Soul Thread

Chapter Five: The Bind

It didn't hurt the way I expected.

I'd braced for pain, something sharp, something you'd need to grit your teeth through. Instead, when Kael pressed his palm flat against mine, mark to mark, what I felt first was warmth. Then recognition. Like sliding into a room I'd been in a thousand times before, except I'd never once set foot in this house.

"Look at me," he said. "Whatever happens, don't let go before it's finished."

"What happens if I let go?"

"Let's not find out."

Row stood back near the door with his arms crossed, watching us the way you'd watch someone step out onto ice you weren't sure would hold. He didn't say anything else. I got the feeling he'd already said everything he was allowed to say.

The mark between our palms started to glow.. not bright, just enough that I could see it through the gaps in our fingers, silver-grey light pulsing in time with something that wasn't quite my heartbeat and wasn't quite his either. It was both. Overlapping. Like two songs playing the same note at slightly different times until they finally landed on it together.

Then the memory hit.

Not a dream. Not imagination. A memory, whole and complete, dropped into my head like it had always belonged there.

*A different house. Older, somehow, though I couldn't have said how I knew that. Rain against tall windows. A woman, me, and also not me, wearing clothes from a century I didn't recognize.. standing across a room from a man with Kael's exact eyes, except the rest of his face was different, older in the way of centuries rather than years.*

*"You know what they'll do to us," the woman said.*

*"Let them try."*

*"Kael"*

*"That's not my name in this one," he said, and smiled like it was a joke they'd already had a hundred times. "But I'll answer to it, if you keep saying it like that."*

The memory folded shut as fast as it had opened, and I came back into my own body gasping, my hand still locked with Kael's, the mark between us burning bright enough now that I could feel the heat of it in my teeth.

"You saw it," Kael said. It wasn't a question. His voice had gone rough.

"The rain. The house. He had your eyes."

"I know." He said it like the words cost him something. "I've had that dream every night since the alley. I thought it was just a dream." His grip on my hand tightened, not painfully, just like he needed something solid to hold onto. "It wasn't a dream."

"No," I said. "I don't think it was."

The glow between our palms flared once, hard enough that I had to close my eyes against it, and when it faded, the mark had changed. Still two lines through a circle, but darker now, more solid, less like a scar trying to heal and more like something that had simply decided to stay.

Kael let go first. My hand felt strangely cold without his.

"Did it work?" I asked.

He didn't answer right away. Instead he closed his eyes, went very still, and I watched something shift across his face.. concentration, then surprise, then something closer to relief.

"I can feel you," he said quietly. "Not just see you. Feel you. Where you are. That you're not in pain right now. That's.." He opened his eyes. "That's not supposed to happen this fast."

"Is that good?"

"I don't know yet." He looked at Row, who'd gone very quiet by the door. "Row. Tell me what you're not saying."

Row hesitated long enough that I understood, before he even opened his mouth, that whatever he was about to say wasn't going to be the comforting kind of truth.

"The bind took," he said slowly, "in under a minute. The last one on record took three days and nearly killed both parties in the process." He looked between us. "Whatever the two of you are to each other, Kael, this isn't new. Row's Law of blood-binds says the deeper the prior connection, the faster and easier the bond forms." He let that sit. "This wasn't easy. It was instant."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Outside, the silence in the woods had finally broken, not into howling, but into something quieter and somehow worse. Footsteps. Many of them, moving in the kind of unison that only came from something coordinated, something that had been waiting for exactly this moment to make its move.

Kael's head snapped toward the window.

"That's not Ashgrave," he said.

"Then who"

"I don't know," he said, and for the first time since the alley, I heard real fear in his voice, the kind that wasn't about wolves or Ferals or anything I'd already learned to be afraid of. "But whoever it is, they didn't come because they heard the howls." His hand found mine again, automatic, like his body had already decided we weren't doing this apart anymore. "They came because they felt the bind finish."

"What does that mean?"

He looked at me, and for just a second, underneath the fear, there was something that looked almost like grief, old grief, worn smooth with time, the kind you carry so long you forget it has an edge.

"It means," he said, "that somewhere out there, whoever's been waking this mark up for a thousand years just found out we didn't wait for permission."

The footsteps stopped, all at once, directly outside the gate.

And then something knocked. Once. Polite. Patient.

Like it had all the time in the world to wait for us to open the door.