him wrong all this time.
His contempt was real, but so was his exhaustion. This wasn’t sabotage. It was a rescue attempt that had been failing for over a decade.
“What you’re doing isn’t working,” I said. “You were wrong to try.”
Bastian’s expression fractured.
“The duskburst won’t anchor,” he said, his voice going flat in the way people’s voices did when they were reciting facts they’d examined from every angle and still couldn’t solve.
“I’ve tried everything. Soil composition, timing, moon phases, and different plant preparation.
Nothing holds. So I’ve been pouring more of…
whatever I can grab onto to compensate.”
His wolves must be affected too. If he’d been pulling from the territorial magic that connected shifters to their wolves, trying to fill gaps that shouldn’t exist, he was causing them considerable harm.
This was the magical equivalent of holding a structure together with glue and will when what it needed was a foundation.
Feral’s face changed, the last of his aggression dissolving into understanding.
“You’ve been weakening your own pack by trying to fix ours,” I said.
Bastian’s silence confirmed it.
He gestured to his enforcers. “Bring food and drink. Take your time.”
They left, closing the hall doors behind them with a solid thunk that echoed through the empty vaulted space.
“Sit.” Bastian pulled out chairs from a table near the center of the room. Heavy wooden things, old enough that the seats had worn smooth from use.
We settled in the chairs.
Feral leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the table. “What do you remember of the ritual from watching my father?”
Bastian described what he’d seen. The seal sites, scattered across the territory at specific geographic points. The duskburst placed at those points in a careful arrangement. The binding words spoken at moonrise, old pack language that predated written records.
One alpha, moving between locations over the course of several nights, anchoring each site in sequence before moving to the next.
I listened, building a framework the way I built any complex theory.
Something was missing from this picture, but I couldn’t name it yet.
The ritual Bastian described made sense on the surface, and it fit the pattern of ceremonial magic I’d studied.
But parts of the structure felt incomplete, like a formula with one component missing.
Acorn hopped up onto the table and gave me a pointed look. The greenhouse holds the bear who knows. Go find the root of where this grows.
He didn’t nudge without reason. His magic always pointed somewhere true.
He’d done this since he’d chosen me when I was twelve and had needed guidance more than I’d needed power.
While my cousins’ companions shared their magic, giving them enhanced abilities, Acorn’s gift was simpler and to me, more valuable.
He showed me where to look when I couldn’t find the pattern yet.
The two males were talking now. Less like rivals measuring each other for weaknesses, and more like two people who’d been looking at the same problem from different directions and were finally comparing notes.
I leaned close to Feral, keeping my voice pitched low. “I need air.”
He looked at me, read my face, and nodded.
I slipped out with Acorn, leaving Feral to continue the conversation.
The hall doors closed behind me with barely a sound.
The compound was quieter now, most of the pack busy with evening routines.
I caught glimpses of them through carved openings in the trees and along the bridges traversing the canopy.
Normal pack life while we tried to solve a problem that threatened us all.
As I approached the greenhouse, I found the bear working inside again.
I approached slowly, opening the door without making myself large or threatening, and stepped inside.
Rather than confront him, I knelt on the floor near the duskburst pots. I examined a plant, taking care with the leaves.
The bear watched me.
Acorn hopped off my shoulder, sitting on the ground between us.
I didn’t ask about Bastian or the seals. Pushing for information would close this down before it started.
Instead, I touched one of the duskburst leaves again, tracing the purple and white petals with one finger. “These are beautiful. I think you’ve been tending them a long time.”
The bear shifted. Magic rippled through the air, and then he stood in human form. Long, black hair tied at his nape. Narrow features. A slim form so different from his bulky bear.
“For a long time,” he said, his voice gruff but gentle.
“Why?”
He shrugged. “Someone must fix this. The alpha comes back weaker every time. Thought it would get better. Never does.” He came over and crouched beside me, picking up one of the pots, turning it to show me the root structure through the drainage holes at the bottom.
“Roots strong,” he said. “Plants healthy. But when he takes them to sites, they die. Every time. I give him new ones, he tries the same. They die again.” His face showed the frustration of someone who understood plants but couldn’t understand people or why this kept failing.
“Not his fault. He does everything right. Still die.”
“What does Bastian do at the sites?” I asked.
The bear set the pot down. He described the ritual as he understood it, his words simple.
One alpha, alone, moving between seal sites. Placing duskburst at specific points around each location. Speaking words he’d learned from watching Feral’s father. Pouring magic into the ground until he and many of the pack were drained, then returning home to recover before heading to the next site.
Over and over, site after site, month after month, year after year.
The pieces started connecting in my head.
“Did you ever see the old alpha perform it?” I asked.
The bear nodded. “Once. When young. Wandered into territory by accident. Scared. Thought they kill me.” He touched one of the plants, his fingers tracing a leaf. “Old alpha, he not punish. He let me watch. Said I could stay if I keep quiet, not interfere.”
“Was he alone?”
“No,” he said slowly. “Other alphas there, standing at the site. Witnessing.”
His hands moved, sketching positions in the air. Four points, maybe five, arranged around a central location. Each, I now suspected, held by a different alpha, all of them present at the same time.
They weren’t witnessing. They were assisting.
It finally hit me. The ritual required multiple alphas, each working on a different point. Like hands holding a net, creating a structure that could hold something larger than any single point.
Not one person trying to do it alone. One alpha pouring his and his pack’s magic in repeatedly wasn’t completing the ritual. He was filling a vessel with no bottom, trying to be four or five points with only one body to work with.
The duskburst wouldn’t take hold because the magical structure it was meant to bind didn’t have the correct points. It needed multiple woven together, creating a pattern that could support the ritual.
Bastian had been trying to make up for the missing anchors by pushing in more of himself. That was why it kept pulling from his wolves, and why the sensation in Feral’s pack may have felt muffled rather than blocked.
This wasn’t a curse or sabotage, just one wolf trying to do the work of five and slowly destroying himself and his pack in the process.
“Thank you,” I said, rising to my feet.
The bear shifter nodded, returning his attention to the plants, already moving to the next pot that needed watering.
I walked back to the main hall with Acorn on my shoulder.
Pack members I passed gave me curious looks but didn’t speak. Word had spread that we were here, that something important was being discussed.
Feral and Bastian were still talking when I entered the hall, though less hostile now. Both of them looked up when I opened the door and stepped inside.
I joined them, sitting, and pulled out my notebook, placing it on the table in front of them.
“The ritual requires more than one alpha,” I said.