Debbie scoffed, but it wasn’t casual. Her scoff, it landed on me heavy and sharp, like broken glass being swept across tile.
“Are we really doing this again?” Her voice grated in the stillness, coated in mockery. “You know I hate that sound. It’s like something’s dying in slow motion.”
Her hand flicked toward the dashboard, but Trixie slapped it away—without looking.
The sound persisted. Low and throaty. The Wolf Elders' chant, ancient and unyielding, spilled from the speakers like smoke creeping under a locked door. It wasn’t music. It was memory. It was blood.
It unsettled her, but moved me. Because I knew what it was, what it meant to Trixie.
Outside, rain stitched the world shut. Fat droplets dragged their way down the glass in crooked, hesitant lines. The forest on either side of the road blurred into a smear of shadows. No moon. No wind. Just the hum of tires pulling us farther away from everything we knew—and toward something neither of us dared name.
Inside, the silence curdled.
Trixie gripped the wheel like it was the last thing anchoring him to himself. His fingers were stiff, bloodless. The muscles in his jaw twitched once—then again.
He hadn’t spoken since we left the city.
But now—now, he moved.
Just his eyes.
They slid to the rearview mirror. Slowly. He didn’t check the road. Or even cared to blink.
He looked for me. Searching frantically through the rearview mirror.
No, at me.
His gaze caught mine—heavy, unreadable. Like he was weighing something he couldn’t bring himself to say aloud.
I didn’t speak either.
I didn’t need to.
I could feel it rising in him—the thing he was swallowing. It pressed against the silence like it might split open and spill across the leather seats.
Debbie sighed loudly, pulling her coat tighter around her swollen belly. “You know, Trixie,” she said, not bothering to hide her irritation, “we’re supposed to be celebrating. The baby’s almost here. And you’re dragging us into the middle of nowhere listening to this… cursed muttering?”
Still, he didn’t answer.
He was staring straight through me now, and yet I could feel his focus like heat pressed against skin.
He remembered.
He remembered that I used to hum along with those chants when I thought no one was listening. That I used to whisper the Old Tongue in my sleep, as if some part of me refused to forget where I came from. That once, long ago, I believed in what those songs meant.
Now I was silent. Still.
A passenger in the backseat of a car that used to feel like home.
The chant deepened. The voices on the track grew thicker, woven with something not human. Not anymore.
Debbie shifted, uncomfortable. “God, it’s like being buried alive in sound. Can you turn it off already?”
And still—he didn’t respond.
But this time, he did move.
His hand jerked forward and twisted the dial. Not just turning the chant off—but cutting it. Killing it.
The silence that followed was worse.
Dead. Thick. Final.
Debbie started talking again. Something about names. Colors for the nursery. The healer's predictions. Her voice bounced around the cabin like wind in a tomb, completely unaware of the grief crawling its way into the space between Trixie and me.
He stared at the road, but I saw it.
The twitch of his eyelid.
The muscle shifting in his jaw.
The betrayal.
Because she didn’t know what the chant meant.
But I did.
And so did he.
