Let me be clear about something: I was not being reckless.
I had my phone charged to a hundred percent, location sharing turned on and sent to Janine with a message that said, "If I don't text you by 10pm, call someone," and I'd looked up Elder Maren's name before I left the motel and confirmed she was a real, documented member of the Graymoor Pack council. I'd also typed the address into two separate map apps to make sure they pulled the same location.
So, I was not reckless but prepared.
The fact that I was driving to an inherited property I barely knew, alone, at nine at night, to meet a lycan elder I'd never spoken to before, because she'd called me on a private landline and said she had things to tell me that were true whether Rhys wanted me to hear them or not—that was just a series of reasonable decisions that happened to stack up into something my more sensible self would have significant objections to.
My more sensible self had been losing a lot of arguments lately.
You have two hours of documentation on this elder. She's legitimate. She called you on a landline. Normal threatening people don't use landlines.
I parked at the nearest road access point and walked the boundary line to the spot she'd given me. Which was fine. It was a clear enough night, my phone had a torch, and the property wasn't that large.
The property was different at night.
Not frightening, exactly. I stood there at the boundary, waiting and trying to put a word to it. More present, maybe. Like it had more weight after dark, like the ground under my feet was doing something quiet that I could almost feel.
Low blood sugar, I thought, was the reason, without much conviction.
And so I waited.
And waited.
Twenty minutes in I sat down on a flat rock at the boundary edge and ate the cereal bar I'd had in my jacket pocket and looked at the tree line and thought about the Mercer file.
Twenty-five minutes.
She said nine o'clock. It is nine twenty-five. I am sitting on a rock in the dark on land I technically own but have never slept on, waiting for an elder who is apparently not particularly concerned about punctuality.
Thirty minutes.
Then I heard something from the trees, which should have been alarming and somehow wasn't.
Then, Elder Maren came through the dark the way someone moved when they'd grown up in woods like these and had stopped thinking about it a long time ago. She looked completely at ease, like a nine-thirty stroll through an unlit property was just a normal Tuesday.
"You're late," I said.
"I am." She didn't sound especially troubled by it. "We were speaking with Rhys. It ran longer than expected."
I looked at her. "You could have scheduled this for after that conversation. It would have been nice to not sit out here alone for half an hour."
She stopped a few feet away and looked at me with something that was almost amusement. "I apologize. Genuinely," she smiled. "You're very direct."
"People do tell me that and I'd like to believe that I am."
"Well, it's a compliment. You'd make a good pack member."
"I appreciate that," I said. "I have no interest in being one."
She looked at me for a moment—that specific kind of look, the one she'd given me through the waiting room doorway earlier. Like she was seeing something she'd been waiting to see for a long time.
"Your mother came here once," she said.
I went still.
"You have her walk," the elder continued, moving toward the property's edge, looking out at the trees. "Same pace. Same way of taking in a space when you enter it."
"You knew my mother?"
"I knew of her. She came to find out what she'd inherited. Asked the same questions you're asking now, more or less," she said, and was quiet for a moment. "She left when we asked her to."
"She just... left? When you asked?"
"She was sensible." The elder glanced back at me. "She understood there were things that weren't ready to be understood yet."
"I've been told I'm sensible too," I said.
"You're still here."
I almost smiled despite myself. Didn't quite manage to stop it fully.
"What happened when she came?" I asked. "Did she — did she meet Rhys?"
"Rhys was nineteen at the time. He was there, but only to carry his father's bags." Something shifted in the elder's expression, brief and careful. "He wouldn't remember her."
"Really?"
She paused and then added, "His wolf might."
The ground under my feet felt suddenly less solid. I looked down and checked; it was still there, still the same ground it had been thirty seconds ago, but something shifted in how it felt to be standing on it.
I looked at her. "He recognized her."
Maren went still. Just slightly, but I caught it. "What do you mean?"
"The photo on my desk. My parents. He looked at it for too long and his face did something." I watched her expression. "You don't look surprised."
"I'm not," she said after a moment.
"Are you going to tell me why?"
She looked at me in that particular way she had, like she was deciding not whether to answer but how much of the answer to give.
"That's part of what I wanted to talk to you about tonight. Your mother didn't come here by accident. She came because she understood something about this land and about what it meant for your family." She paused. "And for you specifically."
"For me." I looked at her.
"Yes," Maren said simply.
I opened my mouth to push further.
She stopped.
I noticed she'd stopped because she'd gone tense. Not the careful stillness of someone choosing their words. The other kind. The kind that meant something had changed in the immediate environment and she was assessing it.
I followed her eyeline.
The tree line.
It was there.
The black wolf was standing absolutely still at the edge of the trees. Not at the distance I'd seen it before, that far-enough-away distance that I told myself was a large animal, unusual but explainable.
It's close.
And its eyes.
I'd assumed the glow was a trick of the light before, a reflection, something mundane. But there was no light out here. Nothing to reflect on. The blue was coming from the eyes themselves, steady and luminous and completely, utterly wrong in the way that made my whole body understand it before my brain had finished processing.
It was looking at me.
Not at the elders. Not at the property.
At me.