Page 164 of Shifting Hearts 1
yet keep walking through the flames.
ONE
Eris
I’ve held thousands of teeth in my lifetime. Milk teeth tied with thread, molars stolen from graves, fangs still slick with blood, but none of them ever pulsed.
This one throbbed like a heartbeat in my palm — not magic, not memory. Presence.
I didn’t need to read the ridges to know who it belonged to. I’d seen his face in my bones. Dreamed of his death more times than I cared to count.
And now the Wyrd Wolf was here.
I woke gasping for air, the scent of pine smoke still clinging to my skin like sweat, as my heart hammered against my ribs as if trying to claw its way out.
The room was quiet, shadows danced across the walls, like spidery fingers. Only the candle I’d forgotten to snuff out burned low on the altar, flickering madly.
The dream lingered like blood in my mouth—Brannan on his knees, chest torn open, silver thread curling from the wound. I had watched it happen. I had felt it.
I sat up, fingers going to the dreambone necklace that never left my throat. Baby teeth — my own, lost in childhood — each bound with silk and time. A charm, a curse, a tether to the between. I wore my past like armour.
At twenty-one, I was old enough to understand the weight of fate, and young enough to still feel the sting of it.
My skin, pale and iridescent like weathered bone or old moonstone, caught the candlelight, faintly glowing with a cold, otherworldly sheen. My eyes — milk-glass grey — seemed to flicker and shift, pupils sometimes vanishing when the magic stirred beneath my gaze. And my hair—jet black, streaked with silver like pulled threads from a skull — fell over my shoulders in loose waves. Small teeth and bone charms were braided into the strands, woven like armour. My nails were bone-coloured and sharp, naturally grown — tools of my craft.
But something was wrong. The string had grown heavier in sleep. My fingers closed around the new weight, as a sharp edge pricked my thumb.
The fang was real. Still warm and still humming with energy.
“No,” I whispered.
This wasn't how fate worked. When the dreambone offered glimpses, they were shadows, warnings—never physical. Never real.
I stumbled to the altar, knocking over a tin of salt and scattering black feathers across the floor. My bones clattered in their bowls—ribs, knuckles, a crow’s skull yellowed with time. I threw the fang into the centre dish and lit the other three candles with trembling hands.
The air around me smelled faintly of mint and decay, and something else both sweet and wrong—like blood on candy.
“Speak,” I told it.
The flame flickered blue, then green, then bone-white.
Nothing.
I ground grave-dust into the blood smear on my thumb and touched the fang with it.
The hum grew louder.
Still not memory. Still not magic… at least not quite.
I couldn’t make sense of it. Unless... he wasn’t dead. Unless this wasn’t a warning, but a summons. I pressed both palms flat to the altar, forcing my breathing to slow, and tried to focus. The ritual was old, drawn from bone and blood, and not without cost.
I laid out the four teeth that made the cardinal points of my working—two human canines, a hare’s incisor, and the molar of a drowned man. I wrapped a silver thread around the new fang, binding it thrice, then knotted it into the centre of my circle.
“Tell me,” I breathed. “Does fate bind him to me?”
The wind outside picked up, slamming against the window. The flame stilled. The fang pulsed once — twice.
And then I saw him again.
