31 Reed
The first coat of oil went into the cedar grain like water into cracked ground.
I dragged the rag along the top rail of the crib, watching the wood drink it dark, and I ran my thumb over the joint where the rail met the corner post to check the seam.
Smooth. No gap. I’d doweled it and glued it and clamped it overnight, and it had set true.
Now the whole small frame of it sat solid on the porch boards in front of me, catching the summer light.
I looked down at my hands.
Sawdust in the creases of the knuckles. Cedar oil worked into the old burn scars along the forearms, the topographical ridges that had never healed because they were never meant to—magical scars.
I’d built a pack with them, sure, but I’d built it the way you build a wall—stone on stone against the dark, every course laid to keep danger out.
These same hands had spent the last month sanding a crib rail down to satin so nothing could ever put a splinter in my son.
A good crib, my wolf rumbled softly, resting his heavy obsidian head on his paws in the warm sunlight of my chest. The best crib ever built.
Out in the yard, the pack was loud.
I let the sound of it wash over me. That was the best part—that I could listen to more than two dozen wolves scattered across the meadow grass of the rebuilt Sanctuary Farm and not once feel my old eye come up to count them.
There was nothing coming out of that treeline but deer and dusk.
Down by the fire pit, Del and Chas were about to come to blows over a brisket.
“You wrap it in the third hour,” Del said, gesturing with a pair of tongs like a conductor, his mustache twitching. “Third hour. You wrap it any later, you’re chasing the stall, you’re not riding it.”
“You wrap it that early, you’re steaming it, you old fool. You want pot roast, go make pot roast.” Chas held his foil out like a challenge flag. “You’re smoking meat for grown wolves and you want to steam it like daycare lunch.”
“I have been smoking brisket since before you had your first shift.”
“And it’s been mediocre the entire time. Consistency’s not a virtue, Del.”
Tommy was at the nearest picnic table, working through his third plate, and pointed a rib bone at the two of them. “Twenty bucks says Chas is right and Del sulks about it through dessert.”
“Statistically,” Kenji said, not looking up from his folding chair with a beer, “Del’s wrong about the wrap and right that it won’t matter, because they’re going to argue until it’s overcooked either way. Nobody take that bet. It’s not a bet. It’s a forecast.”
Tommy pointed the bone at Kenji instead. “See, this is why nobody invites you to Vegas.”
“I’ve been to Vegas. I came back up eleven percent.”
“That’s the least fun sentence anyone has ever said.”
I let the corner of my mouth pull up. A real grin.
Across the yard, under the big oak, Brann sat in the grass with his back against the trunk and a bundle against his chest.
His daughter was weeks old and fit in the crook of one forearm.
The Sovereign King was making a face at her that I would have paid good money to show his old probies.
Wren sat tucked into his side, her head on his shoulder, exhausted and lit up from the inside, one hand resting on the baby’s back.
She caught me watching from the porch and lifted her chin. I lifted mine back.
Santos and Nell were sprawled together on a blanket a little ways off, Nell tracking the yard’s overlapping conversations with a dispatcher's rapid-fire focus. “Tommy’s going to drop that plate in exactly three seconds,” she announced, leaning back into Santos’ chest with a relaxed smile.
Santos chuckled, pressing a kiss to the crown of her head just as the paper plate buckled.
Levi had their baby in his arms. The baby had both fists knotted in her uncle’s hair, steering him around the yard like a truck.
Beyond the tree line of the Sanctuary Farm, the lower valley was an absolute madhouse.
Over three thousand wolves had set up camp across the ridgeline over the last few months.
Alphas from the Bitterroot, the High Sierra, and the Great Lakes syndicates were currently squabbling over temporary territory lines, demanding audiences with Brann, and practically howling at the gates of Nadia’s Pavilion, desperate to catch the scent of a dormant mate.
The noise of it was a constant, low-grade earthquake that made the quiet of our own yard that much sweeter.
On the porch steps just below me, Nadia and Maren sat with sweating glasses of iced tea, a stack of biometric diagnostic slates resting beside Nadia’s medical kit.
“You put something in it,” Nadia said, turning her glass in her ringed fingers. “For the swelling. I can taste it.”
“I put a great many things in it.” Maren didn’t look up from the tiny sock she was mending, her hands moving without hurry. “You’re the one who told me her ankles were bothering her.”
“I told you her ankles were bothering her so you’d stop hovering over my medical charts, not so you’d dose my patient with hedge-craft.”
“And yet her ankles are better.” Maren bit the thread clean. “Drink your tea, Doctor. And tell me how your protocol is coming along.”
Nadia picked up one of the glass diagnostic slates, her dark brows drawing together in that clinical focus that had kept the Fireline Pack alive through years of war.
“Dormant women are registering for the assembly in the lower valley next month,” Nadia said, her voice dropping into a professional cadence.
“Every single one of them had their wolves freed when Avaline cracked the dam in the Dreamscape. But having a spirit free in the astral plane is only half the equation. Their waking biology has been suppressed for years.”
I looked down from the crib rail. “You’re setting up the matching circles at the Caldera base?”
Nadia turned her head, her rings flashing in the sun.
“Not matching, Reed. Screening. Let’s use the accurate terminology.
Shifter biology doesn’t care about politeness.
If a dormant woman encounters her fated mate among the visiting packs, the resonance will instantly trigger an unshielded First Heat.
If she isn’t in a controlled environment with proper medical oversight—”
I smiled at her. “Tell me something I don’t know.”
She grunted.
“And consent?” Maren asked quietly.
“Absolute and non-negotiable,” Nadia replied firmly.
“Nobody enters the pavilion unless they have explicitly requested to scent the visiting lines. We have private recovery cabins warded with ice-salt, IV hydration stations, and a full team of nurses trained to manage withdrawal. The dormants who want to find their mates will have a safe place to do it. The ones who just want to rebuild their lives in the packs will have our full protection without anyone pressuring them.”
“You’re a good doctor, Nadia,” I told her.
“I’m a pragmatic doctor,” she countered with a dry smirk, tapping the glass slate against her knee. “I’m not letting a bunch of unmated alphas set the valley on fire with unmanaged pheromones. I have enough paperwork.”
Maren chuckled, setting her sewing aside. “Drink your tea, doctor.”
Nadia drank her tea.
Mia came across the yard with a cord of firewood in her arms.
The Order had built joint-snapping, geometry-bending speed into her body, and it had not yet drained out of her marrow.
She crossed the summer grass in a blink, a shadow skipping over the ground.
Where a month ago that speed might have meant she was hunting a target, now it just meant Kenji’s woodpile was about to get restocked whether Kenji wanted it or not.
She pulled up short at the pile, and instead of dumping the cord, she flicked each split log off her forearm one at a time, stacking them into a perfect course without looking.
“Show-off,” Kenji muttered.
“You were going to do it in forty minutes and get a splinter,” Mia answered. “I did it in ten and I won’t.”
“That’s not a personality. That’s a commercial.”
She laughed—a loud, free laugh, the kind that used to startle her a month ago.
She turned and walked over to the edge of the porch and hopped up onto the bottom step, pulling a throwing knife from her boot. She grabbed a clean rag from her pocket and began polishing pine pitch off the dark steel.
“Nice crib, old man,” she said, nodding toward the cedar joints.
“Takes time to do it right,” I said. “You packing your go-bag?”
Mia didn’t feign surprise. She kept buffing the steel.
“The visiting Alphas have been screaming for blood for what the Order did to their people. But Brann won’t let a mob hurt those who are innocent.
He signed the warrant for my squad instead.
We got everyone in that throne room, but a few of the monsters didn’t show up for the fun. ”
I looked at my little sister—the weapon the Order had forged, choosing for the first time exactly where to point herself.
“A squad?” I asked.
“Just a few volunteers,” Mia said, sliding the dagger back into her boot. “Misfits. The ones who don’t know how to sit at a picnic table yet. We need another month or so to train together and then we’ll head out.”
“Good hunting, then,” I told her.
Mia flashed a wide, radiant grin. “Always.”
She hopped off the porch and headed back into the fray of the yard. I watched her go, then picked up the oil rag and set it back on the crib rail.
A month ago she couldn’t hold my gaze for three seconds.
There’d been ghosts behind her eyes—the First Saint’s cold, our mother’s stolen voice.
I’d watch her look at me and I’d watch her fight the thing riding her memory.
She had still not had her First Shift, nor dared to be around any unmated shifters except for the Fireline Pack for fear she’d encounter her mate.
Now she just looked at me. Clear brown eyes. Our mother’s eyes. Nothing in them but my sister.
She lifted a hand and flashed me a thumbs-up, wide and beaming and stupid, and turned back to argue with Kenji about stacking technique.