I cross the courtyard in seconds that feel like hours, my feet barely touching the ancient stones, the iron gates groaning open just as I reach them. I slam into her with enough force to stagger us both, arms thrown around her neck, and she crashes into me like a homecoming, like the missing piece of my soul snapping back into place. She holds me just as tight, her grip almost desperate, and I can feel her trembling against me.
“I thought I lost you,” I whisper against her neck, breathing in her familiar scent mixed with sweat and fear and determination. “I thought?—”
“You didn’t.” Micah holds me tighter, her voice rough with emotion. “I came for you.”
Something inside me knits back together at her words, the ragged edges of my broken heart beginning to mend. She came for me just when I was about to do the same.
I pull back to tell her exactly that, to share the irony of our timing, when I feel it. A flare of searing heat in my chest, a violent tug that has nothing to do with our severed Tether but it feels like something else entirely. Something foreign and wrong and terrifying.
Micah hisses in sudden pain, her face contorting as she steps back to pull her shirt down, revealing skin that makes my blood freeze in my veins.
A glowing, jagged brand burns bright red against the center of her chest, pulsing with its own malevolent life.
The second I see it, agony rips through me like lightning. I double over with a cry that tears from my throat, one handclutching my sternum as heat explodes beneath my skin like molten metal being poured directly into my bones. Locke and Sam rush to either side of me, but I throw out a hand to steady myself and stop them from getting closer.
With shaking fingers, I yank down my shirt and watch in mounting horror as the same mark slowly burns itself across my chest. It begins as a thin line of fire, then spreads and deepens, becoming a perfect mirror of what marks Micah. It pulses in time with my heartbeat, alive and hungry and wrong.
Micah stares at my chest, her eyes wide with horror and terrible knowing. Her face has gone ashen beneath the dirt and blood, and I can see her hands trembling.
“He marked us,” she says, her voice cracking. She reaches for me with fingers that shake, running them gently over the burning symbol on my skin. Her touch is cool against the fire, but it doesn’t stop the pain. “He’s relentless, Esme. I thought stopping him would be easier, I thought we could end this quickly. He did this to me while I was fighting him, branded me like cattle. He won’t stop until he gets what he wants. He’s hunting us.”
“Who?” I gasp as the men around us all begin to talk at the same time, their voices a blur of concern and anger and questions I can’t focus on through the pain.
Micah looks me dead in the eye, and in her gaze I see fear that chills me more than the mark burns me.
“Cain.”
– The End –
For Now
