I stand. My knees crack. My back screams. Everything hurts and the cottage smells like blood and moonbright and candle smoke, and outside the deer is rotting and Nugget is probably plotting my death.
"I'm going to get fresh water. And check the chickens. And try to figure out what Nugget knocked over last night. Don't move."
"Where would I go?"
"Knowing you? Anywhere except where you're supposed to be."
"That's fair."
"I know it is."
I head for the door. The morning light is thin and gray, just cresting the trees. The air smells cool, clean, nothing like the cottage. Tracks near the deer carcass—something big got to it overnight. Good. Less to deal with.
Nugget is in the garden, still pink, pecking at my herbs. She's knocked over the water bucket, the feed container, and somehow dislodged three fence stakes. Impressive, honestly, for a chicken her size.
"You—are a menace."
Chapter 4
The bond rips through me mid-sentence.
"—need the eastern patrol doubled until we know what Sarveil's warden is—"
I stop.
Low in my chest, behind the ribs, left side. That's where I carry her. Every pack member sits somewhere different in the bond—Axan steady at the base of my skull, the patrol wolves a dull hum across my shoulders, the pups barely there, flickering at the edges. But Kestria has always been here. Left side, between the ribs, deep. Blood bond. Family.
Right now it's screaming.
Her terror floods through, not words—the bond doesn't carry words—just fear-pain-danger slamming into me until my breath catches. Already running.
"Keer?"
Axan's voice cuts off behind me. The clearing falls away.
The cottage. She's at the fucking cottage again.
I warned her. Stay away from there. The human is a liability, a risk, a complication we don't need. She went anyway. She always does.
Another spike hits. Worse. Pain now—real pain, notfear. The bond cuts. Hot where it should be warm. Sharp where it should be steady.
Her blood.
Someone is making my sister bleed.
Shirt over my head, boots kicked off, trousers shoved down and abandoned in the dirt. Can't afford torn clothes, can't afford delay, can't afford anything except speed. The change takes me between one stride and the next—bones cracking, reforming—and then I'm down on four legs and running.
Trees blurring past. Undergrowth parting. I know this path—run it more times than I want to admit, hanging back at the tree line, watching her laugh.
The bond pulses. Weaker now.
Far past our territory. The connection thins this far out, the pack behind me gone faint and background, a low hum I carry everywhere. Kestria is what matters. The blood bond doesn't care about distance the way the others do—it fades, weakens, but it holds.
Except the fading is wrong.
Not distance-fading. Injury-fading. Her signal going thin at the edges. Fraying. And—
Don't.
