Adam woke up exactly where he’d fallen asleep, with that particular ache in his body of sleeping absolutely motionless.

Casey was still sprawled across him, but now he was poking at Adam’s shoulder. “Breakfast,” he mumbled. “Are there protein bars left? Those maple ones?”

If there were any maple protein bars left, they were in the pile on the floor at the foot of the bed. Adam would actually have to move farther than Casey would to find them.

Casey clearly hadn’t moved at all since the moon set and his heat cut off. He had dropped straight into sleep, with Adam under him. Adam hadn’t been able to budge him to clean up; Casey had made discontented noises and dug in with every fingertip on whatever bit of Adam he could grip when Adam so much as tried to sit up.

He let Adam wriggle out from under him now. Adam leaned over the foot of the bed, stirring through the pile to find a couple of unopened Gatorades and a handful of maple protein bars. He also grabbed a clean towel, and dropped it between him and Casey so he could put the food on that instead of the cloth they’d been fucking on all night.

Casey sat up. His hair was wild, curls springing out in every direction, including vertically, but he was looking down at himself, poking at the bruises Adam’s grip had left on his hips.

Adam winced, but Casey looked up with a sleepy smile and said, “No, come on, they’ll be gone tomorrow. Let me enjoy ‘em while they last. Ooh, I got you, too, huh?”

Adam looked down at himself and winced harder. There were bruises and scratches and scrapes all over his arms and his upper chest. “You, ah... didn’t like how often I made you sit still and drink something. But you really, really liked everything else.”

Casey grinned and snagged a protein bar. “That sounds about right.”

Watching Casey eat, a stray sense of waiting for something clicked into place. Adam looked at the light coming in through the windows and the snow-covered skylight; it had to be close to noon.

“Casey? Do you need to...”

Casey raised his eyebrows and kept chewing. He’d crammed most of the protein bar into his mouth and already had the Gatorade uncapped to wash it down.

Adam debated for a few seconds about whether he should even ask. It was Casey’s body, and Casey had reminded him often enough that he was a midwife; he knew what he was doing. He had never actually acknowledged what the shifting meant or even that he was doing it.

Werewolf etiquette, especially within packs like the Niemis, required a certain amount of not speaking of things one noticed that hadn’t been brought up by the person concerned.

Pregnancy, for example, was never to be acknowledged until the pregnant person announced it, usually sometime after they felt the baby—fetus—move.

Still. This concerned Adam, too, and after last night he and Casey were surely past the usual standards of etiquette—if they’d ever felt bound by them at all.

“Do you need to shift?” Adam asked, getting the whole sentence out this time.

Casey dropped his gaze, and Adam’s heartbeat skipped. That wasn’t an Oh God, yes I do right now, reaction. And it wasn’t a How dare you ask me that, reaction.

Casey swallowed and said, “Why do you ask?”

Adam’s pulse was racing, and he couldn’t have said if it was fear or wild hope driving it.

“Last time,” Adam said hesitantly, still not wanting to put his deduction into words, even though he had to be right, given Casey’s reaction. “You shifted every morning, like clockwork, for a week after the full moon.”

Casey picked up a protein bar and opened the wrapper. He held it out to Adam, and after a moment of confused surprise, Adam took it from him and took a bite. It was sticky, and took time to chew. Adam wondered whether Casey wanted to feed him or just wanted him to shut up.

“I don’t know,” Casey said. “I don’t know if I need to.” He looked up, meeting Adam’s gaze. “Do you know if I need to?”

That had to mean, Are you asking me to? Are you saying no to this?

Adam shook his head and swallowed with an effort, forcing it past his wildly beating heart. Could it be hope and fear at the same time? “It’s your choice, really. Whatever you want to do. I... either way, it’s fine with me, as long as it’s what you want.”

Casey studied him a moment longer, and then took a long swig of his Gatorade and put the cap back on decisively. “I want to go back to sleep. Do you want to sleep some more?”

Adam needed a shower, or possibly just a brisk roll in the snow, and he knew Casey needed the same. They both really ought to eat something other than protein bars. They should clean up a bit, open what windows they could to air out the loft.

But none of that sounded a tenth as good as the idea of lying down again with Casey in this bed that reeked of them and the full moon night they’d just spent together, knowing that Casey might be willing to let it mean even more than it already had. Knowing that if it did, he and Casey would face that together.

Adam crammed the rest of the protein bar into his mouth and nodded.

Casey smiled and picked up the towel with the remaining protein bars. He moved the whole bundle to the nightstand, which was miraculously still upright on Casey’s side of the bed. Adam chewed, swallowed, took a swig of Gatorade and set the bottle on his own side of the bed. The nightstand that had started out there had gotten shoved a few feet away, but the floor worked just as well.

As soon as Adam’s hands were empty Casey was pushing him down to lie just so, and Casey settled himself comfortably half on top of him again. “Okay?”

“Mm-hm,” Adam muttered, closing his arms around Casey. It was all up to Casey, really. Adam was just along for the ride.

They spent the rest of the day drowsing. Eventually they made it downstairs for more food, and Adam built a fire in the fireplace, but that burst of energy ended with them lying on the rug in front of the hearth. They basked in the warmth of the fire while digesting the soup and sandwiches, which they’d eaten in less time than it took to prepare them.

After they’d been lying there a while, Adam heard the sound of a heavy engine coming slowly closer, and realized what it was. “Snow plow.”

“Mm,” Casey stirred a little, looking toward the window. The sun was nearly down, but the sky was clear. “Think it’ll snow again tomorrow?”

Adam shrugged. He hadn’t checked the forecast, and without at least going outside and scenting the air he had no better guess than Casey did. It didn’t matter; they had the cabin through tomorrow night, and didn’t need to head to the last pack on their list until the day after.

Adam wasn’t thinking about what happened after that. He really would have to go back to Maryland at some point, and for all Casey’s heat-high babble about wanting to come with him wherever he went... If the last month and a half had taught him anything about Casey, it was how much he belonged here, among other werewolves, other midwives, within the pack of packs.

It wasn’t that Adam didn’t think they could solve that, one way or another. He just didn’t know how, and didn’t want to think about it, because whatever the answer was it probably wouldn’t be easy. He wasn’t going to go looking for worries, not when he had Casey in his arms, a good fire and a full belly.

Casey squirmed a little, though, and said, sounding more awake and alert than he had anytime in the last twenty-four hours, “If it’s clear tomorrow, there’s something I want you to do for me.”

Casey said it so carefully, so deliberately, that it had to be something important, and something Adam wasn’t going to want to do. He felt himself go rigid, his heartbeat speeding up, as possibilities rushed through his mind. A lot of them had to do with the fact that they were in North Dakota, and Casey knew now where Adam’s father lived. Casey just watched him, silent and serious and patient.

But maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was something else. He managed to keep his voice fairly level as he said, “What do you want me to do?”

Casey pressed a soft kiss to Adam’s throat, where the pulse had to be pounding against his lips. “I want to go to see the Hathaways.”

Adam pulled back enough to look at Casey, and Casey met his eyes, his expression gentler than any Casey had directed at him yet. It reminded him of Casey saying, You’ve got me now, whether you like it or not. It reminded him of the day he’d gotten his hand full of splinters, and Casey had snapped into midwife mode, treating Adam like a patient because he was hurt.

“I just want you to drive me there,” Casey said softly. “That’s all. Because I want to have a word with the Hathaway midwives about what happened to your dad, and how, and why. They should’ve helped him; he should’ve gone up north before it got to the point of him hurting himself, let alone dying.”

Adam felt his adrenaline spike again in a whole different direction. “He—that was why, at the end. Because my father was threatening to make him go.”

Casey frowned, opened his mouth and closed it again, his eyes narrowing. “Adam... what did your dad think would happen if he went up north? What do you think happens to somebody who goes up north?”

A flurry of images, vague but nightmarish, flashed through his mind: snow and cold and utter isolation, being lost in the dark and the icy wind.

But it couldn’t be like that, not really. Not if Casey talked about it like something thinkable; not if the same Alpha who had killed human hunters to protect Casey had been willing to have him go up north.

“I know he was terrified,” Adam said, because that was the only thing he was sure of. “I know you were desperate enough to avoid it that you came on this road trip with me instead. And you didn’t like me then.”

Casey gave him a brief smile of acknowledgement before his expression turned serious again.

“I would have hated it because it means staying shifted for a long time, and I can’t for more than about an hour at a stretch. I would have had to have an alpha pushing me to shift and stay shifted, so it would have been double the unpleasant exposure therapy. But I do believe it would have helped me eventually. I just wouldn’t have liked it.”

Adam opened his mouth to argue, and thought instead of how often he’d shifted after his dad died. When the grief was too much, when he felt too alone to bear, he’d found himself some little den-like space and shifted, and it had been easier to keep going afterward. Easier to think about; easier to just be angry about.

Easier not to have doubts, or wonder about all the details. Easier to latch on to one idea and believe it wholeheartedly, no matter what he had to push aside to do it. But it had helped him survive.

If going up north was just the systematic version of a wolf’s instinctive self-soothing...

“I think my dad,” Adam said slowly. “I think he thought he wouldn’t come back. Or wouldn’t come back the same.”

Casey grimaced. “It can make people forget, yeah, and people are often changed by it. That’s kind of the point of it. Being a wolf too long makes you forget human stuff. Usually you get the important stuff back when you go home, but I can see why it would have been scary for someone raised human.”

Adam felt a new and different crushing weight of guilt slam down on his shoulders. “He—he didn’t want to leave me. He didn’t want to lose me.”

Casey leaned into him. “That should’ve been solvable. If he wanted you nearby, you could have gone up north in the strictly literal sense and been fostered with whatever pack was supervising his recovery, and shifted for short periods of time to visit him.”

Casey hesitated a moment, then said more cautiously, “Bonded mates usually go with their partner—because they don’t want to be separated that long, and because if one partner in a bond is that far off balance, the other can’t help but be tilted by it. They usually need the recovery time themselves. It helps with remembering, too, if mates are together.”

Adam opened and closed his mouth, and a very old, very familiar anger was rising from where he usually kept it contained. “Why—why didn’t anyone tell him that? Why didn’t they make him understand? He was born human, he was scared of it, but—why didn’t my father—why didn’t anyone—”

He was half-shouting at the end; he cut himself off when Casey’s expression turned pained. Casey pulled him close, reversing their usual positions to press Adam’s head to his chest. Adam closed his eyes and listened to Casey’s heartbeat.

“I don’t know,” Casey said after a while. “I don’t know why he didn’t get help. And I want to know why. Among other things, the Hathaway pack takes kids on exchange, and that’s a vulnerable time. I need to know if other packs are right to trust the Hathaways with their kids. I need to know if there’s a systemic problem, if they aren’t helping people the way they need to be helped. If they’re allowing abuse instead of stepping in.”

The anger curled in on itself as Adam thought that through. If other packs had been sending teenagers to the Hathaway pack for the last sixteen years, it had to mean nothing bad was happening to those kids. It had to mean the Hathaway pack wasn’t unrelentingly villainous or cruel.

Hell, given what Adam had learned on this trip about the gossip network among the packs, every werewolf in the Midwest must have, or at least ought to have, known all about what happened to his dad. Everyone but Adam himself, because he had been ten when it happened, and refused to speak about his dad to anyone in his pack, or any other, for more than a decade. Because he’d made a child-simple, wolf-simple explanation for himself and clung to it.

What were the odds that his own understanding had been perfect under those conditions?

Probably as good as the odds that no one in any pack for a thousand miles saw the signs of what was happening to his dad and wanted to help.

But someone had been trying: Adam remembered his father shouting, arguing, trying and trying to make his dad understand that he had to go up north. Not forcing him, not just dragging him away in the night. And if going up north was treatment, if it meant being safe with another pack...

Adam had been taught enough about domestic violence during his medical training to know that abusers didn’t send their victims away from them. They didn’t try to connect them with other people, or get them treatment that would mean other people finding out what was going on. The things Adam had heard as threats could also have been desperate attempts to help. Angry attempts, frightening to a child—but would Adam himself sound any different, if Casey were suffering from some mental illness and wouldn’t listen when Adam told him he was sick and needed help? Adam wouldn’t force him either, would try and try to make him listen and agree, and...

Adam swallowed hard. “What if... what if they tried to help. What if he...”

Adam felt shaky and guilty and terrified all at once, even without naming the possibilities, the vertigo he’d been dodging for days coming back full force. If he had been this wrong about what happened to his dad and why—but how dare he imagine that he was? How dare he even imagine that his father might be worth forgiving?

If it hadn’t been his father’s fault, it might not have been Adam’s fault, either, and that was too much to even comprehend.

He could still hear his dad sobbing, could still smell his fear, and his blood. He could still see the light going out of his dad’s eyes.

He also remembered his father standing beside that fire in the yard and feeding papers into it. Why, if the problem was that his dad had been depressed, sick, and resisting treatment, had his father destroyed his work? If it were him, if he lost Casey, what could possibly drive him to destroy any surviving scrap of Casey left in the world? What had happened?

Casey’s hand ran gently over his hair, and Casey’s heart kept beating steadily under his ear. “In that case, I think you need to know.”

Adam closed his eyes. “If it’s clear tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Casey agreed. “If it’s clear.”

The next day dawned bright, the sun strong enough to make a good showing even through the snow that still covered the skylights.

They got up and didn’t speak, working in quiet, familiar concert to pack up, cleaning up as well as they could. Adam opened a few windows just far enough to let some air in while Casey texted the owner of the cabin about their change of plans.

They didn’t talk on the drive. When he started gritting his teeth at the sound of leftover bottles of Gatorade bumping and sloshing in the backseat, Casey leaned over and rearranged them into silence without saying a word.

Adam didn’t put the GPS on. It had been a long time since he drove away from Clearwater, but he still remembered the way. He kept his thoughts focused on the study and data analysis and the weather and anything that wasn’t Casey or his dad or his father or where they were going, until they were about two miles short of the boundary of the Hathaway pack’s lands.

“Fuck,” Adam said abruptly, as the familiar sensation of being almost back hit him, the old dread and anger stirring up like they’d never left. “Fuck, why am I—I should have talked to Joey, I didn’t even get their number.”

He didn’t let himself touch the brakes. If he stopped now he would never get there.

“I did,” Casey said. “I texted them this morning, they let some people know we were on our way.”

“Is he,” Adam started and then clenched his teeth before more words could escape. He hadn’t known, or hadn’t let himself know, that he was here to speak to—confront—his father, but it was obvious as soon as it occurred to him. Why else would he have come here after all these years?

“Last I heard, yeah,” Casey said.

As if he might change his mind, and not want to speak to Adam. Adam stared grimly ahead, and then he did slow down, to rattle over the grating in the road that marked the boundary.

Casey wince at the noise and Adam said, “That’s why. Early warning. When you live here you get to know what every pack member’s vehicle sounds like going over the grates, so you know if strangers are coming in.”

“Handy,” Casey agreed. His voice was light but he was sitting up straight and tall in his seat, shoulders squared like he was going into a fight.

For Adam.

Adam suddenly found the words I love you burning on his tongue. Casey had said it the other night, while he was in heat, and Adam had even said it back, because Casey had needed to hear it as much as he had needed to hear the address of Adam’s apartment in Bethesda and his favorite color.

But Casey hadn’t said it in his right mind, and Adam hadn’t even let himself think it, and now he could hardly think anything else.

Or maybe he just didn’t want to think about anything else, right now.

It didn’t take long before they were pulling up to the four-deep wall of meticulously cultivated trees that surrounded the main pack settlement, blocking wind as much as possible. The road approached from the south and east, so he couldn’t see how high the snow had drifted up against the trees on the windward sides. The shadow on the leeward side looked as pronounced as ever, though, and as usual there were kids playing in the shallow snow there, darting out to the edges and coming back.

Adam pulled in past the trees, and saw the welcoming committee waiting for them near the small area kept clear for visitors to park.

Two omegas stood there waiting; for a moment they looked like the strangers who had greeted them every time they arrived at a new pack, and then recognition struck. The one on the left was Auntie Suz—maybe Granny, now? Her hair had gone all white, and she looked oddly smaller and frailer than Adam remembered. Beside her stood Joey’s mom, Ray, his hair gone gray and grown out long enough to brush his shoulders.

Neither of them was very warmly dressed—they must have come out just when they heard Adam cross the grates. They aimed identical uncertain semi-smiles at him, and Adam felt the same trapped fury he’d felt from age ten to seventeen when everyone in the pack looked at him like that.

“I want you to just punch me if I start regressing into my surly adolescent self,” Adam said as he turned the car off.

“Gladly, but how will I tell?” Casey flashed a bright grin at him and bolted from the car before Adam could even muster up a glare in response.

Casey was already making friends by the time Adam followed him out of the car.

“And I hope you’ll let me have a peek at your local wolfsbane varietals? I know everything must be harvested by now, but—”

“Oh, no, dear,” Auntie Suz patted Casey’s arm, looping hers through it and turning them toward the Midwives’ House. “We’ve got a greenhouse for that, just past the kitchen garden—locked, to keep the kids out, of course.” She gave a stern look over her shoulder at that.

Adam, who had been feeling a little better for Casey’s cheerful refusal to let things be too solemn, glared down at his feet as he remembered the succession of punishments he’d gotten for attempting to break into that greenhouse.

He couldn’t even remember why anymore. He was certain he hadn’t intended to hurt himself—his anger had never turned in that direction—but why...?

Adam forced his attention to Ray, walking at his side. He cleared his throat and said, “Joey was looking well, when I saw them.”

Ray grinned. “They were so thrilled to see you again, after all this time. Said you’d grown up nicely.”

Adam flushed, looking ahead to Casey for rescue, but he was obviously absorbed in discussing the contents of the locked greenhouse with Auntie Suz.

Ray barked a laugh and patted Adam’s shoulder firmly. “In terms of manners, Ad, not anything else. They’ve only got eyes for Marc these days. You’re safe, I promise.”

Adam nodded, muttering, “I know, sorry.”

“It’s all right, they did have an awful crush for a while there. Which would have made things kind of awkward, if...”

Adam stopped in his tracks, staring as Ray’s smile faded back to that first cautious expression.

Joey had talked about Adam’s father like they were in touch with him, hadn’t they? Like they knew him, more than just a former packmate of their parents’ generation. Had they hinted about their mom and Adam’s dad? Surely not. Casey would have told him, even if he’d missed it himself.

He felt—not betrayed, but blindsided, as if a tornado had touched down in February. This hadn’t been among any of the possibilities he’d considered. He hadn’t imagined his father moving on.

Adam was still staring when he heard the front door of the Midwives’ House open, and a familiar alpha voice said levelly, “Adam, if you’re going to yell at anyone, don’t yell at Ray.”

Adam didn’t look toward his father, but that voice sent a shiver down his spine, brought an adolescent snarl to his lips by sheer reflex. It took everything in him just to keep still. Ray didn’t move either, still looking back at Adam, his expression softening. “Joey really didn’t drop any hints, huh? I’m sorry if this is a shock.”

Adam shook his head. It was, but it probably shouldn’t have been. His father had been a widower for sixteen years now, Ray longer than that. Adam had already mostly concluded that his father probably wasn’t the villain Adam had imagined since his dad died.

Still, he felt all off balance. His father’s life had gone on while Adam was away; he hadn’t been waiting for Adam’s blessing to move on. Adam wondered suddenly what he was even doing here. He’d figured it out, mostly, and his father wasn’t going to...

A hand touched his shoulder, big and warm and familiar and painfully careful. Adam finally turned his head and looked into his father’s eyes.

Greg Hathaway’s eyes were the same as the ones Adam saw every day in the mirror, the same whirl of color that should have been impossible to replicate. There were more lines around them than Adam expected, and his hair, black in Adam’s memories, had gone a gray lighter than Adam’s blond. They were eye-to-eye, almost exactly the same height, which they definitely hadn’t been when Adam left.

Adam swallowed hard, struggling for words that weren’t accusation or recrimination or an incoherent howl of pain.

His father squeezed his shoulder, no harder than he would have squeezed a baby’s foot. “It’s good to see you, Ad. I’m glad you came.”

Adam gave a jerky nod, then tore his gaze from his father’s and managed to look around. Ray had slipped away into the Midwives’ House with Auntie Suz; Casey lingered on the steps, watching him worriedly. Adam considered attempting to introduce them, and shook his head slightly at Casey.

Casey bit his lip, but nodded and turned away, going inside, and then Adam and his father were alone together.

The simplest question seemed to be the topic already in the open. “You and Ray,” Adam managed. “Is that... Are you...”

His father squeezed again gently and dropped his hand, turning a little to stand at an angle to Adam, so Adam didn’t have to work so hard not to meet his eyes. Adam realized he’d done a lot of that, those last two years, giving Adam space. Letting him go. “Serious enough, but not formal. I don’t know that we’ll ever try for a full bond. We both know what it’s like to feel it break, and it’s hard to sign up for that again—or sign him up for it, if I go first.”

Which brought them right back to Adam’s dad; he supposed that was inevitable. “I... I’ve been talking to Casey about Dad. I’ve never really... told anyone about him before, and it means I’ve never... thought some things through, even the stuff that I did know about what happened.”

His father gave him a quick sideways look, almost hopeful, and then looked away again, nodding silently. His heart was beating fast, and the longer they stood there the better Adam could smell him, even on this cold air. He was nervous, for all his quiet, calm appearance.

“At the end,” Adam said, feeling his way, “that last few days before... you were telling him he had to go up north. Because he was ill. Depressed. That’s why he killed himself, because he... because he wasn’t well. He hadn’t been for a while.”

His father nodded again, a quick, sharp motion before he returned to keeping carefully still and not looking directly at Adam. “Yeah. That’s... that’s the short short version.”

He looked over after he spoke, meeting Adam’s eyes and holding his gaze steadily, just long enough for Adam to take it as a silent show of truthfulness. His quick heartbeat stayed steady, and nothing in his face or body or voice or scent betrayed a lie.

Adam closed his eyes for a moment, letting it sink in. He’d known already, really, or he wouldn’t have come. He considered asking about the less-short version and decided not to. Not yet, not here and now, not when it was bound to be even more complicated than what he was already trying to get a grip on. “He was so scared, though. He... didn’t you explain to him, how it was?”

His father laughed bleakly. “Till I was blue in the face, Ad, I promise you. There were times when he’d almost agree to it, and we’d make all the plans—which pack we’d go to and where you’d go to school while you fostered there—and then he’d have some reason he couldn’t yet. Work he needed to finish, or it was a bad time for you, or he just couldn’t bear to go. I didn’t understand it until a long time later, but where he grew up—gay and human, in the 70s and 80s, in some little town in Nebraska, with parents who—well. I wasn’t the first person to tell him he had to go away somewhere to get better, and those humans—”

Adam had heard of that. Humans didn’t have alphas and omegas, and some of them considered the idea of males in love with males abhorrent. A disease or disorder, to be “cured” with cruelty and violence. No wonder his dad had been afraid, if he’d spent his human life facing that danger from being sent away.

“I told him it wasn’t like that. I talked to him, the midwives talked to him, but the worse he got, the more those old ideas took over.”

“But you...” a dozen memories of anger and absence coalesced abruptly. “You went. After he died, you...”

His father nodded. “He made me promise, if he... if he ever lost that fight, I had to hang on for you.” His father’s voice was shaking a little now, not with a lie but with a struggle to hold back emotion. Grief was heavy in his scent, and he raised a hand as if he meant to touch Adam again, but drew it back. “The first few months I tried to just stick it out, but you were so angry and I was so lost, and... well, the whole pack had just seen what came of waiting too long for someone to agree it was time. So you went to live with Monica and Earl, and I went up north, and then it was two years before I came back and by then you’d made up your mind to be angry and I... I couldn’t exactly tell you you shouldn’t be. I was bonded to him, I should’ve understood better. I should’ve known...”

He shook his head, his scent turning tired and hollowed out. “I’m sorry, Ad. Words can’t... but I’m so sorry. I wasn’t the mate your dad needed, and I wasn’t the father you needed, and... and I’m living with that, every day. But I’m still living.”

Adam nodded. He had no idea how to feel about any of that—the idea of his father and Ray was still surreal—but on the whole it was probably better than the alternative. If his father hadn’t survived—if there really had been no one left to ask, only another grief even more tangled and complicated than the first...

Adam tentatively raised his own hand to touch his father’s shoulder, and felt it jerk under his fingers. He was still struggling to think of what he could say—he suspected there was still an awful lot of anger lurking under his momentary shock—when he became aware of the sound of Casey’s heartbeat.

Casey had left the Midwives’ House by the back door, with a few other omegas. They weren’t visible from here, but they were obviously heading toward one of the greenhouses—the locked one, presumably.

“Do you know what was up with me trying to get into the wolfsbane greenhouse when I was a kid?”

His father froze, going pale, and Adam reached for him, losing track of Casey’s heartbeat in his sudden mostly-clinical worry for the man in front of him. “Pa?”

“You—when was this? After...?”

“Yeah,” Adam said. He hadn’t been so angry all the time until after his dad died and his father went away. His confused memories of his attempts to get into the greenhouse, and getting punished for it, were all coated with that perpetual furious haze. “It must have been while you were gone. No one told you, I guess.”

“No,” his father said, getting a hand on Adam’s arm. “Ad, you never—you never did get in, did you? You never did anything—no, they would have told me that.”

“I don’t remember what I was trying to do,” Adam said, watching his father’s face. He had an awful feeling his father knew exactly what he’d been trying to do, and that even fifteen years later it scared the hell out of him. “Do you know what I would have been doing?”

“I...” his father shook himself a little, looking toward the Midwives’ House and the sound of a lock opening, beyond it. “Maybe. We can’t talk about it here. I’ll tell you, you deserve to know if you want to, but not here. We’ll go over to the house—you can see if you want any of your dad’s stuff, there’s a bunch in storage there, kept for you.”

Adam stared. “But you... you burned it. His work. You—”

His father looked equally baffled. “You saw...? No, Adam, no. I mean, a lot of stuff, I had to, and we had journals piled to the rafters that I didn’t know what else to do with, but—no. I tried to get a couple of his papers published, once the Revelation started. He wrote up some stuff about turning, about becoming an omega, and omega anatomy, and I found them after. I couldn’t get a journal to take them, and then I had to go up north, and by the time I came back it was mostly over, and we weren’t living in the house anymore, so I just... left it where I’d put it away, mostly.”

It was on the tip of Adam’s tongue to demand to go right now, and then he heard Casey make a startled-hurt sound as Casey’s heartbeat started racing.

Adam was running toward him without a thought, cutting around the Midwives’ House and following the trail of churned-up footsteps to the greenhouse, bounding up over the snow like it wasn’t there at all. He yanked the door open with enough force that it would have broken if it hadn’t been unlocked, hurtling into the warm, humid space full of deadly flowers in dozens of shades of purple.

All he saw was Casey, clutching one hand with the other and looking toward the door. Toward him.

The next second he had closed the distance and had one arm around Casey’s shoulders, the other hand reaching for Casey’s. “What happened? What was it?”

Casey turned his hand to show Adam: puffy patches, violently red and radiating heat, covered the side of his pinky finger. Tiny blisters rose around the edges of them as Adam watched.

“What the hell—”

“Deep breath, alpha,” Casey said firmly, and Adam stopped and tried to pull himself together—and realized that Auntie Suz was holding an emergency irrigation bottle, having already rinsed Casey’s hand clean of whatever had done that to him.

“Greg, hon, grab some snow?” Ray called, and Adam turned to see his father just inside the door, obviously having run after him, nearly as fast. He turned and gathered up a double handful of snow, and Adam looked back down at Casey.

“Sorry, I just—are you okay? What did that?”

“What do you think?” Casey smiled crookedly and gestured with his unburned hand to the wolfsbane growing all around them. “The Hathaways grow a varietal I’ve never seen anywhere else. Suz said it wasn’t very strong, good for a few different remedies. Good thing I didn’t lick it, huh?”

“Don’t you ever,” Adam snapped, tightening his grip on Casey’s shoulders, almost shaking him with how hard he was holding on.

That, of course, was when his father walked up with a ball of clean snow and a wry look directed at Adam.

“Thanks,” Casey said, offering his hand and allowing Greg to pack snow around the burn. “You must be Adam’s father?”

“I am,” Greg said, smiling slightly. “And you must be Casey. Joey let us know that’s how you prefer to be addressed.”

Casey beamed, his father smiled back, and Adam suspected that he had lost whatever control of this situation he might ever have hoped to have.