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Great. That’s a brand-new category of problem. Possibly a whole new color. She would call it Deepwater blue, and she would never explain it to anyone, and that would have to be fine.

Mirelle turned, setting the moment aside for later.

She found him at the northern edge of the pack line. Tor’s wolf had shifted back. He stood solid and contained, himself again. He’d taken a hit, and he was doing the standard Tor thing by not mentioning it. Mirelle approached him and put her hands on his ribs without asking, running her palms along the left side where she’d seen the strike land, feeling for the shape of the injury through his jacket.

“Mirelle.” Tor practically breathed her name.

“Ribs.” She wasn’t concerned about anything but his injuries.

He stayed still and let her examine them. “How many?”

“None broken. Bruised. It’ll close in a few hours.”

She kept her hands where they were. He was warm through the jacket, the wolf-warmth she’d grown used to, and solid under her palms. She checked his ribs, aware down to her fingertips that her hands were on him, and both things were true at once. “I saw you go down.”

“I saw you close the breach.”

Her eyes lifted to him. Everything he had was in his face, nothing held back, and she was not going to pretend she didn’t know what that meant. “You scared me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not asking for an apology. I’m telling you it happened.” She held his gaze. “I don’t do well with losing people I —” She stopped. He covered her hands on his ribs with his. Warm. Certain. Waiting. “People I want to keep,” she finished. Quieter. True.

He pulled her in by both hands, slowly, the way he did things now, without urgency but without any possible misunderstanding. He held her against his chest on the storm shoreline, with the ward line at her back and the breach closed, the Lantern drifting somewhere nearby and her hands still warm from his ribs.

She held on.

Behind them, from the general direction of the coven: Bexley’s pen moving. Garnet talking to Fiora, quietly, her hand on Fiora’s shoulder. Althea doing the thing she did that wasn’t comfort so much as the right thing. And Valene, from somewhere to the north, spoke. “The raccoon is here. It has decided it earned this.”

Tor, against Mirelle’s hair: “Tell her to give it the sourdough.”

Mirelle pulled back enough to see his face. “You’re siding with the raccoon.”

“The raccoon was here for four of the six engagements.”

“That is not how participation works.”

“It has a longer track record than most of the pack.”

“Do not say that where Pike can hear you.”

“Pike’s track record is longer, but his contributions are more debatable,” Tor said. She laughed. His arms tightened. She stayed where she was. The Lantern bumped his arm, and he didn’t move.

The ward hummed beneath her feet, steady and deep, the whole family-line frequency running clean for the first time all season.

She had done that. She stood on a stormy shoreline, held by a man she was keeping. The raccoon had earned provisions, and Bexley, whose pen she could hear moving from here, would need two new notebooks and a revamped color system. She had a name for the ancient ocean category, too, and she was keeping it to herself, for now.

She held on a little longer.

The ocean waited.

TWENTY

TOR

The shoreline after a contained breach went quiet in a specific way: not silent but settled. Like a room after an argument had finally said its piece. Tor had been doing this long enough to know the difference.

The tide pools glowed. Bioluminescence, more than he’d seen in years. The ward lines offshore showed faintly beneath the water, slow-moving phosphorescence tracing the grid. The ocean running its waves the way it was supposed to. That meant it had worked.