ThorneVale

Chapter Five

The cold started two days after the rite, and at first Wren blamed the house.

Old places held drafts, she told herself, standing in the kitchen with a mug of tea she couldn't seem to warm her hands on no matter how long she wrapped her fingers around it. Old wiring, old windows, an old furnace that probably hadn't been serviced since her aunt's divorce. She found the thermostat and turned it up three degrees and told herself that would fix it.

It didn't fix it.

By the third day the cold had moved from a nuisance to something stranger, a bone deep ache that no number of layers seemed to touch, like her body had stopped trusting its own ability to generate warmth. She slept in socks and a sweater and still woke shivering, and when she caught her reflection in the bathroom mirror on the fourth morning she almost didn't recognize the face looking back at her. Pale in a way that had nothing to do with the season. Shadows under her eyes that made her look like she hadn't slept in a week, though she'd technically been in bed for nine hours.

She told herself it was grief. That made a certain kind of sense, didn't it, the body processing loss in strange physical ways, her aunt's death and the estate and the whole disorienting unfamiliarity of this town finally catching up to her all at once. She'd read about that. Grief doing strange things to the body. It was a reasonable, ordinary explanation, and she held onto it with both hands because the alternative explanation, the one that kept surfacing at the edges of her thoughts whenever she let her guard down, involved a stranger in a clearing saying words that had felt less like rejection and more like a diagnosis.

I reject the bond.

She hadn't been able to shake the phrase, or the way it had landed in her chest, precise as a blade finding the exact gap between ribs it was aiming for. She didn't know what a bond was, not really, not beyond whatever Ines had tried gently to explain on the walk home that night, half sentences that never quite resolved into anything Wren's rational mind could hold onto. Something about the town. Something about certain families. Something about how she shouldn't be frightened, that it would make more sense in time, that Ines would explain properly once Wren had had a chance to sleep on it.

Wren had slept on it for five nights now and made no sense of it at all, except that whatever had happened to her in that clearing was still happening to her, slow and relentless, and getting worse.

She went into town on the fifth day mostly because staying in the house alone with the cold and the quiet had started to feel like its own kind of danger, the specific unraveling that comes from too much time spent inside your own worsening body. The walk to the Copper Spoon, which normally took ten unremarkable minutes, left her breathless and shaking by the time she reached the door, and she had to stand on the sidewalk a moment gathering herself before she trusted her legs enough to go inside.

Ines was behind the counter again, and the moment she looked up her expression did something Wren had seen a version of once before, in the clearing, right before everything went wrong. A carefully controlled alarm.

"Sit down," Ines said, already moving around the counter before Wren had fully processed the instruction, guiding her into the nearest booth with a hand under her elbow that felt necessary in a way it embarrassingly hadn't a few days ago. "How long has it been this bad?"

"How long has what been this bad?" Wren's voice came out thinner than she wanted it to. "Ines, I don't understand what's happening to me. I feel like I'm getting sick, except nothing about it feels like any sickness I've ever had. I'm cold all the time. I can't sleep properly. Everything feels like it's happening from somewhere far away."

Ines was quiet for a long moment, studying her with an expression that had gone soft in a way that frightened Wren more than anything else had so far, because it looked like sympathy for something that hadn't happened yet.

"You need to talk to someone," Ines said finally. "Someone who can explain this better than I can, and who has more of a responsibility to fix it than I do."

"Fix what? Ines, please, just tell me what's going on. You clearly know something."

"I know pieces. It's not my place to hand you the whole thing, not when it's tangled up with people who deserve the chance to explain it themselves." Ines reached across the table and closed her hand briefly, warmly, over Wren's, which had gone cold enough that the contrast was almost startling. "What I can tell you, because I think you need to hear it plainly, is that this isn't grief, and it isn't the flu, and it isn't going to get better on its own if you just wait it out. You need to see the Ferro family. Specifically, you need Del, or Callum, before this gets much worse."

The name landed in Wren's chest with a strange, dropping weight. "Ferro. That's the man from the clearing."

"Yes."

"The one who said he rejected me. In front of the entire town, like I'd done something to deserve it." Wren pulled her hand back, some old, protective anger flaring up through the exhaustion. "Why would I go anywhere near him?"

"Because whatever he did to you that night, intentionally or not, he's the only one who can undo what it's doing to your body now." Ines held her gaze, steady, serious, the historian's careful diplomacy dropping away into something more direct. "I know that's not fair. I know it's the last thing you want to hear right now. But you're getting worse, Wren, and I don't think you have the luxury of being too proud to ask for help."

Wren sat with that for a long moment, the diner's ordinary warmth doing nothing to touch the cold that had settled somewhere deep in her chest, and thought about the way the man in the clearing had looked at her for half a second before his face had shut like a door. Recognition, and then its complete and deliberate erasure.

She didn't want to need him for anything.

But her hands were shaking around a coffee cup she couldn't seem to warm, and some honest, frightened part of her understood that wanting had very little to do with what she was going to have to do next.