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I come around the corner just in time to see Seraphina blast Tanner back into a tree.

Her magic sparks and snarls, singing through the air with the might of a lightning bolt as it stretches out from her fingertips and zips through the night, hitting him in the center of his chest and hurtling his body.

Nora is untouched, but Seraphina crumples to the ground.

Her daughter steps in front of her, looking impossibly small with her hands out. From the back, I can’t see her face, only hear her voice when she says, “Stay back !”

Farris laughs, “Oh, are you going to stop us?”

When Dallas lunges toward her, it sends my wolf into a frenzy. Hurtling toward them, I kick up pine needles and dust, snarling and sliding over the ground in front of Seraphina and Nora just in time to keep Dallas from reaching toward her.

He jumps back, startled. Maybe he was too invested in the exchange, too single-minded to keep his nose up for scents.

If he had, he would have noticed me heading this way.

Would have caught the signs of me shifting and running through the woods for the past five minutes, just after I woke up and realized the girls were gone.

I should have thought to do more than stick one of those little trackers on Seraphina’s car. If I’m being honest, I didn’t think she would do anything but climb in and start to drive. I thought that the notification coming through my phone would wake me up quick enough.

If I was in my human form like the rest of them, I might respond to Farris’s question with, “No, I am.”

But I can’t speak—can only snarl at them. Through the eyes of my wolf, I have to lower my head to see their faces, which are brimming with barely contained fear, a thin veneer of anger slapped over it.

I could rip them to pieces right now, just for deigning to threaten my… what?

What right do I have over the woman and girl behind me right now, except for Declan “giving” Seraphina to me?

Tension grows taut between us, the air sharp with the sense that a single wrong move could send blood spattering over the dirt. Deep down, I know the truth of why I haven’t already sunk my teeth into their necks.

Because when I look at Dallas, I see him as he was ten years ago, fifteen years ago. I see him as the cool teenager I looked up to, the guy driving the black Mustang that I thought was so awesome. The guy who’d bring back little treats after a weekend of hunting with Dad.

I see Farris as the snotty kid we’d all make fun of, but still the kid I protected on the playground like my own life was in the balance.

And maybe they still feel some resemblance of brotherhood, too, because when Tanner gasps and groans, writhing on the ground by the tree he slammed into, both Dallas and Farris turn to him, their gazes showing the worry behind their eyes.

“Fuck,” Dallas snaps, glancing at me, then to Farris, then back to the brother with steam rising from the scorch mark in the center of his chest.

I have a feeling that if Seraphina had put just a fraction more juice into her blow, Tanner wouldn’t be moaning in pain right now.

Quickly, Dallas steps back and shifts, his tail down and his head lowered, though I can sense how his wolf wants to challenge me.

He moves to the side, and Farris hefts Tanner up, sliding him over Dallas’s broad shoulders.

With one backward glance at me, Farris must only barely keep himself from saying something like This isn’t over before he, too, shifts, and they disappear into the woods in the direction of town.

Likely to report back to Declan.

There are a lot of questions to answer about this—how did they know Seraphina was going to leave? Were they waiting for her? What was their plan once they had her, and Nora?

But there’s no time to answer them.

Eyes on Seraphina’s body on the ground, I shift back just as Nora kneels down, putting her fingers to her mother’s neck in a move that would make me laugh if I wasn’t so concerned. She doesn’t act like any other kid I’ve met.

As a firefighter, I came across all sorts of kids.

Boys and girls her age, sticking things in electrical sockets, falling off the top bunk, starting dumpster fires behind their apartments.

Children who seemed to have the single goal of stressing out their parents—and emergency services—as much as possible.

And here she is, doing something as grown-up as checking for her own mother’s pulse.

“She’s alive,” Nora says, and when she looks at me, our eyes meeting perhaps for the first time, I see myself reflected in them.

It hits me with such a shock, such a shove to the chest, that I am genuinely breathless for a moment. My lungs feel flat, useless.

Those blue eyes are my blue eyes. My father’s blue eyes. The blue eyes that I looked into just a moment ago, when my brothers tucked tails and ran away from me.

As a reflex, I suck in a breath of air and try to catch her scent. And when I do, it smells unfamiliar. Nothing like me. Nothing like anyone in my family, and only very faintly of Seraphina.

Why does that feel so crushing? I’d known from the moment I smelled the girl that she couldn’t belong to me. A scent like mine would be strong in my offspring. That’s how our family has always been.

“It’s because she used too much of her magic,” Nora says cautiously, breaking me out of my thoughts.

From the tone of her voice, she’s not sure what my reaction might be to that.

Surely she knows that magic isn’t allowed here.

That I would never condone her mother using it, especially to the extent she clearly has been.

“We need to cool her off, get her something to eat. A lot to eat.”

“This has happened before?”

Nora stares at me, and it feels as though I can practically see her considering what to say. Whether or not she should admit to her mother’s extreme use of magic in a place where it’s prohibited.

Finally, instead of answering the question, she says, looking down at her mother, “If you won’t help me, I can carry her myself.”

I’m not quite sure that’s true, not with how small Nora is. But based on the sheer determination on her face, she might kill herself trying. I nod, pushing aside my curiosity and the still lingering shock from the color of her eyes, staring right back at me.

“I’ll help you,” I offer.

She nods, and I shift back to my wolf, bowing down so Nora can heft her mother up onto my back, much in the same way Farris did with Tanner.

Seraphina is strong, and Nora moves with a surprising strength—even for an alpha child.

And a moment later, we are making our way back down the side of the mountain toward my family home.

Questions itch in the back of my throat, trapped by this form I’m in. I want to ask Nora everything—what it’s been like for her growing up. If her mother has used magic like this around her before.

If she knows who her father is.

But I ask nothing. Instead, I walk with her at my side, her hand on her mother but also slightly on me, as the birds start to sing and the night insects buzz around us.

***

Seraphina wakes up intermittently through the next ten hours, only to eat soup from the spoon Nora offers and fall right back into her coma-like sleep.

At first, Nora seems suspicious of the fact that I want to sit with her and her mother. Then, as the hours pass, she seems to relax around me.

Finally, when the sun is high in the sky and my body is starting to grow heavy from lack of sleep the night before, Nora clears her throat, opens her mouth, and begins to talk to me.

“Why did those wolves run away from you?” she asks, turning to look at me. “You weren’t bigger than the large one. At least, not when he shifted.”

I bite my tongue, glance at Seraphina, then shift in my chair. “Size isn’t everything.”

“So you’re a better fighter.”

“Yes.”

“Are they your family?” Nora asks, tilting her head. “They smelled like you.”

Her words are a punch to the gut. It used to be that I was proud to carry the Sorel scent. Now it feels like a heavy mantle around my shoulders. Like a mark of shame.

Again, I glance at Seraphina. She hasn’t told me a thing, hasn’t answered any of my questions. So why should I be candid with her daughter?

Though I tell myself to say nothing, I confirm, “Yes. My brothers.”

For the next hour, Nora continues to talk to me, asking questions that I tell myself I won’t answer, only to find myself giving in.

She asks about when my wolf grew, and if I did anything to help it get bigger.

If I trained with my brothers, and what that was like.

How I managed to increase my alpha control to the point where even my brothers—other alphas—seemed to want to listen to me, to follow the natural order of things.

“It’s always been like that,” I answer. It’s the truth—I have always had slightly more weight to my voice than the others. It’s why many in town always thought I would take over as the alpha supreme. It’s why Declan is so threatened that I’m back in Silverville.

Nora is in the middle of asking another question when Seraphina wakes up again, using one shaking hand to try to push herself to a sitting position.

“Nora,” she whispers, her voice hoarse like she’s been screaming for hours, “don’t—”

She coughs, cutting herself off, but her hand flutters in my direction, and her meaning comes across.

Nora hands her a glass of water, whispering, “Sorry, Mom.”

Seraphina is alive. Nora seems capable of taking care of her, and Seraphina clearly doesn’t want me around.

I stand and leave, coming down the steps into the living room just in time to hear a knock at the door. My brain catches up to the moment—to the time—and I realize the guys are all going to be showing up.

When I open the door, Lachlan Cambias struts into the room, wearing a fine leather jacket and smelling of expensive, foreign cologne. He’s the kind of man who wouldn’t look out of place on the cover of a magazine, far more polished and perfect than I could ever be.

The last time I saw him, he was clean-shaven, but now he sports a beard along his jaw that makes him look older. His outline is thicker than it was before.

How long will it be before I stop being astounded at the ways Silverville has continued marching through time without me? My high school friends, somehow aging up from teenagers and into men, just like I did?

“Alright,” Lachlan says, turning and flashing his perfectly white teeth at me. “Are you going to get this party started or what?”