The afternoon sun is fading when we stop to eat and rest. I pull out my knife to cut strips from the dried meat, but the blade catches wrong on the tough leather of my pack. My grip shifts to compensate, and the sharp edge slices cleanly across my palm.
Blood wells immediately, dark against my pale skin. It’s not serious, and I’ve had far worse, but before I can even reach for my medical supplies, Lyra is there.
“Let me see,” she says, not asking, already taking my hand in both of hers.
The moment our skin makes contact, the world explodes.
Silver-blue light flares around our joined hands, but it’s more than just her healing magic. My ice magic rises without my conscious call, twining with her storm-touched power in spirals of frost and lightning. The very air between us seems to sing, harmonies of winter storm that shouldn’t exist, can’t exist, but do.
I feel her power sink into my skin, not just healing the cut but reading me, knowing me in a way that’s almost unbearablyintimate. And my magic responds by opening to her, welcoming her, recognizing her as?—
We both jerk back simultaneously, breathing hard.
“That’s not—” she starts.
“—normal,” I finish, staring at my completely healed hand. No scar, no mark, like the cut never existed. But I can still feel where she touched me, tingling with the memory of merged magic.
“Our powers shouldn’t be that compatible,” she says, voice shaky. “Different clans, different magical sources. It shouldn’t work like that.”
“No,” I agree. “It shouldn’t.”
But it does. And we both know what that level of magical resonance means in shifter culture. It’s one of the signs. One of the markers that ancient texts speak of when describing true mate bonds—magic that recognizes its match, power that completes itself in another.
We retreat to opposite sides of the small clearing, both processing what just happened. The air between us remains charged, crackling with unspent energy and unspoken truths.
As night falls and we set up camp while still maintaining that careful distance. I find myself watching her in the firelight. She’s trying so hard to pretend nothing has changed, but I see the way she keeps flexing her hands, like she can still feel the magic we created. I see how she won’t quite meet my eyes, afraid of what she might see there.
Or afraid of what I might see in hers.
My snow leopard is beyond restless now. It knows what that magical harmony means, even if we’re both trying to deny it. She’s not almost right or nearly perfect or close enough.
She’s exactly right. Perfectly matched. The one my magic has been waiting for all my life.
The thought terrifies me as much as it exhilarates me. Because Mountain Cats don’t do half bonds, don’t do uncertainty, don’t do maybe.
And Lyra still shows no signs of feeling the same certainty that’s taking root in my bones.
But as I watch her bank the fire for the night, the carved leopard visible in her pouch, I make a decision. I won’t push. Won’t pressure. Won’t speak of what happened when our magic merged.
But I won’t run from it either.
Because maybe she’s right. Maybe I am lonelier than I admit. And maybe, just maybe, she’s the warmth I didn’t know I was seeking in all this cold.
Even if she doesn’t know it yet.
Even if she might never know it.
Even if hoping for her is the most dangerous hunt I’ve ever undertaken.
7
LYRA
The narrow cave entrance is almost invisible, hidden behind fallen stones and centuries of accumulated ice. If not for Magnus’s tracking sigils glowing faintly in the morning light, we would have walked right past it.
“Something alive is hiding in there,” Magnus says quietly, frost patterns spreading from his fingertips as he reads the ice memory around the entrance. “But the signature is... wrong.”
I move closer to him instinctively, and he doesn’t step away. After last night when our magic spiraled together when I healed his cut, we’ve been caught in this careful dance of almost-touching, neither acknowledging what happened nor able to forget it. The air between us remains charged, crackling with possibility and fear in equal measure.
