The words barely leave my mouth before I feel it. A pressure against my skin. A weight in the air that wasn’t there before.
My body knows before my brain catches up. Legs locking. Breath stopping. The animal part of me that remembers beinghunted on savannas before we learned to make fire. That part goes very, very still.
Something is here.
Something that eats things like us.
Orion’s hand finds the small of my back. Not pushing. Just there. “I don’t see anything.”
“Neither do I.” Kieran’s shadows pool at his feet, reaching outward, searching. Then they recoil. Snap back to him like they’ve been burned. “My shadows won’t…something’s blocking them.”
“The Crown is...” Finnian presses his fingers to his temples. “I can’t interpret it. Just noise. Static. Like something’s scrambling the signal.”
The forest holds its breath.
No insects. No wind. No rustling in the underbrush.
Just silence, and the dark, and the creeping certainty that we are not alone.
Something flickers in my peripheral vision. White. There and gone.
Don’t look. Don’t acknowledge. Don’t invite.
The rules older than language. Older than fire. Written in the marrow of every creature that ever survived a night in the dark.
I feel it watching me. Its attention presses against my skull like a thumb. It wants me to turn. Wants me to see it fully.
I don’t.
“Move,” I whisper. “Slowly. Don’t run. Keep your eyes ahead. And if you hear anything, ignore it.”
We move.
Four bodies pressed close, feet finding the path by memory more than sight. The moss stays dark. The trees seem closer than before, branches reaching down like fingers.
Orion’s grip tightens on my back. He saw it, too.
“Ash.” Kieran’s voice is barely a breath. “Ahead.”
I look.
It stands in the middle of the path.
At first glance, a deer. White as moonlight. Beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful.
Then I really look.
The proportions are wrong. Legs too long, jointed in places they shouldn’t be. Neck bent at an angle that would snap a real deer’s spine. The head turns toward us with a motion that’s too smooth, too deliberate, like something practicing how necks work.
And the eyes.
Forward-facing. Predator eyes. Set in the skull of something that should be prey.
It blinks.
Sideways.
The membrane slides across those terrible eyes and I watch my own reflection disappear and reappear in the wet shine of them. It’s seeing me. Really seeing me. Not as a queen or a Fae or a threat. As meat.
