Chapter6
870 Words
The nightmare is always the clearing.
It’s not a replay — my subconscious is more creative than that. In the nightmare it goes differently: I walk to the center of the clearing and Caden is already saying the words before I reach him, and I can see it happening, I can see the bond breaking in real time like a light going out room by room, and I’m trying to reach him before the last light goes but my legs aren’t working right, they’re the nightmare kind of legs that move through something thick and resistant—
I wake up at 3am.
This is not unusual. I’ve been waking up at 3am for twenty-three nights now, which is how many nights it’s been since the Verification. I know the number because I’ve been counting them. Tomorrow it will be twenty-four. Eventually it will be enough that I stop counting.
I sit up. I press my palms flat on the mattress and take in a deep breath.
My room is dark except for the streetlight coming through the east window. The house is quiet. Mira sleeps at the other end of the hall. I can hear her breathing — slow, even, unbothered — and I find somewhat relaxing in that, the way I find something useful in knowing where exits are.
I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and head to the bathroom.
I run cold water over my wrists — not for any mystical reason, just because cold water is real and physical and requires me to be present in the temperature of it. I splash my face. I look up at the mirror out of habit, the reflex self-check I’ve had since I was fourteen and my wolf first started stirring, the nightly catalog of eyes and hands and the physical evidence of what I am.
I stop.
My eyes are gold.
Not amber. Not the usual wolf-shift amber that I’ve seen my whole life. Gold. Deep, luminous, actual gold — the color of something lit from inside. They are completely wrong. They are the wrong color for any wolf on any spectrum I’ve ever studied. They are the color of something that shouldn’t be able to exist in a face and yet here they are, in my face, in the mirror at 3am in Mira’s upstairs bathroom.
I stare at them.
They stare back.
I run more cold water and splash my face a second time. I look again.
Still gold. If anything, brighter.
I grip the edge of the sink. This has to be a stress response. This is twenty-three days of grief and disruption and not enough sleep and this is my body doing something abnormal because I have been through something abnormal. Maybe wolves’ eyes change under extreme emotion. This is an extreme emotion. This is explainable.
I look at my eyes.
this is not explainable.
I stand in the bathroom and I watch my eyes be the wrong color for seven minutes. I watch the gold deepen and brighten and pulse faintly, like it has its own rhythm, and then — slowly, over the next three minutes — I watch them fade. Not back to amber. Through amber, like amber is a middle stop, and then to something close to my usual color but not quite exact.
Ten minutes, twenty-three seconds.
I counted.
I go back to my room. I get my journal from the nightstand and write: Eyes changed. Not wolf-standard. Duration: 10:23. No apparent trigger except the dream. I pause. I write: A boy from the Vael pack said a word to me today. Aurum Primalis. I looked it up. Everything has been erased. I’m going to find someone who isn’t redacted.
I close the journal.
I go to the window and I look at the street below. The neighborhood is asleep. The trees are bare — it’s late October and autumn has stripped them down to structure, just the bones of things visible now, the bare architecture of what they are when there’s nothing to hide behind. I’ve always thought autumn is more honest than spring.
I think about the Vael boy — Roman — and the way he said the words like they were information I already had access to.
I think about Jasper saying I can feel something pulling me toward you.
I think about Elias Cross, who has been in my classes for three weeks and writes about me in his notebook when he thinks I’m not looking.
I look at my hands. In the dark, for just a second, I think I can see something faint along the veins. Something like light, or like the memory of light. I blink and it’s gone.
There is something happening to me that I do not understand yet.
Caden rejected me. Mira has secrets. The pack records are redacted. My father is dead. I have twenty-three nights of nightmares, one impossible blood type, and eyes that glow the wrong color.
I go back to bed. I lie down. I stare at the ceiling.
I do not sleep, but I stop being afraid of the dark, which is something.
Tomorrow I’m going to look in Elias Cross’s notebook.
- Writer
