Seeking the Pack (Dragonblood Dynasty #10)

Chapter 1

Willow

The truck is loaded. Two duffel bags, a cooler, weapons wrapped in canvas, and a burner phone with six numbers in it. Everything we need for a trip that might take a week, or might take a month, or might end with both of us in the ground.

I lean against the tailgate and look at the ranch.

Late fall in the Ozarks turns the valley amber.

The hills are a wash of gold and rust, the oaks holding the last of their color while the hickories have already gone bare.

The lodge sits low against the hillside, lights on in the kitchen where Greta is probably feeding someone who doesn’t need feeding.

The new barn is solid. The cabins are warm. The fences are strong.

Two years I held this place together. Fed thirty wolves on nothing. Patched roofs, stood watch, buried the ones we couldn’t save, and pretended I knew what I was doing when half the time I was running on rage and instinct and the stubborn refusal to let the Ravenclaw Pack die on my watch.

Now Brenna’s back. Merric’s here. The pack has an alpha pair that actually knows what they’re doing, and the ranch feels more like home than it has since my aunt walked into a fire and didn’t come out.

So, of course, I’m leaving.

“You done staring, or should I get comfortable?”

Briar is already in the passenger seat. Door open.

Boots on the dash. She’s cleaning a knife with a cloth she keeps in her jacket, working the blade with the absent attention of someone who’s done it ten thousand times.

Slim, dark-haired, gray-eyed. Pretty in a way that makes you think of scissors—fine and sharp and designed for purpose.

She’s not mine. She’s Merric’s. One of his Frostbourne wolves, sent south with me because Brenna asked, and Merric doesn’t refuse Brenna much these days.

Or anything at all. I don’t know Briar well.

What I know is that she can track a wolf across dry stone, she sleeps three hours a night, and she’s never once asked me how I’m feeling.

I appreciate that more than she’ll ever know.

“Coming.” I push off the tailgate and walk around to the driver’s side.

Cameron is on the lodge porch, sitting on the top step with a book he’s not reading.

Seventeen and already too old for his age.

He watches me cross the yard with eyes that are all Brenna, and I see him taking in the truck, the gear, the direction I’m headed.

He knows I’m going. I told him last night.

He lifts his chin. I lift mine back.

We don’t need words. Cam and I have a language that’s older than conversation.

Two Corvus wolves who survived the same winters, ate from the same thin stores, sat together when his magic flared and the fire came out of his skin and someone had to be there to talk him through it.

He’s my cousin. My responsibility. And now Brenna and Merric will keep him safe, which means I can go.

I climb in. Start the engine. Briar doesn’t look up from her knife.

We leave. No fanfare. No teary farewells. I said my goodbyes last night.

The ranch road winds down through the valley and joins the county blacktop heading south.

I roll the window down. The air is cool, smelling of leaf rot, creek water, and the faint mineral edge of limestone.

My wolf stretches inside my chest, interested in the scent change, the new direction.

She’s been restless for weeks. Cooped up now that the pack doesn’t need me running things. She wants a job. So do I.

Twenty minutes down the road, my phone rings. I put it on speaker.

“You’re on the road.” Brenna’s voice is clipped and clear. She tracked us leaving.

“Just passed the county line.”

“Good. I want you to check in every forty-eight hours. Use the second burner if the first is compromised. The dead-drop in Waco is still active; I refreshed it last month. The one in Austin may be burned. Don’t use it unless you have no other option.”

I commit it to memory because Brenna doesn’t repeat herself. “Got it.”

“Your primary contact in central Texas is a woman called Margaux. She runs a feed store in a town called Eldridge, a few hours out from where the families were last tracked. She’s human.

Married to a wolf. She’s been in my network for eight years, and she’s reliable.

She’ll have supplies and local intelligence.

During our last call, she’d picked up word of a family moving through the Hill country. She’ll have more details by now.”

“And if she’s compromised?”

A pause. The kind that means Brenna has already considered this and doesn’t love the answer. “Then you’re on your own until I can route you to someone else. Don’t trust anyone who isn’t on the list.”

“I know.”

“Willow.” Her tone shifts. Still professional.

But underneath it, something else: concern.

“These are traditional pack territories. The wolves down there don’t think like us.

They don’t live like us. Magic-blooded wolves are not welcome, and some of those packs enforce that with more than words. You cannot let them know what you are.”

“I know, Aunt Brenna.”

“Say it back to me.”

I roll my eyes. Briar’s mouth doesn’t move, but I swear the air in the cab gets amused. “I will not let anyone know what I am. I will keep my magic locked down. I will not lose my temper, shift in front of strangers, or set anything on fire. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.” She’s not. “Find the families. Get them located. Do not attempt extraction alone. Call me when you have a picture, and we’ll build a plan.”

“Copy.”

“And Willow… Briar is your partner. Listen to her. She sees things you won’t.”

I look at Briar. She’s still working the knife. Still looking out the window. Still radiating the calm indifference of a woman who could kill everything in this truck and sleep fine afterward.

“I will.”

“Good. Forty-eight hours.”

The line goes dead.

We drive in silence for a while. The Ozarks give way to flat Arkansas farm country, then the highway opens south toward Texas. The sky widens. The trees thin out. Something in the landscape loosens, spreading toward a horizon that seems to pull further back with every mile.

My wolf tracks the change. She’s a hill wolf, born in Ozark hollows, bred on dense timber and creek bottoms. This open country makes her uneasy.

Too much sky. Not enough cover. But there’s something else, too, a low hum in the ground that I’ve been feeling since we crossed into the southern territories.

Not magic, exactly. More like an awareness.

A frequency my body picks up even when my mind isn’t listening.

I’ve had it since I was small. Brenna called it the thread-sense—the ability to feel the connections between wolves, the invisible bonds of pack and blood that tie us to each other across distance.

It’s faint right now. Background noise. But it’s there, and it’s pulling south.

Somewhere ahead of us, three Ravenclaw families are breathing. Or they’re not. Either way, I’ll find out.

Briar speaks for the first time in four hours. “How far?”

“Eleven hours to Eldridge. We’ll stop halfway, sleep a few hours, hit the town in the morning.”

She nods. Returns to silence. I drive.

The sun drops behind us as we push into Texas.

The terrain changes again. Flat gives way to rolling hills, and the vegetation shifts from scrubby plains to cedar and live oak.

Hills rise on either side of the highway, pale stone breaking through the green.

It’s beautiful in a hard way. Unyielding.

The kind of land that doesn’t forgive mistakes.

Hill Country. I’ve never been here. Brenna described it to me once; old territory, settled by wolf packs centuries ago.

The kind of place where the same families have owned the same land for generations and don’t take kindly to outsiders.

Traditional to the bone. The packs down here never mixed with magic bloodlines, never tolerated the old ways, and when the rest of the wolf world was debating whether Ravenclaw had a right to exist, these were the wolves who said no.

My people have been dying because of that “no” for as long as I’ve been alive.

We stop at a motel outside Waco. Briar sits watch even though we’re not in imminent danger; I guess old habits die hard.

I lie on top of the covers with my boots on and close my eyes and try not to think about what happens if we’re too late.

If the families are already gone. If the silence that swallowed them is the permanent kind.

I sleep three hours. Dream of fire. Wake to Briar’s hand on my shoulder and a thermos of gas-station coffee that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. But it’s caffeine, and I’m not going to be a princess about it.

We’re back on the highway before dawn. I’m reaching for the thermos again when it hits me: a pull below my ribs, sharp and sudden. Not pain. Direction. South and east, faint but unmistakable.

A bond-thread. Frayed, almost silent, but alive.

Someone is out there. And they’re terrified.

“We need to find Margaux,” I tell Briar, who nods without speaking. She may not have my connection to Ravenclaw kin, but I can tell she can feel something.

I put my foot on the gas.