“How long?”
“Jericho says by tonight. Aurora’s good at this.”
“And the rest of the team?”
“Nadia and Jericho are south of Austin already; they’ll reach you by this evening. Merric’s mobilising. He needs to gather the fighters and equipment—they’re spread across three locations. It’ll take a day to assemble and move south with Rook, Sienna, and Dane. Everyone’s moving.” A pause. “How are you?”
The question catches me unprepared. Not the operational version—how’s the mission—but the personal one.
How am I?
“Fine,” I say.
“Willow.”
“I’m fine, Aunt Brenna. I got the intel. We’re en route. I’ll be fine.”
She lets it go. “I’ll be there tomorrow. Hold position until Nadia arrives. Don’t approach the facility without her.”
“Copy.”
The line goes dead. I drive. The sun climbs. The landscape gets drier, hotter.
We find a motel outside Pleasanton, forty minutes north of the facility coordinates. Anonymous. Cash. Two rooms.
By mid-afternoon, while I’ve set up for when the team arrives, Briar’s scouted the first approach route: a ranch road that runs within two miles of the facility’s eastern fence line. She comes back with more dust on her boots and a new set of pencil marks. I swear the woman’s not wired to sit still for any length of time. I doubt she even sleeps.
“Security is real,” she says. “Fenced compound. Guard rotation on the east side… I counted four. Vehicle patrols on the access roads.” She traces the layout. “But the south approach has a blind spot. Terrain dips into a creek bed about three hundred yards from the fence. You can’t see it from the guard posts.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was in it for an hour and nobody saw me.”
That’s Briar. An hour in a creek bed three hundred yards from a Syndicate compound, invisible, counting guards, and she reports it like she’s describing a trip to the grocery store.
I close my eyes and feel for the connection. At this range—forty minutes instead of four hours—the signal is different. Not the faint whisper from Cedar Falls. Here, the bonds are audible. I can feel individual wolves. Ravenclaw. Still distinct, still alive. The damaged group, the broken bonds, the gaps where connections should be. And the children. Their signals are dim, exhausted, the fading pulse of young wolves who’ve been scared most of their lives.
I hold the connection until my head aches. Then I let go and sit on the edge of the bed and massage my temples.
They’re there. Forty minutes south. Alive. Waiting for someone to come.
We’re coming. Don’t give up. We’re coming.
Nadia and Jericho arrive at dusk.
Nadia comes through the door already working, laptop under one arm, a case of equipment in the other, her sharp features set in the expression of a woman who knows how to run operations in her sleep. Tall, lean, precise in her movements, with dark hair tied back and unusually pale eyes that seem too sharp to miss anything. She scans the room, scans Briar, scans me, and makes three assessments in the time it takes to set down her laptop.
“Willow.” She extends a hand. The grip is firm and brief. “Brenna speaks highly of you. I’ll form my own opinion.”
“Fair enough.”
“Show me the satellite overlay against your ground reconnaissance. I want to compare before we lose the light.”
Jericho is behind her. He fills the doorway without seeming to try: insanely tall and broad, the build of a man whose body was designed for something bigger than human form. He moves quietly for his size, with a stillness that has nothing to do withcalm and everything to do with containment. The dragon, held in check. His eyes find Briar, and he nods. She returns it. Two operatives recognizing each other—the wolf who moves through terrain like smoke and the dragon who spent years inside the Syndicate learning to read their playbook.
“The relay network,” Jericho says, quiet and direct. “We cracked the outer layer. The contact number connects to a routing system: three intermediary nodes before reaching the facility’s internal communications. I’ll have the full trace by midnight.”
We spread the maps. Overlay Briar’s ground reconnaissance with Nadia’s satellite data. The facility takes shape: a converted ranch compound, roughly two hundred yards square. Main building, secondary structures, guard posts, vehicle depot. The heat signatures Nadia’s been tracking confirm a population inside: dozens of wolves. More than just the Ravenclaw families. Others, from other packs, collected over months or years.