"Supernatural-friendly," she muttered, lacing up her combat boots and surveying the demolition supplies she'd picked up from the local hardware store. The shop owner, a gruff man with suspiciously pointed ears, had given her a knowing look when she'd requested "the good stuff" and thrown in a pair of work gloves that supposedly repelled negative energy.
The inn looked less intimidating in the morning light, though no less mysterious. Whatever had been making those footsteps yesterday had either left or decided to stay quiet. Lyra had chosen to interpret the silence as a good sign.
She cranked up her music—a playlist titled "Renovation Rampage" that started with vintage rock and escalated to pure chaos—and got to work. The first order of business was clearingout decades of accumulated furniture and debris. Most of it was beyond saving, but she found a few gems: an ornate mirror that hummed with protective magic, a set of crystal doorknobs that glowed softly when touched, and a wooden chest filled with what resembled spell components.
"Okay, Grandma Vera," Lyra said, hefting a particularly ugly lamp shaped like a ceramic duck. "I'm starting to get why you and Mom never saw eye to eye."
She'd been working for three hours when she realized her magic was making the job considerably easier than it should have been. Boxes that should have required two people to move floated obediently behind her like oversized balloons. Dust and debris swirled themselves into neat piles without her conscious direction. Even the music seemed to be helping—the bass line was actually vibrating loose nails out of the walls.
"Well, that's about as useful as a chocolate teapot," she said to herself, then paused. Her magic had never been this responsive before. Usually, it took conscious effort and specific intent to make things happen. This felt more like the inn itself was eager to be renovated.
By noon, she'd cleared the entire first floor and was ready to tackle the cellar. The basement access was through a door behind the kitchen that opened onto steep wooden stairs disappearing into darkness. The air that drifted up smelled of earth and stone and something else—something that made her magic curl with interest.
"Right then," Lyra said, flicking on her phone's flashlight. "Let's see what mysteries you're hiding down there."
The cellar was larger than she'd expected, with stone walls that looked original to the building and a dirt floor that was surprisingly level. Shelves lined one wall, holding jars of preserved... things she wasn't ready to identify. Another wallfeatured what seemed to be a wine rack, though the bottles were covered in dust so thick their labels were illegible.
But it was the floor that caught her attention. Beneath decades of accumulated grime, she could make out the edges of stones that had been deliberately placed. The pattern wasn't random—it looked almost like a mosaic, though she couldn't make out the design through the dirt.
"Huh. Wonder what you're supposed to be."
Lyra grabbed a broom from upstairs and started sweeping. The more she cleared away, the more intrigued she became. The stones were different colors—some dark gray, others pale blue, and a few that looked almost silver in the flashlight beam. They'd been arranged in concentric circles around a central point, with symbols carved into some of them that made her eyes water if she looked too closely.
She was halfway through the cleaning when her broom hit something that definitely wasn't floor.
"What the—" Lyra knelt down and brushed away the remaining dirt with her hands. Embedded in the center of the stone pattern was something that made her breath catch. It looked like a piece of obsidian the size of a dinner plate, perfectly round and polished to a mirror shine. But running through its center was a crack that thrummed with a rhythm all its own.
The crack looked fresh, as if something had struck the stone recently. But that was impossible—the cellar had been sealed when she'd arrived, and the layer of dust suggested no one had been down here in years.
Lyra sat back on her heels, studying the stone. Her magic was practically humming now, drawn to whatever was embedded in the floor. The crack seemed to pulse in rhythm with her heartbeat, and she could swear she heard something—a whisper so faint it might have been her imagination.
"Okay, mystery stone," she said, twirling a burnished curl in absent distraction. "What's your story?"
She reached out tentatively, intending to just touch the edge, see if she could get a sense of what kind of magic she was dealing with. Her grandmother had always said the best way to understand something magical was to listen to what it was trying to tell you.
The moment her palm made contact with the obsidian surface, the world exploded.
Power surged through her like lightning, wild and ancient and utterly uncontrolled. Her chaos magic, usually as manageable as an enthusiastic puppy, roared to life with the force of a wildfire. The stone beneath her hand blazed with light that turned the dark cellar bright as noon as though an ancient force stirred beneath the foundation of the inn.
Lyra tried to pull her hand away, but her palm seemed fused to the stone. Magic poured through her in waves that made her teeth ache and her vision blur. She could hear herself screaming, but the sound seemed to come from very far away.
The crack in the stone widened.
Miles away, in the middle of his morning patrol through the forest preserve, Cade Halloway stumbled as if he'd been punched in the chest. His wolf surged to the surface so fast he barely had time to brace himself, every instinct screaming that something was wrong.
Power rolled across the landscape like a shockwave, raising the hair on his arms and sending every animal within a five-mile radius into panicked flight. Birds exploded from the trees in black clouds. Deer crashed through underbrush in their desperation to escape. Even the insects fell silent.
Cade's phone buzzed with emergency calls—pack members checking in, town council members demanding answers he didn't have. But beneath the chaos of voices, he could hearsomething else. A call that bypassed his ears entirely and hit him somewhere deeper, more primal.
His mate was in danger.
The thought stopped him cold. He didn't have a mate. Had never found one, despite being thirty-two and pack alpha for five years and he has given up. His wolf had shown interest in precisely no one, much to the disappointment of every eligible female in a fifty-mile radius.
But that pull, that desperate need to run toward the source of the magical disturbance, felt like nothing else in his experience. It felt like coming home and losing everything all at once.
"Shit," Cade muttered, already sprinting toward his truck. His wolf wanted to shift and run flat-out, but he could move faster on four wheels than four paws. Besides, if his instincts were right, he was going to need opposable thumbs.
The magical pulse had come from the direction of town, somewhere near the old inn that had been empty since Vera Whitaker's death. But Vera's granddaughter was supposed to arrive this week—Margaret had mentioned something about renovations at the last council meeting.
