Page 169 of Shifting Hearts 1
“Then stop bleeding on my bed,” she said, her voice flat.
I laughed once. It hurt.
“I didn’t mean to come here,” I said.
She studied me. “But you did.”
I felt it again then. The Wyrd shifting, the way only we who walk its threads can feel. Something in its weave had changed.Disrupted. Warped. The moment the fang left me; something had torn open. I followed the echo of that tear, thinking I’d find a threat, instead, I found her. The collector of teeth. The girl who wore death on a chain. I didn’t know her name, not really, but my magic did.
The Wyrd whispered it to me like a secret I wasn’t supposed to hear.
Eris.
And the second I thought it, a memory that wasn’t mine slammed into me — her voice in the dark, chanting my name like a spell. Her hands warm with blood. My chest torn open beneath them. Her lips on mine. Not in a kiss, more like a promise. A tether that screamed:fated.
“No,” I snarled. “No, no, no.”
The thread pulled tighter.
She stilled. “You felt it.”
“I saw it.”
I lunged, not to harm her, not really. Just to touch her… toknow, but the second my skin met hers, the vision struck like lightning.
Her face above mine, mouth painted in blood. Her hands driving bone through my heart. Her voice whispering,“Forgive me.”
The pain was real… too real, and I recoiled like I’d been burned. My hand spasmed, and my chest heaved.
She didn’t speak. She didn’tneedto. She’d seen it too.
“You kill me,” I said.
“Maybe,” she whispered. “But not today.”
The thread between us sang like a blade. Every breath I took in that cottage felt borrowed. Like it belonged to her and not to me. The Wyrd whispered that something waited beyond the trees. So, I left, not to run away, not exactly, but to remember why I feared her.
The wards scraped across my skin as I passed the threshold — a whisper of something ancient and cold dragging its claws down my spine. I felt her magic retreat behind me, curling back into bone charms and carved runes, locking me out.
Good.
I didn’t want her too close. Not when every part of me still hummed with the echo of her hands on my chest, her voice in my ear, ricocheting around inside my skull. Not when I could still feel the thread between us.
I didn’t know how to sever it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. That in itself terrified me most.
The forest beyond her cottage was wrong. Not just wild —wyrd.
I’d known it from the moment I'd entered her boundary. Now I could see the way the air shimmered in places, like heat off summer roads. Threads of fate tugged at the corner of my vision, not glowing gold like normal —black— the colour of death and decay. I would have laughed at the irony if fate had chosen to tie me to anyone but her, but of course it had not. Maybe Eris was right after all, and fate was cruel.
So, I followed the strongest pull. Which led me deeper into the woods, past a tree cleaved by lightning, past a hillock where birds wouldn’t land. The forest fell silent the moment I stepped onto scorched earth.
A field of bones lay ahead. Wide. Bleached white. Stained in places by old magic. A graveyard, but not for humans. Thesewere animal bones — wolf, crow, deer, bear — but laid in shapes.Patterns. Glyphs only the wyrd-born could read.
Spells etched in marrow, and Eris was standing at the centre of it all. Wind tangled her dark hair, revealing the bone knife at her hip. Her back was to me, but she stilled the second I stepped onto the boundary, almost as if she’dfeltme coming.
Of course she had.
“You followed me,” she said.
