Page 168 of Shifting Hearts 1
I knew this wasn’t the end.
It was only the beginning.
TWO
Brannan
Iwoke to the scent of blood, smoke, and sage.
The air was too warm. Not pack-warm, not fire-warm — close, heavy, wet. My body ached like I'd been gutted and stitched together with thorns. My ribs dragged with every breath. Something slick tickled the back of my throat. I swallowed copper.
I tried to move, but the weight of fate held me down.
No, not fate.
A thread.
It hummed along my spine, pulling tight across my sternum, searing through bone and blood. I followed it inward and found her waiting in the dark. Eyes the colour of grave moss. Skin shadowed by candlelight. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her hands — I’d seen them soaked in my blood.
I’d seen her kill me.
My body jerked.
Pain screamed through my side. I wasn’t in the woods anymore. Not on pack ground. I lay on a cot draped with blackwool, the scent of herbs and burnt marrow clinging to every fibre. Antlers crowned the walls like guardians. Bundles of teeth hung from iron nails. Thread — red, white, silver — draped the ceiling like a spider’s web.
Magic. Old, ugly and bone-deep magic.
I growled low, throat raw.
She turned. Just a shift of shadow at first, and then the light caught her face, and I stopped breathing.
“You,” I rasped.
Her lips parted, not in surprise, not in fear. No. Recognition. Sheknewme.
“You shouldn’t be here yet,” she said softly. “It’s too soon.”
My jaw clenched. I pushed myself upright with a snarl, as every muscle locked against the pain that radiated through me.
“Where am I?” I demanded.
“In my home,” she said. “You followed the thread, or maybe the thread followed you. I’m still trying to understand it myself.”
“You stole from me.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t steal anything from you.”
“One of my teeth is missing. A fang. I dreamed it gone, and when I woke up—” I stopped. My fingers had already gone to my neck, where a string of charms always hung, but one fang was missing.
She didn’t even flinch. “I dreamed of you, and then your tooth was in my hand.”
“You dreamt of medying,” I ground out.
She didn’t answer. She didn’thaveto. The thread between us — whatever it was — thrummed with more than magic. It pulsed with memory. Like we’d done this before. More than once, and maybe, we had. My death, was tangled in her hands.
She moved closer, cautiously, like I was a wounded thing that might still bite. I bared my teeth, just to prove something. To myself or to her, I didn’t know.
“Don’t touch me.”
