Chapter 4 A Terrible Idea

Marcus POV

My wolf refused to accept my answer.

He slammed forward hard enough that my teeth lengthened. I caught the edge of the table with both hands and forced the shift back down. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

He paced beneath my skin, not angry or threatened but searching. The call remained faintly present because I had not pushed it away completely, and my wolf strained toward it with an intensity I had never experienced. There was none of the violence I understood perfectly well. There was simply an absolute refusal to leave.

I straightened gradually, keeping both hands against the table while I waited for the pressure beneath my skin to ease. It did not. My wolf had challenged me before, usually when instinct recognised a danger my human senses had missed, but this was different. He had stopped pushing for the shift. Now he wanted me to pay attention.

“I am paying attention,” I muttered. “That does not mean I intend to follow an unknown spell across half the country.”

His agitation sharpened.

That made me hesitate. I had trusted him through battles, hunts, bad decisions and worse odds. He had warned me about people before I recognised the threat myself and driven me toward danger when someone needed help. He was instinct where I was reason, and mine had kept me alive more times than I cared to count.

I looked toward the shuttered window, although the direction pulling at my awareness lay far beyond anything I could see from the room. The call had begun to fade, not because it was weakening, but because it was respecting my refusal. Whoever had created it was allowing me to leave.

There would be no punishment. No magical hand closing around my throat. No distant witch using my name, blood or nature to drag me where she wanted me. The choice remained mine even after I had rejected her.

My wolf strained toward the disappearing thread.

“You are going to make me regret this.”

Impatience answered me.

I released my hold on the table and stopped resisting the call. “Fine. I will answer.”

The response was immediate. Magic flared around me, bright enough in sensation that I opened my eyes expecting the room to be illuminated, but nothing had changed. Inside me, everything shifted as the call recognised my acceptance.

For one extraordinary moment, I felt the shape of the spell more clearly than I should have been able to. It had travelled a great distance and passed through layers of protection, but the woman behind it was powerful. Skilled too, although something about the working felt wrong. Frayed. Strain ran through it, and beneath that strain lay urgency so profound that it had somehow survived the distance between us.

At its centre, beyond the failing strength of the caster, I sensed the faint impression of another life. The spell revealed almost nothing about the person I had been asked to protect. I could not identify a face, a name or even the precise nature of the danger surrounding her. What reached me was less specific and somehow more difficult to ignore: grief held beneath stubborn control, fear sharpened into anger and a loneliness so carefully contained that I might have missed it if the working had not been fraying around her.

She did not appear to be participating in the call. There was no plea from her and no attempt to pull me closer. I suspected she did not know I existed. My wolf strained toward that distant presence anyway, not with recognition, because I still possessed no name, face or scent to connect to the person hidden there, but with the certainty that walking away now would leave something unfinished inside us.

Whoever had called me was desperate.

Then the spell did something I had not expected.

It continued searching.

I frowned. I had answered. A protector had been requested, a protector had accepted, and yet the magic did not close around that agreement. It stretched farther, branching beyond my ability to follow.

For an instant, I thought I felt something answer from very far away.

Not something.

More than one.

Then the entire spell shuddered. I staggered as pain ripped through the magical thread. It was not mine, but I felt the echo of a sudden collapse, a violent interruption and something failing at the source. The call snapped tight between one heartbeat and the next, and my wolf lunged forward with a snarl.

The connection fragmented and the magic disappeared, but a direction remained. I stood motionless while my pulse hammered against my ribs. The invitation was gone, along with the distant presence of whoever had cast it, but I knew where to go.

More troublingly, my wolf knew too.

I looked at the bloodied water in the basin, the damp cloth I had discarded and the travelling pack I had intended to leave unopened until morning. Whatever plans I had made no longer mattered. The pull beneath my skin remained steady, pointing toward a destination I could not name and a woman who did not know that a dying witch had used her final strength to find help.

I returned to the untouched supper and ate standing up. Leaving hungry would be stupid, and I had apparently committed myself to enough stupidity already. The stew had cooled. I scarcely tasted it.

My pack lay beneath the bed. I pulled it out and checked the contents: spare clothes, money, a second blade, nothing I couldn't carry for miles. I had intended to buy provisions in the morning. Now I wrapped the bread from the tray in a cloth and added it to the bag.

Only then did I take out the map. The pull led east, away from the road I had planned to follow north. Hills occupied most of that section. There were villages marked between them, but nothing that explained the woman or the failing spell.

I folded it carefully. Directions were something to work with. Answers would have to wait.

I crossed the room and reached for my coat.

“This is a terrible idea,” I muttered aloud.

My wolf had no interest in my opinion.