Page 6 of Match Made In Growl

She left the Gazette building with the signed permits in her bag and the survey records tucked under her arm. The sky had shifted since she'd gone inside, clouds stacking dark and heavy from the west, the kind that moved fast and hit hard this time of year. The air pressure dropped enough that she felt it in her sinuses, a dull squeeze that always meant rain was close.

The trail to the dig site cut through the eastern woods along a path that was more suggestion than road. Steph walked it with the easy confidence of someone who'd navigated worse terrain in worse weather. The canopy closed overhead as she moved deeper in, filtering the grey light into something green and underwater. Ferns uncurled along the path edges, and the ground grew soft underfoot, spongy with weeks of spring rain.

She felt the wards before she saw the ridge. A pressure change, subtle but distinct, like stepping through an invisible doorway. The air grew denser, warmer, carrying a charge that made the fine hairs on her arms stand up. Her molars hummed. The magnetometer at her hip clicked once, twice, then settled into a low, steady pulse.

The clearing opened ahead of her, and there it was.

The eastern ridge rose about fifteen feet at its highest point, a shelf of weathered limestone thick with moss and lichen. Below it, the ground sloped into a natural basin where rainwater collected in shallow pools between exposed rock. It looked unremarkable to most people. Steph had met hikers who'd walked right past it without a second glance.

But she could feel what was underneath. Layers of it, stacked and compressed like pages of a book pressed shut. The magic was old and heavy. Someone had put this here. Someone had sealed it, layered ward upon ward upon ward, and then walked away and let the forest grow over the evidence.

She knelt at the basin's edge and pressed her palm flat against the wet stone. The hum intensified, traveling up through her wrist and into her forearm. Not painful. More like a conversation she could only hear one side of.

"All right," she murmured. "I'm here. Show me what you've got."

The first crack of thunder split the sky directly overhead, and the rain came down like a wall. Not the gentle mist of last night but a hard, driving downpour that plastered her hair to her neck and turned the basin into a rushing stream within seconds. Steph grabbed her field bag and scrambled for the tree line, ducking under a broad oak as the storm unloaded.

From her shelter, she watched the rain hammer the exposed rock face with almost surgical precision. And as the water sluiced across the stone, carrying away topsoil and loose sediment, something emerged beneath. Patterns. Carved lines in the limestone that the erosion was revealing inch by inch, angular and deliberate, too geometric to be natural fractures.

Steph pulled her journal from inside her jacket where she'd kept it dry against her body and started sketching, rain dripping from her chin onto the page. The lines formed shapes she'd seen in the center's oldest records. Ward foundations. Boundary markers. The kind of structural magic that civilizations built when they wanted something to last forever.

Her hand was shaking, and it wasn't from the cold.

This dig was going to matter. She could feel it in the stone, in the storm, in the way the land had waited for years and years until someone who could hear it finally came back to listen.

She sketched until her fingers cramped and the rain showed no sign of stopping, and she didn't care about any of it because the ground was finally, finally talking.

4

CRISS

The problem with helping Kieran was that Criss kept accidentally being good at it.

They'd spent the morning checking ward markers along the southern perimeter, and by the time they looped back toward town, Criss had identified two failing anchor points that Kieran had walked right past. He hadn't even been trying. The resonance just felt off when he got close, a flat note in what should have been a steady hum, and he'd mentioned it the way someone might mention a crooked picture frame. Casually. Like it didn't matter.

Kieran had stopped, gone back, checked both markers, and confirmed the readings without a word. Then he'd pulled out his phone, called Emmett's office, and reported the findings. He'd said "we found two compromised anchors" instead of "Criss found them," which was generous, which made Criss want to punch something.

After the markers, it was supply runs. Kieran had a list from Freya for the apothecary, another from Rufus at the Mercantile for warding components, and a third from Diana at the inn for firewood that needed splitting and stacking before the next storm hit. Criss had split wood before, plenty of times, but never with an audience of two elderly witches who sat on the inn's porch drinking tea and commenting on his form like he was a lumberjack competition they'd paid admission to see.

"Shoulders are good," one of them had said. "But his follow-through needs work."

"He's compensating with strength instead of technique," the other had agreed.

Criss had buried the axe in the next log with enough force to split it clean through the stump underneath, sent both halves flying, and turned to them with his best smile. "How's that for follow-through?"

They'd tutted and gone back to their tea.

By early afternoon, the sky had turned black from the west and the rain came down so hard it sounded like gravel hitting the roof. Kieran called it for the day, and they sat on his cabin porch watching the storm tear through the valley with the kind of violence that spring in the mountains specialized in. Lightning cracked over Moonmirror Lake, turning the surface white for a split second before the dark swallowed it again.

"You did good work today," Kieran said, because the man apparently couldn't let a silence exist without filling it with something earnest.

"I always do good work. People just don't notice because they're distracted by my personality."

"Your personality is a distraction, I'll give you that."

Criss stretched his legs out and crossed his boots at the ankles, watching the rain pound the yard into mud. His shoulders ached from the wood splitting, a satisfying kind of sore that he didn't want to feel satisfying. That was the trap of Hollow Oak. The work felt good. The routine felt good. Fitting into Kieran's daily rhythm felt so natural that it made Criss's skin itch, because he hadn't come here to fit. He'd come here to serve his time and leave.

"Freya's doing a thing at the apothecary this weekend," Kieran said. "Community herb workshop. She wanted me to ask if you'd help set up."