My lion stays fixed on them, fascinated and uneasy all at once. I understand it more than I want to. I felt the same ugly thing earlier, the want to hurt the one I love most for the crime of almost leaving me. But my lion would never go through with it.
“Children.” Kade snaps it from beside me, and neither of them so much as glances over. “I mean it.” She pinches the bridge of her nose. “Crack one more stall and I’m telling Amari you’re both banned from the mainland.”
That, Layla hears. Her head turns slow, her eyes burning, and she holds Kade’s stare for a long moment. Then she presses one last kiss to the tip of the stake, climbs off Josiah, and tosses the wood over her shoulder.
“We’re finished.” She smooths her gown down like she didn’t just take a man through a cart. “For now.”
Josiah springs up behind her, brushing splinters off his coat, beaming at the back of her head.
Beside me Aaron doubles forward with his hands braced on his knees. My attention snaps to him. I reach for his back, careful, but my fingers barely land before he flinches under them.
I look up at Kade.
She crosses to us, her humor gone. “Should we take you to Wintermoon Medical?”
Aaron shakes his head. “No.” He drags in a breath. “Where’s my mother?”
“At House of Zorah.” Kade’s eyes stay on him. “Jacob thought she needed a cool-off period.”
Aaron’s head turns toward the old cottage at the edge of the Market, still bound in the chains he wove around it, white and blue-gold light humming low through the wood. “How’s the Witching Glen holding?”
“I check it hourly.” Kade follows his look. “Still holding. But I can feel them in there, pooling what they’ve got, trying to break it from the inside.”
Aaron straightens by inches, his hand lifting, and he tears a portal open in the air beside us. Through it I can see the cabins of House of Zorah ringed around their quiet cul-de-sac. “I need to talk to my mom.”
“Did something happen back in Detroit?” Kade asks.
Aaron meets her eyes. “Yes. Eric’s working with Henry, and he has dark magic now. We’ve got to stop him.” His voice drops. “But I don’t think I can do it alone.”
I step through the portal first, my tail lashing the air behind me. Aaron comes through after, and Kade leaps through on her heels just before the light folds shut.
Aaron looks back at her, worn down to nothing. “What are you doing?”
“If this reaches the Witching Glen, I’m helping.” Kade lifts her chin. “You don’t know those witches and warlocks the way I do.”
He groans. He looks to his cabin across the cul-de-sac, then to the porch opposite it, where Kane, Levi, Gabriel, and Micah stand in a row, watching us arrive. Levi comes off the porch in one long leap, and Aaron drags a hand down his face.
My lion surges up in me. My ears go flat. My tail snaps high and alert, and a hiss tears out of me at the wolf coming for my mate. Their scents reach me on the air, disappointment laid sharp and sour over a thick base of worry. I can’t tell if they mean to help him or hurt him.
Aaron’s hand closes around my arm. “Stop, Mara.”
I frown at him.
“If they’re upset with me, let them be.” His voice is quiet. “I did make a mistake.”
I snatch my arm out of his grip. “No...”
He grins at me.
“Go inside, both of you.” Kade’s already moving. “I’ll deal with the pack.” She crosses the cul-de-sac toward Levi. Gabriel and Micah drop off the porch to meet her.
Aaron watches them go. “I don’t know why this feels like the last time I’ll see them.”
I press into his side, hissing, hating those words in his mouth. “Don’t say that, Aaron.”
He pulls me up the steps of the cabin and pushes the door open, drawing me in behind him.
His mother’s behind the counter with a knife in her hand, fussing over a board of cut fruit with Seth at her elbow. She looks up the second we cross the threshold. The knife clatters out ofher hand. She’s around the counter and across the room, her arms thrown around her son.
