“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 thelandscape 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 worldwas 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.
Chapter 2
Willow
We hit Eldridge mid-morning. The town is barely a town: a post office, a farm supply co-op, and a feed store with a hand-painted sign that reads “Hill Country Feed & Ranch Supply” in letters that have been touched up enough times to show three different shades of green. A dog sleeps on the porch. Two trucks in the lot. The kind of place you drive through without remembering.
Briar stays in the truck. We agreed on this before Waco; one face is less memorable than two.