“Efficient as always.”
She gives me that sisterly half-smile that never reaches her eyes. “Don’t die, Silas. It would inconvenience me.”
“I’ll try to spare you the paperwork.”
The Council’s helicopter waits on the roof, rotors cutting through the rain. I step into the wind, coat snapping around my legs, city lights flickering below like stars caught in glass. The pilot salutes, and I climb aboard.
As we rise above the skyline, I glance back at the sprawl of Chicago—the grid, the pulse, the promise of everything I’ve worked for. Power, prestige, control. It’s all down there, humming.
But above it, in the clouds, something stirs. A shimmer, faint but unmistakable: the ley network rippling. I trace a rune on the window, a reflex. It flares, then fades.
The Rift’s already reaching this far.
I lean back in my seat, loosening my tie. Willowbrook. I haven’t set foot there in ten years, not since training.
I don’t get why the Council won’t just enforce their laws there. I know my father, Councilor Edward Thorn, the regional representative for all of New York, agrees with me.
This town is way too much trouble.
Still, if fixing their mess earns me Whitlock’s favor, I’ll do it. I always do what the Council asks. This is the only way I can finally get to the top.
Maybe then, I will prove to them that they should have given me the council job instead of my sister.
The helicopter banks east. The lake disappears behind us, swallowed by darkness.
I check my watch one last time. Then I pull out my phone and text Kayla to reschedule our date night. Again.
When the helicopter drops beneath the cloud line, the town appears in flashes—street lamps sparking, rain slanting sideways, a smear of wet pine and blue lightning crawling across the ridge like an exposed nerve. Willowbrook doesn’t just look wrong. It feels wrong.
The instant the skids touch the cracked tarmac behind the old mill, something punches through my ribs. A pull. A drag. The ley lines under this place don’t hum—they scream. The headache hits behind my eyes, enough to blur the runway lights.
I grit my teeth, steady my breath. Discipline first. Everything else later.
My driver—Council-trained, forgettable and interchangeable—opens the door and waits for me to climb down. The rain slaps hard against my coat, cold needles against my skin.
“Sir,” he says. “Where to?”
“The sheriff’s station. I need to find Wilder.”
The driver nods and jogs around the car. The moment I slide into the backseat, the tug from the ley lines sharpens, like something reaching up through the soil, clawing at my spine. A Rune Alpha can feel the lines anywhere, but here? It’s as if Willowbrook is trying to burrow under my skin. The magic tastes metallic. Overcharged. Wrong.
A fresh bolt of pain cleaves through my skull, catching me off guard.
Perfect. This is another reason why I didn’t want this assignment.
The car pulls out of the lot, tires spitting water. We turn onto Main Street, and everything tilts further into chaos.
A downed power line sparks on the asphalt. Half the buildings along the strip are dark except for the glow of emergency generators. The rain’s coming down so hard it blurs the edges of the world. A man in soaked pajamas stands in the middle of the street, arms lifted to the sky as he shouts about prophecy and “the final veil.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Fantastic.”
My driver flinches when the man hurls a handful of gravel at the windshield.
“Sir—”
“Keep driving.”
We swerve around him, and I watch the madness fade behind us in the mirror. I sip my water, letting the cold take the edge off the headache. If this is what the Rift surge feels like to me—with decades of control and training—then a young Alpha or Omega caught in the crossfire must be a disaster. No discipline. No shielding. Just raw instinct slamming through an unprepared system.
