HOWL OF THE GODWOLF

Everyone In The Building

Chapter 2 — Wren Hall

Wren Hall didn’t look like a place that quietly ran half the shifter economy in the Northeast. It looked like every other overpriced liberal arts campus in New England — ivy, brick, a fountain nobody had thrown a coin into with sincerity in fifty years. That was the point. The real hierarchy lived underneath the postcard, the way it always did in my family’s world.

Rhys found me before I found my dorm.

“You’re late,” he said, hauling one of my bags out of Rowan’s trunk before I could stop him. “The mixer started twenty minutes ago. Your dad called my dad. Your dad called everyone’s dad.”

Rhys Okafor and I had known each other since a summer camp for pack heirs that neither of us had wanted to attend, back when we were twelve and mutually miserable about it. His family ran logistics and shipping for half the pack-owned ports on the East Coast — not Kade-tier money, but close enough that our fathers had spent a decade circling each other at the same events, deciding whether an alliance was worth the paperwork.

“Networking,” I said. “Positioning. Scent.”

“God, he actually said that to you.” Rhys grinned, and for a second it was just us, the way it used to be before either of us understood what our last names were going to cost. “Come on. Free food, minor royalty, the usual horror show.”

The mixer was in the top-floor lounge of the pack-affiliated dorm — Colby Hall, four stories of old money doing its best impression of a normal residence building. I’d been in a hundred rooms exactly like it. Crystal glasses of something the college definitely didn’t sanction. A string quartet nobody was listening to. Twenty-year-olds performing adulthood at each other like it was a job interview, because for most of them, it was.

I did the rounds. I shook the hands my father would have wanted shaken. I said the sentences that meant nothing and cost nothing and moved everyone one inch closer to remembering my name favorably. It was easy in the specific, exhausting way that things you’ve done ten thousand times are easy.

Then I turned around, and the room had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with me finishing a sentence.

Dahlia Voss was standing by the window, and she was watching me with an expression I couldn’t immediately place, because I’d never seen it on a Voss before. Not disdain. Not the careful neutral mask her family wore like a second skin at every function I’d ever shared with them. Something closer to confusion.

“You feel that?” she asked, when I got close enough that it would have been rude not to.

“Feel what?”

“Nothing.” She recovered fast — Voss family trait, apparently, along with the jawline and the talent for making silence feel like a threat. “You’re Julian Kade.”

“Last I checked.”

“My father says your father sent you here to be looked at.” She said it like an accusation, though her eyes were doing something that didn’t match her tone — flicking over me the way you’d study a door you weren’t sure was locked. “Consider yourself looked at.”

She left before I could decide whether that was an insult or the opening move in something longer. Rhys reappeared at my elbow, watching her go.

“That’s new,” he said.

“What is?”

“Dahlia Voss actually starting a conversation instead of ending one.” He handed me a drink I hadn’t asked for. “You two are going to be a whole thing this year. I can already tell.”

I laughed it off. I didn’t know yet that he was right, or that “a whole thing” was going to undersell it badly.Rhys got me out of there before campus security showed up asking questions nobody in that bathroom was going to answer honestly. He didn’t say anything in the elevator down, or in the walk back to my dorm, or for the first ten minutes after he’d sat me down on my own bed and put a towel around my bleeding hand like it was the only useful thing he could think to do with them.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay. We’re going to talk about this like adults, and you’re not going to tell me it was nothing, because I was in that hallway before I got you out, and I felt something too. Everyone did. It went through the whole building.”

“I don’t know what that was.”

“I do.” He said it quietly, like the words cost him something to hand over. “My grandmother used to tell me stories. Every pack family has some version of it — the old ones, before the corporations, before the estates. A name that isn’t a rank. Something the bloodline is supposed to answer to, if it ever wakes up.” He looked at my hands, my eyes, the crack still visible in the porcelain two floors up in his memory. “Liveth. That’s the word she used. I thought it was a bedtime story.”

“Bedtime stories don’t put six people on their knees in a bathroom, Rhys.”

“No,” he agreed. “They don’t.”

We sat with that for a long time, the two of us, in a dorm room that suddenly felt too small for what had just happened inside it. Somewhere outside my window, I could hear something I hadn’t noticed before, now that I knew to listen for it — voices, low and murmuring, gathering on the quad below in numbers that had no reasonable explanation for a Tuesday night. I didn’t go to the window. I didn’t want to know yet how many there were.

My phone buzzed on the desk. My father’s name on the screen, the fourth call in twenty minutes I’d been ignoring.

“You have to answer that eventually,” Rhys said.

“I know.”

“He’s going to know something happened. People like your dad always know.”

He was right, in the way he usually was, in the specific and infuriating way of best friends who’ve watched you make the same mistake enough times to see it coming before you do. I picked up the phone on the fifth call, and my father’s voice came through before I’d even said hello, low and clipped and using the tone he reserved for board meetings that had gone catastrophically off script.

“Julian.” A pause, and in it I heard something I had never once heard from Marcus Kade in twenty years of being his son. “Tell me what happened in that library. And tell me the truth, because I am already hearing three different versions of it, and none of them are things I know how to fix.”

I looked at Rhys. Rhys looked at the window, at the murmur of voices gathering below it that neither of us had an explanation for yet.

“I don’t think this is something you can fix, Dad,” I said. “I think it’s something that already happened.”