LOGINRebecca's POVClaire and I watched from the end of the corridor.Not obviously — we were not standing there staring. We had moved to the end of the corridor the way Ember had asked, and we were nominally looking at our phones and nominally having our own conversation, but we were also watching the two figures by the notice board in the way that people watched things they were pretending not to watch."She is not happy," Claire said."No," I said."He is not happy either.""No."Claire sipped her coffee. "That is what feelings look like.""It is more than that," I said.Claire looked at me. "More than feelings.""I do not know what exactly," I said. "But yes. There is something going on between those two that is not just — romantic tension and a quarrel." I watched Knox pick up his bag. I watched him say something final and walk away. I watched Ember stand there and not watch him go, which was its own kind of watching. "Something has happened. Something significant. And neither of them
Ember's POVI looked at him.He was waiting for the answer — which one is it, what you saw or something else — with the patient, direct expression he had when he had asked the real question and was not going to accept a deflection in place of it.I tried to find the deflection anyway.I looked at the corridor. I looked at the notice board beside us. I looked at the floor.Then I looked at him."I do not believe you," I said.Knox said nothing."Any of it," I said. "The wolf, the hybrid, the — I saw something in that building last night that I cannot explain. I am not disputing that. But the rest of it—" I stopped. "I think you are trying to trick me."He looked at me steadily. "Trick you into what.""Into believing something about myself that is not true," I said. "Into feeling like I need you. Like you are the only person who understands what is happening to me and I have to stay close to you because of it." I kept my voice even. "That is a very convenient story for someone with your
Ember's POVHe called after me twice.I did not stop either time.The morning was cold and the tree line was quiet around the path and I walked fast without looking back, through the gap in the fence and onto the campus path and across the quad and into the girls dormitory before the building had fully woken up.My room was empty. Alice's side was undisturbed — she had not noticed I had not come back, or had not cared, which amounted to the same useful outcome.I changed fast. Yesterday's clothes off, something clean on, hair fixed as well as it could be fixed given the circumstances. I looked in the mirror once and decided not to look again. I picked up my bag and my notes and I went to class.---Rebecca and Claire were in the main school hall.I saw them before they saw me — standing near the notice board at the entrance, Claire with her coffee, Rebecca looking at her phone with the focused expression she had when she was reading something carefully. Normal. Completely normal. The
Ember's POVThe morning came in slowly through the gaps in the boarded windows.Thin strips of it. Gray first, then warmer. The building around us becoming visible in stages — the concrete walls, the two latches on the door, the floor where we had sat through the night. Everything ordinary and abandoned and not a place two people should have spent the night on a concrete floor.I was stiff everywhere.I shifted and my back protested and my legs protested and everything that had been through last night's pain protested in its own specific way. I pressed my hands flat on the floor and pushed myself upright and sat with my back against the wall and looked at the room in the morning light.Knox was already awake. He was sitting a few feet from me, arms resting on his knees, watching me with the quiet alertness of someone who had not slept much and had been present through all of it and was waiting to see what morning produced."How are you?" he said."Done," I said.He looked at me."I am
Ember's POVMy hand was on the door handle.I pulled it.It did not open.Not because the handle had failed — because something was on the other side of it. Something large and present that pushed back against the door with a weight that was not human and held it shut without effort.I stumbled back.The wolf was in front of me.Not Knox. Knox was gone. In his place was something that filled the doorway in a way that Knox's human body did not fill doorways — larger, lower, the shape of it wrong in every dimension that my brain tried to apply to a person. Dark fur and the bulk of it and the specific stillness of something that was not still in the way furniture was still. Alive-still. Aware-still.The eyes.Gold. Burning. The same gold I had seen twice in Knox's face in human form and had told myself I had imagined — but not in his face now, in the face of the thing in front of me that was Knox and was not Knox, and the gold looked at me the way something looked at you when it recogniz
Ember's POVThe inside of the building smelled of concrete and age and something else underneath both of those — something I could not name but that landed in my senses the same way everything had been landing differently for weeks. Sharp and layered and more present than it should have been.Knox had a small torch. He turned it on once we were inside — a narrow beam of light that found the walls and the floor and the door at the back of the ground floor. The building was not large. Not comfortable either. Just a space.He stopped in the middle of the main room and turned to face me."Before I show you anything," he said, "I want to make a deal with you."I looked at him. "What kind of deal.""Simple," he said. "You tell me one thing that proves you have no wolf blood. One thing that explains everything — the sounds, the smells, the dreams, last night, the timing with the full moon. Give me one explanation that covers all of it." He held the torch at his side so the light sat between
Knox's POVShe had not made it easy.I had not expected her to. Ember did not make things easy when she had a reason to push back and she had a legitimate reason here — a sister she had never known existed, a portal that would close in three days, and a mother's name she had heard for the first tim
Ember's POVThe train back was quiet.I sat in my seat with my bag on my lap and the word in my mouth and my chest, not saying it to myself exactly but not quite letting it go either. Reva. My father had said it twice and then sat at the kitchen table for a long time not saying anything, and I had
Knox's POVI left the field before midnight.Whatever had been in the tree line had not moved while I stood watching. It had not approached, had not made a sound. After twenty minutes of standoff in which neither side did anything, I had walked backward to the edge of the field, picked up my bag, a
Ember's POVI took the train on Saturday morning.My father lived forty minutes out of the city by rail, in the same house I had grown up in, in the same neighborhood that looked exactly like it had always looked except that I no longer fit inside it the same way. I had not been back since the star







