Luna Eclipse: The Eclipsed Saga (Every Wolf Has A Dark Side)

LUNA

The track is still wet from last night's rain, and every time my shoe hits the rubber I can hear the faint hiss of water kicking up behind me. I don't mind it. Wet track means good grip, and good grip means speed, and speed is the only thing in my life that makes complete sense. Everything else - grades, boys, the future waiting somewhere past graduation - feels like a puzzle with missing pieces. But this, the sprint, the burn, the counting down of seconds, this I understand completely.

Coach Dunbar stands at the finish line with his stopwatch raised like he's about to conduct an orchestra. He's been coaching track at Mountain Ridge for eleven years, and he still gets that same twitchy, nervous energy every time he times me, like he doesn't trust his own watch to tell him something good. I've seen him time other runners with a bored, half-lidded patience, but with me his knuckles go white around the stopwatch every single time, like he's afraid of jinxing something he can't quite explain.

"Last one, Willow," he calls. "Give me everything."

I roll my shoulders, plant my feet in the blocks, and look down the empty lane in front of me. Four hundred meters. One full lap around the track. It doesn't sound like much until your lungs are on fire and your legs feel like wet rope and you still have a hundred meters left. I've run this same stretch of track hundreds of times, and it never gets easier, not really. It just becomes a pain I know how to carry.

"Set."

I breathe in through my nose. The mountain air up here in East Tennessee is thin and cold even in April, and it claws at the back of my throat every time I run hard. Somewhere behind me, a bird calls out from the tree line, and for one strange second, everything goes quiet, like the whole world is holding its breath along with me.

The whistle cuts through the morning.

I don't think about my legs. I don't think about my arms or my breath or the ache already building in my calves. I think about nothing at all, which is the only way I know how to run fast. Thinking slows you down. Thinking makes you doubt the fourth step before you've even taken it. My body knows this track better than my mind does anyway, every crack in the rubber, every subtle rise near the curve.

The first hundred meters fly by in a blur of green bleachers and chain-link fence. By the two hundred mark my lungs are already screaming, but I've trained through worse mornings than this, colder mornings, mornings when Coach Dunbar had us running suicides in the rain until half the team was throwing up on the infield. This is nothing compared to that. Pain, I've learned, is mostly a matter of memory. Once you've survived the worst of it, everything after feels almost bearable.

The final stretch is the only part of the race that actually hurts, and I let it hurt. I lean into it, arms pumping, eyes locked on the white line ahead of me like it's the only thing that exists in the whole world. My chest burns, my thighs scream, and still I push, because somewhere underneath the pain is the version of myself I'm trying to become.

I cross it and stumble to a stop, hands on my knees, sucking in air that tastes like river water and pine trees. My heart hammers so hard I can feel it in my throat, in my fingertips, in the soles of my feet still buzzing from the impact of the run.

Coach Dunbar is staring at his stopwatch like it just told him a secret.

"Fifty point two," he says.

I straighten up, still gasping. "Say that again."

"Fifty point two seconds." He looks up at me, and for a second I think he might actually smile, which would be a historic event, because Coach Dunbar does not smile during practice. He says smiling is for after the race is won. "Willow, do you understand what that means?"

I shake my head, even though some small part of me is already doing the math, already spinning through every possibility that number could mean.

"Three seconds," he says. "You are three seconds away from Olympic qualifying times. Do you hear me? Three seconds." He taps the stopwatch against his palm like he needs to hit something to believe it's real. "You keep running like this, and you are going to nationals. I mean that. I'm calling it right now, in front of God and this ugly wet track. Nationals."

I want to say something smart back, something cool and collected, but all that comes out of me is a laugh, breathless and a little wild, because three seconds is nothing. Three seconds is the time it takes to tie your shoe. Three seconds is close enough to touch. My hands are shaking, and I don't know if it's from the run or from the number still ringing in my ears.

"Get some water," Coach Dunbar says, already turning to scribble my time onto his clipboard. "And then you're doing it again, because I don't trust a fluke."

"It's not a fluke," I say.

"Then prove it."

I grin at him and jog toward my water bottle at the edge of the track, chest still heaving, sweat cooling fast in the mountain air. This is what I'm good at. Not because some higher power tapped me on the shoulder and decided I should be fast. Not because of some destiny I never asked for. I'm fast because I earned it, one 5 a.m. wake-up at a time, one interval at a time, one blistered heel and one pulled hamstring at a time. Every second I've shaved off my time belongs to me. Nobody gave it to me. Nobody can take it away. That thought settles into my chest like something solid, something I can hold onto whenever the doubt creeps in.

I glance toward the bleachers, and there he is. Jace Calloway, sitting three rows up with his sketchbook propped against his knee, sandy hair falling into his eyes the way it always does when he's concentrating too hard to bother pushing it back. He's got a pencil moving fast across the page, and I already know what he's drawing before I even walk over, because he draws the same thing every practice. Me, mid-stride, caught in that split second where my back foot is still in the air and my front foot hasn't landed yet. There's something oddly comforting about being drawn the same way, over and over, like he's trying to capture a feeling rather than a picture.

"You're going to run out of pages in that thing before track season's even over," I call up to him, wiping sweat off my forehead with the back of my wrist.

"Worth it." He doesn't look up, just keeps sketching, his tongue caught between his teeth the way it does when he's working on something he actually cares about. "You ran that last one different."

"Different how?"

"I don't know. Like you meant it more." He finally glances up, blue eyes catching mine, and something in my chest does that stupid little flip it's been doing since freshman year, the year he first sat next to me in Ms. Halloway's biology class and asked to borrow a pencil he clearly already had three of. "Fifty two?"

"Fifty point two."

His eyebrows shoot up. "Lune. That's insane."

"That's what Coach said. Well, he said a lot of other stuff too, mostly about nationals, but yeah. Insane is the word."

He closes his sketchbook and comes down the bleachers two at a time, and when he reaches me he doesn't even hesitate before pulling me into a hug, sweat and all. I swat at him halfheartedly, but I don't actually pull away. His arms feel like the safest place in the world, even soaked in sweat and smelling like rubber track and effort.

"Nationals," he says into my hair. "You're serious. You're actually going to nationals."

"I haven't gone anywhere yet."

"You will." He pulls back to look at me, and he's smiling that lopsided smile that used to make me nervous back before I got used to it, back before it became just a normal part of my day, like sunrise or gravity. "You're the fastest girl in Tennessee, Luna Willow. Everybody knows it."

"I'm the fastest girl in Tennessee right now," I say. "I want to be the fastest in the country."

"You will be. I'm telling you." He slings his backpack over one shoulder, sketchbook tucked carefully under his arm like it's something precious, which to him it probably is. "Come on. I'm starving and your grandmother's diner is calling my name."

"Everything's calling your name. You're like a garbage disposal."

"A garbage disposal that loves you very much."

I laugh and shove him, and we head off the track together, my legs still humming with the good kind of exhaustion, the kind that means I did something right. The morning sun has finally broken through the clouds, warming the damp grass and turning the puddles on the track into little mirrors of sky.

Mae's Diner sits on the corner of Riverbend and Main, right where Little River curves along the edge of the Pigeon River, close enough that on quiet afternoons you can hear the water running behind the building if the jukebox isn't too loud. Nana Mae has owned it since before I was born, and the whole town treats it like a second living room, the kind of place where the regulars have their booths practically reserved by unspoken agreement and the coffee is always a little too strong and nobody minds. I've spent more hours in this diner than in my own kitchen, and sometimes I think the smell of it, coffee and syrup and old wood, is more like home to me than home itself.

The bell over the door jingles when Jace holds it open for me, and the smell of frying onions and cinnamon rolls hits me like a wall, warm and familiar in a way that makes my shoulders drop an inch without me even meaning them to.

"There's my girl," Nana Mae calls from behind the counter, wiping her hands on her apron. Her silver hair is pulled back in its usual loose knot, a few strands falling free the way they always do by mid-morning. "How'd practice go?"

"Fifty point two," I say, sliding onto our usual stool at the counter.

She stops wiping the counter and looks at me properly. "That good, huh."

"That good."

"Well." She sets down two glasses of sweet tea without being asked, one for me and one for Jace, because she's known our orders since we were fourteen. "I suppose that means I owe you a slice of pie."

"You always say that and then you never give me the pie."

"I'm building character, baby. Character requires patience." But she winks and disappears into the kitchen, and I know good and well there's a slice of pecan pie coming whether I earned it fair or not.

Jace steals a fry off my plate the second the basket lands in front of me, which is a crime he commits at least twice a week and never once feels bad about.

"Hey." I smack his hand, too slow, the fry already gone. "That's mine."

"It was closer to me."

"It was on my side of the plate."

"Boundaries are a construct." He pops it into his mouth, grinning around it, and I steal two of his onion rings in retaliation, which he protests loudly enough that Nana Mae hollers from the kitchen for us to quit hollering.

We eat and argue about nothing, the way we always do, whether the movie theater in the next town over is actually worth the drive, whether Jace's art teacher hates him personally or just hates everyone equally, whether I should try the 800m at the next meet even though the 400 is clearly my event. It's easy. It's the same argument we've had a hundred times in a hundred different shapes, and I love it precisely because it doesn't matter. There's a comfort in the pettiness of it, in knowing that no matter what happens on the track or anywhere else, this - us, bickering over fries - stays exactly the same.

"University of Tennessee," Jace says at one point, out of nowhere, stirring his tea with the straw. "You thought more about it?"

"If I get the track scholarship. Coach thinks I will." I steal one more onion ring before he can stop me. "Three seconds, Jace. I'm three seconds away from Olympic qualifying times."

"You'll make it. You're the fastest girl in Tennessee."

"I'm the fastest girl in Tennessee right now. I want to be the fastest in the country."

"You will be." He says it so simply, like it's already decided, like the universe already signed off on it. "And I'll be wherever you are. Studying art. Stealing your fries. Arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes."

"That sounds perfect."

"That sounds like the rest of our lives."

I look at him, at his stupid lopsided grin and the pencil smudge on his jaw he never notices is there, and something in my chest goes warm and certain, like standing in a patch of sun. He leans across the counter and kisses me, quick and soft, tasting like salt and fry oil and something that's just him, and for a second the whole world narrows down to this. This diner. This boy. This town by the river where nothing bad has ever really happened to me. I let myself believe, just for a moment, that life could stay exactly this simple forever.

It tastes like a future that's only three seconds away.

That night, I dream of wolves.

They run through a forest I don't recognize, trees made of something that isn't quite bark, silver and glowing faintly like the whole forest is lit from beneath the ground. The wolves move together, fast and silent, paws barely touching the earth, and somewhere far off, a voice is calling a name.

Not my name. A name I don't know. But it feels close to mine, close enough that something in my chest answers to it anyway, some old buried part of me straining toward that voice like a plant leaning into light. The forest smells like nothing I've ever smelled awake, cold and metallic, like snow right before it falls.

I wake up gasping, sheets tangled around my legs, heart slamming against my ribs like I actually ran that forest myself. My room is dark and still and completely ordinary, my track medals hanging crooked on their hooks by the window, my phone glowing faintly on the nightstand with no new messages. For a moment I just lie there, waiting for my pulse to catch up with the rest of me, waiting for the strange ache in my chest to fade.

Just a nightmare, I tell myself, pressing a hand to my chest until my heartbeat slows. Too much pie. Too much running.

I roll over and pull the blanket up to my chin, and eventually, I fall back asleep.

I don't dream again.

LUNA

Something is wrong with me today, and I can't explain it any better than that.

It starts small. A headache behind my eyes before first period even ends, dull and pulsing, the kind of ache that makes the fluorescent lights in the hallway feel like they're buzzing directly into my skull. I press the heel of my hand against my temple, willing it away, but it only settles deeper, coiling behind my eye sockets like something looking for a way out. By lunch it's worse, a low hum under my skin that won't settle no matter how many times I roll my shoulders or crack my neck. I feel too big for my own body, like I'm wearing a coat two sizes too small, seams straining at the shoulders, the collar pressing too tight against my throat.

Raven notices before I even say anything, because Raven notices everything. She's been my best friend since the fourth grade, back when she moved to Little River from Knoxville and cried on the swing set because nobody would sit with her at lunch, and I sat with her, and that was that. Twelve years later she still knows my face better than I know it myself, can read the smallest shift in my expression the way other people read weather.

"You look like you want to bite someone," she says at our lockers, unwrapping a granola bar with the kind of loud, deliberate crinkle she uses when she wants attention.

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're doing the thing where your jaw gets tight."

"Raven."

"I'm just saying. If today's a bad day, we can skip the mall thing after school. We can do ice cream and complaining instead. That's a whole valid alternative."

"I said I'm fine." It comes out sharper than I mean it to, sharp enough that Raven actually flinches, and immediately I feel awful, guilt curling hot and fast in my stomach. She doesn't say anything, just presses her lips together and looks down at her granola bar like it personally offended her. The silence stretches, heavy and unfamiliar between us, because Raven and I have never once run out of things to say to each other.

"Raven, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap at you like that."

"It's fine." But her voice has gone small and careful, the way it does when she's deciding whether to be hurt or let it go, and I hate that I put that voice there. I hate it more than the headache, more than the strange hum under my skin, more than anything else about this terrible day.

I go to shut my locker to end the moment, to just move past it, and my hand closes around the metal handle harder than I intend to. There's a sound, a sharp crack of metal bending wrong, and when I pull my hand back the handle is warped, dented inward like something slammed into it from the inside.

Raven stares at it. Then she stares at me.

"Okay," she says slowly. "That's not normal locker behavior."

"I don't know what happened." My hand is shaking. My whole body is shaking, actually, a fine tremor running from my fingertips up through my wrist, and the headache behind my eyes flares hot and bright like something trying to claw its way out from behind my skull. "I barely touched it."

"You barely touched it and it looks like the Hulk got detention." Raven's trying to make it a joke, but there's something careful in her eyes now, something watching me a little too closely, the way she watches a pot she suspects might boil over. "Are you feeling okay? You've been weird all week."

"I'm just tired. Track's been kicking my butt." The lie comes easy, easier than it should, and I hate how easy it is. "I didn't sleep great last night."

She doesn't push, because Raven never pushes, she just waits until you're ready to tell her the truth on your own terms, which is honestly the most annoying and wonderful thing about her. "Okay. Well. Text me if you turn into a werewolf or whatever."

I laugh, but it comes out thin and strange, and I don't know why the word werewolf makes something twist cold in my stomach, why my whole body seems to flinch at a joke that should mean nothing at all.

Jace finds me by the gym doors after last bell, leaning against the brick with his backpack hanging off one shoulder and that look on his face he gets when he already knows something's wrong before I've said a single word. Three years of dating him and he's never once needed me to spell things out; he just reads it in the set of my shoulders, in the way I hold my mouth.

"Raven texted me," he says, without preamble. "Something about a haunted locker."

"It's not haunted. I just... I don't know. I grabbed it too hard."

"Luna." He pushes off the wall and comes closer, close enough that I can see the worry sitting behind his eyes, patient and steady, the way it always is. Jace has never once in three years given up on getting an honest answer out of me. He just waits. He's good at waiting. "Talk to me."

"I had a rough day. That's all."

"You've had a rough week. You've been distracted, and now you're bending metal with your bare hands, and I'm allowed to be a little concerned about my girlfriend, you know."

I sigh and lean back against the brick beside him, letting the cool wall soak some of the heat out of my skin. It doesn't help much. The heat feels like it's coming from inside my bones, not my skin. "I don't know what's happening to me, Jace. I feel wrong. Like there's something under my skin trying to get out."

He goes quiet for a second, and when he speaks again his voice is lower, more careful, like he's stepping onto ice he's not sure will hold him. "Can I tell you something weird?"

"Weirder than my locker exploding?"

"I've been having dreams." He says it fast, like if he doesn't say it fast he won't say it at all. "Since we started dating. Wolves, mostly. Running through some kind of forest, except the trees are all lit up silver, like they're glowing from the inside. And there's a girl standing at a crossroads. I can never see her face, but I always know it's important. Like she's waiting for something."

My skin goes cold, prickling from my scalp down to my fingertips, but I don't tell him. I don't tell him that I know exactly what silver forest he's talking about, because I've stood in it too, because a voice called a name that wasn't mine and something in me answered anyway. The memory of it flickers behind my eyes, bright and disorienting, gone before I can hold onto it.

"They've been getting worse," he continues, when I don't say anything. "More vivid. Last night felt so real I could smell the pine trees when I woke up."

"It's probably just stress," I say, too quickly. "AP exams are coming up. You've been staying up too late working on your portfolio."

"Maybe." He doesn't sound convinced, but he lets it go, because that's what Jace does, he lets things go until they're ready to be picked back up. "You'd tell me if something was going on with you, right? Actually going on, not just track being track?"

"Of course I would."

It's not exactly a lie. It's just not exactly the truth either, and the space between those two things feels wider than it ever has before.

The next day, we sit at our usual booth at Mae's, vinyl seats cracked with age, the smell of frying oil and coffee thick in the air the way it always is on weekday afternoons. But Jace isn't really there. His eyes are somewhere else entirely, his pencil moving across his sketchbook in slow, absent strokes while his fries go cold in the basket between us. I watch the shape come together under his hand and my stomach drops.

Wolves. He's drawing wolves again, three of them running in formation through trees that are all wrong, too tall, too silver, glowing at the edges the way nothing in nature actually glows.

"You okay?" I ask, nudging his foot under the table.

He blinks, like he's surfacing from somewhere deep, and looks down at the sketchbook like he's surprised to find it in his own hands. "Yeah. Sorry. Bad dreams again. Wolves. Silver forests." He rubs a hand over his face, and for a moment he looks older than seventeen, tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. "Probably just stress."

I don't tell him I had the same dream three nights ago. I don't tell him that hearing him describe it makes my whole body go tight and cold, because some small, scared part of me is terrified that saying it out loud will make it more real than it already feels. The words sit heavy on my tongue, and I swallow them down along with the last of my milkshake.

Instead I reach for a safer subject, one that's ours, one that belongs only to us and not to whatever strange thread is starting to stitch itself between his dreams and mine.

"University of Tennessee," I say. "You given any more thought to it?"

He looks up, and something in his face relaxes, grateful for the change of direction. "If I get in. You?"

"If I get the track scholarship. Coach thinks I will." I steal one of his cold fries, mostly out of habit. "Three seconds, Jace. I am three seconds away from Olympic qualifying times, and Coach Dunbar has already started saying the word nationals out loud like it's a foregone conclusion."

"You'll make it." He says it the way he always says it, certain, unshaken, like doubting me has never once occurred to him. "You're the fastest girl in Tennessee."

"I'm the fastest girl in Tennessee right now." I bump his shoulder with mine. "I want to be the fastest in the country. I want the record. I want all of it."

"You will be. And I'll be there for every bit of it, wherever you end up. Studying art in some cramped little dorm room, stealing your fries, losing every argument about whose turn it is to do the dishes."

"That sounds perfect."

"That sounds more than perfect."

He leans in and kisses me, slow and easy, tasting like salt and cold fries and something warm underneath that's just him, just Jace, and for one whole minute the wolves and the silver forest and the ache under my skin all go quiet. It tastes like stolen fries and Tennessee and a future that's still just three seconds away, close enough to touch if I only keep running fast enough to reach it. I let myself believe, just for that minute, that the future really is that simple.

We say goodbye in the parking lot, the sky bruising purple at the edges as evening settles in, and I'm digging my keys out of my bag when I feel it.

A pull. Sudden and magnetic, low in my chest, dragging my attention across the street before I've even consciously decided to look. There's a man standing on the far sidewalk, near the old hardware store that closes early on weekdays. Tall. Too still, the kind of still that doesn't belong to a body that breathes and shifts its weight the way normal bodies do. He's watching me, and even from this distance I can see his eyes, and they don't look right. They catch the streetlight strangely, glowing faint and gold for just a second before it's gone.

My heart slams against my ribs.

I don't know him. I've never seen him before in my life. But something in me, something buried so deep I didn't know it existed until this exact second, recognizes him anyway, and it terrifies me more than anything else has today. A primal instinct rises in my chest, urging me to run, to hide, to do anything but stand here in the open where he can see me.

"Luna?" Jace's voice sounds far away. "You okay?"

I don't answer. I turn and I run, faster than I've ever run in my life, faster than my 50.2 seconds, faster than anything Coach Dunbar has ever clocked on his stopwatch, and I don't stop until I'm three blocks away and my lungs are burning and the man is nowhere in sight. I lean against a stranger's fence, gasping, waiting for my heartbeat to slow, but it doesn't, not really, not for a long time.

Nana Mae is waiting for me on the porch when I get home, a mug of tea in each hand, steam curling up into the cooling evening air. She doesn't ask why I'm out of breath. She doesn't ask why my hands are still shaking. She just looks at me with an expression I have never once seen on her face in seventeen years, not when Grandpa died, not when the diner nearly went under during the flood, not ever.

Fear.

"Sit down, baby," she says, her voice too gentle, too careful, like she's talking to something that might shatter. "We need to talk."

I sit. I take the tea. My hands are shaking too hard to actually drink it, and some small, quiet part of me already knows that whatever she's about to say will change everything.

That night, my fever starts.

LUNA

The fever hits me like a wave I never saw coming.

One second I'm sitting across from Nana Mae at the kitchen table, tea gone cold in my hands, and the next my skin feels like it's been dipped in fire. Sweat breaks out along my hairline. My vision swims, the kitchen tilting sideways like the whole house has shifted on its foundation. I grip the edge of the table, knuckles white, willing the room to hold still.

"Luna?" Nana Mae's voice sharpens, all the careful gentleness from the porch gone in an instant. She's on her feet, hands cupping my face, tilting it up toward the light. "Baby, look at me."

I try. My eyes feel heavy, wrong, like they don't belong in my skull anymore. I catch my reflection for half a second in the dark window over the sink, my green eye and my brown eye, the mismatched pair I've had since birth, the ones Jace has always said make me look like I belong to two different worlds at once. Right now they look glassy and too bright, rimmed red, like something underneath them is trying to burn its way out. A distant part of me, the part still capable of rational thought, wonders if this is what dying feels like, or if it's something worse.

"It's happening," Nana Mae whispers, more to herself than to me, her hands trembling against my cheeks. "Oh, it's happening so fast. Faster than your mama's did."

"What's happening?" My voice comes out cracked, barely mine. "Nana, what's wrong with me?"

She opens her mouth like she's finally going to answer, seventeen years of secrets rising up all at once behind her eyes, and I think, this is it, she's going to tell me everything. For one suspended moment, I actually believe I'll get an answer before the world falls apart completely.

The pain hits before she gets a single word out.

It starts in my chest, a searing pull like something is trying to claw its way out from beneath my ribs, and then it spreads, fast, faster than anything should be able to move through a human body. My legs give out from under me. I hit the kitchen floor hard, the linoleum cold against my burning skin, and the world narrows down to nothing but the pain, white hot and endless, tearing through every nerve I own. Somewhere above me, I hear Nana Mae crying out, but the sound reaches me as if from underwater, muffled and far away.

"Nana." I can barely get the word out. "Nana, it hurts."

"I know, baby. I know." She's on the floor beside me now, gathering me into her lap the way she used to when I was small enough to fit there, rocking me even though I'm seventeen and nearly as tall as she is. Her hands smooth back my hair, damp with sweat, and I can feel her whole body shaking. Whatever strength has held her together for years, whatever secret she's carried alone since before I could walk, seems to be cracking open right along with me. "It's happening. Oh baby, it's happening."

I don't know what "it" is. I don't have room in my head for anything except the fire spreading under my skin, my spine arching against the pain, a sound tearing out of my throat that doesn't sound human, doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard myself make before. Some distant corner of my mind screams that this can't be real, that seventeen-year-old girls don't catch fire from the inside out at their grandmother's kitchen table, and yet here I am, burning.

And then the burning finds my forehead.

It's different there, sharper, more precise, like someone is carving into my skin with a blade made of light instead of metal. I scream. I can't help it. Nana Mae holds me tighter, murmuring words I can't understand through the roaring in my ears, some language that sounds older than anything I've heard her speak before, and I catch one more glimpse of my reflection in the dark window glass before my vision blurs entirely.

My eyes aren't green and brown anymore.

One has gone pure silver, bright as moonlight on water. The other burns gold, molten and strange, like something ancient just opened up behind it. And between them, searing itself into my forehead in a mark that glows white hot before settling into a deep, aching silver, is a shape I don't recognize. Not the twin crescents I'll later learn every wolf at Hollowcrest wears. This is a full moon, whole and dark at its center, eclipsed, ringed all the way around in fire the color of starlight. I don't know yet what that shape means, only that it feels heavier than skin should, like it's been waiting under the surface my whole life for permission to surface.

The front door bangs open so hard it cracks against the wall.

"Luna!"

Jace's voice cuts through the haze of pain, and distantly I remember he was coming for dinner, that this was supposed to be a normal Tuesday, spaghetti and garlic bread and Nana Mae asking him about his college applications for the hundredth time. He skids into the kitchen and stops dead in the doorway, and I watch his face go through shock and terror in the space of half a second, watch him take in the mark blazing on my forehead, my convulsing body, my strange new eyes. For one terrible heartbeat, neither of us moves, like the whole world is holding its breath alongside us.

He doesn't run.

I will remember that for the rest of my life, however long or strange that life turns out to be. He doesn't run, doesn't hesitate, doesn't do any of the things a normal boy watching his girlfriend seize on a kitchen floor with fire burning into her skin should reasonably do. He drops to his knees beside me instead, sliding across the linoleum, and grabs my hand like he can hold me together through sheer force of will. There's a rawness in his face I've never seen before, fear stripped down to something closer to devotion.

"I'm here," he says, voice cracking down the middle. "Luna, I'm here, I'm not going anywhere."

I squeeze his hand. It's the only thing I can do.

The pain starts to ebb, slow and reluctant, like a tide pulling back out to sea. My body stops convulsing. The fire under my skin banks down to something smaller, a low simmering heat instead of an inferno, and I go limp against Nana Mae, gasping, drenched in sweat, my forehead throbbing where the mark has settled. For a moment, the three of us stay frozen there on the kitchen floor, none of us quite ready to believe it's over.

That's when I hear the footsteps on the porch.

Slow. Deliberate. Nana Mae's whole body goes rigid around me, and Jace's grip on my hand tightens until it almost hurts. The air itself seems to change, growing thick and watchful, like the house has noticed the approach of something it recognizes.

A shadow falls across the open doorway, and then he's standing there, filling the frame, the same tall stranger from across the street last night. Up close, he's even stranger than he looked from a distance, too still, too composed, like the ordinary rules of breathing and blinking and shifting your weight don't apply to him the same way they apply to everyone else. His eyes catch the kitchen light and glow faint gold, the same unnatural color I just watched bloom in my own reflection.

"I'm here for her," he says. His voice is calm, low, carrying an authority that makes the air in the kitchen feel heavier.

Jace is on his feet before I even register him moving, putting his body between me and the stranger, chest heaving, hands curled into fists at his sides. Every line of him radiates a fierce, stubborn refusal, the kind that comes from loving someone more than you fear the unknown. "You're not taking her anywhere."

The man, Orion, though I don't know his name yet, looks at Jace for a long moment. Not with anger. Not with the dismissal I'd expect a stranger to have for a scared human teenager standing his ground in a kitchen that isn't even his. Something closer to respect passes over his face, brief and quiet, there and gone again before I can be sure I saw it at all.

"You can't stop what's happening to her," Orion says. "But you can say goodbye."