Wolfbound

The rain starts before the call comes.

It always does.

I'm standing at the kitchen sink, hands wrapped around a chipped mug gone cold, watching water slide down the window like the world is slowly dissolving. The sky is the color of bruised clouds, heavy and waiting. I've learned that this kind of rain doesn't pass it settles in, makes a home of you.

That's when my phone begins to vibrate against the counter.

I already know who it is.

I let it ring once. Twice. My chest tightens the way it has every day since my father disappeared like my heart is bracing for something it can't outrun. When I finally answer, I don't say hello.

"Amaris," my mother's voice says softly, as if speaking louder might break something already fragile. Kamaria always sounds like she's standing somewhere open near trees, near water. Even through the phone, I can almost smell the salt and pine.

I close my eyes.

"I think it's time," she says.

The words settle into me, heavy and inevitable.

Forks.

The name alone stirs something restless beneath my skin, like a memory that isn't quite mine. I haven't been back in years not since my parents separated, not since my father stayed behind with promises he never kept. Not since the forest became something I dreamed about instead of walked through.

"I know," I whisper.

There's a pause on the line, filled with the sound of wind. Then, quieter: "The land's been... unsettled."

I don't ask what she means. We both know.

Outside, a crow lands on the fence, black feathers slick with rain. It tilts its head, watching me through the glass. Animals have been doing that more lately lingering too long, unafraid. As if they're waiting for me to notice something I don't yet understand.

My father used to say the rain in Washington wasn't sad. It was patient.

"He didn't vanish without a reason," my mother says, carefully. "You know that."

I swallow hard. The police said missing. No signs of struggle. No body. Just his truck abandoned near the tree line, keys still in the ignition, as if he'd stepped out for a moment and planned to come right back.

Sometimes I still expect him to walk through the door, smelling like wet earth and cedar, asking if I've been feeding the stray cat down the road again.

I always fed it.

I feed everything that looks lost.

"I keep dreaming about him," I admit. "But he never speaks."

"Dreams listen even when people don't," my mother says.

That sounds like something she learned long before me.

After we hang up, I move through the apartment in silence. My suitcase sits open on the bed, half-filled with clothes I never really liked. I don't pack much. I've never been good at holding on to things. Plants, animals, moments they all seem to pass through me gently, like I'm meant to care for them, not keep them.

Thunder murmurs in the distance.

I step outside, letting the rain soak into my hair, my clothes, my skin. It doesn't bother me. It never has. The air smells clean here, but it's wrong somehow too open, too loud. Not like the forests of Forks that press close and breathe with you.

For a moment, I swear I hear something else beneath the rain.

A low sound. Distant. Almost like a heartbeat.

Or a howl.

I shake my head, laughing softly at myself. Grief does strange things. It fills the silence with ghosts.

Still, my pulse won't slow.

That night, I dream of trees taller than memory and mist curling around my ankles. I dream of eyes glowing in the dark not threatening, just watching. Protecting. I dream of my father standing at the edge of the forest, half-hidden by shadow, his mouth moving as if he's calling my name.

When I wake, my pillow is damp with tears I don't remember crying.

The decision is already made.

I will go back to Forks. Back to the rain. Back to my mother and the reservation and the land that seems to remember me better than I remember myself. Whatever took my father is there. Whatever is calling me is there too.

The mist has been waiting.

And somehow terrifyingly it feels like I have been waiting for it right back.