Nova
I’m the first out of the door and I do not give a shit.
Behind me chairs scrape. Trey’s coffee hits the counter.
Outside the Hollow is already reacting. Doors opening. People on porches with their hands shading their eyes. Someone down the road calling a name. The normal morning sounds from thirty seconds ago just — gone.
I get to the porch and stop.
Movement in the tree line. Crashing. Wrong.
The hoofbeats are louder now and more uneven and I can hear breathing that carries and that’s how I know it’s bad, that’s how I know before I see him because something that big doesn’t breathe like that unless—
Marcus bursts from the trees.
One antler.
That’s what I see first. One antler where there should be two, the break ragged and dark, and he’s moving but barely staying upright. His legs going wrong under him, blood on his flank catching the morning light.
“Marcus—” Rane’s voice. Not loud. Just broken.
He’s already running.
Marcus makes it to the road.
Tries to keep going.
His legs buckle.
The shift when it comes is violent and incomplete and wrong, bones cracking too fast, and he hits the road in human form hard enough that I feel it in my chest from the porch.
I’m moving before I decide to.
Rane reaches him first, dropping to his knees in the dirt, hands already on Marcus’s shoulders.
“Hey. Hey, hey, hey—”
Brent comes from somewhere down the road at a run. He gets there fast, dropping beside Marcus, hands moving with the specific efficiency of someone who’s done this before. Checking his neck. His side. The blood.
The Hollow is gathering. I can feel it. Doors opening wider. People stepping off porches. A woman pulling her kid back by the collar. Someone asking what happened, what happened, what—
Marcus’s eyes open.
He finds Rane first.
Then he finds me.
“They’re coming.”
His breathing turns ragged.
His eyes close.
Rane’s hands tighten on his shoulders. “Marcus. Marcus—”
“He’s breathing,” Brent says. Not soft. Just fact. “He’s breathing.”
No one’s talking. They don’t have to.
“Where has he been?” I hear myself say it. “All this time — we thought he just — where has he been?”
Brent doesn’t look up from Marcus.
“Out there,” he says nodding to the treeline. “Every day. Trying to catch them between him and the other shifters before they got to the town.” He takes a breath. “Trying to warn us if they did.”
The road is quiet.
“Silas,” Locke says. Low.
Brent nods once.
“He was there,” he says. “When Silas came. He tried then too.”
I look at the broken antler on the road.
He’s been out there alone this whole time. Fighting a war none of us could see. And Silas got through anyway. Now whatever’s coming broke his antler and he still ran here because he needed to warn us.
To give us a fighting chance.
I won’t let that go to waste.
“How long?” I say, flat. “How long do we have?”
Brent looks up at me.
“Not long,” he says.
I look at my guys.
At the Hollow spreading out behind them.
At my home.
“Alright,” I say. Loud enough for the road to hear it. “Let’s go.”