Morning light found the forest thin and gray, slipping between boughs like an animal moving through undergrowth. Elara woke to a sharp, unfamiliar sting at the inside of her wrist and the world came into focus around that pain … the narrow cabin, the scent of damp wood, the echo of last night's fever.
She lifted her arm with fingers that trembled and there it was.. the crescent Corvus had warned of. Overnight the faint curve had darkened, its outline pulsing with a soft red that looked as if the moon had been painted beneath her skin.
When she pressed her palm to it, warmth poured into her hand, slow and deliberate. It crawled along her veins, threading up her arm with an insistence that made her breath hitch.
The heat pooled beneath her collarbone and the room tilted for a heartbeat. She steadied herself on the table, feeling suddenly small in the cabin's low light, as if the walls pressed closer to listen to the secret under her flesh.
Outside, Lucien moved with the quiet, precise gestures she had come to know… stacking thin lengths of wood beside a dying fire, arranging them as if the act could set some rightness in the world. He did not look up when she spoke.. His voice carried across the room in its even baritone. "You should not move so quickly."
"There is something wrong," Elara said, the words raw. Her hand stayed on her wrist. "It is spreading."
He turned then, and for the first time since she had met him she saw worry cross his face like a shadow. It was small, quick, and gone, but it altered him. He stepped into the space between them and took her hand with surprising gentleness.
Under his fingertips the crescent thrummed, and the thrum found a reply inside her ribs, as if two separate instruments had begun to play the same note.
"It is the bond," he said quietly, as if speaking the name could keep its shape from collapsing. "It is growing stronger."
Elara felt her throat close. "What does that mean?"
Lucien's voice was measured but threaded with a tired sorrow. "It means our lives are no longer separate. What I feel … you will feel. What harms me … harms you."
She recoiled as if from a sting. "That cannot be."
"Look at me," he urged. When she did she noticed the faint lines of weariness etched beneath his eyes and a small ache that pulsed somewhere under his ribs. "Do you feel that dullness in your chest? The cold at the base of your skull?"
She paused, searching the sudden map of sensations she no longer trusted. "Yes."
"That is not yours," he murmured. "That is mine."
The weight of it pressed down like a stone. "So if someone hurts you …" Her voice quavered.
He nodded slowly, grave and unsparing. "You will bleed with me."
Silence settled between them the way fog settles into hollows. Outside a wind moved through the trees, carrying the smell of rain and something older and sharper… a metallic tang of fear that made her think of blade edges and closed doors.
Elara stepped back, needing air like a child stepping away from a crackling hearth.
"You said Corvus told you there was a way to stop it," she said, forcing steadiness into her words.
Lucien's gaze dropped to the crescent, its soft glow a heartbeat in the dim cabin. "He did." He paused and the pause was a small abyss. "But it is not a way you would want to hear."
"Tell me anyway," she demanded. The stubbornness that had carried her through other nights flared up.. bright and bitter.
He hesitated, the admission heavy on him, then gave it in a single, flat line. "One of us must die before the blood moon reaches its peak."
The words hit her like a physical blow. Her knees wanted to fold. For a long second there was only the sound of the cabin and the distant, indifferent chitter of the forest. "You cannot mean that," she said, though the voice sounded thin, as if the very syllables could not hold all the terror inside them.
"I do not," he said, and the old pain in his voice made the air feel colder. "But the curse might."
She turned away from him, crossing the small room as if space could buy a reprieve. She wrapped her arms around herself as if she could stitch the world together with will alone. Every choice felt treacherous now… to run would be to flee into the unknown with the bond still latched to her.. to stay would be to accept the knife at the throat of fate. Both options burned.
They left the clearing and walked deeper into the wood. The day bled into a dim, filtered light beneath close canopy, and they moved like two shadows that belonged to the same body.
Lucien hunted with a practiced silence while Elara gathered what she coul … pale berries that clung to low bushes, thin roots stringy with earth, and a scalloped herb the old women on the edge of the valley used for colds.
Each time a sharp bolt of pain flared along her side or a dull ache settled in a shoulder, she glanced up and saw the same flicker of discomfort cross Lucien's features at exactly the same moment.
It was proof she had not sought and did not want, and yet it was proof all the same.
When night fell it came heavy and certain, folding the forest into a cloak. Sleep did not bring refuge. In the dark she found herself carried into another body's memory as if by a current beneath the earth.
She moved through a hall of fire, felt the swing of a blade in her hands that were not hers, saw hair cascade like a river of black as it was torn and falling. A woman's face, a woman with features like her own, bent close and whispered,
"You will never be free." Fangs flashed and tore, and the sensation of pressure against a throat sent her jarring awake with a scream.
His hands were on her shoulders in a breath. Lucien's grip steadied her with the patience of someone who had learned the precise pressure to calm panic. "Elara … breathe."
She obeyed, lungs slow to find their rhythm again. "I saw her again," she said, meaning every word. "Amara. She said you could never be free."
Lucien turned away as if to hide the rawness his jaw had become. When he answered his voice was a brittle thing. "She was right."
Defiance crowded at the back of Elara's mouth, the fierce need to throw words into the dark and force the world to change. But exhaustion closed like a hand at her throat and she sank into silence.
Sleep edged back toward her uneasy and shallow, and while she succumbed to it only in pieces, Lucien did not sleep.
He kept watch by the small embers, eyes heavy with centuries and yet alert, and he watched the crescent glow beneath her skin as if the pulse there would read like a map.
Far from the low cabin and the hush of pine, the manor still tasted of ash and old screams. Adrian Alderidge awoke with a start. Wounds that had been raw and bleeding were now closed, but beneath the surface something else moved.
He stared at his reflection and discovered new light in his eyes… a faint gold that made the world sharpen and hum. He ran a hand to the scar along his throat and felt the memory of pain replaced by a strange kind of hunger, a focused, uncompromising need that threaded through him like a new spine.
Outside his window the moon hung low and red, a swollen bruise at the edges of the night. Adrian's voice when he spoke was low and iron-cold, the words a pledge and an oath. "I'll find you, Elara," he whispered. "And I'll end him."