Page 81 of Alpha Charmed

I exchange a glance with Anouk. “Weird how?”

“Stable. Predictable. Like my brewing actually does what I want it to do instead of creating random side effects.” Zeph frowns at her own glass. “It’s unsettling. I’ve gotten used to the chaos.”

“That sounds like your magic is maturing,” Anouk observes carefully. “Settling into its proper form.”

“Or—” Zeph’s eyes narrow with sudden suspicion. “Or that matchmaking witch has me on her list. Peach keeps appearing at my brewery with cobbler and meaningful looks.”

“Meaningful looks?”

“Like she knows a secret I don’t. It’s extremely annoying.”

Across the room, Rhodes has already produced his documentation kit.

“Rhodes, please stop studying us,” Aslan calls out.

“Science doesn’t stop for social occasions.”

“That’s not actually science. That’s just you writing things down.”

“All science is writing things down. Eventually.”

Veren leans over and plucks the pen directly out of Rhodes’s hand mid-sentence. “For the record, I’m confiscating this until you agree to enjoy one evening without a citation.”

“I need that.”

“You need several things you don’t get tonight. Dance with someone. Insult a stranger. Live a little.” Veren examines the pen, decides it’s unremarkable, and pockets it anyway.

Elio watches the crowd with the satisfied expression of someone whose intelligence network has been thoroughly vindicated. “Six known regional cells,” he says quietly, leaning toward me. “Possibly more. But they’re weakening—every new claiming hits their structure like a crack in a dam. We don’t have to find them all at once. We just have to keep going.”

“I predicted this, you know,” he adds, surveying the room. “The claiming. Years ago.”

“You predicted everything,” Torin points out mildly. “Some of it had to be right eventually.”

“I have a ninety-three percent accuracy rate.”

“You made that number up.”

“I did. But it sounds impressive.”

“My foxes predicted it first.” Veren doesn’t look up from Rhodes’s confiscated pen. “I have it in writing. Somewhere. I’ll find it eventually, and when I do, Elio, you’re going to hear about it for weeks.”

“Your foxes predict everything. It’s not impressive when you’re wrong nine times out of ten.”

“Nine times out of ten I predict something entertaining. That’s a better ratio than being right about something boring.”

Vera has arrived at some point, and she’s deep in conversation with Grandmother Peach about council reconstruction and long-term security measures. Grandmother Peach nods seriously at whatever Vera is saying, but I catch Peach glancing toward Zeph with an expression that can only be described as calculating.

Interesting.

The future stretches ahead of us—complicated, challenging, full of threats we haven’t identified and problems we haven’t solved. There are more Preservers out there, more agents to hunt, more secrets to uncover. The Severing still holds, even if it’s cracking. We need more pairs, more allies, more time.

Later, we walk through The Hollow under a sky full of stars.

The mist has thinned to a silver shimmer, and the streets are quiet. Most of Mistvale has retreated to their homes, but the night feels alive—humming with potential, charged with possibility.

“Peach said the number was never fixed,” Anouk muses. “Just that it takes enough pairs, freely chosen, to outweigh what was lost.”

“We have three.”