Soul Thread

Chapter Two: The Mark

I didn't sleep that night. Or the next one.

By the third night I gave up pretending and just sat on my bedroom floor with the lights off, staring at the back of my hand like it might start talking if I waited long enough.

Because something was happening to it.

Not visible, not yet. But there was a spot near my thumb that had started to ache in a way that wasn't quite pain. More like pressure. Like something underneath my skin was trying to remember how to exist.

I told myself it was stress. I told myself a lot of things that week.

Kael found me again on Friday, which meant he'd either been watching the school or watching me, and I decided I didn't want to know which. He didn't bother with hello.

"You're not sleeping," he said.

"Good morning to you too."

"I'm not sleeping either." He said it like a confession, like it cost him something. "I keep dreaming about a house I've never been to. A woman with your laugh. A conversation I know I've never had, except I remember how it ends."

My stomach did something complicated.

"How does it end?"

He didn't answer that. Instead he reached for my hand, not asking, just doing it, the way you'd catch something falling and turned it palm-up between both of his. His skin was cold. Not corpse-cold. Just cold, the way stone is cold, like it had never had a reason to be anything else.

"Show me," he said.

"Show you what?"

"The mark."

I yanked my hand back. "How do you know about that?"

Something in his face changed, not quite like a surprise. Recognition. Like a door he'd been holding shut had just been confirmed to have something behind it.

"Because I have one too," he said, and pulled back his own sleeve.

There, on the inside of his wrist, was a symbol. Faint. Silver-grey, like a scar that had never fully healed, in the shape of two lines crossing through a circle. It hadn't been there in the alley. I would have noticed.

I held my hand out before I could talk myself out of it.

The same mark. In the same place his was. Like we'd been stamped by the same hand.

"What is it," I said. My voice didn't sound like mine.

"I don't know." He was still holding my wrist, and neither of us moved to end that. "But I know it's not new. I know that the way you know your own name is not new. It's old. Older than me. Maybe older than my family's whole bloodline."

"That's not an answer."

"No," he agreed. "It isn't."

We stood there long enough that it stopped being about the mark and started being about something else, the fact that his thumb had found the inside of my wrist and hadn't left, the fact that I hadn't asked him to. The fact that some small, stupid, reckless part of me didn't want him to.

Then, from somewhere behind the treeline, a howl cut through the quiet. Not the ragged, wrong sound the Ferals had made in the alley. This one was controlled. Deliberate. A signal, not a threat.

Kael's whole body went rigid.

"That's not a Feral," he said.

"Then what is it?"

"That," he said, already pulling me toward the school building, away from the tree line, "is a scout. Which means the Ashgrave pack already knows you exist. Which means we have less time than I thought."

"Time for what?"

He stopped at the door, and for the first time since the alley, he looked genuinely afraid.

"Time to figure out why the mark on your hand is a thousand years old," he said, "before whoever put it there decides to finish what they started."

Behind us, the howl came again and closer this time.

And underneath my skin, right where the mark was forming, something answered it.