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Nothing answers.

Not sleep, not privacy, not even the firm human wall he puts between us when he needs to think without me sensing it. This is wrong—this is a door slammed from the outside. My hand tightens against the hemlock until bark breaks beneath my claws.

Lucas!

The bond jerks and distress floods through me abruptly, ripping a snarl from my chest before thought can form. Pain. Shock. Confusion. The taste of wet leaves, creek mud, fear flaring bright, and betrayal so sharp it cuts through the distance. Then a blow. White impact. His mind twists toward me, reaching on instinct.

I’m sorry, Wildheart.

My name comes broken before darkness swallows him.

I run. No decision exists between the feeling and the motion. My body becomes speed, claws tearing into earth, antlers slashing through branches too slow to move aside. Birds explode from trees as I pass; deer bolt and scatter. The forest tries to speak, tries to offer direction, but panic roars too loudly inside me, a storm with Lucas’s last flash of pain at its center.

I follow the bond at first, but it’s wounded, muffled, and twisted under something old and rotten that clings like black sap. North Ridge, creek, split pine, the shape of his fear. I tear toward it, but when I get there, the crossing is empty.

Lucas’s scent is there, bright and familiar and wrong with blood at the edge. But it breaks apart too quickly, muddled under Parker’s human scent, under crushed fern, under Labrador tea.

My scent—no, not mine.

I lower my skull to the ground and breathe so deeply the mud trembles under my mouth. Labrador tea, yes, but flat. Stolen. Worn like a dead pelt. My brother’s trick. Rage tears through me so hard the bond shudders.

Lucas had said to let him breathe; now there is blood in mud and no mate at the creek.

I circle the crossing twice, too fast, then force myself down to stillness because panic makes a poor tracker, and I cannot fail him because my fear is louder than his trail. Parker’s footprints. Lucas’s heavier boots. Another mark near the alder, not foot, not hoof, claw pressed lightly into soil as a signature and insult. Drag signs begin, then vanish beneath a spread of false scent so thick it burns.

I follow and lose him within twenty paces.

I follow again and find only my own stolen ghost.

My brother has not only taken Lucas; he has made the forest smell like me.

I tear through every likely path from the creek to the old quarry gullies, every deer trail, every forgotten hunter cut, every dry wash beneath limestone ridges. I search high and low. I climb rock faces with claws and drop into ravines hard enough to crack stone.

I break apart hollow logs, shove my skull into old mine vents, rake aside brush so fiercely roots recoil. More than once, I catch Lucas, or think I do, and lunge after it only to find false Labrador tea smeared on bark, his scent placed like bait, then cut off. My brother plays with grief the way he plays with fear in humans.

I stop calling only through the bond and begin roaring his name into the trees, though Lucas cannot hear the old sounds in human ears. I try mind-speech again and again until the bond burns.

Little Ember. Lucas. Answer.

Anger comes back sometimes, not his, mine reflected from walls I cannot see. Fear comes back once, so faint I nearly doubt it, and I run until my legs tear through bramble and stone. Nothing. Empty slope. Moss bent away from a place where wrongness stood. Blue thread tied to a branch like a smile.

I crush the branch in my fist.

The forest begins to look frightened of me.

That knowledge reaches through the rage in fragments. Small animals burrow deep. Trees draw sap tight. Even the old roots near North Ridge, roots that knew my claws before Lucas’s great-grandfather drew breath, hesitate before touching my path.

I am not hunting now; I am unraveling. My antlers ache with the force of too many impacts. Blood runs down one shoulder from tearing through tight stone. The lantern at my antler swings dark and useless, striking bone in a rhythm that sounds like accusation.

I return to the creek crossing because I have nowhere else. The mud still holds the shape of loss. I drop to both knees near the split pine and bow my skull until it touches wet earth. The old pride breaks. It breaks without ceremony, without dignity, without any witness but roots and water.

“Moth…er,” I force aloud, though human words are not what she made my first body for. The sound comes wrong through skull and teeth, low and torn. “Aestrata. Pl…please.”

I dig my claws into mud until cold water fills the grooves.

I failed him. I failed my mate. You shaped me for guarding, and I have lost the only thing I was not allowed to lose. Please help me find him before there is no pulse to follow.

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