Marked by the Moon

Chapter 4: Something Is Wrong With Me

SERAPHINA’S POV

I have a system.

By 6am, my alarm goes off, I have my coffee black, twenty minutes of reading before the day runs past my ability to manage it gracefully.

By 7am, I have my Behavioral Analysis notes reviewed on the bus. 9am, there's class. At 11am, there's more boring classes. 1pm, library, the only time I actually get to enjoy myself cause I love reading. 4pm, café shift. 8pm, courier route. By 10pm, I go home, if everything goes right.

Everything rarely goes right, but the system holds anyway. The system is the whole point. When you have no one to catch you if you fall, or some prince in shining armor, you stop leaving room to fall.

I built this life with my very hands from nothing, and I was very proud of it in the quiet way of someone who doesn’t talk about their pride because there’s nobody to tell.

Today, the system almost killed me.

-----

It started small. It always starts small.

I was in Research Method class, watching my classmate Jordan struggle through a presentation he clearly hadn’t prepared for. It was easy, I could ace it in my sleep. He could too, if he focused less on hot girls and more on his notes. We were supposed to document micro-expressions, catalog stress indicators, and write two pages on what we noticed.

I noticed plenty.

Jordan’s jaw was tight. His breathing was shallow. His eyes kept tracking left, which meant he was constructing rather than recalling. Textbook anxiety presentation.

And then something else happened.

The anxiety hit me.

Not in a metaphoric way . Not even in an empathetic ‘I understand what he’s feeling’ way. It fell in my chest like something moved directly — his pulse was racing and it was somehow echoing in my own throat, his dread settled into my stomach with a weight that had no business being there. This is strange.

I pressed my pen hard against my notebook and breathed through it.

It wasn't real. It couldn't. This feeling….

'Hypersensitivity,' I told myself. 'Emotional contagion. It’s a documented psychological phenomenon. You’re fine.'

By the time Jordan sat down, it had faded.

I wrote my two pages. Got full marks. Told no one.

-----

The café shift ran long because it always ran long, and by the time I was walking home it was past nine and the city had gone quiet in the way it does when the temperature drops and sensible people had gone inside.

I was cutting across Mercer Street. It was faster than the main road, I’d done it a hundred times before but then a car came from nowhere.

No headlights. Engine already running. Moving too fast for a residential street.

I pulled myself back and on the way down, my wrist caught the edge of a bollard. The impact was off — the angle, the force. The kind of wrong that should mean fracture. I lay on the pavement for three seconds cataloguing the damage with the detached efficiency of someone running a systems check.

‘My wrist has significant pain, my vision seems clear and my breathing is intact.’

I got up. Looked at my wrist. It was already swelling, already bruising purple-black along the outer bone.

‘s**t, okay,’ I thought. ‘That’s going to be really bad tomorrow.’

I walked the rest of the way home with my arm against my chest. By the time I reached my building, the swelling had reduced. By the time I’d showered and eaten, the bruise had faded to a faint yellow shadow.

By morning, there was nothing there at all.

It was unreal

I stood at my bathroom mirror and stared at perfectly clear skin on my arm that didn't even have a bruise and thought very carefully about all of the reasonable explanations.

I didn’t find any. There was none.

What is wrong with me?

-----

I saw Damon on Wednesday, it was becoming a routine cause I had seen him two Wednesdays since our first encounter in the library.

I liked my new chestnut friend. Friend? I wasn't sure yet. But there was something about him that made me want to spill my soul. That was weird. I’m usually very guarded around people.

I’d come out of the library early. There was a headache building behind my eyes, there has been a strange chest-pressure that had been following me since the Jordan incident still hovering at the edges — and there he was. Leaning against the wall of the building opposite, looking at his phone casually like someone trying to appear like they weren’t watching the library entrance.

If he wasn't so tall, lean and smoking hot, I'd think he was a creep

I crossed the street.

“Are you following me?”

He looked up. The surprise on his face was good. Almost perfect. A little bit too composed.

“I was waiting for a friend,” he said. A charming smile and a relaxed posture. “You’re early.”

“My seminar ran short.” I held his gaze. “You’re on the wrong side of campus for your afternoon class.”

Something moved in his expression. There and gone.

“Changed my schedule,” he said. “Added a seminar in the east building.”

“Which one?”

A half-second pause. “Its developmental psychology. Hartley’s section.”

I filed it away. I’d check. He knew I’d check. Something in the quality of his attention shifted slightly — a recalibration, like he’d revised his assessment of how closely I was paying attention.

“Right,” I said.

“You okay?” His voice changed. Less deflection, more something genuine. It was refreshing to feel his kindness, then his eyes dropped briefly to my wrist — the wrist that had no bruise, no swelling, no evidence of last night.

He couldn’t know about last night.

“Fine,” I said. “Why?”

“You look—” He stopped. Reconsidered his words. “Tired.”

“I’m always tired. I work three jobs, Damon.”

“I know.” He said it automatically. Then caught himself. “I mean — you mentioned that. Last week.”

I hadn’t mentioned that last week. I was pretty sure I hadn’t mentioned that at all.

“Right,” I said again, slower this time.

He smiled. That disarming smile “Let's grab something to eat. I'm starving”, he held the door open as we moved toward the building to hang out.

The subject closed itself the way he intended it to — smoothly, without visible seams.

I let it close shut.

But I kept the thread running in my head.

-----

That night we grabbed lunch after my shift but for most part of it Damon stepped out and was on a call I would never hear.

A woman’s voice, it was clipped and urgent: “Damon. The sample you sent.”

“What about it?”

“This isn’t a dormant wolf gene.” A pause weighted with something that sounded like controlled fear. “This is something else. Something older. I’ve run it three times.”'

Silence.

“If the Alpha sees these results….”Another pause followed '“He may not be able to stop the instinct to claim her immediately. Or he panics and tries to contain her. Either way—”'

'“Either way we have a problem,”' Damon said quietly.

'“Damon.”' The woman’s voice dropped. '“What is she?”'

The silence on his end lasted a long time.

'“I don’t know,”' he said finally.

'“But I’m starting to think whatever she is — she doesn’t know either.”'