There was weight in that one word—and with it, relief flooding me.I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the faint beat of his heart and the cicadas humming overhead.
Then they stopped.
Not slowly.Not naturally.
Like someone had reached down and pinched the sound out of the air.
The breeze shifted around us—humid Gulf air to something thinner, sharper.Wrong.
Owen stiffened, still holding me tight, as his body went rigid.I tried to remain perfectly still as a shudder skipped down my spine.
“You feel that?”he asked, his voice a rumble beneath my ear.
“What… is it?”My voice was a whisper against him.
I shifted in his arms to turn and look back toward the road.He never let me go, keeping me close, as we both peered toward the street.
The shimmer was back.
A faint, gold-threaded distortion crawled along the blacktop like a seam being pulled open—quiet, deliberate—sliding toward the driveway.
My skin prickled.The magic in my chest answered it, humming in recognition, like it had been waiting for this exact frequency.
And then I knew—knew with the same sick certainty I’d felt in the woods.
The crossing was calling.
Not the tree itself.
The thing behind it.
Listening.
Reaching.
“Piper,” Owen said, sharper now, and I felt the shift in him—the druid in his blood waking to the threat.“We need to go.Now.”
My pulse hammered.“The tree,” I whispered.“It’s getting worse.”
He nodded once.“Yeah.”
I pulled back enough to look up at him, panic rising fast.“Voss said it’s loud.If it’s loud enough to follow me home—”
“Then we don’t give it time to get comfortable,” Owen cut in.Determination hardened his mouth.“We go shut it down.”
“How?”I asked.
“I have an idea.Something we can use.”
He didn’t wait for me to ask more questions.
“I’ll drive.Get in the truck.”
His keys were already in his hand as he rounded the front while I slid into the passenger seat, my body a bundle of nerves.
I didn’t know what waited for me in the woods.
But I knew one thing with terrifying clarity.
