Page 17 of Embers of Midnight
“Not standard fae,” Caelum says. “We prefer… edges.” He gestures at the flow lines like a man who respects craft even when he didn’t make it.
“Shifter,” Ronan says after one beat. He rises. “Probably stuck.”
“Maybe,” I say, because I don’t like arguments that sound like answers yet. My chest says yes like a hand on a door. I keep my face the same.
Darian goes still, the way he does when he listens past the air. Then he opens his eyes. “She was afraid,” he says. He doesn’t throw the pronoun from nowhere. He lays it like a coin on a table he’s sure of. “Frustrated. Not wild. Not empty.” He touches the new line he cut in his book last night, like the muscle memory helps him hold it. “Female.”
I nod because it lets something inside me breathe. “Okay,” I say. “She. And she learns fast, because control like this is not beginner energy.”
Caelum casts his gaze over the north side beyond the trees. “Now she’ll want water,” he says. He tips his head and listens. “She’ll follow the river and look for cover. If she’s new, she’ll avoid voices. That puts us…” He draws a line in the air and ends his finger pointing northwest. “…downstream.”
We move. It isn’t a chase yet. It’s a reading exercise. Snow reports to anyone who knows language. Mine is shadow. Ronan’s is heat. Darian reads pressure. Caelum hears silence. We match our paces. We talk only when needed. Vex rides my shoulder then leaves me when the trees thicken and does a high arc and comes back. Two taps on my collarbone: two human scents, old now, left high on the ridge. Hunters, probably. Ahead, the air holds wet.
The river introduces itself as sound before sight. A low, constant hiss. The banks are brushy with alder. The skin of the wateris thin ice and open places. We drop our bodies small without crouching like prey. That’s a trick: move low without reading low.
Ronan touches my sleeve and tips his chin left. I nod and peel right. Darian uses a natural screen to set himself where he can move in three directions. Caelum lifts his fingers and the brilliance on the water dims by an inch like a cloud passed. It didn’t.
We seeherthe same instant from three angles.
Black hide veined with ember lines. Fire mane low and steady. Horn dark with a quiet edge. Chest built to run and to hold heat like a furnace brick. She stands with her front hooves on the packed edge of the bank, muzzle to water. Steam is a thread, not a show. She leashes it. She drinks in slow pulses like it hurts to do it wrong and she’s teaching herself not to.
She is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
The thought arrives whole. No permission. No defense. Everything in me goes quiet in a way I do not like. The ink under my skin crawls toward my heart in slow lines and then settles like it’s found home. Vex tightens his feet on my jacket and goes still, watching with me. Morrow presses a little tighter at my wrist; Silks lifts her head under the glove to taste the air like she wants to be sure it’s real.
I go to one knee without choosing it and let my hands rest open on my thighs because if I move like a hunter, she will run. If I move like a fan, I disgust myself. So I pick wall.
“I wanted excitement,” I breathe, quiet enough that only the men near me hear it. “Not to fall in worship. Yet here I am, kneeling to a girl who boils rivers.”
Caelum covers a smile with the back of his hand because he knows better than to beam at a miracle. Ronan doesn’t look at me. He looks at her hooves, at the ice, at the heat she’s editing. “Shifter,” he says, certain now. “Stuck.”
Darian’s voice is low and unintrusive. “She’s holding panic by the throat and making it behave,” he says. “If she keeps that up, she lives.”
He’s right. She does it again: pulls heat down, mane drops one notch, drinks, lets a little steam go, breathes. She ignores us because thirst is louder and because whoever she was yesterday knew how to not invite men into her life when she was busy surviving. Good. I approve of past-her.
Alder cracks somewhere upslope. Not deer. Not branch under snow. Human weight, bad feet. Hunters. Close enough to ruin everything if they get eyes and phones. Far enough that I have time to do one useful thing.
“Hold,” I whisper. Ronan’s jaw tightens. Darian’s hand lowers toward Vigil and then stops because we don’t need a sword for idiots. Caelum stitches a hush bloom between us and the sound.The world loses a layer of echo. I lay a null seam across the obvious angle a camera would love. Sound control. Sight control. A bad step turns flat.
She lifts her head. Water beads along her muzzle and drops. Her eyes catch mine across the cold. It is not cinematic. It is simple. Two beings share a line and everything I am moves.
My tattoos kink and then smooth, a slow thread pulling toward my sternum. My mouth tastes like vows. The kind I know how to keep. The kind you make to yourself first and then to someone else when you’re ready to not be a liar.
If anyone touches her, I will ruin them.
I do not say it out loud. I don’t make threats I can’t keep in front of witnesses. I tuck it behind my teeth and let it sit in my chest like a blade slotted into sheath.
She looks past me to the others. She measures Ronan in one slow blink. She gives Darian a second look like angels make a different silence than the trees and she doesn’t know what to do with it. She watches Caelum without falling into anything he doesn’t want her to. Smart. I adore her faster than is healthy.
The crack uphill happens again. Closer. Dumb. She jerks a half step, muscles tight. The mane lifts a fraction. She makes a choice I can follow in her body: run.
“She bolts,” I say, and I’m already moving.
Ronan drops heat across our last five steps so snow doesn’t squeal under boots. Darian throws a thin arc from metal to metal on the ridge to the left; it snaps and pulls eyes that way. Caelum pins a trickle of boredom across the bend ahead so anyone trying to look at her sees trees. I Umbra-step two trunks right to line us parallel, not crossing her face. Vex leaves my shoulder like a black knife and goes high. Morrow floods off my skin in a hush-wolf and plants on the path behind us to turn any ugly feet at the knee. Silks keeps low, a dark line along a root, set to trip anything that doesn’t belong to her.
I cut the line between her and the bad crack with my body at an angle she can choose to trust or not. My hands stay empty. My eyes stay steady. Run, I think at her like an idiot talking to a thunderhead. I’ll make sure the wrong ones slip.
She runs. It’s clean. It’s not panic. It’s the kind of speed that spends energy like cash you know you can make back if you move right. Snow holds under her because the heat above says do it. She threads the first stand of trees like she drew the gap herself, not the other way around.
