Chapter 29

Kade

The expedition set out three days after the summit formally concluded, delayed by the practical business of coordinating supplies and guards from five packs' worth of overlapping bureaucracy, and Kade spent most of those three days in a state he was beginning to recognize as his new permanent condition: simultaneously dreading and anticipating the exact same thing.

Seraphine saw him off at Blackthorn's gates the morning they left, Torren already mounted and waiting a respectful distance off, the small contingent of Blackthorn wolves assigned to the expedition falling into formation behind them.

"Four weeks, they're estimating," she said, adjusting something on his pack that didn't need adjusting, a small, practical gesture that had nothing to do with logistics and everything to do with needing something to do with her hands. "Ashenmoor and back, assuming the ruins don't take longer to properly survey than anyone's accounting for."

"Four weeks." He tested the number, feeling its weight. "That's a long time to be away from the pack."

"The pack will survive four weeks without you standing over every decision personally. I'll manage the council in your absence, same as I would for any other reason you were gone." She finished with the pack, straightened, and studied him a long moment, something complicated behind her composed expression. "I'm not going to pretend I don't know what four weeks of close quarters with her is likely to mean, Kade. I want you to go anyway. Whatever you find out there — about Ashenmoor, or about yourself — I'd rather you find it honestly than keep circling it from a safe distance for another five years."

"That's remarkably generous, for a woman I'm still technically married to."

"I contain multitudes." A small, genuine smile, an echo of something lighter between them that had survived even this. "Go. Find whatever you're looking for. Come back and tell me honestly what it turned out to be, and we'll figure out the rest of it from there, together, like we've figured out everything else."

He kissed her forehead before he mounted — not romantic, not performative, just genuine affection for a woman who'd become, against every reasonable expectation either of them had walked into the marriage with, someone he trusted completely — and rode out through Blackthorn's gates toward a rendezvous point three days north, where five packs' worth of representatives would converge before making the final push into Ashenmoor territory together.

The rendezvous point was a wide clearing at the edge of what maps still labeled, with old and clearly outdated confidence, as Ashenmoor's southern border — the actual border having shifted, Kade suspected, sometime in the last forty years of nobody bothering to properly survey it.

Wren's contingent was already there when Blackthorn's group arrived, along with a smaller Ironfang detachment and two representatives each from Ashborne and the fifth power, the whole gathering having the specific, wary energy of people who'd agreed to cooperate in principle and were only now discovering what that actually meant in practice.

She looked up when he rode in, and something in her expression — not quite warmth, not quite the careful distance from the summit either, something new and unresolved sitting somewhere between the two — told him this expedition was going to test both of them considerably more than either had let themselves admit out loud.

"Alpha Voss."

"Alpha Calloway." He dismounted, matching her formality, though something in his chest had already started doing the complicated thing it always did in her presence now, a low hum of awareness he'd stopped bothering to fight the moment he'd left Blackthorn's gates behind. "Ready to find out what's actually out there?"

"As ready as four decades of nobody bothering to check will allow." She glanced past him at the gathered expedition, five packs' worth of wary allies checking supplies and exchanging cautious introductions. "This is either going to work remarkably well, or fall apart spectacularly by the second week. I haven't decided which I'm expecting yet."

"For what it's worth, I'm hoping for the first one."

"For what it's worth, so am I." Something almost like a real smile, there and gone. "Come on. Ezra wants to brief the whole group before we cross into Ashenmoor proper, and I suspect you're going to want to hear this part directly."

Ezra had the whole expedition gathered within the hour, maps and old records spread across a makeshift table, the particular quality of his attention telling Kade this was a man who'd spent considerably more than three days preparing for this moment.

"What I know for certain," Ezra said, addressing the full group, "is thin. Ashenmoor was Nightshade's sister pack, three generations back, same bloodline before an old dispute split us apart. Forty years ago, something ended them — thoroughly, and fast, from what little survived in the old records. No survivors ever surfaced. No explanation ever got confirmed. Just a territory that went silent and stayed that way, and every pack smart enough to leave it alone."

"Until now," Rurik said, from where he stood near the map, arms crossed.

"Until now. Somebody's using their old brand on organized rogue incursions across at least four territories. Either they revived a dead symbol for reasons we don't understand yet, or somebody who survived whatever happened out there is still around, still organized, and has decided the timing's finally right to make themselves known again." Ezra's gaze found Wren's, something old and careful in it. "I'll say the part everyone's thinking and nobody's said out loud yet. If there's a connection between what happened to Ashenmoor and the Nightshade bloodline surfacing again after three generations dormant — in Wren, specifically — we should all go in expecting that whatever's out there already knows exactly who's coming to find it."

The gathered expedition went quiet at that, the particular quiet of people recalculating risk in real time.

"Then we go in careful," Kade said, into the silence, "and we go in together. Whatever's out there, it's had forty years to prepare for anyone stupid enough to come looking. Let's not be stupid about how we do it."

They crossed into Ashenmoor territory an hour later, and Kade felt the shift in the land itself before anyone said a word about it — the trees growing wrong, somehow, twisted and close together in a way that had nothing to do with simple decades of neglect; the particular, unnatural quiet of a forest with no birdsong in it at all; an old, cold wrongness in the air that raised the hair on his arms and, judging by the tightening posture of every wolf in the expedition, wasn't something only he could sense.

Wren rode close beside him, close enough that he caught the moment her breath went shallow, the moment her hand found her sternum in a gesture he recognized now as pure instinct rather than deliberate choice.

"You feel that," he said, quiet, echoing words neither of them had said aloud to each other in five years.

"I feel that." She didn't look at him, eyes fixed on the darkening tree line ahead, something old and wary in her expression that had nothing to do with the two of them and everything to do with whatever waited in the silence beyond it. "Whatever's out here, Kade — it's been waiting a long time. I don't think it's going to be happy about visitors