Page 48 of Claimed By The Tracker

She didn't argue.

The morning was cold enough that I could see my breath, the Tennessee woods doing what they did at first light—making everything feel slightly more possible than it had inside. Frost crunched under our boots with each step, and under the clean bite of it I could pick out the ordinary layers of the property: pine, wet stone, the faint smoke-and-cedar of Maddox's chimney two hundred yards behind us. Nothing that didn't belong. No second set of tracks, no scent that shouldn't have been there.

"Anything?" Lena asked, watching me read the tree line the way she'd learned to read it too, these past four days.

"Clean. Wards are humming the way they should." I nodded toward the fence line ahead. "Second set of tracks from the other night—still cleared. Nothing new."

"Good." She exhaled, and some of the tightness went out of her shoulders. Then she glanced sideways at me and frowned. "You're doing that thing."

"What thing."

"The wolf thing. Where you go quiet because you're arguing with it instead of talking to me."

"It doesn't like sharing this much space this well." That was as close to the truth as I could get her without saying the rest of it—that the bond had been loud since the diner, loud enough that six hours of driving with my hands white-knuckled on the wheel hadn't done a thing to quiet it, and now she was here beside me, her power rising and falling with her breath, and the wolf was having to work for every inch of the space I was giving it.

"Tell it I said hello," she said, and almost smiled.

She worked the discharge as she walked. Gold bled from her palms in controlled streams, running down to the frost-stiff ground, and the ozone-metal smell of it sharpened every time her power met one of Tara's anchor points—the ward-lines brightening, a faint pulse of recognition, like a system acknowledging a voice it knew. The gold sank into the earth like water finding channels that had been waiting for it.

"It feels different now," she said, watching the gold fade. "Directed. When I was hiding it, the magic always felt like something I was holding back. Something I was afraid of." She turned her hands in the pale light, gold flickering at her fingertips. "Now it feels like breathing."

"Good," I said, because it was the only word I trusted myself with.

"You're not going to say more than that?"

"Not while I'm holding the wolf back with both hands, no."

At the eastern property line she stopped at a section of old fencing Maddox had reinforced with Tara's ward-work. She turned to me, and there was something new in her expression. Not the smile she used as armor. Not the brightness she deployed when she was managing fear.

"I want to try something."

"That's not usually good news, coming from you."

"It's not bad news either. Just—new." She nodded at the fence post. "That's an anchor point, right? I can feel it from here."

"Tara's work. Maddox reinforced the post itself."

I positioned myself three feet behind her, near enough to intervene if it went wrong. "Tell me."

"Sixty seconds of sustained discharge. Tara says my control is better than it should be for someone who's been hiding this for twelve years."

"You believe her?"

"I want to find out." She pressed her palms against the anchor point, her shoulders settling into stillness.

The gold came immediately—brighter than I'd ever seen it, more intense, the ozone smell rising sharp enough that I had to breathe through my mouth to keep the wolf from surging at it. It ran from her hands into the wood and spread along the ward lines like a current finding a channel it had been waiting a long time to fill. The wood hummed under my boots. Then it sang.

I felt it through my feet first—a vibration in the frozen ground, something old and structured answering something it recognized. The wards had been built by Tara and anchored by Maddox, but they were responding to Lena now like she'd always been part of them.

"Forty seconds," I said.

"I can feel that."

"Fifty."

"Almost there⁠⁠—"

At sixty she lifted her hands and the discharge faded. The hum in the ground continued for another three heartbeats before it settled back to its baseline—different now. Stronger. Changed in a way I could feel even through the stillness of the wood, and changed in the way she smelled too—less nerves, more certainty, something settled where the anxious edge had been all morning.