Forbidden Mate, Fated Sin

Chapter 14: The Face In The Fire

Wren's pov

Odette refused to let go of my hand. The vision stayed locked in place. Rough waves of fire filled my eyes. Orange mixed with black and covered the trees I knew better than my own face. Deep inside that dark burning place a voice called out my name. I could not decide if the voice belonged to a real person or only to the fear that tore through my chest.

"Wren." Odette spoke near and sharp. "Wren, come back now. Look at me."

Everything vanished at the same moment. The barn. The hall. The fire. I found myself on my knees in cold grass outside the pack hall. Odette knelt in front of me. Her wrinkled hands held my shoulders instead of my wrist.

"Tell me what you saw," she said.

"Fire." My voice came out thin and shaky. "Near the trees. I think the northern border. A person screamed."

"Who screamed?"

"I cannot say. The voice sounded like mine but I do not believe it belonged to me."

Odette made her face empty in the careful way that showed she felt fear and wanted to hide it from me. "This never happened before. A vision that falls straight on top of a moment you already live through with no warning and no slow start."

"Does that mean trouble?"

"It means the two events link together." She pulled me to my feet. Her grip felt stronger than her thin arms looked. "The rejection and the thing that comes at the border. I do not know the link yet but power like yours never shows two things one after the other unless they tangle."

Behind us the doors of the hall opened. Light and noise poured into the dark. The pack began to leave. The formal meeting had ended. Pieces of talk reached me as people walked past. None of the words were kind. Most of them spoke about me. Some eyes stayed on me longer than they should. Priya laughed somewhere in the group. The sound was sharp and pleased. I could not make myself look for her.

"I must take you away from this place," Odette said. "Before more people stop and stare."

She guided me around the side of the hall. We left the thinning crowd and took the quiet path that led toward the house. My legs still shook under me. The rejection and the vision mixed inside my chest until I could not tell which pain belonged to which wound.

"He spoke those words," I said soft, mostly to myself. "In front of every person."

"I heard them." Odette's voice grew soft. "I am sorry, child."

"He did not mean the words. I know he did not mean them." My voice broke. "That still fails to make the pain smaller."

"No," Odette said. "It almost never does."

We walked without speaking for a time. The noise from the hall faded behind us. Ordinary night sounds took over the pack lands. Crickets. Wind moving through the trees. My own rough breathing that still had not settled.

"Odette." I stopped walking. "What if the fire I saw is real. What if it already burns."

"Then the patrols under Grier will find it before it spreads far enough to matter." She looked at my face. "You cannot treat every vision like a crisis, Wren. Some of what you see sits far away. Some is only possible and not sure. You must learn the difference or the visions will drown you before they ever help anyone."

"How can I learn that tonight after everything that happened inside the hall?"

"You cannot," Odette said plain. "Tonight you rest. Tomorrow we begin the work."

"What if tomorrow arrives too late?"

Odette stopped and turned to face me fully. Her silver hair caught the thin moonlight that reached through the branches above. "Then we face tonight while it is still tonight. But do not take tomorrow's trouble before it arrives, child. That is the quickest way I know to break a gift before it finishes growing."

"It does not feel like a gift."

"It almost never does at the start." She reached up and brushed a loose strand of hair from my face. The motion felt so much like something a grandmother would do that my chest filled with a longing I could not name. "My own mother told me the same words when my sight first woke many years before you were born. I did not believe her either."

"You never said that before. That your own mother had the sight."

"There is much I have not told you yet," Odette said. "Time was always going to be short for us, Wren. I only did not expect it to grow this short this fast."

Maribel waited at the door when we reached the house. Her face fell the moment she saw mine.

"Oh, Wren." She pulled me into her arms before I could speak. I let myself lean against her. I was too worn out to pretend I did not need it. "I heard what took place. The whole staff knew within minutes."

"I do not want to speak of it."

"Then we will not." She ran a hand over my hair the same way she had when I was small and scraped my knee on the training grounds. "Come inside. I will make you something warm."

"I am not hungry."

"I did not ask if you were hungry." Her voice left no space to argue. "Come inside, Wren."

I let her guide me in. Odette stayed at the door only long enough to promise she would return in the morning and then she vanished back into the dark toward her cabin. The kitchen was quiet. Most of the house staff had already left for the night. Only one low lamp burned over the table.

Maribel set a cup in front of me and sat across the table instead of standing the way she usually did. It seemed she wanted to stay closer tonight.

"He should not have done that to you," she said soft. "Whatever the council used to threaten him, he should have found a different path."

"There was no different path. Thane made that plain enough."

"There is always a different path, Wren. Men simply pick the one that costs them the least and then call it the only choice because admitting the truth forces them to face what the choice truly cost someone else." She wrapped her own hands around a second cup but did not drink. "I watched Edwin do the same thing to your mother once a lifetime ago though that is not a tale for tonight."

Something in her words caught my attention but weariness pressed too hard for me to follow it. "I keep thinking I should hate him."

"Do you?"

"No." My throat closed around the word. "That is the worst part. I do not hate him at all."

Maribel reached across the table and took my hand. It was the same gentle weight she had offered me a hundred times over the years from scraped knees to nights worse than this one.

"Then do not force yourself to hate him," she said. "Grief does not care what we believe it should look like. Let it be whatever it needs to be tonight."

I sat with her until the lamp burned low and my eyes grew too heavy to stay open. At last I went upstairs alone. The house was dark and quiet around me. On the landing I paused outside Celeste's door. I half expected to hear her cry or throw something or do any of the things I imagined a woman might do after watching her whole future fall apart twice in the same month. Instead there was only silence. It was thick and complete and felt more unsettling than any noise could have been. I stood there a moment longer than I planned before I forced myself to walk on toward my own room.

I changed out of my clothes and climbed into bed without washing the barn dirt fully from my skin. I was too tired to care.

Sleep did not arrive easy but when it finally came it came fast and hard. It pulled me under before I could prepare.

I dreamed of fire again. The same line of trees. The same scream. Except this time I did not watch from far away. This time I stood inside the flames myself. When I turned toward the sound of my own name being screamed I found myself looking back at my own face twisted with terror and forming words I could not hear over the roar of the burning trees.

I woke gasping. Sweat covered me. My heart slammed so hard I felt it in my throat.

Someone stood at the foot of my bed.