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Metal screams again.

Cass doesn’t.

That is worse.

XXXVII

Ash With Teeth

The sound reaches me before the meaning does. The sound is old. Not fresh. Already finished by the time it reaches me.

Not a scream. Not thunder. Just metal—dragged slow and hard enough to complain about it. A long, teeth-on-edge shriek that makes my shoulders lock and my breath catch halfway in, like my body recognized it before my mind could catch up. Wind pushes through the trees and tries to wear the sound like a mask, but it doesn’t fit. This isn’t weather. This is iron pulled too tight. This is something giving way without being allowed to break. And somewhere in the back of my skull, something answers it—sharp, furious, awake—like a chain just snapped free of whatever had been holding me still.

Daybreak doesn’t arrive up here so much as it leaks in, thin and reluctant, a pallid wash seeping between the trees like the mountain is waking against its will and resenting every inch of the effort. The cold doesn’t retreat when the dark loosens; it clings instead, damp and persistent, pressed into my skin the way grief presses—quiet, patient, refusing to be dislodged just because the world has decided to keep going.

Nothing looks different.

That’s the first lie.

Stone is still stone. Pines still stand in their crooked patience. The slope hasn’t shifted, the air hasn’t broken, and yet something feels misaligned, like a bone that set wrong while I wasn’t paying attention. Not the kind of wrong that sets my pulse racing or floods my mouth with panic, but the subtler kind—the wrongness of walking into a room where someone has already left without saying goodbye, where the air still remembers the shape of them but the weight is gone.

I stay still longer than I should, eyes tracing the fractured lattice of branches overhead, listening to the trees stretch and creak as the light changes. My body resists movement, hoarding the last scraps of sleep like leverage, like if I don’t sit up then whatever shifted while I wasn’t watching might slide back into place and pretend it never happened.

Then my gaze drifts toward the fire, and something in my chest tightens, slow and unmistakable.

The fire isn’t dead. It isn’t alive either. It’s been disciplined—pressed down into a shallow bed of coals, ash smoothed carefully over the surface, starved of air without being smothered. Controlled. Silenced. The kind of fire you leave when you’re finished needing it to announce you, when you want it quiet and unremarkable and gone without spectacle.

The kind of fire you don’t leave if you intend to come back.

I sit up, slow enough that the blanket rasps across my shoulder instead of sliding free, the sound too loud in the thin morning. Cold surges in immediately, sharp and eager, stealing my breath for half a second before my muscles clamp down on instinct. Shadow is already awake, planted at the edge of the clearing like he grew there overnight—body angled downhill, ears pitched forward, eyes locked on the trees like they owe him something.

He isn’t restless.

He isn’t searching.

He’s waiting. Like he’s been positioned to guard the camp not follow.

My pulse doesn’t spike. It sinks instead, dropping into that hollow, steady place where my body understands something my mind is still trying to negotiate its way around.

“Malek?” I call, but my voice comes out too quiet to be useful, already thinning around the answer I don’t want.

Nothing answers.

The silence thickens, gaining weight in the air around me, the kind that settles after a door has already closed and all that’s left is the shape of what it took with it. This isn’t absence. Absence is clean compared to this. This is aftermath.

I push to my feet. My boots land exactly where I left them, soles finding familiar dirt without thought, and the ache in my thighs pulls memory forward like it’s been waiting for permission—his hand under my shirt the night before, firm and steady against my stomach while the Hollowborn stood close enough to smell us and decided not to touch. The way my body went still around that pressure, like stillness itself was a skill I’d been taught and finally learned how to use.

Like he already knew what I’d need to remember when he wasn’t there to do it again.

I step toward the fire. The coals collapse softly beneath my weight, a low, tired sound, and ash lifts into the air, fragile and pale. It drifts against my lips, dry and bitter, clinging to my tongue like a warning I’m not ready to listen to yet.

“Malek,” I say again, louder, the word scraping my throat on the way out.

The trees remain indifferent.

Shadow makes a sound deep in his chest—nothing close to a bark, just a rough vibration that feels like a plea. Don’t go that way. Don’t make me follow.

I ignore him.