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I followed his gaze. The limestone looked exactly the same, except… something about the shadows was wrong.

I tilted my head. The wall seemed to move. Not physically. The rock itself remained perfectly still, but the edges no longer aligned properly with what my eyes insisted I was seeing.

“Barrett.”

The shimmer across his skin intensified as he stepped closer.

The wall changed. No, that wasn’t right. The wall wasn’t changing. My perception of it was.

I blinked hard as a gap appeared.

My heart slammed against my ribs.

The darkness I’d taken for a shadow was suddenly deeper than the rock surrounding it, the edges resolving into a narrow opening.

A passage.

“Tell me you see that,” I whispered.

Barrett stared. “I see it.”

I moved closer, stopping before the strange pressure returned. “Was that there before?”

Barrett turned his head slowly toward me. “No.”

He’d stood in this exact place dozens of times, and there had never been a passage. At least, not one he could see.

I stepped backward. Cold. Heat. Pressure. The passage vanished. I stepped forward again.

The strange sensation passed over me, and the opening returned.

I stared at Barrett. “Some kind of boundary?”

“Boundary for what?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

He looked toward the newly revealed passage.

The shimmer was beginning to fade from his fur, but something about Barrett himself remained different. His shoulders had lowered, his breathing deeper, and he had a stillness to him that reminded me less of the man who baked bread at three in the morning and more of the enormous animal I had first encountered beneath the oak.

Not threatening. Primal. Awake.

“I think… you opened it,” I said. “You walked up to a wall, started sparkling, and now it has a passage in it.”

The opening was narrow but unmistakable, disappearing into darkness beyond the reach of our headlamps.

Beside me, Barrett had gone very still. He was staring into the darkness, his head slightly tilted, the last diamond-bright flecks fading beneath the fur at his throat.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s safe.”

I looked at him. “How do you know?”

His brow furrowed, but he didn’t take his eyes from the passage. “I just do.”

A week ago, that answer would have driven me insane. Now, after watching him choose soil by scent, propagate plants he shouldn’t have been able to grow, and sense roots buried behind solid rock, I was learning that I just do meant something very different when Barrett said it.