The sun rode high as the red Feral Eclipse tour bus rolled west into Iowa, cutting a lazy trail across fields that stretched out like patchwork. Des Moines rose up in the distance — modest, familiar, and distinctly homegrown. Cassie stood near the front of the bus, arms crossed, one foot braced on the step behind the driver’s seat. Her dark red hair was pulled into a loose braid that had mostly unraveled by now, and her green eyes tracked the skyline like she was trying to remember every inch of it before it was gone again.
“I used to think this place was small,” she said softly, more to herself than to anyone in particular. “Now it just feels… full.”
Thane stood beside her, quiet, steady. “Let’s go fill it up a little more.”
Diesel made a low “mmhmm” from the driver’s seat and gently turned the wheel toward the city.
The high school looked smaller than Cassie remembered. Roosevelt High had always seemed massive to her as a teenager — a fortress of lockers and looming judgment. Now it just looked tired. The linoleum floors hadn’t changed. The trophy cases were still full of track medals, debate plaques, and a few dusty jazz band ribbons. And her locker, of course, still had the dent from the time Jonah had tried to demonstrate “kinetic physics” using a loaded backpack and a questionable understanding of momentum.
Cassie reached out and pressed her fingers against the cool metal.
“I can still feel the bruise,” she muttered, smirking.
Jonah, right behind her, made a defensive noise. “It worked in theory.”
They walked the halls like ghosts, brushing against memories that lived in echoes. Gabriel tried—unsuccessfully—not to get caught sticking FERAL RULEZ in dry-erase marker on the corner of a whiteboard. Mark caught him mid-defacement, loomed silently behind him, and confiscated the marker with surgical precision. Gabriel made a soft whine and retreated with a sulk.
Cassie led them down to the music room.
Ms. Tate stood just inside the door. Her silver curls were pulled into a loose bun, and her hands were clasped in front of her like she didn’t trust herself not to cry.
“I told you you’d be someone,” she whispered.
Cassie stepped forward and hugged her tight. “You told me I already was.”
It started as a rumor — just a quiet whisper that Cassie and the wolves were in town. Within hours, someone leaked it to the fairgrounds committee, and everything shifted. By evening, the Summer Fest closing lineup had been shuffled around to make room for a surprise act.
The Feral Eclipse crew didn’t argue. It wasn’t a full production — no pyro, no LED walls, no sprawling crew of stagehands and designers. Just what they had on the bus and what Thane and Mark could scrounge from what the fair already had.
Mark spent an hour cursing softly while rerouting power from a popcorn stand to get the riser lights to stop flickering. Thane balanced two wireless mics on a hay bale because the soundboard was missing half its faders. Jonah re-tuned the drums with duct tape and prayer. Emily used a strand of fairy lights to jury-rig a backdrop that at least glowed if not impressed.
And then, just as the sun slipped behind the Ferris wheel, the crowd gathered in front of the stage and began to chant.
“Cassie. Cassie. Cassie.”
She stepped out to screams.
The fairground lights cast her in gold. Her boots thudded against the old wooden planks of the stage. She stared out into the sea of faces — some young, some familiar, some wide-eyed — and for just a moment, she froze.
These were the people who used to roll their eyes at her in math class. Who called her weird. Loud. Too much. And now… they were screaming for her.
She grinned, grabbed the mic, and let out a howl that cracked straight into the opening chords of Wild Static Heart.
The set only lasted five songs, but they played like the earth was on fire. Gabriel snapped a bass string. Rico soloed so hard his amp hissed at the end. Cassie climbed onto a speaker stack and held her arms out wide, voice raw, full-throated, and untamed.
Her voice rang out like thunder over the Iowa cornfields.
They didn’t have a green room — just a row of folding lawn chairs behind the stage and a cooler full of water bottles that were already half warm. Cassie collapsed into one of the chairs and tipped her head back to stare at the stars.
“That was insane,” she said, barely above a whisper.
“You were insane,” Gabriel replied. “You fried that speaker. I saw its soul leave its body.”
Mark dropped a towel on her lap and sat nearby. “It’ll recover. Probably.”
Cassie stared down at her hands for a moment, still trembling slightly. “I used to sneak into this fair with a fake pass. Just to stand near the stage. Just to dream.”
Thane knelt beside her chair. “And now?”
Her voice was quiet. “Now I know it was never a dream. Just a really slow entrance.”
He smiled. “You’re home.”
Cassie looked around at the others — her pack, her people, her chaos — and nodded.
Somewhere off in the distance, fireworks boomed. Kids screamed near the Ferris wheel. The fair played a canned pop song over tinny speakers — but no one was really listening. They were too busy talking about the girl who screamed like lightning and sang like she meant it.
In the crowd, somewhere just past the lights, a girl in a handmade Feral Eclipse shirt whispered to her friend, “That’s gonna be me one day.”
Cassie heard it. She smiled wider.
“Hell yeah it is,” she whispered.