Chapter 1

Josephine POV

The two-lane road cutting toward Kisatchie unspooled ahead of me like something without an end point. My dad's old truck groaned every few miles, a familiar complaint I'd never quite figured out how to fix. That had always been his department.

"Almost there," I told the cardboard box riding shotgun. My throat tightened. I'd told myself I was done with the crying three weeks after it had wrung me hollow but grief had a way of showing up uninvited. I kept my eyes on the road. The last thing I needed was to wrap his truck around a pine tree before I even got to say goodbye.

Nineteen and already an orphan. I still couldn't make that fact sit right in my head, no matter how many times I turned it over. Dad's heart had just stopped, no warning, no dramatic last words. One morning he was there; by afternoon he wasn't. The only real anchor I'd ever had, and it had just slipped loose.

I exhaled slowly and loosened my grip on the wheel. "You should've told me things," I said quietly. Not angry, just tired. I'd spent years nudging him for pieces of our history, why we had no pack, where we came from, what happened to Mom. He always gave me the same answer, more or less: stay away from other shifters. She'd been killed by one. Beyond that, a wall. I never pushed hard enough to break through it, partly because I didn't know the right questions, and partly because watching his face go distant and hollow whenever her name came up felt like its own kind of answer.

What I did know fit in a small handful of facts. Her eyes storm-gray, the color of clouds before rain had passed down to me. She and Dad were fated mates, bound to each other in a way that was more than just a choice. I used to think that kind of love sounded like something out of a book. Two people built for each other, no cracks where doubt could get in. It seemed unbreakable.

Pine trees started showing up on either side of the road, scattered at first, then thicker, pressing in until the forest became a solid presence. My chest did something strange and fluttery. Mom and Dad had run here together under full moons. That was the one piece of their story I'd been given, small and bright as a stone in the dark.

Kisatchie. I'd never been anywhere near it. My whole life had existed inside the radius of Canesville, that quiet nothing-town straddling the Louisiana-Texas line. I'd told myself I was staying for him, that I'd travel once things were different. Now things were different in every way I hadn't wanted, and I was finally crossing into new territory with his ashes in a box.

I turned onto a dirt forest road and drove until something in me said to stop. No logic to it, just a feeling. I cut the engine and sat listening to it tick as it cooled. Then I wrapped my fingers around the pendant at my throat, the one he'd given me the summer I turned fourteen. Fleur-de-lis, he'd called it, though it was built from two crescent moons and a spearhead. His Cajun roots, our wolf nature, and the fighter's edge he wanted me to remember I had.

There was no spell woven into the metal. I could sense that. I'd inherited something of my mother's feel for magic, a low hum of awareness I'd never learned to properly use. But the pendant didn't need enchantment to carry weight. It was just him. His hands, his voice, his way of trying to pass something on.

"Trust your intuition." I said it out loud into the quiet cab, the way he used to say it. I traced the spearhead. "Remember your strength." My thumb found the moons. "Honor your dual nature."

I got out of the truck.

The trees closed around me almost immediately, tall pines throwing down cool, uneven shadows. Somewhere off through the undergrowth I could hear a creek running fast over rock. The air smelled green and heavy and alive. My wolf stirred in a way she almost never did back in town: a pull toward movement, toward open ground, toward something I'd been keeping her away from for too long.

"This is it," I murmured, adjusting my grip on the box. "I get it now."

I walked without a destination, following the sound of water when nothing else presented itself. The forest had a thickness to it that didn't feel lonely, not the way the house did. Things were happening all around me even when I couldn't see them. I needed that right now.

At some point I'd have to figure out a life. Dad had left me enough to breathe for a month or two, but not much more. I'd been turning small jobs over like rocks in Canesville, never finding anything worth holding. Standing among these trees, I remembered a version of myself that had wanted more than that herbalism, protective magic, the path my mother had walked. It wasn't the kind of ambition that fit easily into a dusty town with no patience for things it couldn't explain. But here, with roots tangling under my feet and the air carrying the sharp green smell of fern and bark, that old wanting came back up like something I'd dropped and just found again.

A cluster of flowers caught my eye white petals, deep pink at the center, tucked between two ferns in a shaft of light. Azaleas. Wild ones.

Something unlocked. A memory I hadn't known I was carrying her kneeling in our backyard, those gray eyes lit up and easy, pressing a young azalea bush into dark soil. She'd told me she loved the wild ones best, that they grew wherever they decided to and didn't wait for permission.

My vision blurred. I pressed my free hand to my mouth and stood there until the wave passed.

Then I kept walking, toward the sound of the water.