Page 17

Terrifyingly, Nora Winward did come close to beating me in one of the matches we played. She didn’t notice—thank the gods—but when I saw it there on the table, it made my heart jump with something surprising. Something I wasn’t expecting to feel. Something like pride.

Like I had anything to do with her aptitude, her intelligence.

Sure, I taught her the rules of the game, but within ten minutes, she fully understood them and started crafting her own strategies, coming up with different ways to play against me.

She was already starting to analyze my weaknesses, look for ways to exploit them. A strategic thinker.

Seraphina surprises us by bringing us hot chocolate, and for a second, I let myself sit in what it would be like if this was my life.

Playing games with Nora. Enjoying a warm drink with them as a summer thunderstorm rolled in over the trees to the east. What it would be like to keep these two in my life.

Maybe that would be my strategy now. Endless delay. Just keep talking about going back to Illinois, then never do it. Keep talking about Nora and Seraphina leaving Silverville together, and never let that happen.

When it’s time to go to bed, I wish I could stay up with Nora, keep playing together. But the guys and I are training first thing in the morning, and Nora is yawning.

As I get ready for bed, stripping down into my underwear and brushing my teeth, I find my thoughts going back to her. To Nora. To those blue eyes that are so much like mine. Her bright mind.

I need to ask her how old she is. It can’t be long before she’ll have her first shift, and her sleeping patterns will move toward an alpha’s.

She’ll no longer go to bed and wake up with her mother.

And it would be nice for her to have another alpha around so she wouldn’t have to spend the free hours of the night alone, sitting in a quiet, dark room and waiting for the morning to come.

Luckily, it was never like that for me, growing up with two older alpha brothers.

By the time my first shift came and I realized I wasn’t sleepy at ten anymore, Tanner and Dallas were already bursting into my room, grabbing me by the limbs as I laughed and writhed, dragging me out with them to go hunting.

In the morning, Farris and Kalen would stare wide-mouthed at whatever we managed to catch the night before. Our mother would sigh, roll up her sleeves, and pull out the dehydrators to start making elk jerky.

That was back when there was still light in the Sorel house. Before she passed.

Now, I slide into bed, letting my head hit the pillow, forcing my body to relax, to let go of the tension in each part of me. Like every night, two things swirl through my head.

First, the knowledge that Seraphina is just down the hall from me, in her own bed.

The pull in my body toward her only gets stronger with each passing day.

I’m thankful for Nora’s presence, because if she wasn’t in that room with her mother, I probably already would have given in and gone to her in the middle of the night.

And second, I think about the strange circumstances around the fires. Etchings in the trees, the little clearings left behind. Something is ringing in the back of my mind, some familiarity that I should hold on to but can’t quite seem to grab.

I’m caught between thinking about the fires and falling into a dream about fighting one when the first ear-splitting wail rings out through the house.

The alarms.

The wildfire alarms that Declan had dismantled. The ones that the squad and I went around and fixed the second day we were here. If they’re going off here and now, that means the fire is close to the house and only getting closer.

I fly out of bed and down the hallway, sprinting toward the room Nora and Seraphina share. The door flies open before I reach them, and Seraphina stands there, her mouth slightly open, the panic and fear flashing over her face in waves.

“Come with me!” I yell, though they can’t hear me over the loud, insistent whining of the sirens. It’s enough to wake even a tired alpha from the deepest of sleeps.

We fly through the house together, the sound of our feet heavy on the stairs, but just before I pull them through the door, Seraphina puts out a hand to stop me.

“Xeran,” she says, her chest heaving as her eyes dart to the windows, where we can see the orange and blue glow of the daemon fire getting closer. “I can protect the house.”

“What?” I ask, shaking my head and grabbing her arm. There is no protecting the house . There’s only getting away from here as fast as we possibly can. Come on—”

She raises her hands in front of her, and I feel the kinetic spark of the magic rising from her skin. “I can keep the house from burning,” she says, her feet planted like she might fight me to stay here.

I want to tell her that it’s stupid, that it doesn’t matter, but there’s something in her expression that tells me she wants to stay. That the house surviving this fire matters to her, too.

“I’ll stay with my mom,” Nora says like that was ever a question, and I don’t have any more time to think. I have to get my gear, get out there, and stop this thing before it can get any closer to the other houses up here in the mountains.

“Okay,” I finally manage, realizing this means I’m putting my trust in magic—in Seraphina’s magic—to keep her safe. To keep her and Nora alive against the deadliest threat in Silverville. “Okay.”

With that, I turn and race through the door, moving toward the shed, dialing the guys as I go. I already have texts from several of them, but there’s no time to read them as I yank on my pants and coat and grab my helmet from the wall.

“X, you good?” Soren picks up, the first to speak, his voice grainy and breathless like he’s getting dressed.

“Yes, fine. Fire is east of here, headed down the mountains quick—”

“Xeran,” Kalen says, and even though I know he’s an adult now, his voice will always sound to me like my little brother. It makes a protective nature rise up inside me. “I had a bad feeling about this. I was already on my way to the house. I have a theory about what those clearings mean—”

There’s a staticky interjection, and his voice cuts out for a second.

“Kalen?” Lachlan asks, then to us, “What was he saying about the clearings?”

Kalen’s voice comes again, choppy and strange, likely cutting out because of the daemonic energy around us.

“—near the house—”

The blood rushes from my body as I stop, picking up the phone like I’m grabbing my brother by the shoulders. “Kalen, are you near the house? Is that what you’re saying? Where are you?”

But there’s nothing on the other end of the line from him.

Something is wrong.

“Meet me up here,” I say to the others, then I end the call and sprint out into the grass, heart pounding as I try to think about what to do.

I’m only half-dressed in my firefighting gear, and the wolf is demanding that I shift, that I go find my brother, even if that means I can’t bring the extinguisher with me. Even if it means I’m a little less impervious to the flames licking up the trees around me.

The wolf hasn’t steered me wrong in the past.

Dropping the pants and coat, I start running, allowing the shift to take over my body, rolling through me like running through a waterfall. A moment later, I’m on all fours, and I catch my brother’s scent easily. It really is astounding, the differences between our senses from one form to another.

Five minutes later, I’m rounding the bend, where I find Kalen’s car driven off the road, the door hanging open and abandoned.

I follow his scent into the woods, where I find him geared up, spraying at a writhing, spitting strain of daemon fire that clings to a patch of trees and twists up into the sky like some sort of reverse tornado.

I can’t call to him, can’t get his attention. Something screams in the back of my mind that this isn’t a good idea—that something bad is going to happen. That none of us should fight these fires until the entire squad is together and we can protect one another.

And sure enough, the moment I get close enough to him that he can sense me nearing, that tendril of fire reaches down from the sky, turning with the might of a living thing and swinging directly for my brother.

I don’t think. I don’t pause to consider the best course of action.

Instead, I just launch myself at him, my wolf colliding with him just in time to throw him to the side and take the daemonic blow myself.