There’s no way to explain it, not if you’ve never been inside a tornado or a building about to come down. The world turned itself inside out, and every nerve I owned fired off at once. Sound hit first—a static roar, then a hush so deep it swallowed my heartbeat. Then the light: not just bright but blue, a blue that belonged to neither the sky nor the sun. I could feel it movingunder my skin, winding through bone and blood, rearranging the molecules into something that might survive what came next.
I tried to move, but my legs belonged to someone else. I tried to scream, but the only sound was the memory of her voice: Don’t follow.
followed anyway.
The ground vanished. I was nowhere for a breath, maybe a year. Time isn’t measured the same in these moments. Then my body slammed down on something hard and cold, and the world snapped back into place.
I stayed face down, coughing up spit and rainwater, for what felt like forever. When I finally rolled to my back, the first thing I noticed was the cold. Not the fake cold of the circle, but the real, marrow-deep chill of a winter that didn’t belong to June. The second thing was the air. It had weight to it, old and untouched, like nobody’d smoked a cigarette within a hundred miles in all of recorded time.
I sat up slowly, testing every joint. My jeans were shredded at the knees, and my hands were bleeding from where I’d gripped the roots on the way down. The leather jacket was stiff and slick with ice, not water, but fucking ice. My breath plumed in front of me. The sky overhead wasn’t the gray wash of Kentucky storm, but the black-blue of a night with no pollution, no light bleed, nothing but the kind of stars you see in movies about places you’ll never afford to visit.
The circle was there. The trees, too, but not the same. The moss was different, brighter green, the trunks fatter, twisted like they’d had centuries to get their story straight. Everything in the woods was sharper, meaner, like it had been whittled down to survive a world that didn’t give second chances.
I crawled to my feet, boots slipping on the frost-rimmed mud, and checked my bearings. The bike was gone, obviously. Thepath I’d come down was gone, too. No tire tracks, not even a hint of civilization in the mud.
The only thing that felt familiar was the electric burn of the tattoo. I rolled up the sleeve. The wolf’s eyes were bleeding out color, orange and gold and new, like the ink itself was metabolizing the shock.
I laughed, because it was either laugh or go insane. My voice cracked in the open air, and for a second, I thought I heard it echoed, far off, maybe a mile, maybe a thousand years away.
There was no point in waiting for the world to explain itself. I staggered forward, picked a direction, and started walking, head down, every step a dare.
Somewhere out there, the girl was running.
***
The girl didn’t make me wait long. Less than two hundred yards from the circle, I found her curled in the mud, arms wrapped around her chest, face pinched to the color of wet ash. She looked smaller than she had in my memory, more bones than flesh, more wild animal than girl.
I went to her, boots slipping, ignoring the ice slicing up my shins, and dropped to a crouch. Her hair was matted to her head, caked with mud and streaks of blood where she’d either fought something off or run through a patch of angry bramble. The dress she wore, some kind of homespun thing with blue stitching at the cuffs, was torn open at the thigh and soaked through.
I reached for her wrist, careful, and felt for a pulse. It was there, but faint, erratic, as if her heart didn’t trust the world not to let it down again. Her breath steamed out in weak bursts. She shuddered even in her sleep.
I shook her shoulder, gentle at first, then with more force. Her eyelids fluttered, and for a second I thought she was awake, butthen her lips parted, and she made a noise, half a word, maybe my name, but not in any language I knew.
I did a quick triage. Her ankle was the worst of it, swollen, ugly, and the skin stretched shiny over the bone, purple and yellow leaking up the calf. She’d lost a shoe somewhere, and the other was little more than a rag. There were shallow cuts up both legs and one across her collarbone, still weeping. I had enough first aid from the club and the war to know infection when I saw it.
I stripped off my jacket and wrapped her in it, pulling her arms through the sleeves like a child. My hands fumbled with the zipper, but I got it closed, cinching her into the warmth and pressing her against my chest. She barely weighed anything, and I could feel the heat of her fever through the leather.
She came awake for a heartbeat, eyes wild and wolf-bright, darting from my face to the trees and back again. For a second, she looked like she would bolt, but then her gaze snagged on the tattoo that wound up my forearm, and her whole body went rigid.
“It’s you,” she whispered, voice cracked. “You’re real.”
“Yeah, I’m real.” The words sounded dumb in the cold. “Stay with me, Scar.”
Her eyelids fluttered, the fight drained away, and she went limp again, cheek pressed to my chest like she’d never once trusted another living thing to hold her.
I braced her weight with one arm, then looked around for shelter. The woods had gone black, not just with the hour but with a thickness that wasn’t natural. Even the moon refused to look at this shitshow. I smelled water somewhere downhill; there was always water in these places, and I remembered seeing a stand of willows in the other world, not far from here.
I hiked her up, arms under her knees and back, and started walking.
The first hundred yards were an exercise in not falling on my ass. The ground sloped and pitched, roots catching my boots at every step. The girl’s breath was hot against my throat. She started shivering hard, teeth knocking so loud it made my jaw ache in sympathy.
It took longer than it should have, but I found a break in the trees, and beyond it, a stone building half-eaten by moss. A hunting lodge. The same as in the dream, or the memory, or whatever the hell you wanted to call it. The roof was mostly intact, but the door hung on one hinge, and the windows had been knocked out and replaced with hides stretched tight and nailed in place.
Inside, it was marginally warmer, the air thick with the ghost of a hundred dead fires and the sweeter stink of animal fat. There were furs piled in one corner, and at the center of the room, a crude hearth, the stone blackened and the ashes still holding a hint of warmth.
I laid the girl on the furs, careful not to bump her ankle, then checked the rest of the lodge. It was empty, unless you counted the rats chewing at a split sack of flour in the corner. The walls sweated cold, but at least there was no wind.
I moved back to her, peeled the jacket open, and checked her face for color. She was sweating now, even with the fever. Her lips had gone from blue to gray. Her hands shook, nails scraping at the hide.
