The Alpha’s Discarded Oracle

WHAT THE ANCHOR SEES

She heard it at 3:47am.

Not a sound exactly. More like a frequency. Something that bypassed her ears entirely and went straight to the base of her skull, pulling her out of the thin restless almost-sleep she had managed on top of the covers still fully dressed.

She was on her feet before she was fully awake.

The anchor was glowing through the floorboards.

Not the dull pulse Ezra had described. A full steady pour of silver light coming up through the old wood like something buried beneath the house had finally broken the surface. She could feel it in her teeth. In the bond scar. In the space behind her eyes where the visions lived.

She was down the stairs before she made the decision to move.

Ezra was already crouched over it, the rod floating two inches above his open palm, rotating slowly in the warm air of the dying fire. He looked up the moment her foot hit the bottom step.

Don’t touch it, he said.

I know.

She sat across from him anyway, close enough to feel the heat coming off the anchor like a second fire. Wrong kind of warm. The kind that came from inside a thing rather than outside it.

What triggered it, she said.

Something moved into range. Something big. He paused. Multiple somethings.

Darian.

Maybe. His jaw was tight. Or the other kind of hunter. I can’t tell yet.

She looked at the anchor. Let her eyes go soft the way they did right before sleep, that loose unfocused moment when the brain stopped gripping.

The anchor lurched toward her.

Ezra’s hand shot out and caught it before it crossed the space between them. He sucked in a sharp breath.

That’s never happened before, he said. His voice stripped of its usual control.

What did you feel, she said.

He set the anchor down and sat back. Looked at her with something raw moving underneath his careful expression.

It recognized you, he said. Eleven years of nothing and now it’s treating you like it never stopped.

The fire had burned down to coals. The room was darker now, warmer, the kind of dark that made the space between two people feel smaller than it was.

What was her name, she said. The last Oracle.

Mara. She was sixty-three and hiding for twenty years when I found her. She said the bloodline doesn’t end. It goes quiet. Goes underground. Surfaces in the last place anyone thinks to look.

In a contract Luna, Seraphine said.

In someone made to feel like nothing, he said quietly. So no one would think to check.

The words hit her somewhere unguarded. Not comfort. Heavier than comfort. The specific weight of a thing that explained years of confusion in a single sentence.

Then the anchor screamed.

A white hot spike that dropped her sideways. Ezra caught her before she hit the floor and the contact of his hand between her shoulder blades sent the power crashing up her spine like a wave hitting a wall.

The vision came.

Darian. Standing at a border crossing, six wolves fanned out behind him, face set in the expression that meant the world would comply or answer for it. He was holding something she couldn’t see.

Then he looked up.

Directly at her.

His expression cracked open for one unguarded second and she saw something in it she had never seen in three years of marriage.

The vision shattered.

She was back in the safe house, gasping, Ezra’s arm still around her, his face inches from hers.

He’s coming, she managed. Darian. Greymoor crossing maybe. Pines. A stone marker.

Ezra swore quietly and it was the most human she had heard him sound. Forty minutes, he said.

She pulled back. He let her go immediately but the warmth of his arm left a ghost across her shoulders.

Oracles can’t be seen in their own visions, he said carefully. The seer observes. The subject never looks back.

He looked back, she said.

I know. He held the anchor as it pulsed steady in his hand. It means the bond isn’t as dissolved as either of you think. When he gets here he won’t just be tracking a runaway Luna.

He’ll be looking for something that belongs to him, she said.

Something he only just realized he threw away.

The coals died. The room went dark.

Outside something stood at the edge of the ward line and did not cross.

It simply waited.

At 4:15am headlights swept the treeline.

The bond scar on her chest pulsed once.

Warm. Familiar. Alive.