Page 23 of Claimed By The Tracker

His absence felt like something opening—a gap in the air where his presence had been, a space my magic noticed at once and didn't like.

The Ashwood power in my blood had developed opinions about distance over the past eighteen hours.

Strong ones.

It treated Jace's absence the way a compass treats magnetic interference, with a persistent, low-grade objection I could manage but not silence.

I moved through the farmhouse with purpose rather than panic.

There was a difference, and I was learning it in real time.

Gold light flickered at my palms without asking, rising like a second pulse beneath my skin. I didn't push it down. Tara had said something the night before about direction mattering more than suppression, and right now I needed to understand what my power wanted to do when I stopped fighting it.

Twelve years of clamping down had taught me what my magic looked like under pressure.

I had no idea what it looked like at rest.

The kitchen island became my anchor.

I put my back to the interior wall—the way I'd watched Jace and Maddox move through this space, always aware of what was behind them, always tracking the exits without making it visible.

Three ways out from where I stood: the window above the sink, the hallway door, the rear passage through the pantry that Maddox used when he didn't want to cross the main room.

I'd picked up his patterns without meaning to.

Old habit, finding new purpose.

Tara was already at the table, folding the ward maps into a precise stack with the methodical calm of a woman who treated crisis as a logistical problem rather than an emotional one.

She wasn't performing reassurance.

She was being consistent, which I was learning was worth considerably more.

"They move well together," I said. The observation came out quieter than I intended. "Jace and Maddox."

"Six years." Tara didn't look up from the maps. "Maddox ran logistics on Jace's retrievals before he moved to safehouse operations. They've built a wordless vocabulary."

A pause, deliberate.

"Jace trusts very few people. Maddox is on the short list."

Through the farmhouse walls I could hear them—not voices, just the weight of footfalls carrying something I didn't yet know how to read.

Maddox circling north, former pack, and it showed in the way he moved along the property's edges with the unhurried authority of a wolf who'd walked worse ground than this and come back calm.

Jace taking the south approach.

The two of them drawing a line around the building with the easy coordination of a long partnership, and beneath the sound of their movement, the farmhouse wards answering them.

A faint brightening along the baseboards.

A deepening of the hum I felt in my back teeth.

The house knew them.

And then my magic did something I hadn't expected.

It reached outward along the ward lines the way water reaches along channels—not toward Jace, not the compass-needle pull I was used to, but something broader.