Chapter 29: Chapter Twenty-Eight

Maxon

The forest starts smelling like something that learned how to lie.

That’s the simplest way I can name it without dragging Amaris into the parts of my head I keep sealed shut. Ravencrest reads the woods like a map, and they’re good at it, but what Boone found near the eastern ridge doesn’t sit right in ordinary terms. The tracks feel wrong. The absence feels wrong. The air tastes like someone touched the world and left fingerprints that don’t belong to wolves.

Amaris tries to pretend she isn’t listening when Boone and Asher talk in low voices, but she listens anyway. She always does. She’s wired to catch threats before they land.

The bond makes it worse, because I can feel her anger like heat under my ribs and her fear like a sharp pulse that she tries to bury. She doesn’t do softness. She does control. She does teeth.

I do my best not to suffocate her with my own attention, but I also refuse to be careless. I’ve been careless once in my life, and I watched everything burn for it.

So I start moving.

I take patrol routes that aren’t mine to take. I slip out before dawn when the lodge is quiet, and the pack still smells like sleep and smoke. I track the ridge line by scent first, then by the subtle breaks in the forest that don’t show up unless you’re looking like you expect deception.

The ground tells stories if you know how to listen.

This ground is trying not to.

The first clue hits me in a shallow ravine where rainwater collects, and mud holds impressions longer than it should. The prints resemble claws, but not those of a wolf. They're too narrow, too sharp, and too deliberate, and the scent that clings to the air makes my stomach twist.

It’s sour, metallic, and old in a way that doesn’t match the decay of time. It reminds me of cold stone and stagnant water and something laughing behind a closed door.

Goblin stink.

I don’t say the word out loud, even when I’m alone, because old habits cling like blood. Names have weight. Names make things real.

Still, I know what it is, and it's a scent that I haven't encountered since everything went up in flames. Even all these years later, I would recognize the scent anywhere.

I crouch, fingers brushing the mud without touching the print directly. The outline is fresh enough that the edges still hold, which means whatever made it passed through recently. I inhale again, carefully, and another layer of scent sits underneath the goblin sharpness.

Dark fae residue.

It’s subtle, like perfume used to hide a body, but it’s there if you’ve ever smelled it before. It slides along your senses and tries to convince you it’s nothing.

I stay still, listening.

The woods are quiet, but it’s the wrong kind of quiet. Not the calm kind of quiet, but the waiting kind.

I move uphill, stepping where rock breaks the soil, so I leave less behind. My body remembers how to do this without thought, and I hate what that says about my past.

The trees thin near an old boundary marker, one of the ones Ravencrest uses to reinforce patrol lines. The bark on the nearest pine is scarred, darkened, and for a second, my heart tries to stop.

A symbol is burned into the wood, and it's not a natural burn, or lightning, and it's not left over from a careless campfire.

This is deliberate.

The mark is jagged, carved by fire that didn’t spread, a shape that looks like it was pressed into the bark by heat alone. The edges of it are too clean, too controlled.

My mouth goes dry, and my memories try to surge.

Witches.

I don’t let myself think the word fully. Thinking it makes my body react, makes my hands shake, makes my wolf press forward like it wants to tear the memory apart with teeth.

I force myself to breathe.

Stay present.

I study the mark, and the sick part is that it doesn’t feel like a witch’s work in the direct way that I remember. It feels adjacent, like someone used the same kind of language but with a different accent. Like the signature was copied, twisted, and repurposed.

That should make me feel better, but it doesn't because it tells me someone knows what happened to my pack and decided it was useful.

I back away slowly and take a wider arc, scanning the ground for more signs. The goblin scent thickens in pockets, then thins again, like whatever came through doesn’t want to stay in one place for long.

It isn’t hunting the way wolves hunt.

It’s scouting, searching. It’s learning where the seams are.

My chest tightens, and through the bond I feel Amaris shift back at the lodge, a sudden spike of irritation that doesn’t match anything happening around me. It’s like her body sensed my tension and decided it hates it.

I pause and press my fingers into the base of my palm, grounding myself.

She doesn’t need my panic.

I keep moving until I find another mark, this one smaller, burned into a fallen branch like a test strike.

Then I find the worst thing.

A patch of earth where the scent doesn’t just linger, it swirls as if something opened here and the world tried to stitch itself shut afterward. The air is colder in that spot. The birds avoid it. Even the wind changes as it passes.

I crouch, jaw tight, and I hate that my first thought is not strategic.

My first thought is a memory of white fur disappearing into a corridor of wrong air while screams echoed behind it.

I haven’t told her that thought exists in me.

And I won’t. At least, not yet.

I stand and start back toward the lodge with urgency wrapped in control, because urgency without control gets people killed.

Boone meets me halfway down the path near the inner boundary trees, his stance wide, expression alert. He doesn’t ask why I’m out. He already knows I’m out because he knows what kind of male I am.

“What?” he says simply.

I keep my voice low. “There’s residue near the ridge,” I tell him. “Tracks that aren’t wolf. Scent that doesn’t belong.”

Boone’s eyes narrow. “What kind?”

I hesitate because saying it out loud makes it heavier. “Goblin,” I finally say. “And dark fae.”

Boone’s expression hardens. “You sure?”

“I’m sure,” I answer. “And there’s a mark burned into bark, and it's not from lightning.”

Boone exhales slowly, like he’s forcing himself not to swear. “Asher needs to see it,” he says.

“He will,” I promise.

Boone’s gaze flicks past me toward the lodge, toward where Amaris is, even if we can’t see her from here. “She smell it?” he asks.

“Not yet,” I say, and that answer is both relief and dread.

Boone nods once. “We keep it that way until we have more,” he says. “Pack panics, and we can't afford to lose control.”

My jaw tightens. “I don’t want to keep her blind.”

Boone’s gaze stays steady. “There’s a difference between blind and burdened,” he says. “Tell her what she needs to stay alive, not what she needs to carry for you.”

The words land, blunt, and accurate.

I nod once. “Fine,” I say.

Then the bond thread under my ribs tightens, a quiet pull that tells me Amaris is closer than she should be.

I turn, and she's standing at the edge of the trees, arms crossed, hair braided tight, eyes bright with anger and suspicion.

“So,” she says. “You found something.”

Boone’s jaw tightens. “Amaris.”

She ignores him and looks at me. “You were gone too long,” she says. “And I felt you go tight inside my chest, so don’t lie.”

I don’t, because lying to her is pointless.

“There are tracks,” I tell her. “And a burned symbol.”

Her eyes narrow. “A symbol like what?”

I hold her gaze and keep my voice controlled. “Like someone marking territory without stepping fully into it.”

Her mouth tightens. “Someone?” she repeats.

Boone answers carefully. “Not wolves.”

Amaris’s nostrils flare. The light in her palm doesn’t flare, but I can feel it stirring under her skin like an animal waking.

She takes one breath, then another, her jaw clenched hard enough to crack. “Take me there,” she says.

Boone starts to speak, but I cut in, keeping my voice steady. “Not yet,” I say. “Not until we're prepared, and not until you’re not walking into a trap someone else built.”

Amaris’s gaze turns razor sharp. “Don’t tell me what I can or can't handle.”

“I’m not,” I answer. “I’m telling you what the woods are doing.”

She stares at me for a long beat, then nods once, stifly. “Then show me how to prepare,” she says.

That’s a compromise I can live with.

Still, as we head back toward the lodge, my wolf stays too still inside me, and the memory of that symbol burned into the bark follows like smoke.

Because whatever left it wasn’t trying to scare us wolves.

It was trying to remind someone like me that history repeats when you let it.