Page 42 of Match Made In Growl

She'd crossed the Veil a dozen times over the years. It was always the same sensation: a soft pressure, a momentary disorientation, and then the world shifted and you were standing in ordinary Appalachian woods with cell reception and highway noise.

The first sign that something was different was the wind. It picked up from nowhere, driving into her face with a force that made her lean forward to keep moving. The trees along the trail bent toward her, branches reaching across the path like arms trying to redirect her. She ducked under one and pushed through, and the trail itself seemed to narrow, the undergrowth thickening on both sides until she was shouldering through brush that hadn't been there on her way in.

She reached the Veil crossing and stopped.

The boundary was visible today, which it shouldn't have been. Normally the Veil was invisible, felt rather than seen, a shimmer in the air like heat distortion that you walked through and forgot. Today it hung in the air like a wall of grey static, crackling faintly, dense enough that she could see the trees on the other side through it like shapes behind frosted glass.

She stepped forward. The Veil pushed back.

Not a gentle resistance. A flat refusal, the kind of force that stopped her boots on the ground and pressed against her chest and face like walking into a current. She leaned in, pushed harder. The wind shrieked through the canopy above her and rain began to fall, not gradually but all at once, a curtain of water so heavy she could barely see three feet ahead.

She tried the boundary again. Harder this time, lowering her shoulder, using her pack as ballast. The Veil flexed under her weight, bowed slightly, and then snapped back, throwing her stumbling three feet down the trail. She caught herself on a tree trunk, breathing hard, rain streaming down her face.

"Come on," she muttered. "Let me through."

The Veil crackled. The rain intensified. Thunder rolled through the valley, close and percussive, and the wind drove the rain sideways with enough force to sting exposed skin. The trail behind her was already flooding, water running in channels between the roots.

She tried a third time. Angled left this time, looking for a thinner section, a gap, any weak point she could exploit. The Veil was solid. Everywhere she pressed, it pressed back. Not hostile. Not painful. Just immovable, like trying to walk through a mountain.

Steph stood in the downpour at the boundary of a town she'd been trying to leave and felt the rain soak through her jacket and her shirt until everything she owned was heavy with water.

The Veil had let her in two weeks ago without resistance. It had parted for her like a curtain, almost welcoming. And now it wouldn't let her leave. The boundary that protected Hollow Oak from the outside world had decided, apparently, that she was not done here.

She thought about the magic beneath the ridge. The way it had responded to her touch, recognized her frequency, reached for her like it had to tell her something. The treaty stone with its two layers of truth. The dead who'd had their words stolen and replaced. The site that had survived seventy years of concealment only to crack open the moment she'd pressed her palm against it.

The town had called her here. She'd known it on some level since she'd first felt the wards hum under her boots. Hollow Oak hadn't just approved her dig. It had wanted her. And now that she'd started the work, it wasn't going to let her walk away with the job half done.

She stood at the Veil for another minute, rain hammering her shoulders, the boundary shimmering grey and impassable in front of her. Then she turned around and started walking back.

The rain eased the moment she changed direction. By the time she reached the main trail, it had softened to a drizzle. By the time the town came into view through the trees, it had stopped entirely, and a single break in the clouds let a shaft of late sun cut through and light the wet rooftops gold.

Steph stopped at the trailhead and looked at Hollow Oak spread below her, damp and damaged and still standing.

She wasn't leaving. She couldn't. Not because the Veil wouldn't let her, but because the work wasn't finished. The dead were still waiting. The truth was still half-buried. And somewhere in that town, a man she was furious with was carrying a secret about the two of them that she wasn't supposed to know, and she couldn't deal with that from a university office three hundred miles away.

She adjusted her soaking pack on her shoulders and walked back toward the inn.

Running had never been her style anyway.

25

CRISS

The summons came through Kieran's phone at noon. Three words from a number neither of them recognized: Neutral ground. Sundown.

Kieran stared at the message for a long time. "When's the last time a pride meeting was called?"

"Before my time," Criss said. "Mom mentioned one when I was a kid. Some territorial dispute with a pride out of Tennessee."

"That was fifteen years ago." Kieran set the phone down on the kitchen counter. "This is about you. Or Stephanie. Or both."

"Probably both."

"Then we need to be careful about what we say in there. A pride meeting operates on its own rules. The council has no jurisdiction, and anything spoken on neutral ground stays on neutral ground." Kieran pulled his jacket from the hook by the door. "Let me do the talking."

"When have I ever let you do the talking?"

"That's what worries me."