Merric frowns. “Gone where?”
“He didn’t say. I don’t think he wanted me to know.”
The transfer happens quickly. Willow coaxes the family out of Dawes’s truck bed. We move them into ours the same way, blankets in the bed, Willow climbing in with them. Sienna hands the children up one at a time. The mother is shaking. The father can barely use his left arm. The kids don’t speak. They just move where they’re directed.
Dawes stays until they’re all in the truck. Then he closes his tailgate, walks around to the driver’s side, and stops. He looks at me across the hood.
“I never liked you,” he says. “Watching you on those ridgelines. Thought you were trouble.”
“I was.”
“Yeah.” A pause. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s not going to survive it without help. You should know that.”
“What does he need?”
“He won’t say. He made Jessie promise not to go after him. Told us to protect the compound. But the man who drove up to our gate yesterday evening is not the same man who drove out the morning before, and I’ve known him since he was fifteen. He’s made peace with something that doesn’t look like peace from the outside.”
My hand is on the side of the truck. I feel the cold metal under my palm.
“When?” I ask.
“Soon. Days. He’s waiting for the family to be clear. Then he moves.”
“Moves where?”
“I told you. I don’t know. He’s going to make them find him somewhere that isn’t his compound. Whatever that means.”
Dawes gets in his truck, starts it, and rolls his window down before pulling away.
“Ravenclaw.” He nods at Merric. Then to me: “Briar. Whatever you’re doing — figure it out fast.”
He pulls out.
We stand in the empty rest area watching his taillights disappear.
Merric turns to me. “You want to tell me what that was about?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so.” He jerks his head toward the truck. “Let’s get them home.”
The drive back is quiet. The children fall asleep against their mother. The father sits with his back against the cab wall, not speaking, watching the road disappear behind them. Willow is beside them in the bed, one hand on the tailgate rail, checking for pursuit, checking for magical residue, reading whatever threads run between the family members and the road behind us.
I drive. My hands are tight on the wheel.
He knows something is wrong with me.
He sensed it in the storage room, and now he’s sent a message telling me he’d be there if he could. He’s planning something that requires him to be somewhere other than home, somewhere the Syndicate can find him, and he’s going without backup.
My wolf is running circles in my chest. Frantic. The restless circling of an animal who can feel something wrong and can’t reach it.
He’s going in alone. He doesn’t stand a chance.
I drive. I don’t cry. Briar doesn’t cry.
But somewhere between the Oklahoma border and the Ozark foothills, my wolf stops circling and does something I’ve never felt from her. She curls. Around the warmth in my belly. Around whatever is growing there. And she holds it tight, the way a mother holds a child during a storm.
She’s guarding it. From what’s coming. From what’s already happening.