I couldn’t bring myself to stay away from the basement for long. Every time I tried, guilt yanked me back down the steps. Autumn lay inside the silver cell, unconscious, the tranquilizer keeping her still. I hated seeing her like that… hated that my own hesitation had helped bring her here. Sam had told me a long time ago about the vision he’d had, a warning of what was coming for Autumn. I should have acted then. I should have done something… anything, before this curse sank its claws so deep into her. Maybe if I had, she wouldn’t be caught in this mess now, fighting against something inside her that we could barely understand. Maybe she’d still be herself.

  Eleanor tried to keep balance where I couldn’t. She came and went, handling the surface problems, putting out fires wherever she could, while I stayed buried down here beneath the house, keeping watch in silence. I was grateful for her steadiness, because as much as Autumn’s condition weighed on us, another problem had already started pressing in.

  Jane had called earlier that night, and her voice over the line carried the kind of dread that made my stomach turn cold. She couldn’t reach Frank, and we both knew that meant trouble. What worried me more was what had happened before he disappeared. Jane admitted she’d been speaking with Clive again.

  That wasn’t the first time he had shown up, trying to convince her to side with him, warning her that something larger was on the horizon, but this time was different. She said he came to her house on the Rockwoods Reservation, alone, and not with the arrogance he usually wore like armor. Instead, he was… subdued. Humble, even. He spoke to her in greater detail about what he knew and how he knew it, peeling back layers he never shared before.

  According to Jane, Clive confessed that his nature, his inner beast, gave him a connection to the earth, a sense for things others couldn’t detect. It wasn’t like the Wicklow family’s bond with the world, not exactly, but it ran parallel to it, just blunted, more primal. Because he was a creature himself, he could feel disturbances in the monster world that even Shelta couldn’t. That was why he was so convinced something was coming. And for once, Jane believed he might not just be trying to manipulate her.

  But that moment of strange honesty was exactly when everything shattered. Frank arrived. He walked in on the two of them together, and Jane hadn’t told him about the meeting. To Frank, it must have looked like betrayal. Like she had gone behind his back and slipped into Clive’s orbit again, even though she said that was not the case. But Frank was already running ragged on Hunter’s Breath. So… it was bad.

  Her voice when she told me all of this over the phone was ragged, frayed with guilt and fear. “He must think that I’m slowly trying to make my way back to Clive… without having to face him,” she had said, and the way she broke on those words told me she believed Frank was gone because of it.

  So here I sit, caught between two crises: my daughter locked away below my own roof, and Frank and Jane tearing themselves apart because of a man we should have cut out of our lives long ago. And all the while, the world outside feels like it’s moving closer to some breaking point, one that none of us are ready for. I could feel it… maybe. Maybe it was just the culmination of everything that was going on.

  Even more concerning was what happened after Frank walked out. Jane said she couldn’t track him. That alone was enough to set me on edge. Frank knew our warding, every single one spread out across the city. He knew them well enough to slip past Jane, who was one of the sharpest I’d ever known with that kind of work… for a supernatural. If he was covering his trail deliberately, that meant he didn’t want to be found. That scared me more than anything, because Frank disappearing into himself never ended well.

  I called. No answer. Eleanor tried too, and got nothing. Every silence on the other end of the line twisted my gut tighter. He wouldn’t ignore us without a reason, not unless something had already sunk its claws into him. And with his current entanglement with Hunter’s Breath… God, that made it worse. That poison had a way of turning his judgment sharp and reckless. I’d seen him like that before, back when he and Jane first split apart. When Frank went off the deep end, he didn’t just stumble… he plummeted. Hard. And every time, it left wreckage behind.

  I wanted to get up, to go after him, to force him to look me in the eye and tell me he hadn’t lost himself again. But I couldn’t move. Not with Autumn here. Not in the state she was in. My brother needed me, but so did my daughter, and I couldn’t tear myself in two, no matter how much I wanted to.

  I turned toward the silver cell. The bars reflected the dim light, and behind them Autumn lay still on the cot. Her chest rose and fell in a slow, steady rhythm, the kind of breathing that should’ve been reassuring but instead hollowed me out. Her dark hair spilled across the pillow like it always had, her clothes perfectly ordinary: jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, her winter coat pulled close around her. She looked untouched, normal. If anyone else walked into the room, they’d think she was just resting. But I knew better.

  Somewhere deep inside her, something vile was coiled tight. Something Peter had engineered, and whatever it was, it wasn’t sleeping. It was waiting. Watching.

  I pressed my hands against the cold metal of the bars and stared at her, trying to convince myself, just for a moment, that everything was fine. That she’d stir, sit up, rub her eyes, and give me that annoyed little look she always did when I fussed too much. I tried to believe that I could blink and have my daughter back. But the truth burned at the back of my mind: things were broken. Broken beyond anything I knew how to fix.

  And then there was Jane. I could still hear her voice on the phone, ragged, heavy with guilt. She was terrified Frank believed she had betrayed him, terrified she’d lost him for good this time. She sounded like someone already carrying the weight of his absence. My heart ached for her because I knew that pain, knew what it was to lose someone you thought would always be there. I hated that she had to bear it again, and worse, I hated that I couldn’t protect either of them from it.

  So I sat there in that basement, heart pulled in every direction. My daughter… trapped between herself and something sinister. My brother lost to silence and addiction. Jane was drowning in the shadow of Frank. Then me… stuck in the middle of it all, useless, trying to convince myself I had any power left to hold this family together.

  After what felt like hours of sitting in that cold silence, the creak of the basement steps startled me. At first, my body tensed, heart thudding as if expecting some new blow to crash down on us, but then familiar voices drifted in, steady and human, grounding me. I turned, and the sight of them, Eleanor, Jane, the Wicklows, and Arthur all filing down the stairs, pulled the breath from my chest.

  Eleanor reached me first. She came up behind me, slid her arms around my shoulders, and pressed a kiss to my cheek. Her dark hair spilled down beside me, brushing against my neck, and for a moment, the world felt less heavy. The scent of her perfume lingered in the air, that same note that had always reminded me she was real, alive, here with me. I couldn’t help but close my eyes for a second, thankful she was still walking this world beside me. In that moment, Sam’s face flickered in my mind, a sharp reminder of what he’d already lost for us. I held Eleanor’s arm tighter, unwilling to let myself imagine losing her too.

  “She’s going to be alright, Carter,” she whispered. Her voice wasn’t just a promise; it was a lifeline.

  Shelta wasted no time, her tone brisk, her eyes sharp. “Arthur and I have been speaking about something. Something you need to be aware of.”

  I looked up, my gaze moving from her to Arthur. He stood like a fortress, broad and immovable, scarred face fixed in that same stoic mask he always wore. But his eyes… those hard blue eyes carried something deeper tonight.

  “What is it?” I asked, my voice low, almost afraid of the answer. My glance flicked back to Autumn, still unmoving inside the silver cell. My heart lurched… was this about her? Had something worsened while I sat here imagining she was just sleeping?

  Arthur spoke, his deep voice breaking through the air like stone cracking. “We’ve reached out to Uncle Chris and Aunt Raven. They’re coming here now. They might be able to beat this thing.”

  For just a second, I thought I’d misheard him. Arthur rarely let any emotion slip through, but I could swear there was the faintest break in his voice, a small fracture in the armor.

  The words hit me like a tidal wave. Uncle Chris and Aunt Raven. Their names carried weight, history, and power. If anyone could tip the scales against what Peter had twisted into my daughter, it was them.

  Relief began to seep in, slow but strong, curling its way through the cracks of my fear. It wasn’t salvation… not yet, but it was hope. Real hope. I felt my shoulders ease just slightly, as though the crushing weight I’d been carrying alone had shifted.

  There would be consequences. There would be hard truths, old wounds reopened, and no doubt changes that none of us could predict once they arrived. But if it meant Autumn had a chance… if it meant I could see my daughter smile again… I didn’t care. I would give anything, pay any price, to bring her back from this corruption.

  For the first time since her ravenous revolt, I allowed myself to believe that this fight wasn’t already lost.

  The drive over had been short, but it felt long. Leaving Autumn behind tore at me, but Frank’s absence felt like another fracture in the foundation of everything holding us together. If Uncle Chris and Aunt Raven walked into this shit storm and Frank wasn’t present… it would be more chaotic in our attempts to heal Autumn’s mind. Plus… if anyone could pull him out of the poison Hunter’s Breath had him drowning in, it was them. But they couldn’t save a ghost. We had to find him.

  Frank’s property appeared through the trees like a bad memory. His house was little more than a sagging frame of rotted siding and peeling paint, leaning into itself as if it was tired of standing. The dirt two-track gave way to a patchy yard where the fire pit still smoked, sending up a weak column of ash and ember into the gray air. It smelled like burnt cedar and stale beer. A fire had been alive here not too long ago… Jane had seen it herself, but now it was nothing more than a smoldering wound in the yard.

  I knew he was gone the second we pulled in. The absence hung over the place, heavy and absolute. His truck was gone. His presence was gone. Just a shell left behind.

  Jane stepped out of the Suburban, unfolding her tall, muscular frame in silence. She hadn’t said much on the ride, but she didn’t need to; her silence was brittle, sharp-edged, and I knew that if she opened her mouth, it would only break apart into something she couldn’t hold back. Her shoulders were tight, her jaw clenched. She carried herself like she was holding up the world, and part of me wanted to tell her she didn’t need to… but I couldn’t. Because I knew that weight myself.

  Being the one at the center of a family meant you didn’t get to break. You didn’t get to slip. You had to hold the reins even when your hands bled from pulling. Jane had her pack to shepherd, werewolves who depended on her to lead them away from the beasts inside. I had mine… but I was struggling to stand in this situation… needing Eleanor to help me. Neither of us got the luxury of collapse, although I was close. But stress fractures form whether you want them to or not, and as I watched her cross the front yard, I recognized the cracks forming in her as clearly as I felt them in myself.

  She didn’t hesitate at the door. No knock, no check. She gripped the knob, twisted hard, and then threw her shoulder into it with all the force she carried in her frame. Wood splintered, the door banged open, and we were inside.

  The smell hit me first. Smoke, stale alcohol, damp wood. The staleness of someone who lived more outside the house than in it, someone who burned fires to chase away silence instead of lighting a lamp inside. The air felt stagnant, like the house was holding its breath.

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  “Geez, Frank,” Jane whispered to herself.

  “This happened quickly?” I asked, speaking of the state of his place.

  She only nodded.

  “I thought you were here with him more?” I figured she’d have noticed this before.

  “It’s been hectic lately with Clive being around. I haven’t come around that much. He’s been coming to me. But… it wasn't like this the other day.” She shook her head in defeat.

  Jane’s black hair swung across her shoulders as she turned toward me, her chest rising and falling with the effort. Her eyes caught mine, dark and burning with something raw. For a second, we just stood there in the wreck of Frank’s living room, both of us knowing this wasn’t going to end neatly.

  The furniture was sparse and beaten. A couple of chairs that didn’t match, a couch that sagged in the middle, bottles scattered across the floor in uneven clusters. There was an ashtray that was overflowing, cigar smoke clinging to the walls. The fire might’ve burned last night, but this place still felt abandoned… like Frank had been trying to burn away more than just the cold.

  He wasn’t inside. The house was hollow, stripped of him. Still, there had to be something… some trace that would tell us where Frank had gone, or at least what headspace he was in before he vanished.

  Jane slipped down the hall on her own, her boots creaking over the worn floorboards, and disappeared into the bedroom at the back of the house. She moved like she knew what she was looking for, like she couldn’t waste time pretending she didn’t already expect the worst.

  I took the other way, down the short passage off the living room. The narrow hallway opened up toward the back door, the one that led out into the woods behind the property. Beyond those trees sat the shed I remembered from years past; tools, old hunting gear, maybe the odd weapon tucked away for emergencies. But before I stepped outside, I made myself look through the back rooms.

  The laundry nook sat in the corner, the washer and dryer quiet and dry, their interiors empty. I opened and closed them anyway, stupidly half-expecting Frank to be crouched inside, hiding from the world like a boy in trouble. No such luck.

  A side room branched off the hall, the door sticking before it groaned open. It was crammed to bursting with cardboard boxes stacked like uneven towers. The smell of dust, paper, and something vaguely metallic filled my nose as I flicked on the weak ceiling light. I shoved one box open and found scattered paperwork; some of it looked like company documents, contracts, or invoices. Why Frank had these here, I couldn’t say. Buried in other boxes were knick-knacks, chipped mugs, rusted tools, old photographs, junk that had no clear pattern or purpose. A hoarder’s cave, chaotic and cramped.

  I stood in the doorway for a while, staring at the mess. Was he hiding something in here, or was this just what his mind looked like these days… fragmented, cluttered, weighed down with things he couldn’t throw away? Eventually, I flicked the light back off and shut the door. That wasn’t where the answers were.

  The shed. That was the last place left.

  The back door shrieked on its rusted hinges when I pushed it open, the sound sharp in the quiet of the trees. The door slapped shut with a clang, signaling to Jane that I had left the house. The cold air outside hit my face, carrying with it the smell of earth and damp wood. My eyes dropped immediately to the ground. A torn-open bag of fertilizer lay slumped in the dirt near the shed door. Only a quarter full. The brand name was one I recognized; we’d bought the same stuff before on company runs. That alone set my teeth on edge.

  My pulse picked up as I crossed the yard, my boots sinking into soft patches of mud. I slowed myself, breathing steady, bracing for whatever I was about to walk into. My hand wrapped around the shed’s old handle. The wood door bowed beneath my pull, the rusted spring whining in protest as I forced it open. It wanted to snap shut behind me like a trap, and as I stepped inside, it did just that; the door slammed closed with a hollow twang, cutting me off from the outside world. Jane no doubt heard that, too.

  I climbed the single step up onto the warped wooden floor and flicked the light switch. The shed came alive in a pale yellow glow, and what I saw wasn’t at all what I’d expected. Three long rows of tables stretched the length of the space, lined with troughs and mismatched pots. But they weren’t growing anything now. Only soil remained; dark, dry, clinging to the containers in clumps. No greenery. No fruit. Nothing alive. Just dirt.

  For a moment, I thought maybe I’d been wrong, that this wasn’t what it looked like. But then my eyes caught something small against the floorboards. A crushed leaf with a red bud, flattened, stepped on who knew how many times.

  Recognition was instant. It was Hunter’s Breath.

  The sight of it sank into me like a stone. This wasn’t just a shed. It was a grow house. And judging by the scale of it… the troughs, the soil stains baked into the wood, the sheer number of containers… it wasn’t some small-time relapse. This had been going on for a long while. Longer than I wanted to admit.

  Dust coated everything, but the kind that told me this place had seen use, not neglect. This wasn’t thrown together overnight. This was work. Care. Obsession.

  I swallowed hard, staring at the remains of what Frank had been hiding. We’d all trusted each other to keep the Breath behind us, to bury that part of our lives. We had plants we maintained for emergencies… but nothing like this scale. For years, Frank had never shown the signs. He was always steady, always Frank. But here… this told a different story. A darker one.

  He hadn’t just been using. He’d been cultivating. Expanding. Doing something with this enhancement herb on a scale none of us had been aware of.

  And if this was only part of what he had hidden… what the hell else had he been doing?

  There was a narrow side room I hadn’t noticed before, wedged off the far wall of the shed. The door stood half-open, its frame busted, and through the gap I could see the faintest hint of clutter. Not the kind of clutter you’d expect in a shed: rusty nails, bent screwdrivers, tangled extension cords, but something else. Something off.

  The workbench sat dead center, an old iron vise bolted to its edge like a sentinel… the only thing that belonged. The surface was buried under piles of books and leather-bound journals, their spines cracked and flaking with age. None of it looked like anything we kept in our library. These weren’t the kind of books you bought at a store or picked up at a library sale. They had the look of things passed down in secret and held close. Where had he gotten these from? I had never seen them before… why weren’t they inside his house… or why hadn’t he brought them to me? We put everything of importance in the library at the main house.

  The walls were worse. Papers were tacked everywhere among the weak and rotten boards of the walls, haphazard but deliberate, layered in overlapping rows like scales. Some were modern, crisp white with clean edges, but others were coarse and brittle, yellowed nearly to dust. A few weren’t even paper. I froze when I realized what I was looking at… thin sheets of stretched hide, the veins faint beneath the ink, dried animal flesh or something close enough to it that it made me sneer slightly.

  Everywhere, across every wall, was a small symbol drawn out in different sizes and colors… but it was the same image. It was everywhere… just a side note, maybe a symbol or family crest of sorts… but it was bold, and sat near the focal point on these pages.

  At first, I thought it was just a sketch. A cross, maybe. Or a sword. But the more my eyes adjusted, the more wrong it became. The blade was curved slightly, serrated along the spine like a predator’s teeth. The hilt was adorned with decorative etchings that didn’t make sense, shapes that drew the eye in circles until my head ached. And at its pommel, on top of it all, was a single eye; serpentine and vertical-slit. Most of the drawings had no color, just black ink and two-dimensional… yet… it felt… alive.

  I almost turned away, but then I caught what I’d missed before. Around the entire blade, faint and jagged, were more lines. Not decorations. Not symbols. Teeth. Dozens of them, sketched with such faintness they nearly vanished, but once I saw them, I couldn’t unsee them. A mouth, jaws spread wide, swallowing the sword whole.

  I stepped back, my throat dry at the sight of it… Like the image affected me somehow. It was hard to explain… but I felt it. It was the entirety of this room… the way it made me feel.

  And then I saw it again. Another sheet had the same blade with the same eye. The same teeth, preparing to chomp down on the weapon. Then again, on a brittle square of parchment that looked like it would crumble if I breathed too hard. Then again, on a modern sheet with smudged pencil marks scrawled in the margins beside financial calculations. It was a finance report…. Over and over, drawn by different hands, in different centuries. It was all different… yet the same.

  Hundreds of years worth of the same drawing, pinned up in one room. Frank had discovered something… what it was… I was unsure. But… it was something… and I could tell that not all of this was Frank's discoveries. Someone else had put this together and handed it down to Frank. But… who… and when?

  I pushed through the papers with shaking hands, searching for words, anything to ground me, something that explained. The ink blurred as my eyes skimmed across old Latin phrases, half-legible names, bar graphs and pie charts, scattered notes written in rushed, frantic strokes.

  Then I found it. A sheet so new it still gleamed. White, sharp-edged, freshly printed. My gut twisted when I saw the same symbol… the same crest… only this time, it wasn’t in plain black ink. It was clean and full of color in an official document.

  The blade and hilt shone gold. The eye burned crimson, the slit black as midnight. And the faint teeth, those jagged shapes I had nearly convinced myself were accidents of ink, were there too… this time unmistakable, etched in pale watermark ivory around the blade like a crown of hunger.

  I scanned the document, and my breath caught. A name was stamped beside the symbol, bold and sharp: Mayor Cassandra E. Arkus.

  For a long moment, I just stood there, staring at the page, my thoughts scraping against each other like stones.

  Arkus. I knew that name. Anyone who owned a business in St. Louis did. It showed up on permits, flyers, election signs, and those glossy brochures the city liked to send out when they wanted to prove they were improving something. I’d seen it in City Hall, slapped across pamphlets that no one ever read.

  And now it was here, on Frank’s wall, stamped over a symbol that made my skin crawl.

  The deeper I stared at it, the more wrong it felt. A gnawing familiarity pressed against the back of my skull, as if I had seen this sword before… not here, not on paper, but somewhere else. In passing, maybe… in the corner of my eye as I walked somewhere. Maybe carved into a wall, or scrawled onto a flyer I hadn’t paid attention to. Something I should have remembered, but couldn’t place.

  This wasn’t just Frank’s secret. This was bigger. Much bigger, but Frank… Frank had been tangled up in it.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard Jane rip open the squeaky spring of the shed front door. She came in quick, and I almost cursed out loud. I gritted my teeth and felt the tingles of adrenaline fade as she approached. I cocked my head back and looked at her as she came in. She could immediately tell something was wrong with my face as I looked at her with fearful apprehension.

  I held this strange paper with the even stranger symbol up in the air for her to see, and I asked, “Has Frank shown you any of this?”

  Jane walked up slowly, eyeing the paper in my hands and analyzing the symbol in all of its intricate detail. She looked down at my hands as I pointed out the same symbol on all of these old documents that dated back to God only knows when.

  Even as I pointed it out to her, I saw more and more papers hidden beneath others with the same symbol and the same name. To say it was the same was incorrect, as sometimes it shifted between Cassandra, Cassie, and the last name from Arkus to Arkin. However, there were variations of first and last names that matched others throughout the years. Like the same person was shifting it up every couple of generations to come back with a new identity. It took us a few minutes to really realize the depth of what we were seeing. It wasn’t just the strange information and the obsessive compulsive board of investigation that was pasted all over the walls in my brother’s shed, but it was just the fact that he had never told us about this. How long had he been looking into this?

  Jane shook her head slowly, her dark hair brushing against her shoulders as her eyes darted across the papers all over the walls. She lingered on memorandums from City Hall, letters that seemed personal, and other writings; contracts, deals made in the dark. Yet every single sheet carried the same emblem, stamped or drawn by hand, like a twisted family crest. The symbol dominated the pages, a constant reminder of whatever secret Frank had been chasing. The symbol itself felt like a signature, or a reference to who was attached to these papers.

  “He never told me any of this,” Jane muttered, voice low and bitter, almost to herself. There was a weight behind her words, a kind of defeatedness that pressed down on me. It wasn’t just the discovery itself; it was the truth about Frank, the realization that he… of all people, had secrets we had no idea existed. And… if he was keeping something like this room a secret… it had to be worse than I had ever imagined.

  I swallowed hard. My eyes moved from the newest papers, the ones bearing the name of the mayor of St. Louis, to the older, brittle ones, the faded parchments and scraps of dried animal hide. Each one seemed to echo the last, layered across centuries. Something about it gnawed at me. Not just the mystery of the documents, but the primal pull of their presence, the raw, instinctive warning at the back of my mind telling me to step back, to run, to protect myself before I got eaten.

  And yet I couldn’t. I had to look. I had to understand. I read through names: Cassandra E. Arkus, Cassie Arkin, Cass E. Arrakus, C.E. Arkon… it went on and on.

  “What if… this,” I said, voice barely above a whisper, “what if this is why Frank started using again? Not Clive. Not that whole situation. Maybe… the way he acted about Clive… was just a symptom of something greater. Maybe this… this puzzle,” I said as I tried piecing it together myself. “What if this is what drove him back to the Hunter’s Breath. Maybe this is what he was growing it for… why he felt he needed it? And we… we had no idea.” I shook my head and wondered… why the fuck hadn’t he told us about this?

  Jane’s eyes met mine, haunted but resolute. “We have to find him, Carter. Now. Before whatever he’s chasing… whatever he uncovered drags him away.”

  I nodded, the tightness in my chest loosening slightly as resolve solidified. My fingers grazed the papers one last time, tracing the jagged sword, the slit-eyed hilt, the faint teeth that seemed to gape across the page. A chill ran through me, but beneath it was something sharper: purpose.

  “Then we find him,” I said, snapping my head back, stealing my courage, forcing the panic down. “We find Frank. And we figure out what he found, and why he’s keeping it a secret.”