She heard herself whine, though it wasn’t an intentional sound. She had seen the face of the driver—and she knew that the man it belonged to was nearly two hundred years dead. There was something scratching in the memories she no longer had.

She took a deep breath and cut across country to the location that she could not have pinpointed on a map but her wolf had no trouble pointing her nose toward. That would be where he was taking her.

Where her father had taken her.

Where she had been summoned to return to. Where he waited. This chapter in her life would finally have a proper ending. She wasn’t sure if the thought terrified her or left her exulted.

* * *

TAG WOKE FOR what felt like the hundredth time that night. He had slept fine out in the woods, but it had been a long, long while since he’d tried to sleep in a hotel next to a highway. Or anywhere the sound of a car was more than an occasional irritant, for that matter.

He rearranged his pillow in preparation to go back to sleep, but unease raised the hairs on the back of his neck and he reconsidered.

There was an odd feeling to this waking. As if he’d been very deeply asleep when the rumble of the semi’s engine had broken into his slumber. He didn’t sleep that deeply unless he was in his own home, and seldom even there. He would never have surrendered his defenses in a strange hotel room next to a weird-ass hoard of grimoires.

He inhaled and caught a trace of magic that seemed to him to be oozing through the wall—the connecting wall between his room and the room where the grimoires ruled. That was a little weird.

They all knew, the pack, that Charles could use magic when it suited him. Though not a one of them had the cheek to ask him about it. His didn’t smell like witchcraft—and this didn’t, either.

Tag was positive that it wasn’t coming from the grimoires. That left Charles. Maybe he’d worked some magic to allow Anna to sleep without nightmares. Strange that it had seeped through the grimoires’ hotel room and into Tag’s, though. Charles usually had better control than that.

The magic made him restless. He was not inclined to try to sleep when someone was trying to make him sleep—even if the magic had not been aimed at him. He got up and dressed, feeling like a cat with its hair brushed backward. It was probably the result of resisting the spell, but it left him unhappy.