Page 104

I told myself they were leftovers. Old habits. Evidence of someone who’d lived there before us and never bothered to clean up.

But they always appeared where I stood longest. Where sightlines opened. Where the ground shifted underfoot.

The memory doesn’t fade so much as it gets shoved aside.

My boot slips on shale and my balance goes wrong for half a heartbeat, the mountain reminding me it doesn’t care where my head just went, bark tearing cold into my palm as I catch myself on a pine trunk. Breath rasps up sharp and useless before I drag it back under control, shoulders pulling inward, spine settling, my body snapping back into itself the way it always does when the world tilts and demands attention.

The woods feel closer now. Not louder—closer. Like they’ve leaned in while I wasn’t looking.

Shadow stops.

Not tense. Not bristling.

Listening.

The wind shifts downhill and brings something with it that doesn’t belong this high up, this far from anything that should be bleeding—metallic and sour, the ghost of old blood burned into iron. My hand finds the hatchet at my hip without permission, fingers curling into the familiar grooves like they’ve been waiting for this moment to be named.

I open my mouth to warn Malek, but the sound never makes it out.

Something is already there.

Not crashing through brush. Not hiding. Just existing where the dark was empty a second ago. A shape resolving itself between the trees like the woods decided to give something back. Then another answers it farther downslope, and another after that, movement rippling outward in a way that’s too deliberate, too coordinated to be instinct.

I count without thinking, the way Cass taught me to when panic wanted to take the wheel. One. Two. Too many. My pulse doesn’t spike—it steadies, drops into that cold, precise place where fear sharpens instead of scatters.

I don’t think.

I move.

I grab Malek by the strap crossing his chest and shove him back hard into the nearest tree, my body turning with the motion until my back is flush against his front. My feet plant. Knees bend. The hatchet comes up, angled outward, blade ready to meet whatever decides we’re worth the effort.

For one split second, I’m aware of him behind me—solid, unmoving, his breath a controlled exhale against the back of my neck—but he doesn’t resist, doesn’t reach past me, doesn’t break the line I’ve drawn with my body.

Shadow presses tight against my leg, silent, teeth bared without a sound.

The Hollowborn step fully into view.

They’re wrong in ways my body reacts to before my thoughts can assemble—joints bent past where pain should have stopped them, skin stretched so tight over bone it gleams wetly, as if it’s been pulled and pinned there and forgotten, heads tilted at angles that make my jaw seize and my teeth ache deep in the roots. My stomach drops into a cold, hollow freefall, that primal terror that comes when something is close enough to breathe on you and you realize it’s following the shape of a human without obeying any of the rules that keep humans alive.

Standing near them feels like the world has miscounted what’s allowed to exist.

They don’t rush us.

They don’t scream.

They slow, and that’s worse.

One drags a leg that never learned how to follow the rest of itself. Another lifts its head, throat opening, chest pulling tight like it’s about to unleash that dry, rib-rattling hymn that crawls into my sleep—and then it stops.

The sound dies so abruptly my ears ring, like someone slammed a door inside its chest.

They adjust.

They choose.

“They’re moving around us,” I breathe, the words barely there.

Malek stays still behind me, a deliberate stillness that feels different than readiness, like recognition settling into place instead of threat assessment. Then his hand moves—slow, measured—and slips under the hem of my shirt.