Chapter 94 What Was Hidden
Maddie POV
Getting Calix across the forest and back to campus took longer than I expected.
He could walk but not well. His weight leaned into me the whole way and I kept us moving at a pace that worked for both of us without stopping to rest because stopping felt dangerous. The forest was quiet behind us but I did not trust that quiet.
"How long were you in there," I asked him.
"I don't know," he said. "A few hours maybe. It's hard to tell."
"Did you know them?"
He was quiet for a second. "No. But they knew exactly what they were doing. Whatever ritual they were running, it wasn't their first time."
I filed that away and kept moving.
We came out of the tree line at the back edge of campus and I steered us toward my dorm building through the route least likely to cross anyone at this hour.
The grounds were empty, most of the campus was asleep and the few lights still on were in the pack house on the far side which was exactly where I did not want to be.
I got Calix up the stairs and into my room without running into anyone. Elara was awake, sitting on her bed with her phone in her hand, and she looked up when we came in and immediately put the phone down.
"What happened to him," she said.
"Ritual in a cave north of the tree line," I said. "Two people in cloaks. He needs water and somewhere to sit."
Elara got up without asking anything else and filled a glass from the sink while I got Calix onto the chair by my desk. He sat heavily and pressed his palms flat on his knees and breathed slowly.
The color in his face was starting to come back.
"Drink this," Elara said and handed him the glass.
He drank all of it without stopping.
I sat on the edge of my bed across from him and watched him for a minute. His hands were steadier now and his eyes were clearer but he still looked like someone who had been wrung out completely.
"You shifted," he said, looking at me.
"Yes," I said.
"Full white," he said. It was not a question.
"Yes," I said again.
He looked at me for a long moment and I let him look because there was nothing to hide anymore.
"Your father saw," I said. "When I came out of the transformation in the woods, he was there. I ran before he could do anything but he saw everything."
Calix closed his eyes briefly and then opened them again. "Then he knows who you are."
"He knows what I am," I said.
"Whether he's connected it to my parents yet I don't know."
Elara sat back down on her bed and pulled her knees up. "So what do we do now."
Nobody answered that right away.
I looked at Calix. He looked tired in a way that went beyond the ritual.
"Sleep," I said finally. "He needs to sleep and we need to think clearly and neither of those things happen right now."
Calix looked like he wanted to argue but his body made the decision for him. I moved my jacket off the bed and he shifted from the chair and lay down without much protest. Within a few minutes his breathing evened out.
Elara looked at me from across the room. "You're not sleeping are you."
"No," I said quietly.
She nodded and did not push it.
I sat in the chair by the desk and watched the door and let my mind go back through the night in pieces. The cave.
The two figures, the way they had positioned themselves around Calix like the ritual required him to be at the center of it. The way the wrongness in the air had snapped the moment I drove them back.
They were trying to bind him. Take control of whatever his wolf was and attach it to something else entirely.
I thought about the claw marks I had left and the fact that wounds from a white fur wolf did not heal clean.
They would still be carrying those marks in the morning and there was only one way to find out whose they were.
I already had a feeling I knew.
Simone had been too precise about everything. The timing of my arrest, the way Jace had been positioned outside my building as a distraction, all of it had been organized by someone who thought several steps ahead. Running a ritual in the woods on the same night felt like the same mind.
She had wanted me locked up so I could not interfere.
She had not counted on Jace's plan falling apart in the middle of the forest or on Gory breaking through the wolfsbane the way she did.
I leaned back in the chair and watched Calix sleep and thought about what the morning was going to bring. His father had seen me shift. Simone and whoever helped her were somewhere on campus with wounds that were not healing. The archive records were still on Calix's phone.
Everything was about to come to the surface at once and there was no way to control the order it happened in.
All I could do was be ready when it did.
I stayed awake until the light outside the window shifted from black to grey and by the time Calix opened his eyes I had already worked out what I needed to say to him.
He looked at me from the bed and I looked back at him and he said, "You came for me."
"Yes," I said.
He sat up slowly. "How did you find me."
"The mark," I said. "It pulled me straight to you."
He was quiet for a moment after that and something in his expression shifted in a way I had not seen before.
"We need to talk," I said. "About Simone and your father. About all of it."
"I know," he said. "Tell me everything.”