The Beta's Fire

Chapter 2

Nobody spoke on the walk back to the pack house. Tobin carried my father because I couldn't do it myself, not with my arms shaking the way they were, and Rhys kept one hand on my shoulder the entire way like he was afraid I'd bolt if he let go.

Lyra worked on my father for two hours before she came out of the infirmary room, peeling off gloves stained black at the fingertips.

"He's stable," she said. "For now. But Wren, I've never seen anything like this. It's not a wound. It's like something's been draining him slowly, for weeks, maybe longer, and today it finally pulled hard enough to drop him."

"Draining him how?"

"I don't know yet. I'm going to need help figuring it out. Real help, not guessing."

I sat outside his door until the sun went down, and that was where Rhys found me, two mugs of something hot in his hands, sitting down on the floor beside me without being asked.

"You should eat something," he said.

"I should be in there."

"You should sleep, and let your father rest, and let Lyra do her job." He handed me the mug. His fingers brushed mine, warm, steady, the opposite of everything happening inside my chest. "Wren. Look at me."

I did. It cost me more than I wanted him to know.

"I've watched you carry this pack's expectations on your shoulders since you were fourteen years old," he said. "You don't have to carry this too, not alone."

"He's my father."

"He's also the strongest wolf I know, and he's not dead. He's resting. Let yourself rest too."

I wanted to believe him. I wanted, more than that, to lean into his shoulder and let someone else hold the weight for one single night. Instead I straightened my spine, the way I always did, and said, "I need to know what did this to him."

Rhys studied me for a long moment, like he was deciding whether to argue. He didn't. That was one of the things I loved about him, even when it made me furious, he never fought me on the things that actually mattered.

"Then we find out together," he said. "All four of us."

We found Tobin and Cassian in the war room a floor above, hunched over a map of the coastal packs with red pins already marking three locations. Ashfall. Cassian's birth pack, marked in the far north. And a third pin, smaller, older, at a pack called Greymont that none of us had heard from in over a year.

"I did some digging while Lyra worked," Tobin said, without his usual grin. "Ashfall isn't the first. Greymont went dark fourteen months ago. Everyone assumed they'd just gone quiet, packs do that sometimes, especially the small ones. Nobody checked."

"And Cassian's pack," I said.

Cassian didn't look up from the map. "Eight years ago. I was seventeen. I came home from a hunting run and there was nothing left standing. No bodies, either, which everyone told me meant they'd scattered, run for safety, that I should hold on to hope." His jaw tightened. "I stopped believing that a long time ago. There were no survivors. Something erased them and left no trace of how."

"The stone," I said quietly. "My father said the stone was screaming."

"Warning stones only react to one thing," Rhys said. "Ancient magic. Goddess magic, or something powerful enough to mimic it."

"There's no goddess magic left in Stonemane," I said. "There hasn't been in three generations. Everyone knows that."

Cassian finally lifted his eyes to mine, and something in his expression made the hair on my arms stand up.

"Everyone believed that about Greymont too," he said. "Right up until the night they disappeared."

Tobin cleared his throat, breaking the silence, and reached for a folder at the edge of the table. "There's something else. I found this in your father's study, Wren, when I went to get his research notes for Lyra." He slid it across to me. "I think you should be the one to open it."

My hands were not steady. Inside was a single page in my father's handwriting, dated the week before I was born, describing a ritual performed at the northern stone, a debt he had paid to protect something the letter only ever called her gift, sealed until she is strong enough to bear it.

I looked up at three faces that had gone carefully, deliberately blank in the way people go blank when they already suspect something they're afraid to say out loud.

"Whose gift?" I asked. "Whose gift is he talking about?"

Nobody answered me. Nobody had to. The word hung in the room like smoke, and underneath it, so faint I almost missed it, I felt something stir low in my chest, something that had been asleep my whole life and had just, for the first time, opened one eye.