Page 104

I turn and see something at the edge of the trees… something moving wrong.

My first thought is not hope—it’s terror.

The shape at the edge of the trees is wrong in a way my brain refuses at first. Too big for a man, too broken up by shadow to be fully Onyx’s true form, and then it moves with this awful, uneven stutter that makes the hair on the back of my neck rise.

He’s half-shifted. That’s the only way my mind can make sense of it. Human shoulders under too much darkness. One arm more like his than a man’s, claw-tipped and disfigured in the moonlight. Antlers not fully there but trying to be, ghosting above his head in fractured dark shapes that flicker in and out like the form itself can’t hold. A face that looks too hollow.

The skull over his face is cracked along one side, or maybe it only looks cracked because blood has dried in black streaks across the weathered bone. One eye burns pale through the socket. The other flickers and dims as I watch.

The bond tears open between us, flooded and chaotic, and I feel him so suddenly after two months of nothing that my knees nearly give. Pain. Exhaustion. Hunger. Fear. And beneath it all, weaker than it should be but still there, is the shape I know better than my own breathing.

Little Ember.

The thought barely reaches me, then he tries to shift completely.

I have seen Onyx shift before. I have watched true form fold into human shape with strange, aching grace, antlers drawing in, skull softening, slate skin paling beneath bark-like markings.

This isn’t that. This is a collapse.

His body buckles inward in pieces, as if something is forcing him through a doorway made of knives. Antlers shrink halfway and then jerk, skull melting around a face that can’t fully hold. Black hair spills over his shoulders in wet tangles, full of leaves and blood. He drops to one knee in the mud, one hand braced hard against the ground, chest heaving.

I’m running before I decide to. “Onyx!”

His eyes find me, and the bond burns with a frantic relief so raw it steals my breath, even secondhand. I want to scream at him. I want to hit his chest. I want to ask if he knows what he did to me, if he knows what two months of a cold bond, false lanterns, and empty trails can do to a person who had already learned too much about being left.

But he looks destroyed.

“Lu…” He swallows like it hurts enough to blind him and tries again, eyes fixed on me with a wild, half-mad focus. “Lu…cas…”

I stop so suddenly I almost fall, and every thought in my head vanishes.

He said my name.

Not through the bond. Not as meaning pressed into my mind. Out loud. With his mouth. Broken, barely human, each syllable dragged over stone and blood, but mine. My name.

Then he pitches forward, and the world restarts.

I catch him awkwardly because he’s still enormous in human form, and I’m not built to stop a collapsing forest guardian with one arm and a prayer. His weight drives me back a step, but I get both hands under him, one around his ribs, one gripping his shoulder. He’s burning hot and shivering at the same time. His skin is slick with rain and blood. The Labrador tea scent pours off him so strongly it makes my eyes sting.

“Easy,” I say, voice shaking hard enough that I hate it. “Easy, Wildheart, I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

His hand clamps around my forearm. Too tight for a second, then suddenly weak. His fingers leave smears of dark blood against my sleeve.

He mumbles something out loud again, though the words make no sense to me. A broken string of sounds, old and guttural, consonants that don’t belong in any language I know.

“Varkh…ath…Aes…tra…” He coughs, and the sound tears through his chest. “Deep…root…blood…no…”

The bond flashes with images too fast to understand. Black trees. White stone cracked open. Antlers locked with antlers. Teeth in moonlight. A lantern burning blue under water. Something laughing in a voice that is not Onyx’s.

Then nothing but pain.

Blood runs from somewhere near his hairline and cuts down the side of his face. His lips are cracked. Dark stains run along his throat, shoulder, and ribs. His left hand curls and uncurls like he can’t feel all of it. His eyes keep slipping half closed no matter how hard he fights to keep them on me.

“Home,” he croaks.

The word breaks something in me. He doesn’t mean my cabin or his den. Me.

He means me.