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River hadn't moved from the dresser, but his head dropped down and he was staring at the floor.

"Hazel," he murmured to his hands that were folded on his lap. "Play the last voice mail again."

"Which part?"

"The end."

I played it again. That gravelly stretch where Davon told me to be somewhere with a wall around it. Behind his voice, very faint, under the noise of a car honking a block down the road and the normal noise from the street…

A siren. Two of them, layered, going away.

And underneath that, so quiet I had to lean into the phone with my hair falling over the screen, a sound like a great flock of birds taking off all at once.

"That's not birds," River said.

Which was when the gate alarm went off.

The alarm was not a siren. Alex had it wired to sound like the bell on an old school building, three flat clangs and a pause, followed by three more, because a siren sends wolves into a frenzy and a bell sends them to the fence. The whole house heard it. I felt like it come up through the floorboards and into my bare feet as I jumped up. Sissily was off the window seat long before it and River was already at the door yanking it open for us. I was moving before I'd made any conscious decision about it.

I have never once in my life been the last person out of a building in an emergency.

Sissily beat me to the stairs because she was already standing, and River beat both of us because he doesn't so much walk as he glides across space. I was three steps behind him through the second-floor landing so I took the last flight of stairs barefoot like an Olympic athlete gunning for gold. My heart was in my throat and I was struggling to breathe evenly. The house was coming awake around us as well. Doors opening on the floor above. Somebody swearing in the dark. Stella's voice, high and sharp, asking her mother what was happening, and Amber's answer, flat and calm and absolutely not an answer. “Stay upstairs with your brother.”

The kitchen still smelled like cinnamon. Four hundred dollars of pastry sat under dish towels on every surface, and the range ticked as it cooled. It was the dumbest thing to notice but apparently random thoughts were my norm now. We went through it all at a dead run and out onto the back porch into a wall of cold wind battering us from the side of the lake.

Where forty people were standing around in bathrobes and aprons that afternoon, there were now maybe fifteen of them sprinkled around. Every one of them was moving toward the gate at a fast walk. Half of them weren't people anymore. Wolves came out of the tree line in twos and threes, low and silent, their shoulders rolling. The floodlight over the equipment barn snapped on and threw everybody's shadow forty feet across the gravel.

The stumps looked worse in that light. Pale and raw, stretching out in two lines either side of the road like blunt teeth in an open mouth.

"Stay behind me." Ace materialized at my elbow out of nowhere, jeans unbuttoned and no shirt at all. His jaw was already changing shape but he fought it.

"That's adorable, pup. No." I gasped and elbowed my way in front of him.

"Hazel…"

"You've got a hundred and six people to look after and I'm the one they're all here because of." I didn't slow down. "I have a lot of anger issues dude. Point me at it."

We came down the road at a jog, past the doubled fencing, past the guard house with its lit window and its door standing open with its chair knocked over. Alex was already at the gate. He'd shifted fully and shifted back halfway somewhere along the way, because his t-shirt was gone and there were claw marks in his own shoulders where he'd caught himself to stop becoming a wolf fully. Which is a thing I'd only seen him do once before and never wanted to see again.

The wrought iron was closed. Four wolves on it, exactly like that afternoon.

On the other side of it, in the middle of the road, lit up by the headlights of a car that had been driven into the ditch and left there with the engine running and the driver's door hanging open, a woman was on her hands and knees on the asphalt.

Her hair was the first thing I recognized. You couldn't miss it if you tried. Flame-red, the color that doesn't happen naturally. And it doesn't need to when you're a witch with enough vanity, except it was plastered flat to one side of her skull with something dark, and the rest of it hung down around her face like a shredded curtain in a burned house.

She looked up into the floodlight. Desperate, confused and more than little afraid.

Sky-blue eyes. A split lip. A long shallow cut down one forearm, and a coat that had been beautiful about four days ago.

Every muscle in my body locked at once.

"Sasha," I said dumbly to no one in particular skidding to a halt.

Something happened inside my chest. I want to be precise about this, because I've had years to be honest with myself where she's concerned. What came up wasn't fear. It was that specific hot certainty that lives at the back of your mind, the one that arrives right before you've decided that you are helpless and can’t do anything about your predicament. The one I first met on a hallway floor when I was eleven years old with my own blood running into my eye and her standing over me laughing.

My sigils came up under my skin like a flood after a dam being broken.

"Hazel." Alex's voice reached me and brought me back like nothing else could’ve, low and steady.