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I make a sound I don’t recognize and haul one of his arms over my shoulders. “You’re comin’ inside,” I say, and it comes out like an order because if I let it come out as a plea, I’m going to lose it right here in the mud. “You can pass out after I get you through the damn door, you stubborn, ancient asshole.”

His mouth twitches. It’s barely anything; a ghost of the dry humor I’ve missed so much I could scream.

Soft insult.

I almost laugh. I almost sob. What comes out is something in between.

“Yeah,” I choke out. “Soft insult. Keep walking.”

And he tries—God, he tries to walk, and that almost kills me worse than if he didn’t. He tries because I ask, because even half dead or whatever the hell he is, some part of Onyx still hears my voice and tries to answer, even though his legs barely hold.

I reposition and get one of his arms over my shoulders, hauling him toward the porch, step by brutal step. The cabin light grows closer. The Labrador tea scent grows stronger until it wraps around the whole clearing, rich and overwhelming, and under it is blood, old stone, deep earth, something rotten burned away.

He mumbles again, words I can’t catch. Not English. Maybe not any human language. Every few steps, his body shudders like it wants to shift and can’t. Once, the shadow of an antler pushes under the skin at his temple, and he makes a low, pained sound that makes me tighten my grip.

“Don’t you dare die on my porch,” I say, fumbling with the lock while holding him up with my hip and shoulder. “I swear to God, Onyx, I will find your forest goddess and file the most aggressive complaint she’s ever heard.”

His head lolls against mine. Through the bond, weak as a hand pressed to glass, comes the faintest thread of amusement.

Aestrata… ignores… complaints.

It’s broken, fuzzy, and barely there. But it’s him.

I get the door open and drag him inside.

The cabin explodes with his scent the moment he crosses the threshold. Labrador tea, rain, blood, old stone, and that deep wildness I thought I’d never breathe again. My knees nearly give out from the sheer sensory violence. The bond surges once, hot and bright enough that I gasp, one hand flying to the mark as it pulses under my skin.

Onyx collapses before I can get him to the bedroom.

I go down with him because I refuse to let him hit the floor alone. We land hard in the narrow space between the couch and coffee table, my shoulder cracking against the rug, his weight half across me. I shove myself upright, gasping, and pull his arm out from under his body before he can hurt it worse.

His eyes are half open, unfocused. His breathing is shallow, too uneven. Blood is everywhere and not enough at the same time, because I have no idea where the worst of it is coming from.

“Onyx.” I drop to my knees beside him and press two fingers to his neck because human panic needs human checks, even if he isn’t human. His pulse is there. Too slow? Too fast? I have no baseline for ancient forest cryptid in human form after possible goddess-related wilderness trauma. “Fuck. Fuck, okay. You’re here. You’re here.”

He doesn’t answer, but the bond is alive now. Wild, flickering, full of static heat where it had been cold. It hurts almost as much as the absence did, because I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know where he’s been. I don’t know why he shut me out. I don’t know what came back with him, what hurt him, what he ran from, or whether I should be locking the door against the forest or opening every window because his blood smells too strong in here.

I sit back on my heels, hands hovering over him, terrified to touch the wrong place. My anger crawls back, rising through shock.

“You were gone for two months,” I say, voice breaking harder now. “Where the hell have you been?”

Onyx lies unconscious on my cabin floor, bloodied and beautiful and impossible, his human face slack with exhaustion, his black hair tangled around him like shadow.

The scent of Labrador tea fills every corner of the room.

The bond flares, alive, wounded, and wild.

And I kneel there with his blood on my hands, more confused than relieved, more relieved than angry, more angry than I know what to do with, while rain begins to tap softly against the windows and the forest outside keeps its secrets one moment longer.

35

Onyx

I dream with my eyes open somewhere far beneath waking.

The body Lucas dragged into his den-that-is-not-a-den lies slack on the softness I still distrust, lungs drawing shallow air scented with him. Yet I am not completely there. The body remains in his keeping because it must.

But the rest of me moves elsewhere through the dark seam between memory and fever, through the place where gods touch what they once made and unfinished things still reach toward their first shape.