Page 12 of Alphas Never Hide (Willow Lake Supernaturals #5)

Chapter Twelve

HAYDEN

Lifting my nose, I pulled as much of the peaty forest air into my lungs as I could. I didn’t scent or hear moving water, so Ryley’s old scent trail hadn’t been swept away. What had happened? The answer was here. I just had to find it.

“ What are you doing?”

“ Shut up,” I said. “ I need to concentrate.”

Ryley grunted but otherwise stayed silent. I drew in another breath. The rich scent of damp earth and dying vegetation was the strongest, so I pulled it away from the rest. I stripped away Van’s scent, then Dillon’s , then Adrian’s .

Ryley’s wasn’t there, except it was?

My nose twitched. I sneezed. And again.

“ There is magic here.” I looked at Ryley . “ Your magic and a hint of your blood, too. ”

“ My what?” He lifted his eyebrows. “ Did you say magic?”

Was his surprise real? Or was he mocking me? I couldn’t detect falsehoods in what people said like the hellhounds could, but my wolf’s instincts were pretty good at detecting lies all the same. I watched Ryley , looking for signs of deception. His skin didn’t grow damp with sweat, and his gaze didn’t dart around like he wanted to hide. And most importantly, he didn’t smell like the cloying scent I always associated with deceit.

“ You sound surprised,” I said finally.

“ You’ve been sniffing the ground for a while now. I think you’ve snorted something that’s made you high.” He glanced around the area, as if looking for the plant.

“ I’m not drugged,” I said. “ I just don’t get why you’re surprised. You’re a shifter. Of course you have magic.”

“ I change into a faun. Nothing more. That’s it.”

“ Fauns are an ancient supernatural race. The older the race, the closer those shifters are to the Eternal Magic .”

“ Someone’s been googling,” he said.

“ I may have looked up some stuff on Supenet when you were seeing Doc ,” I admitted. Supenet was a section of the internet dedicated to supernatural beings. I didn’t know how they kept mundane humans out of it, but it seemed to work. Thankfully , it was easy to use, or I wouldn’t know anything about his kind.

“ Listen , I might look like a faun, but I don’t have their magic, okay?” His cheeks darkened. He tugged off his glasses and started cleaning them on the hem of his shirt. “ My dad was a mundane, so my genetic makeup is pretty watered down. ”

“ Why would you think that? Supes mate with humans all the time.”

“ And magic is dying,” Ryley said. “ There are too many mundanes in the gene pool, it’s getting diluted. I’m a prime example of everything that’s wrong with the magical world.”

It sounded like he’d heard that bullshit so many times he believed it. Someone had lied to him about his own magic. I hated how many bigots there were in the world. I wished supes weren’t like that. We were so much stronger together. But even my asshole brother thought there was a hierarchy of supes with wolf shifters at the top. He was wrong for thinking that, but he’d have spread those same lies about bloodlines and gene pools.

I doubted I could change Ryley’s mind in one conversation, but I had to try.

“ That’s a lie. As long as one parent is a supe, the child will be a supe too. Science has proven it.”

Ryley crossed his arms over his chest. “ Sure . But I’m weaker. My senses aren’t as strong. I don’t have magic.”

“ Being able to shift is magic.”

He waved his hand through the air, as if to wipe away what I said. “ You know what I mean.”

I didn’t, but what else could I say? “ What type of magic do full-bred fauns have?”

“ I know what you’re doing.” He frowned. “ You’re trying to find out what magics other fauns can do so you can attribute this, whatever this is, to my imaginary magic.”

“ Humor me.”

He tapped his foot. I was still in my wolf form, so he was taller than me. The perfect height for him to stare down at me. I wasn’t intimidated. How could I be when he looked so…

I didn’t need to think about him being cute or adorable. Nope . Those thoughts needed to shut the fuck up.

I waited.

“ Ugh . Fine ,” he bit out.

His face was flushed, and I suspected he was angry about things that had nothing to do with me. Still , I hated how uncomfortable I’d made him. I had the urge to tell him it didn’t matter. That I didn’t need to know. That I could look it up on Supenet later.

Except it did matter.

If we were going to get any closer to Robbie today, I needed to know. Now . And it would be a hell of a lot faster if Ryley talked to me. It had nothing at all to do with me hating Supenet . Sure , the creators tried to make it foolproof since I wasn’t the only technophobe in the supe world, but it still took me a ridiculous amount of time to unearth answers. I’d only found the most basic listing about fauns, which is why I didn’t know much about their magic. I hadn’t gotten that far.

“ Fauns are musical. That whole flute playing thing? That’s true for the purebreds, while I can’t play a flute to save my life. But fauns are mostly known for their relationship with the natural world. Fauns can feel if the earth is damaged or thriving. My mother described it as a visceral sense of knowing, deep inside where their magic lives, whatever that means. They have a profound connection to nature in other ways too. You don’t want to play hide and seek with other fauns in the forest, believe me. Those bastards can hide like no one else.”

And there it was, the answer, even if Ryley didn’t realize it. I also had an answer to my earlier unspoken question about his interest in technology. He’d turned his back on his magic and found a career in something as far away from nature as he could.

But for now, the important thing was that whole connection-to-nature bit he mentioned. I wanted to explore that a little more, but Ryley was still talking.

“ When I was about six, the elders took me on a hike. It was just after my dad died from a sudden cardiac arrest, so I thought they were being nice, trying to cheer me up. Then they all just disappeared, and it was like the trail vanished right along with them. Later , they said it was a rite of passage that every faun had to go through at that age, but I was lost out there for days. Needless to say, I did not pass their test.” He wrapped his arms around his stomach and slumped forward a little.

My wolf bristled at the thought of adults abandoning a grieving child in the woods. Who would pull shit like that? He could have died out there from exposure or an animal attack or so many other things. Those elders needed to be locked up. Then the SC needed to investigate the rest of them, expose their archaic traditions and narrow-minded beliefs, and drag them into the twenty-first century. Fewer and fewer supes were born each year and there was a group of assholes out there torturing the ones they were blessed with.

“ Can we forget I said that last bit? But , yeah, that’s what fauns do. ”

I wanted to ask more questions. I wanted details. I wanted names. But this wasn’t the time or the place.

“ So ,” I said.

Ryley pointed at me and shouted, “ Ha !” He even managed a small smile. I regretted using that word, but making him smile, even a little after he’d seemed so dejected, did something to me. My stomach felt lighter. My skin felt warmer. I scrambled to finish my thoughts. “ When a faun is in the forest and wants to hide, what happens?”

“ How should I know? They just…” He lifted his hands and made a gesture that looked like something exploding. “ Poof . Disappear . Vanish .”

“ Because the forest responds to their magic.”

“ Yeah . I guess.”

I stared at him. He stared right back at me.

“ No way.” He waved to the forest. “ I didn’t do this.”

“ We can ask Van about your magic when we get back to Willow Lake , but bear with me for a minute.”

Ryley’s brow furrowed. “ What’s he got to do with anything?”

“ Hellhounds can identify other people’s magic. They can tell how strong it is.”

He scoffed.

“ In the meantime, humor me. Walk ahead of me a bit. Go that way.” I pointed with my snout. It was a little further from where we’d stopped, but along the same trajectory as what we had been walking. I thought it would be good to move away from where so many people had been trampling through the underbrush. “ Then shift. I want you to open your senses and see if you can detect anything useful.”

He sighed like this was a huge inconvenience. He stomped a few feet ahead of me, muttering the whole way. He hooked his glasses on his shirt collar. A moment later, he was standing in front of me in his shifted form.

When I’d first seen him as a faun last night, we’d been in the shadows of a starlit forest. With my wolf’s senses, I’d seen him well enough, but the darkness had obscured the subtle tones of his fur. I wasn’t a poet, so I’d normally describe his fur as tan or beige, but there was so much more to it than that. It ranged from the color of sweet honey to the soft hue of sun-drenched sandstone.

Last night, I also hadn’t seen him shift, so I hadn’t noticed the smaller differences between his two forms. I saw everything this time as he transitioned right in front of me in the daylight. His torso was slim in both forms, but it appeared more toned when he was a faun. I wished I could stare at him longer to catalog all the minor differences, but he crossed his arms over his bare chest and gritted his teeth. He was uncomfortable and a touch angry with me. I doubted he’d just stand there and let me look at him.

“ I don’t feel anything. Are you satisfied now?”

Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t feel a damn thing with that attitude. I approached him slowly. The last thing I needed was for him to kick me in the head again. I leaned against his side and sent out a wave of my alpha power to him. It took a moment for him to relax, but eventually, the tension eased from his body. His hand came to rest on my head. His fingers combed through my fur, like he was petting me. I didn’t stop him because the action seemed to relax him.

Really .

That was the only reason.

“ Now close your eyes.”

His fingers tightened on my fur for a moment before they relaxed again.

I’d never tried to help someone connect with their magic like this before, but I remembered my dad doing this for me. Maybe every shifter had to be talked through this when they were first learning about magic and how to shift. Some of it was innate, which was how Ryley knew how to shift, but some connections to the Eternal Magic needed to be nurtured. If Ryley’s parents had decided he wouldn’t have a strong affinity for magic before he’d been given the chance to find out, they could have unwittingly stifled it.

It made me wonder how many other people were cheated out of their magic this way. Maybe magic wasn’t fading from the earth, maybe people were just being trained to ignore it. Although that wasn’t the full answer either, because look at Jake . He hadn’t even known magic existed and yet his powers still pushed to be set free. Still , I couldn’t help but think there was something there, but I didn’t have time to think about it right now.

“ Breathe in deeply. Now , let it out slowly.” I spoke quietly. “ And again. Deep breath in. Then out.”

I didn’t rush. That would defeat the purpose. So we stood in silence and simply breathed for a few minutes.

“ Now , I want you to reach deep inside…” I almost said where your magic lives except that’d trigger him and make him tense up again. So instead, I focused on the magical part of himself he did acknowledge. “ Go to the place that warms when you shift.”

He swallowed hard, but he didn’t protest or pull away.

“ Now slowly brush against it with your mind. See how it responds? Feel how warm it is? How welcoming?”

His fingers spasmed against my fur again.

“ Gently coax that feeling forward until it fills your chest.” I paused to give him time to do as I suggested. “ Let it spread down your legs, into your arms, and up the back of your neck.” I spoke slowly, guiding him through each step. “ Now your fingers and toes are getting tingly as it flows through them. Don’t resist. Just let it happen. Let the feeling drip from your fingers into the forest. Feel it fan out from your toes. As the feeling expands, take another deep breath and let it go. Let it all go.”

His breath hitched. I scented tears in the air. He was gripping my fur hard now.

Something was happening.