Mark, Stop!
—SAGE
“Absolutely not,” I say. “You cannot name her that.”
“Why not?”
Eden is sprawled across the sunroom nest like she’s been poured there, the book of name meanings Therael brought her balanced on the top of her bump. “It means gift from gods, which she literally is. It’s dogmatic.”
“You mean thematic, sweetheart,” Ashán corrects.
“It’s also the name of the goat,” I murmur.
“... Your goat?”
“If by my goat you mean the one that screams at me every time we go to Elena’s—then yes. I love that you want to name our daughter after a goat that has personally threatened my life.”
“Ignore him, Eden. He takes after his mentor… remember the baby swan?” Ash winks at her.
Eden laughs so hard that tears start spilling down her face.
Which is honestly happening at an alarming rate these days.
Droot cracks an eye open from where he’s been asleep on the windowsill.
Once he decides the noise isn’t a threat to his fruit bowl, he goes back to sleep.
The kettle hisses from the kitchen. The morning is slow and full of her giggles, and I am crouched at the edge of the nest pretending to be exasperated when I would really let her name our daughter after a hundred screaming goats if it meant she’d keep making that sound.
“Okay.” She wipes her eyes. “Not the goat name. But we have to pick something, Sage. I’m five and a half months pregnant, and Elena thinks we’ll run even shorter than a regular pregnancy.”
Pain shoots through the back of my skull as I reach to steal the book off her belly.
The world around me whites out and I go down.
My body smacks the floor, and the name book lands open beside me.
I stare at the pages without seeing them, while something cold and white starts to float behind my eyes.
“Sage? Oh my god, your head is bleeding. I’ve got the dust right here in my pocket.” I can hear her scrabbling around to grab the pouch. “Hold on, Vaelí. I’ve got you. I’m so sorry, Ashán. I have to.”
As the cold spreads over my body, some ancient part of me wakes up for the first time.
This time we go all the way down, it whispers.
The dust hits the back of my throat, and I wait for the vision to evaporate the way it always does. But the cold doesn’t soften this time. Something grabs the back of my neck and shoves me down into the snow.
When I stand back up, the cold bites through a coat that isn’t mine. The hands in front of my face don’t belong to me. They’re pale and narrow with a thin white scar across my left knuckle.
The wind howls through the pines, nipping at my face. There’s a woman running through the trees. Dark hair streaming behind her, breath fogging the chilly air. She stumbles blindly in the deep drifts.
But this time I’m not chasing her—she’s chasing me.
“Wait—” she shouts, her voice cracking with desperation. “Stop!”
I try to turn, but my legs won’t budge. My boots are rooted to the ground.
A familiar thrum hums deep in my chest, and the feeling is so familiar, it makes me sick. It’s an aching pull that I recognize instantly. It’s a soulbond. The same frequency that connects me to Eden.
“Mark!” she screams. “Mark, stop!”
Who is Mark? Why is she calling me that?
Suddenly I’m dropped into a dark box that smells like stale dust and cheap alcohol.
In front of me is a small brunette boy. He’s shivering so hard his teeth are clicking together, his knees pulled tight against his chest. He switches on a flashlight, and I realize we’re sitting in an old closet.
His eyes are wide with terror. From outside the heavy slatted door, a crash echoes.
The sound of glass shattering, followed by a woman’s scream.
It’s a raw, wet sound that makes the little boy in front of me flinch so hard he hits his head against the wall behind him.
A sob hitches in his throat, his small hands flying up to cover his own face.
“Don’t look, MK,” someone whispers.
I look around, searching for whoever said it, and my mind reels when I understand it came from my own throat. I am the other person. I’m not watching a memory play out; I am a memory playing out, hiding in the dark, shifting forward on my knees until my small shins press against his.
My hands are tiny, with a white scar across my left knuckle. They tremble, but I force them steady as I pull his hands away from his face.
“Look at me,” I whisper to my twin brother. “MK. Open your eyes.”
His wet, bloodshot eyes lock onto mine as he reaches for me, his fingers digging into my torn sleeves.
Another scream rips through the wood, and MK lets out a whimper, burying his head between his knees. I slide my small palms over his ears, pressing down hard until the sharpest edges of the violence outside our tiny sanctuary are muffled.
I lean in until my forehead is resting against his, and I start to hum. The same way I hum to calm the soil in the greenhouse.
I never learned it from the earth—I brought it with me.
I hum until the vibration fills the tiny closet, creating an invisible barrier between my brother and the monster on the other side of the door.
“Once upon a time,” I whisper against his skin, “there was a prince who lived in a castle made of iron. No one could get in. No one could hurt him. He had a brother who was a great knight, and they sat in the highest tower where the sky was always quiet, and the air always smelled like cotton candy…”
A small gold dragon made of dust floats in the air between us. MK’s breathing starts to slow, his small forehead pressing harder into mine. I keep humming, weaving new stories, while I hold the walls of our little box together.
“I l-love you, Micah,” he mumbles as his body gives way to exhaustion. We stay there for hours. Long after the screaming stops and the house goes silent. The gray morning light finally peeks through the slats in the closet door.
Micah.
The name lands the way a stone drops down a well.
That’s my name. I am Micah—the boy who hums into the dark to keep his brother safe—and the brother clinging to my sleeve, MK… is Mark.
The closet disappears, and I am back in the brutal winter forest, and the woman from before is still there, frozen mid-stumble. Her dark hair covers her face, but I know that I know her. Why else would she be screaming a name that belongs to the boy I held in the dark?
I don’t know how long I lie on the sunroom floor after the vision lets me go. Long enough that the light has changed, and the blood at my temple has dried. Eden smooths her hand over my hair, whispering I’ve got you over and over again.
Ashán? I call out, even though I know he can’t answer yet.
“Vaelí?” Eden’s hand finds my jaw. Her eyes are red-rimmed. “You’re scaring me. Talk to me. What did you see? Was it the woman again?”
I open my mouth to tell her.
And I can’t.
How do I look at my mate, round with our daughter, and tell her I don’t know who I am?
That I had a brother. That I had a name before this one.
A life where I hid away in a closet, humming to keep someone I loved safe—and I still don’t know what any of it means.
I can’t tell her until I understand it myself.
I reach for the one person who has never once pretended the ground was solid.
“I just need a minute,” I tell her. “Would you put the kettle back on?”
She doesn’t want to leave me. I can feel it, but she kisses my forehead and makes her way into the kitchen.
The moment she’s gone, I call for him.
Therael. If you can hear me. I need you.
A swirl of leaves spirals up from nothing in the center of the sunroom. Therael steps out of the vortex, takes one look at me, and his face falls.
“How much did you see?”
I push myself up, and my head revolts.
“Who is Micah?”
Beneath his translucent skin, the warmth of amber traveling through his veins halts, replaced with a pale winter blue. The leaves of his halo turn yellow and brittle.
“Where did you hear that name?”
“From my own mouth,” I rasp. “I was in a closet with a little boy named Mark.” My hands won’t stop shaking. “Therael, I had a brother. I had a life I don’t remember, a name that wasn’t this one—and I need you to tell me.” My voice cracks. “Who is Micah?”
He slowly lowers himself onto the floor in front of me, the way you would approach a wounded animal.
“I cannot” he whispers.
“You can’t?”
“I cannot tell you who Micah is.” His eyes find mine.
“Not because I don’t know. I know exactly who he is.
I have always known.” The color of his eyes begins to swirl.
“But there are things about you that I am bound from saying. You know that. I have never once hidden it from you—I told you there were truths I would not be able to give you, no matter how badly I wanted to.” He pats my knee.
“And I want to, Little Reaper. You cannot imagine how badly I want to.”
The Horsemen tried to convince me that Therael had been keeping things from me for the fun of it. But staring into his eyes, at the way he can’t quite hold my gaze without the glowing currents of his veins stuttering in his throat, I know they were wrong.
He isn’t toying with me. He’s grieving while he watches me drown an inch from his hand without any way to throw me a rope.
“I believe you,” I murmur. “If you can’t tell me who I was, then tell me what you can. Anything. Give me something to hold onto before I lose my mind trying to fill in all the missing pieces by myself.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. The frost in his veins slows, like grains of sand falling into an hourglass.
“I cannot tell you who you were,” he says finally, “but I can tell you what is true—and you must listen closely, Sage, because this is the most I am able to give you.”
The leaves of his halo resume their twirling.
“The seed that withered in the frost, still remembers what was lost.
In every life, beneath the sun, the hunter’s chase was never done.
You chased after a mirrored light, a phantom spark beneath the night.
A sister’s shroud, a borrowed flame, to find the hearth that knows your name.
You hunted where the echo stayed, by one small piece of soul betrayed.
But look behind the iron door, the ghost you fear, the skin you wore.
Is not a curse the heavens made, but a shelter where your grief was laid.
To wake the man, you break the bough, and bleed the past into the now.”
The brittle, yellow leaves of his halo rattle as the last line leaves his mouth. A puff of gold magic snaps through the air. He winces, the frost in his veins pulsing erratically. Whatever he just did hurt him, and he did it anyway.
“Therael.” My hand closes over his cold forearm. “I won’t ask you to give me more.”
“I know.” His voice is threadbare, gold limping back into his veins. “But you needed something. I think of you like one of my—”
My eyes snap to his.
“I cannot stay,” he murmurs. “I must go back to my realm to seek… answers.”
I reach for his arm, but my fingers slip through as the air spins and the vortex of leaves collapses inward, vanishing and leaving nothing behind but a single pine needle.
“Like your what, Therael…” I whisper to an empty room.