The sound came again, closer this time, and it didn't belong to anything with lungs.
Nisera felt it before she heard it — a pressure against her eardrums like standing too near a struck bell, low enough to shudder up through the moss and into the soles of her feet. Beside her, Ronan had gone utterly still, every line of him coiled, and she understood with sudden, cold clarity that a man who could face down a true wolf without flinching was afraid of whatever was coming through the trees.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"Nothing that should exist." He didn't look at her. His eyes stayed fixed on the dark between two ancient trunks, where the shadows had started doing something shadows weren't supposed to do — thickening, pooling, gathering themselves the way spilled ink gathers before it st
