The flight felt like it lasted forever and then not long enough — a bruise of time pressed thin between takeoff and landing. I slept in short, fractured snatches: a dream of my father's laugh, a flash of the clinic lights, then the sickening loop of Cecil's voice on the phone telling me to get here, now. Dawn clawed at me the whole way, restless and hot and raw.
He's waiting. Anubis is waiting. Move, she kept saying, little pushes against my ribs that no one else could hear.
"I know," I whispered into the stale airplane air, voice hoarse and small. My braids were damp where I'd cried before boarding; I hadn't fixed them. I didn't have time. I didn't even have the right to be selfish. Not when the thing I was running toward might already be dying.
By the time the captain announced our descent, my chest felt shredded. Lights dimmed. Seatbelts clicked. The plane dipped like a throat clearing. America spread below in a dark scrape of highways and lights, and something in me folded up like paper.
Immigration moved in a blur — passport stamps, trays, a polite smile from a woman who asked the same questions a thousand other people had asked that day. My hands shook when the officer stamped me through. I fumbled my suitcase like it was the only thing tethering me to the ground.
When I pushed through the sliding doors into the arrivals hall, the ache hit me: no faces, no familiar bulk of pack warriors with tight jackets and tighter expressions waiting to fold me into something solid. Just a river of strangers with signs, a man eating a wrapped sandwich, a toddler skipping with a balloon.
For a second I wanted to turn back through those doors and find the safety of airplane coffee and stale pretzels again. The emptiness felt obscene.
Then I saw her — Cecil, unmistakable even from across the crowd: shorter than I remembered, hair pulled back into a practical knot, a blue scarf knotting around her neck like armor. She looked up from a cup of coffee as if she'd been watching the doors the whole time. Relief skimmed me like warm water.
I started toward her and then stopped. Something inside me — Dawn — sighed and braced, hard. Quiet. Not here. The pack was elsewhere; no one else knew I was coming. It had to stay that way. I swallowed and walked the last few steps like I could make myself small.
"Dwyn." Cecil's voice found me before her arms did. She hugged me like she'd been rehearing it in her head all day. I let myself fold into her, rain and salt and exhaustion sinking into the familiar fabric of her jacket. She smelled like eucalyptus and something sharp that was hers alone: the scent of someone who'd spent a lifetime holding things together.
"Mom," I said, and the word broke out of me like an apology and a prayer at once.
Cecil stepped back just enough to look me over properly — the braids, the dark circles, the way my mouth trembled. Her hand went to my cheek like she wanted to make sure I was real. "You came as soon as I called?" she asked, quiet with a pressure behind it. "Are you sure you don't want me to—"
"No," I cut in, louder than I meant to. The plane's noise and my heart and Dawn's sharp little breaths filled my ears. "I have to see him. I have to know."
Cecil nodded. She didn't talk about Kael or the pack. She didn't stare at the bruise I could feel in my chest but was barely there anymore. She had already collapsed the world down to the one fact: Dad was sick. Everything else could wait.
We stepped out into the chill night. The air hit me like an insult. My tears came anyway; they slid over my cheeks hot and fast. Cecil pulled a pack jacket out of the trunk and wrapped it around my shoulders as if I were a pup.
"We're traveling alone back to the pack?" I asked, voice small. Of course she was driving me; of course she'd come. But I needed to hear it.
"I am," she said. "And the fewer people who know you're on your way, the better. We'll get there before the word spreads." Her eyes were flat, businesslike. There was a tired iron in them I hadn't seen before.
I thought about calling Jaerin, about letting my voice tremble into his ear. I thought about how it would feel to hear his voice — steady, warm, the anchor I'd been allowed to forget for a few hours. Dawn twitched at the thought, a tiny, inconsolable ache.
He's far. He can't help. Focus, she told me.
"Cecil," I said, gripping the sleeve of her jacket. "Promise me we keep my arrival quiet. For now. No one else. Not the pack. Not anyone."
Cecil's jaw flexed. She looked older in that moment, older and harder and unmistakably the woman who'd raised three little girls and folded a broken house back into a home. "No one," she promised. "Not until we know more. And Dwyn?" Her fingers curled around mine with ridiculous strength. "You tell me everything the moment you know. I mean it."
"You always mean it," I said, and it was both accusation and comfort.
She laughed once, breathless, too small. "It's my job to mean it." Then, softer: "How is Jaerin?"
The name landed me like a blow and then a balm. I wanted him there more than anything petty or smart or showy, but both of us had lives — contracts and schedules and managers and late-night practices that didn't care about wolves and blood and fathers. "He's okay," I said, the lie tasting like rust. "He's... he's in Seoul. He'll hear when I can tell him."
Cecil's face folded. "I'm sorry."
"You say that like it means anything, It's fine." I muttered, more to myself than to her. Then, because the sudden panic needed somewhere to go, I added: "Are Liora, Viora, and Fiora awake? Will they be scared?"
Cecil's face softened. "They're at home, but I'll wake them when we're there. They'll be overwhelmed, Dwyn. They might cry. But they'll be at your side."
My throat closed on the image of the triplets — tiny blonde whirlwinds, tripping words and tiny fists. I'd missed so much of them. The thought of them tumbling into my arms was the only thing that kept my feet moving.
We slid into the car and the city unfurled in a smear of headlights. I watched buildings slide by as if watching someone else's life. Dawn was a restless pressure under my sternum, every inch of her tuned to Anubis. He's not strong, she worried. It's not right.
I swallowed and looked out at the road. "Do you think he'll make it?" I asked, my voice almost gone.
Cecil's hands tightened around the steering wheel. The streetlights painted her face in quick bright slices. "I don't know," she said honestly. "But we'll get there. We'll make sure he has the best of everything."
"How did he even get the poison, what if it's someone close to us or him?" The words were small and sharp.
"Then we'll tear that poison out with our teeth," she said. "We'll find who did this."
Her certainty hung between us like armor. For a moment I let myself lean into it, into her promise. For the flight, for the airport, for the cab, the world had been a place that hurt and demanded action. Now it felt a little less like a cliff and more like something I could climb.
The car turned off the highway, and the trees swallowed the streetlight. Darkness thickened until the road became a slit ahead, and then there was the first flash of the pack's uphill approach — the long lane flanked by pines, the old sign with the Silverpine crest half-covered in moss. My heart lurched. Dawn coiled and then stilled, listening for Anubis in the dark.
Cecil eased the car past the checkpoint without fanfare. No sentries, no grand welcomes — this was what we wanted: quiet. We reached the clinic before the pack's rumor mill could catch up.
"Stay in the car for a minute," Cecil whispered, stopping the engine. She turned to me, eyes blunt with something like pleading and command all braided together. "I'll get you in. Let them see me first. Let me set it up. You wait here. Don't get out until I say."
I stared at her. My hands were white around the strap of my bag. The part of me that had always been the loud stage-queen wanted to fling the door open and run straight into whatever waiting room light they had for us all. But Dawn pressed cold and sensible against my ribs.
"Okay," I said, voice tight. "Okay. Be careful."
"I will," she said, and kissed my forehead like a benediction. "You rest. Save your strength for him."
I folded down into the seat and let the darkness swallow me. The trees shivered; a far owl called, small and hoarse. Dawn settled then, a watchful coil. My phone buzzed once in my bag — a text from Jaerin that I didn't answer. I couldn't explain to him how everything had fractured in a single phone call: the way Cecil's voice had broken, the word poisoned dropping like a stone.
I closed my eyes and let the tears come again, quieter this time, the way people cry with their mouths closed when they don't want to wake someone up. I thought of Anubis and of my father's hands and of how the pack would shift when they learned. I thought of Mera's smile, and it was like a needle under my skin.
Cecil was moving in the dark — the car door, footsteps on gravel, the murmur of voices that sounded like directions. I could hear her talking, low and fierce, to someone who would let her through without questions. She was a lock-pick wrapped in a grandmother's cardigan.
And in a little while, I told myself, I would step out of that car and into whatever came next. I would walk into the clinic and be the daughter who had come home.
Dawn pressed a slow, steady heat against that thought, and for the first time since the airport, I believed that maybe, just maybe, we could do this.