A Stronger Pull

KAEL'S POV 

"What do you mean, gone?" The words come out before I can stop them, useless, because I already know exactly what gone means.

"The bathroom window," Darin says. "Screws worked loose, frame pushed out. She's not in the house, not on the grounds. I've got two wolves checking the tree line now."

I don't remember telling Bren to turn the truck around. I just notice, a few minutes later, that we're already moving faster than we were a moment ago.

Mara sits silent beside me, her unfinished answer still hanging in the air between us. I don't push her for it. Whatever kept her from reporting that border alone, it'll still be true an hour from now. Lyra won't.

By the time we reach the house, half the pack is already gathered in the yard, waiting for instructions I haven't fully worked out yet.

"Spread out," I say. "East fence first. She wouldn't have gone toward the mill road if she had any sense left in her. Check anywhere with cover. She'll have wanted somewhere she could disappear."

They scatter. I stand there a moment longer, useless, furious at myself for leaving at all, for believing a locked door and two guards were enough to hold someone who's spent her whole life learning how to stop being held.

Then something in my chest shifts.

It isn't the ache I've grown used to since the rite, the constant, steady background noise I've learned to live with.

This is sharper. Directional. Like a string pulled taut between my ribs and something out past the tree line, insisting I turn, insisting I walk, insisting in a language that has nothing to do with words.

 My feet are already moving before my mind catches up.

"Kael?" Darin's voice, somewhere behind me.

"I feel her," I say, and it sounds insane even as I say it. "I can feel which way she went."

Nobody argues with me. Nobody asks how. I don't have an answer I could give them even if they did.

I move through the trees faster than I should, the pull sharpening with every step, like the distance between us is a wound closing instead of widening. I think about everything that should make this impossible, the hours she's had and the distance she could have covered. None of it matters against the certainty sitting in my chest.

I know, somehow, that I'm walking toward her.

I also know, with a dread I can't quite place a reason to, that something's wrong with the direction itself. It doesn't feel like someone running. It feels like someone who stopped.

I find the spot an hour later, a flattened patch of undergrowth where someone clearly went down hard, a trail of disturbed undergrowth leading away from it toward the old access road that cuts through this stretch of forest. No blood. No struggle that I can see.

Just the absence of her, loud enough to feel like its own kind of wound.

Mara crouches beside the marks, quiet for the first time since the truck. "Someone carried her."

"Ashford."

"How else would she end up out here unconscious, with no sign of a struggle?" Mara looks up at me, something careful in her expression, like she's choosing her next words with real weight behind them. "Kael. About the border—"

"Not now." 

"It matters now. More than you think."

Something in her voice stops me cold.

Before I can ask what she means, my phone buzzes. Lorenzo's name on the screen, which is strange enough on its own, since Lorenzo doesn't text, doesn't call unless it's urgent enough to justify interrupting whatever he assumes I'm doing.

Found something. Records go back further than I thought. Come to the study. Now.

I look at Mara. She looks back at me, whatever she was about to say still sitting unsaid behind her eyes.

"Later," I tell her. "I promise. Later."

I don't know, walking back toward the house with that pull still tugging low and insistent in my chest, which conversation I'm more afraid of having first.