Silver Heart

Chapter Four

Freya POV

I twisted into the hold instead of away from it, driving my heel back into his shin.

He didn't expect the angle. His grip loosened enough that his weight rocked backward, chasing his balance for half a second before he caught it.

Half a second was still something.

Then the dark split red.

Two points of light cut through the dark from the hallway, low and fast, nothing like the amused yellow ones that had been circling me all night. These came in already moving.

A second shape barreled out of the dark and slammed into the enforcer's side, tearing his hand off my wrist. I hit the wall shoulder-first and stayed there, breath punched out of me.

They tore into each other where I'd been standing seconds before, red eyes locked on yellow, close enough that I could smell blood and something wild underneath it, wet fur and ozone.

The red-eyed one had him pinned before I could blink, driving him back into the wall hard enough to split the wood behind it. Plaster rained down from the cracked ceiling, dusting my hair, my shoulders.

"Freya!" Esther's voice, close, ragged, from somewhere near the stairs. "Freya, where—"

"I'm here! Stay back!"

The fight didn't sound like a fight. It sounded like something breaking apart, over and over, too fast to separate one hit from the next. A body slammed into the wall beside me hard enough that the whole house shuddered, and I flinched away, arms up, bracing for it to be me next.

It wasn't.

The yellow-eyed enforcer scrambled back across the floor on his hands, breathing hard, all the earlier confidence gone out of him. He'd looked almost bored holding my wrist a minute ago. He didn't look bored now.

"This isn't over," he said, low, voice shaking around the edges.

Then he was gone, out through the shattered window, faster than my eyes could track him leaving.

Silence dropped over the room so completely my own pulse filled it.

I didn't move. Whoever had just torn through that fight in under a minute was still somewhere in the dark with me, and my body hadn't decided yet whether that was a good thing.

My pulse hammered for a reason that had nothing to do with the fight anymore. Something about the air had changed, gone thick and close, and underneath the fear sat something stranger. Familiar, in a way that made no sense. Like recognizing a voice before a single word had been said.

"Are you hurt?"

The voice came low, controlled, from somewhere near the doorway. Not the enforcer's voice. Not anyone's voice I'd ever heard before, and still it landed like something I already knew.

"I don't know." It was the only true thing I had. My legs held. My wrist ached where his fingers had dug in. Nothing about tonight made sense anymore.

A shape moved through the dark. Tall. Broad-shouldered enough to fill the doorway.

For one second, a shaft of moonlight through the broken window caught him full in the face: sharp jaw, black hair cut close, dark eyes still burning faintly where the red hadn't quite faded.

Then he was gone. No retreating footsteps, no door swinging shut behind him. Gone, the same impossible way the enforcer had vanished, air rushing into the space where he'd stood.

I stood there, staring at nothing, my heartbeat refusing to slow down.

"Freya!" Footsteps pounded toward me, and then Esther's arms were around me, shaking harder than I was. Her hands ran over my shoulders, my face, checking for injuries she couldn't find in the dark. "Are you hurt? Tell me you're not hurt—"

"I'm fine." The words came out steadier than they should have. "Esther, someone else was here. He fought him off. He just—" I didn't have the rest of that sentence. I didn't have any words at all for the thing sitting in my chest right now, something too big and too strange to name.

Esther went very still.

"What did he look like?"

Something in her voice pulled my attention away from the broken window, away from the space where he'd disappeared. She wasn't asking out of curiosity. She was asking like the answer mattered more than anything else that had happened tonight.

"I only caught him for a second." My throat tightened around the rest. "Esther, what aren't you telling me?"

She didn't answer.

In the dark, her face stayed a shadow, but her hands went rigid against my shoulders, holding on like she was afraid to let go and afraid to keep touching me at the same time.

Somewhere outside, a wolf howled, long and low, and Esther's breath caught, sharp and sudden, her arms tightening around me like she already knew exactly what that sound meant.