Chapter 36

Kade called Damon within the hour, phone on speaker so Ivy could listen while she paced the nursery, Rowan finally down for his afternoon nap.

"Tell me everything," Kade said, no greeting, straight to business. "Your letter said something crossed onto their territory. What kind of something?"

Damon's voice came through static-heavy and tired, like a man who hadn't slept properly in days. "Nobody here has a name for it. Three pack members gone in two weeks, found drained somehow — not killed the way an animal kills, not marked the way a fight leaves marks. Just empty. Like whatever took them took more than just their lives."

"Drained," Kade repeated slowly. "Drained how?"

"I don't know, Kade. That's the problem. The pack elder here says there are old stories about something called a Hollow, a creature that feeds on pack bonds themselves, not bodies. I always assumed those were just stories meant to scare pups into staying close to the group at night." A pause, heavy with static. "I don't think they're just stories anymore."

Ivy's stomach turned cold. "Can you fight it? Whatever it actually is."

"We don't know how," Damon admitted. "It doesn't fight like anything we've trained for. It doesn't even seem to fight at all — victims are just found, alone, drained, with no sign of struggle." Another pause, longer this time. "I wouldn't have written if I thought we could handle this ourselves. I know what it costs me, asking you for help after everything."

"It costs you nothing," Kade said. "You're still pack, Damon. That hasn't changed, and it's not going to."

Something in the static shifted, quieter, almost unsteady. "Thank you. I mean that."

"We'll come," Kade said. "How long can your people hold, without us there?"

"I don't know," Damon said. "That's the honest answer. I don't know how long any of us can hold against something we can't even properly see coming."

They left Rowan with Margaret and a full security detail two days later, packed light, and drove south toward a territory Ivy had never seen, following directions Damon had sent through Rhys's encrypted channel rather than trust to an open phone line.

"I don't like leaving him," Ivy admitted, somewhere past the halfway point, watching unfamiliar trees blur past the window. "Not after everything that's already tried to take pieces of our life this year."

"I don't like it either." Kade's hands were tight on the wheel, the same white-knuckled grip she remembered from the drive to the hospital, over a year ago now, though this fear felt different — wider, less defined, aimed at something neither of them could properly picture yet. "But whatever's happening down there, it's not staying contained to Damon's territory forever. If a Hollow can drain pack bonds themselves, that's not a local problem. That's every pack's problem, eventually, including ours."

"You think it'll come north."

"I think most things that start somewhere else eventually find their way to wherever the next meal is," Kade said grimly. "I'd rather meet it on Damon's ground, with his people's knowledge backing us up, than wait for it to show up on ours with none of that advantage."

They arrived at dusk, the border pack's compound smaller and rougher than Voss territory, exhaustion and fear plain on every face they passed. Damon met them at the gate himself, thinner than Ivy remembered, dark circles carved deep under his eyes.

"You came," he said, something raw and grateful in his voice.

"Of course we came." Kade pulled him into a brief, hard embrace, the kind of gesture Ivy had never once seen pass between them before this year. "Show me what we're dealing with."

Damon led them through the compound, quiet and watchful, pack members eyeing the newcomers with a wariness Ivy understood completely — outsiders, arriving in the middle of a crisis nobody could properly explain yet.

They stopped at a small building near the eastern fence line, guarded by two exhausted-looking pack members who stepped aside at Damon's nod.

"This is where we found the last one," Damon said quietly, pushing the door open. "Three days ago. I wanted you to see it yourselves, before I tried explaining it in words that don't do it justice."

Ivy stepped inside, and the air went instantly, unnaturally cold — colder than the evening outside, colder than anything she'd felt since that first terrifying night in Kade's clinic office.

In the center of the small room, someone had drawn a wide circle of salt and old iron nails, and inside it, faint but unmistakable, a shape was burned into the wooden floor. Not a footprint. Not a mark from any weapon Ivy recognized.

A shadow, scorched permanently into the wood, shaped like something that had once, briefly, stood exactly there.