Levi came home to a war.
Not the slow, gathering, theoretical war that had been building since Draven walked uninvited through their border — the kind of war that lived on maps and in briefings and in the tightening knots of dread that every wolf carried in their stomach when they looked north. This was the other kind. The real kind. The kind that announced itself not with strategy but with smoke.
He saw it from three miles out — a column of dark gray rising above the tree line to the northwest, thick enough to obscure the afternoon sun, carrying the acrid tang of burning wood and something else. Something underneath the smoke that Lionelle identified before Levi's human senses caught up. Dark magic. The oily, wrong scent of power that didn't belong in the natural world — power that had
