Chapter 35

The ceremony happened in the same clearing where Ivy had first watched Kade change under a full moon, though tonight there was no moon at all, just torches and a small circle of witnesses standing quiet at the treeline.

Sarah stood at the center, steady despite the nerves plain on her face, Odalys across from her holding a simple silver bowl of water that caught the torchlight like something alive.

"Once spoken," Odalys said, "this cannot be unspoken. Are you certain?"

"I'm a journalist who just spent a year chasing something real," Sarah said. "I don't think I've ever been more certain of anything in my professional life."

The words Odalys taught her were old, unfamiliar on Sarah's tongue, and Ivy watched her stumble twice before settling into the rhythm of them. When she finished, the water in the bowl shimmered once, gold and brief, and something in the air went still in a way Ivy felt more than saw.

Sarah gasped, hand pressed to her own chest, eyes wide.

"I feel it," she said. "It's like — a door closing somewhere inside me. Not painful. Just final."

"That's the vow," Odalys said gently. "Settling in. It'll feel strange for a few days. After that, it becomes simply part of how you carry the truth."

Kade stepped forward then, and without ceremony, without drama, let the change take him right there in front of her — slower this time, deliberate, giving Sarah the chance to actually watch it happen instead of catching only half a heartbeat of it.

Sarah didn't scream. She didn't run. She stood very still, tears streaking down her face, and when Kade shifted back she just shook her head slowly, like a woman finally setting down something she'd been carrying for a very long time.

"A year," she said. "A whole year, chasing shadows and blurry photographs, and it was real this whole time. All of it."

"All of it," Ivy confirmed.

"I need a minute," Sarah said, laughing wetly, wiping at her face. "I think I need several minutes, actually."

She took the minutes. Then she took the rest of the night, sitting with Ivy on the porch while the others gave them space, asking question after question that she'd clearly been holding back for months, finally free to actually ask them out loud.

By morning, she had a plan.

"I'll give my editor the land conservation story," she said, coffee cupped in both hands, exhaustion and something like peace both sitting easy on her face now. "Private family, ancestral land, unusual but legal privacy measures. True enough to satisfy him, boring enough that nobody digs further. I'll frame the animal sightings as a rare, protected species the family's been quietly conserving. It's not far from the truth, honestly."

"Will he buy it?"

"He'll buy it because I'm about to hand him a genuinely good, well-researched story about land conservation and rural privacy rights, with real color and real quotes." Sarah managed a tired smile. "I'm still a good reporter, Ivy. The vow doesn't take that away. It just means I'm choosing, very deliberately, exactly which true things I get to tell."

Ivy felt something loosen in her chest that had been wound tight since the moment Dani first called about the reporter three days ago.

"Thank you," she said. "For choosing us. I know that wasn't a small thing to decide."

"I didn't choose you," Sarah said, standing, gathering her things. "Not exactly. I chose the truth, same as I always do. It just turned out the truth was worth protecting, the same way you told me it was, that first night at the diner."

She left an hour later, story already forming in her head, and Ivy watched her car disappear down the long gravel drive with a feeling she hadn't expected — not relief, exactly, though there was plenty of that too. Something closer to hope. Proof that the secret didn't have to stay a wall between their world and everyone else's forever, not if they were careful, and honest, and willing to trust the right people with the weight of it.

Kade found her still standing there when Rhys came jogging up from the house, phone in hand, expression tight with a different kind of urgency than the last three days had brought.

"Letter came for you," Rhys said, handing Kade a folded page. "From Damon. Marked urgent."

Kade read it fast, and Ivy watched his face change, worry replacing the relief that had barely had time to settle.

"What is it?"

"The border pack he's been working with," Kade said slowly. "They're under attack. Not from within. Something's crossed onto their territory that none of them have ever seen before, and Damon's asking for help before it spreads any further south."

He looked up at Ivy, exhaustion and resolve both moving across his face at once.

"I think," he said, "we're about to find out this world is a lot bigger, and a lot stranger, than even Ashgrove and Voss combined."