The road east was nothing but a wound in the earth.
Gravel and dirt and the occasional patch of cracked asphalt where someone had tried, years ago, to make this route civilized.
The trees pressed in on either side, their branches tangling overhead like clasped hands, blocking out the moon.
Sebastian sat in the back of a mud-splattered jeep, wedged between Max and a wolf named Ellis who hadn't spoken a single word since they left.
Lucian drove.
Timothy rode shotgun, a map spread across his knees, his finger tracing a route that seemed to exist more in memory than on paper.
"The Hollow Table," Lucian said, breaking the silence. His voice was low, careful, the way people speak in graveyards.
"I've heard stories. I didn't think it was real."
Timothy didn't look up.
"Most things that hurt you are real. Doesn't matter if you believed in them first."
Sebastian stared out the window.
The landscape had changed somewhere behind them—the familiar forests of pack territory giving way to something older.
The trees here were twisted, their bark scarred with symbols that wind and weather had worn into obscurity.
The air smelled different too.
Not like pine or earth or the clean cold of home. It smelled like iron. Like old blood. Like something that had been waiting.
"How do you know where to find it?" Sebastian asked.
His voice came out rougher than he intended.
He hadn't slept. Hadn't eaten.
He hadn't done anything except watch the miles pass and feel the bond pull at his chest like a fishhook caught in a current.
Timothy folded the map and set it aside.
"Because I've been there before."
The jeep went quiet. Even Ellis turned his head.
"You've been to the Hollow Table?" Max asked, disbelief bleeding into his voice.
Timothy's reflection stared back at them from the windshield, pale and hollow-cheeked. "Forty years ago, a wolf went missing. A good wolf. Young. We found him there," he paused.
"We found what was left of him."
Sebastian's stomach turned. "What does that mean?"
Timothy didn't answer.
He just pointed through the windshield at the road ahead, where the trees had begun to thin and the sky had started to lighten with the first gray fingers of dawn.
"We're close. Everyone on foot from here. The Hollow Table doesn't welcome engines."
Lucian pulled the jeep to the side of the road, killing the headlights.
The silence that followed was absolute: no birds, no insects, no wind moving through the leaves. Just the sound of four wolves and one vampire breathing air that tasted like copper.
Sebastian climbed out.
His legs were stiff, his feet sore inside Lucas's borrowed boots.
He pressed a hand to his chest, where the bond flickered weakly, like a candle drowning in wax.
Lucas, he thought. I'm coming. Hold on.
The trees parted ahead, revealing a clearing.
And in the center of that clearing, half-sunk into the earth like a tooth in rotting gums, stood the Hollow Table.
It wasn't a table at all. It was a stone slab, black as obsidian, covered in grooves and channels that looked like they had been carved to drain something liquid.
Something red.
The morning light touched its surface and seemed to recoil, sliding away like water off oil.
Sebastian took a step forward. Then another.
The bond screamed.
Sebastian's third step never landed.
The bond didn't just scream.
It howled—a jagged, splintering sound that existed somewhere behind his ribs and inside his skull and beneath his skin all at once.
His knees buckled.
His hands flew to his chest as if he could physically hold himself together, as if he could keep whatever was cracking inside him from spilling out onto the forest floor.
Stop.
The word wasn't his own. It wasn't even a word, not really.
It was a feeling. A command.
A wall of pure, ancient NO slammed into him so hard his vision went white at the edges.
Stop. Turn back. You are not welcome here.
"Sebastian!"
Max's hand closed around his arm, hauling him backward.
Lucian was there a second later, grabbing his other shoulder, and together they dragged him away from the clearing's edge.
Sebastian didn't fight them. He couldn't.
His legs had turned to water, his lungs to paper. Every breath was a blade.
The moment his feet crossed back onto the packed earth of the forest path, the pressure released.
Not all of it. The bond still throbbed like a fresh bruise, still pulsed with something that felt like a warning, but enough. Enough to breathe. Enough to think.
"What the hell was that?" Ellis asked.
The quiet wolf's voice was rough with something that might have been fear.
Timothy stood at the tree line, his arms crossed, his face unreadable. He hadn't moved to help. Hadn't needed to. He had known.
"The Hollow Table," Timothy said slowly, "is not welcoming you in."
Sebastian shoved Max and Lucian off him, staggering to stay upright.
His fangs had descended without his permission. His claws had dug crescents into his own palms. He didn't remember drawing blood.
"It's not just the table," he said, his voice raw. "It's me. The bond. It's trying to keep me out."
Lucian frowned. "The bond? I thought that connected you to Lucas. Why would it—"
"Because it's protecting him." Sebastian's chest heaved.
He pressed a hand flat against his sternum, where the bond pulsed like a second heart.
"It knows something I don't. Or someone."
Timothy's expression didn't change, but something in his eyes shifted. Darkened.
"The Table has a will of its own. Older than any pack. Older than any coven. If it doesn't want you there, Sebastian, there's a reason."
"I don't care about the reason," Sebastian's voice cracked. "Lucas is in there."
"And you'll be no good to him dead." Timothy stepped forward, close enough that Sebastian could smell the pine and smoke on his coat.
"The Table won't kill you quickly. It will draw it out. It will make you watch yourself fall apart piece by piece. I've seen it happen."
Sebastian wanted to argue.
Wanted to shove past Timothy and run into that clearing and damn the consequences. But the bond was still humming, still warning, still wrapped around his ribs like a chain pulled taut.
Not for you, it seemed to say. Not yet. Not like this.
He closed his eyes. Breathed. Forced his fangs back. Forced his hands to uncurl.
"Then what do I do?" he asked, and the question tasted like surrender.
Timothy studied him for a long moment.
Then he turned and walked to the edge of the trees, stopping just shy of the clearing's invisible border.
"Stay here," he said. "Max, Lucian, Ellis, with me. We find Lucas. We bring him out." He glanced back at Sebastian over his shoulder.
"And you wait. However long it takes. You wait."
Sebastian opened his mouth to refuse.
The bond tightened around his chest like a warning hand.
He closed his mouth.
Timothy nodded once, then stepped into the clearing.
The wolves followed. Sebastian watched them go, watched Max's broad shoulders disappear between the twisted trees, watched Lucian's lean form swallowed by the strange, wrong light of the Hollow Table.
And then he was alone.
The forest pressed in around him, silent and watchful.
The bond hummed low and steady now, not screaming, just... waiting.
Sebastian sank down against the trunk of a gnarled oak, pulled his knees to his chest, and waited with it.