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Drayce, eight feet ahead taking ward-line readings, heard every word of this and stopped at the northern marker. “Bexley’s report is in.” Without preamble, without turning. He closed the tablet. “It confirms all of it.”

Tor stopped walking. He had known. Reading it in black and white was different. He was not calm. He was not going to be calm. “Who knows. Outside this team.”

“Coven. Gerri Wilder — somehow. The Elder Council gets the summary but not the tether detail.”

“Gerri Wilder.”

“She knew before Bexley found it. I’ve stopped asking how.”

Pike had his hand on his radio, professional mode on. “Northern marker is showing elevated pressure.”

“Elevated since when?” Tor pulled up the monitoring. The northern reading had jumped four points since the trailhead.

They did not wait for the rotation schedule to change.

“Contact positions.”

The creatures came out of the trees on the left flank first, which was the gap. Maelin would have covered the left flank, but he was on the right with his shoulder strapped, and the creatures found the gap as if they’d been handed a map.

They know where we’re not again.

Three contacts, bigger and heavier than at the cliff, pushing hard on emotion. Their grief hit the moment they engaged and found nothing. Grief needed unguarded feeling to work. Tor had none available right now. “Three,” Pike called from the left, already moving. “Modified.”

“I see them.”

“Left flank is going to be a problem —”

“Work it.”

“Working it, yes, thank you —”

He gave it partial: gold eyes, doubled speed. He went for the first contact at the angle that put him at the cliff’s edge. The creature was fast, like all the newer ones, and when grief wouldn’t land, it tried hesitation. He didn’t hesitate. He drove through it and off the trail’s edge, and the contact dissolved into the undergrowth. The second tried the grief angle from his left and found the same wall. He had one direction right now, and it was south, toward the residential streets, toward Mirelle.

Drayce was already moving when the third came off the trail edge: a shoulder drop, one exchange, and it was over. The creature went down clean. Pike held the left flank alone and did it well, which seemed easier from the outside than it was. Pike wouldn’t complain; he could tell when complaining helped, and right now it didn’t.

Then the fourth arrived from the east. Tor almost missed it.

He caught the sound a quarter second before it cleared the tree line on Pike’s unguarded side: movement in the undergrowth, wrong weight, wrong direction. That quarter second was all he had. He turned and drove between the creature and Pike, taking the full force of the impact. His left forearm registered it, the same one the last fight had already marked, opening again. He drove the creature into the ground, and it dissolved.

His arm was bleeding. He noted this and kept moving. “Clear on the left.” Pike, breathing hard, one hand clamped around his own forearm. “You okay?”

“Arm.”

“Your arm is —”

“Already closing. Fifth contact, southern —”

“Fifth contact, southern approach,” Drayce confirmed at the same moment. The fifth one was what the whole engagement had been set up for. Smaller than the others. Faster. Not targeting any of them. It tore through the gap in the southern tree line at full speed, not fighting, and hit the residential perimeter trail as if it had a destination. It ran straight for the residential streets. His wolf had had enough of being managed.

Tor ran.

The partial shift, three hundred yards of residential zone, and no uncertainty about the direction. He went through the gap in the forest boundary and onto the first residential street before the creature had covered half the distance. He was closing in, past the community garden, past the cut-through by the Harmon house, when he caught it in the pool of light under the second streetlamp, where the street bent south toward Mirelle’s block, and drove it into the cobblestones.

It dissolved. He stood in the quiet residential street, his chest heaving, the understanding settling in his bones: a creature had been running toward her house, and he’d caught it three hundred yards out. His arm was bleeding. Mirelle was going to see it Thursday.

Tor stayed where he was for a moment. Cedar from his cabin still clung to his jacket from this morning. The text from the night before, the way she’d quoted the rigging process back to him from memory: hull goes in sideways, thread the rigging through the neck first. She’d been thinking about his things. His wolf eased from fury into something quieter. The danger hadn’t gone anywhere, but what he was protecting had come into focus.

He stood on her street at half past nine with his arm closed, and he was done telling himself Later about what he already knew.