Chapter 21
Rane
She’s still asleep.
I know because I checked. Not in a creepy way — I just cracked the door and looked.
She’s curled up on Beckett’s side of the bed, face buried in the pillow, one hand fisted in the sheet.
Beckett’s already downstairs. He left without waking her and I don’t know how because she’s literally wrapped around where he was.
I close the door and mouth “let her sleep” at Kyron, who’s standing in the hallway with his arms crossed looking like he’s been awake for hours. He probably has.
He nods.
Downstairs, the house is already moving. Vaelor’s in the kitchen — obviously — and from the sounds of it he’s already reorganized whatever was in the cabinets. Locke is wiping down the table. Trey is on his knees in front of the fireplace with kindling and an expression of deep concentration.
“Did anyone sleep?” I ask.
“Vaelor cooked,” Beckett says from the corner, like that’s an answer. He’s got his laptop open on his knees.
“That’s not sleep.”
“It’s what Vaelor does instead of sleep. You know this.”
I do know this. At the Academy, we’d wake up at three in the morning and find him making bread. It was either comforting or concerning depending on how much he’d already made.
Kyron comes down the stairs. “She’s out. Hasn’t moved.”
“Good,” Locke says. He doesn’t look up from the table but his shoulders drop slightly. “Let her rest.”
“You just had to look,” I say looking at him with my best annoyed face.
He grins. “Of course I did.”
Everyone agrees without saying it. That’s how it works with us — half our conversations happen in nods and looks and the absence of argument.
I grab a piece of whatever Vaelor made — some kind of flatbread with cheese — and head for the back door because the house feels too full and too quiet at the same time and I need air.
The backyard is bigger than I expected. There’s a fence that’s more suggestion than boundary, a patch of dirt that might have been a garden once, and beyond that, the edge of the forest.
And on the fence, watching me with dark eyes, a crow.
It’s the same one from yesterday. The one that was on the ledge when we walked into Minerva’s building. The one on the windowsill when we left. Just sitting there. Head tilted. Studying me with an intelligence that birds shouldn’t have. Probably a shifter.
“Morning,” I say to it, because apparently I talk to birds now.
It doesn’t move.
I take a bite of the flatbread and look past the crow, past the fence, into the tree line.
There’s something there.
Big. Still. Watching me the same way the crow is watching me but from thirty feet away.
Marcus.
The stag from the forest. The one Brent nodded at like a neighbor. He’s standing at the edge of the trees, those massive antlers catching the early light, and his gold eyes are on me.
Something happens in my chest.
Not whatever this bond thing is. It’s not the pull I feel toward Nova. This is different. This is recognition. Like looking into a mirror that shows you something you didn’t know was there.
I set the flatbread down on the porch railing. I don’t think about it. My feet just start moving. Across the yard. Past the fence. Toward him.
He doesn’t run. Doesn’t even shift his weight. Just watches me come closer with those gold eyes.
I stop about five feet away. He’s bigger up close. His shoulders are higher than my head. The antlers spread wide enough that I could lie down between them. Up close I can see the scars — old ones, running along his flank, across his chest. He’s been through things.
I reach out.
My hand is shaking and I don’t know why. I’m about to touch a wild animal that could kill me and I can’t stop myself because something in me needs to know what he feels like. What I feel like.
My fingers are inches from his nose.
“Rane, what the fuck—”
Brent. Coming around the side of the house.
“Sorry, I just—”
Pain rips through me so suddenly I can’t breathe.
There’s no warning, no nothing.
One second I’m standing there with my hand out and the next second I’m not standing. I’m… I don’t know what…
The ground is further away and closer at the same time. My hands are gone. My feet are gone. Something is on my head that weighs more than it should and the world looks different — sharper, wider, colors I don’t have names for.
I can hear Brent’s heartbeat from across the yard.
I can smell the flatbread on the porch railing. The smoke from the chimney. Nova, upstairs, asleep. She smells like warmth and something sweet and I—
Marcus makes a sound. Low. Not threatening. Something between acknowledgment and welcome.
I don’t know how I know that.
I look at him. He looks at me.
He’s shorter than I am now.
Oh.
Oh fuck.
“GUYS!” Brent is yelling toward the house. Not panicked — more like bewildered. “Someone — you need to — just come outside!”
The back door bangs open. Locke first, because of course. Then Kyron. Then Trey, who stops dead on the porch.
They see two stags in the backyard.
“Where’s Rane?” Locke is scanning. Counting.
Trey’s head snaps between me and Marcus. “Which one is—”
“The white one,” Brent says. He sounds like he still doesn’t believe it. “The white one is Rane.”
Everyone stares at me.
“Holy shit,” Trey says.
Vaelor appears behind them, a towel over his shoulder, and his mouth falls open.
“He’s glowing,” Kyron says. Flat. Like he’s reporting a fact he hasn’t processed yet.
Beckett steps out last. Looks at me. Looks at Marcus. Looks at me again.
“Well,” he says. “That’s new.”
I try to say something. What comes out is not words. It’s a sound — deep and resonant and coming from somewhere in my chest that didn’t exist five minutes ago.
The crow on the fence ruffles its feathers. Like it’s been expecting this.
I look down at myself. Legs that aren’t legs. A body that’s bigger than I’ve ever been. I can feel the antlers — branching, heavy, alive in a way that shouldn’t make sense. My hooves — I have hooves — are pressing into the soft earth.
I’m a stag.
I didn’t mean to do this. I didn’t try. I didn’t even think about it. I just saw him and something inside me opened up and now I’m standing in the backyard of a house in the Hollow, shifted into an animal I didn’t know I was, while my cluster stares at me from the porch.
“Can you shift back?” Kyron asks. Practical as ever.
I have no idea.
I try. Nothing happens.
I try harder. Still nothing.
Marcus nudges me with his nose. Gentle. Like he’s saying: stop trying. Just be here.
Locke comes down the porch steps. Slowly. He walks across the yard and stops in front of me and looks up because I’m taller than him now, which is a first.
“You’re beautiful,” he says. Quiet. And then his mouth twitches. “Don’t tell Nova I said that. She’ll steal it.”
A sound comes out of me that might be a laugh. I don’t know what a stag laughing sounds like but I think that’s it.
From the upstairs window, I hear movement. A curtain pulling back.
I look up.
Nova’s face. Sleep-creased. Hair a disaster. Staring down at me with her mouth open.
Then she grins.
And something in my chest settles. It isn’t the shift, or the animal I’ve become. It’s something else. Something that’s been waiting.
I’m a stag. I’m standing in the backyard. The crow is watching. Marcus is beside me. My cluster is on the porch. And the woman I’d do anything for is grinning at me through a window like I just made her whole morning.
I don’t know how to shift back.
But right now, I don’t really want to.