Chapter 14
Locke
Five shapes. Low. Spread wide in the tree line, positioned to cut off every angle except the rock at our backs. If these were men, we’d be fine. Six of us, five of them, and I’ve been in worse fights with worse odds. But these aren’t men.
The shapes resolve as my eyes adjust. Shoulders like boulders. Heads too wide, too heavy. The nearest one shifts its weight and the ground under it compresses.
Bears. Five of them. Each one bigger than anything natural.
“Nobody move,” I say. Low. Controlled. The voice I use when things are about to go very wrong.
Behind me Nova’s awake. I heard her gasp, the scramble of blankets, the quick breath of someone who’s been ripped from sleep into danger. Fifteen years of surviving alone means she’s on her feet in seconds. I want to turn around and check on her but I can’t take my eyes off the tree line.
“Locke.” Kyron’s voice. Tight. “Those aren’t—”
“I know.”
They’re not natural. The spacing is too even. The positioning is tactical. And they haven’t charged, which means this isn’t a hunt. It’s an assessment.
Memory’s territory. Memory’s border. And we just walked across it with a woman whose mark shouldn’t exist.
The largest bear takes a step forward. Just one. The others hold their positions. Testing us.
My hands are shaking. Not from fear — from something else.
Something that’s been building in my chest since the night by the well, since Kyron cornered me on the road and said I felt yours from inside the house, since the bond conversation an hour ago when everything I thought I understood about what’s happening to us turned out to be smaller than the truth.
The shaking gets worse.
Nova moves.
I feel her before I see her — heat, rolling off her skin in a wave that reaches me before her footsteps do. She steps past Rane. Past Trey. Past Kyron, whose eyes — I catch it in my peripheral vision — are glowing. Blue, lit from the inside, brighter than at the lake.
She steps in front of me.
In front of me.
The heat intensifies. Her skin is doing something. She’s not shifting, but the air around her is distorting like heat waves. Gold light flickers at her wrists, her neck, the edges of her face. The ground under her bare feet darkens. Scorches.
And none of it touches us. The heat rolls outward toward the bears but where she’s standing, where we’re standing, the air is just warm. Safe. She doesn’t know she’s doing it. Her body is drawing a circle around us and she has no idea.
She’s protecting us. She’s standing between me and five bears the size of trucks with fire crawling up her skin, and she’s protecting us.
Absolutely not.
What the…
The thought isn’t mine. Or it is, but it comes from somewhere older. Somewhere that I can’t…
My chest cracks open.
My actual fucking chest. It feels like my ribs are being pried apart from the inside. My knees buckle. My hands hit the ground and I hear someone say my name, but the sound is wrong, distorted. Too far away.
My spine bows. Something shifts under my skin.
It’s not painful, not at first, but it’s wrong.
And then my body starts to rearrange itself and I can’t stop it.
Then the pain hits. My shoulders pop. My jaw dislocates and reforms and the scream that tears out of me doesn’t sound human because it isn’t.
My fingers dig into the dirt and they’re not fingers anymore, they’re wider, harder, tipped with something sharp that gouges furrows in the earth.
I can’t breathe. I can’t see. Everything is heat and pressure and bone grinding against bone and I want it to stop, I want to take it back, I want—
The pain peaks.
And then I’m something else.
The world snaps into focus so sharp it hurts. I can smell everything — the bears’ musk, the old stone, the scorched earth under Nova’s feet, the sweat and fear from every person behind me. I can hear heartbeats. Five behind me, fast and terrified. Five in front of me, slow and predatory.
And Nova’s.
In sync with mine.
I’m low to the ground. My body is enormous and wrong and mine. Black. I can feel the heat running through me like veins of fire — not Nova’s heat, my own, burning under my skin in cracks and fissures like something that cooled on the surface but never stopped being molten underneath.
The largest bear freezes.
He doesn’t retreat. Just stares the way an animal does when everything changes and they’re suddenly not the only predator in the room.
I open my mouth and the sound that comes out vibrates through the ground. Not a roar. Something lower. Something that says I am the wrong thing to find at your border in a language older than words.
The largest one takes a step backward. Then another. The others mirror it — all five moving in unison, coordinated, retreating into Memory’s forest the way they emerged from it.
Because whatever they expected to find here, it wasn’t a woman made of fire standing next to whatever nightmare I am.
The flames on Nova’s skin die. Slowly, like embers cooling. The gold light fades from her wrists and neck. She’s shaking. She turns around.
Her face when she sees me.
I’ll never forget it.
“Locke?” Her voice is small.
I can’t answer her. I’m not sure what I’d say, even if I could.
“Run.” Kyron’s voice cuts through. Sharp. Urgent. “We need to go. Now. Before they come back with more.”
We run.
I can’t shift back. I don’t know how — I don’t even know how I got here, my body just did it, and now I’m running through Memory’s ancient forest on four legs with fire cracking through my skin and the others sprinting beside me.
Kyron’s in front, his eyes still glowing blue in the dark.
Trey has Nova’s hand, pulling her faster.
I take the rear. Every instinct in this body screams between her and the threat and I listen because I don’t know how to do anything else right now.
We run until the forest thins. Until the old trees give way to younger growth and the canopy opens enough to see sky.
Kyron slows first. The others follow. I don’t stop — I circle back, ears flat, scanning the tree line we just came through. Nothing. No movement. No heartbeats except ours.
I come back to them. Vaelor’s standing at the edge of the group, looking the way we came, breathing hard. He holds for a long moment. Listening.
“We’re clear,” he says.
Nova stops. Doubles over. Hands on her knees, gasping, her whole body heaving with the effort of running flat-out on no sleep.
The others stop around her. Breathing hard. Nobody talking. All of them looking at me.
I need to come back.
I don’t know how. I reach for it — or fucking attempt to anyway. For me, for the body I’ve lived in for twenty-six years — and it resists. It doesn’t want to let go. Whatever I am wants to stay between her and everything else in the world.
Let go.
I force it. And it’s worse than the first time.
The shift back is slower, uglier, my bones grinding in reverse, my spine straightening in a way that feels like it’s being broken rather than reformed.
I hear myself make sounds that aren’t human or animal — somewhere in between, caught in the transition.
I end up on the ground, on my hands and knees. Naked. Shaking so hard my teeth are rattling. The cold air hits my skin that was burning a minute ago and every nerve ending screams.
Nova’s there.
She doesn’t hesitate. She drops down beside me and her hand goes to my shoulder, my neck, my face. Her fingers are warm.
“Hey.” Her voice is steady. How is her voice steady? “Hey. Look at me.”
I look at her. My vision is still adjusting — too sharp, too bright, the human version of the world feels flat and dull after what I just had.
I reach for her. My hand finds her jaw. Her cheek. She’s real. She’s here. She’s alive.
“Don’t you ever—” The words come out wrecked. My voice sounds like something dragged over gravel. “Don’t you ever step in front of me like—”
I see my wrist.
The words die.
My mark. Shadow’s mark. The angular lines I’ve had since I was sixteen, the mark that meant I belonged somewhere.
It’s gone.
In its place is Nova’s mark. Not the same colors, but the same shape.
The one I’ve been staring at on Nova’s wrist since it first appeared in the lake.
The same one that doesn’t match any House.
But where hers runs gold and red, mine is black.
And I mean black. The kind of black that absorbs light.
The kind that looks like it was burned into my skin so hot it went past color into nothing.
“What the fuck?”
Nova follows my eyes. Looks at my wrist. Her lips part.
She reaches out. Her fingers hover over my mark without touching it. Her hand is shaking.
“That’s my mark,” she whispers.
I look at her. She looks at me.
Neither of us has a single word for what’s happening.