FREYA
It still felt unreal, like a dream someone else was playing and I’d woken into the middle of it. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at my hands. The mark on my neck...Killian’s mark...still felt foreign and, at the same time, precisely placed, as if it had always belonged there and someone had only just remembered to point it out.
For the first time in as long as I could remember, the center of me didn’t feel hollow. The fire that had haunted me for years thrummed quietly, not the wild animal it had been, but a coiled thing that listened when I told it to. I kept testing it because curiosity tugged at me, and because fear had taught me to test everything I couldn’t trust.
I stared at my palm and thought of the first time the fire had answered me—how it had rolled across my ski
