So you can tell Rae. So they can stop me.
"Of course," I said.
He didn't look convinced, but he let it go. "These sessions are about learning to navigate what you see. Control is the wrong word—you don't master the current. You learn to swim. But first, you have to understand the water."
I opened the book. The text was dense, annotated in several hands over what looked like centuries. Techniques for grounding after a vision. Methods for distinguishing true sight from anxiety dreams. Warnings about the cost of ignoring what you'd been shown.
The vision always finds a way to fulfill itself. The only question is whether you're prepared when it does.
My chest tightened.
We sat in comfortable silence after that, reading, and I let the quiet settle into my bones.
But I could feel him watching, patient and observant, and I knew this balance wouldn't hold forever. Eventually, I'd have to choose: tell them and be stopped, or keep lying to the closest thing I had to family.
Outside the small basement window, night blanketed the campus. And somewhere in my mind, a wolf howled—waiting, feral, alone.
I left the library an hour later, cutting across the quad toward the dormitory. The path was empty, lampposts casting pools of pale light, and I was halfway to the door when I felt it—that hum, rising unbidden.
James was sitting on a bench near the trailhead. He had a book open in his lap, though I doubted he could read in this light.
He looked up when I approached. Didn't say anything. Just shifted over, making room.
I should have kept walking. Every rational thought said to keep walking.
I sat down.
We stayed like that for a long moment, side by side in the darkness, and the hum thrummed steady beneath my skin—not demanding, not pulling, justthere. A warmth I hadn't asked for.
"You were at the library," he said finally. "Saw you go in."
"And you decided to wait outside in the cold?"
"Figured you might want company on the walk back." He shrugged. "It's dark."
"I can take care of myself."
"I know." He said it simply, without challenge. "Doesn't mean you have to."
The words landed somewhere tender, somewhere I hadn't armored properly. I looked away, toward the mountains, where Denali waited.
"You're strange," I said.
"So I've been told." He stood, offering me a hand. "Come on. It's cold."
I didn't take his hand. But I walked with him, and he didn't seem to mind.
At the dormitory door, I paused. He was still there, patient.
"Why?" I asked.
"Why what?"
"Why wait?"
He considered the question like it mattered, like I mattered, and the hum swelled.
"Because you look like someone who's used to walking alone," he said. "And sometimes that's a choice. But sometimes it's just... habit."
