Reid’s growl starts low and rolls through the floorboards. His eyes catch lamplight and flare amber. “You won’t touch her.”
The wraith looks him over with something that might be contempt, might be hunger. “You’re not even a true wolf. A science mistake in a costume. But your bite served me. It opened the door I couldn’t.”
Reid doesn’t answer with words. With a feral growl, he shifts—a ripple of bone, a low crack, black fur rolling over shoulders. He lands on four feet in the crushed rosemary, his amber eyes burning with protective fury.
The wraith shifts his weight as he recalculates. He lunges for the easy target, the injured woman on the floor. Reid is faster, catching him mid-stride and turning him with a snapping twist as they smash into the table. His teeth meet flesh that isn’t flesh. It yields wrong, then splinters like waterlogged wood.
My mate grunts as the spines rake through fur and flesh. His blood hits the floorboards in a dark spray as the wraith’s thorns rake his ribs. Reid staggers, rights himself, plants his feet, and drives again, his jaws closing on the wraith’s hind leg to pull him away from Grandma.
But the thing moves like smoke, flowing and reforming.
Grandma’s eyes find mine. “He's not alive. We can’t kill him like this.The rune. Answer him with magic.”
She’s right. This isn’t a creature you kill the way you kill a boar or a bear. He’s not alive in a way that ends with teeth. He’s a curse wearing a carcass. Curses aren’t slain; they’re answered.
A memory unfolds in my head. I’m six again on scrubbed floorboards while Grandma lifts the braided rug and shows me thespiral carved into the heart-plank.Hearth-law,she said, tapping the curl with a flour-dusted finger.The house’s oath-mark. It remembers what we promise it. If a curse comes to the door, yousend it back. This mark takes a debt and writes it where it belongs.
I know exactly what to do.
I grab a splintered length of chair and slice my palm open in a clean, fast line. Blood wells. In the center of the main room, beneath the rug, the spiral carved into the heart-plank of Ruby Cottage—the house’s oath-mark—sleeps like a seashell in wood. Yanking back the rug, I press my hand to the spiral. My blood hisses where it hits, glowing red-gold.
“You were bound by my father,” I say, my voice strong. “Cursed by his dark magic. Tied tohisblood, so you could make him pay withours.ButIam nothim.”
I draw a fresh spiral over the old one, my blood the ink, my Sight the pen. Lines flare like molten iron. “I end the tether by lawful redirection. The debt returns to the doer; it cannot hunt the heirs.”
My blood unspools from the spiral and runs along the seams of the floor, up the lintel, through the knife blade on the mantle, out along the invisible lines that make this house our house. I have never felt my magic move like this—thin threads catching, then holding, then tightening into a rope. When the net finds the wraith’s edges, it tightens again.
“You’ll never be free,” he spits. “Magic remembers.”
“So do I. And it’s time to pay with something that isn’t me.” I push my hand harder into the spiral, into the house that made me, into the rules that raised me, the magic that Grandma taught me. “By hearth-law, the debt returns to the doer. It will not claim the heirs.Be unbound from us.”
The stone flares white-hot beneath my hand. The spiralpulses with magic as light erupts from it.
Fenric screams, thorns shriveling, limbs cracking backward as the wraith-skin blisters and peels. His shadow tries to flee, but the magic catches it. Nails it in place.
“You tied yourself to blood, Fenric,” I whisper as the light burns through him. “Now bleed it back into the earth.”
His coal-bright eyes turn white. Not empty but wiped clean. His formcollapses inward, crumbling into a pile of thorn-dust and ash and broken spellwork.
Smoke curls in the shape of a spiral above the ruin he left behind… and vanishes.
Silence fills the room, thick and ringing. My knees wobble. Reid sways on four legs for a heartbeat longer, his fur soaked along his side where the thorns raked him. He stumbles and shifts back to man again on a breath—bloody, bare, and glorious.
I run to him as he sinks to his knees, throwing my arms around his neck. He catches me even though he’s hurt.
“Hey,” he says into my hair, his voice ruined and soft, as if we’re in the bed by the fire and not in a room that still smells faintly of rot. “Hey, little wolf.”
Over his shoulder, Grandma stirs. She blinks, gathers herself, tries to sit, and thinks better of it.
“Don’t you dare move,” I tell her.
She huffs, which means she’ll listen to me for exactly as long as she wants.
Reid’s hand is heavy and careful at my back; the other is clamped to his ribs. I press my palm over his and feel his warmth, the pulse that matches mine even when we’re not touching. I let my forehead fall to his and breathe him in.
Grandma watches us with eyes that have seen more winters than I can count. “Smart girl,” she murmurs, and I can’t tell whether she means the spiral or Reid. Maybe both.
I help Reid to his feet first, then cross to Grandma.
