Chapter 2

She kept her eyes closed and her breathing even, because that was how you survived.

Not here — not in this impossible room with its impossible bed and its impossible softness — but everywhere. In every group home. In every shelter. On every park bench and bus station floor where sleep was a gamble and waking up meant knowing, before you opened your eyes, whether the person standing over you was a threat.

Wren had learned to listen before she looked. She had been doing it since she was twelve.

Three voices. Two male, one female. The female — Nyima, the one with the amethyst eyes and the hands that had taken the pain away — was speaking with the particular patience of someone who had already answered the same question several times.

"For the umpteenth time, I'm positive she's your mate, Declan. What I'm not sure about is how she's here. No new humans from the human realm should be here."

A chair creaked. Close. To her left, close enough that she could feel the warmth of a body near the bed. That would be him. The one with the glowing eyes and the scent of something she couldn't name and the way he'd looked at her in the marketplace like she was the answer to a question he'd been asking for a thousand years.

She didn't move.

    "I think we should start with Valkin," Declan said. His voice was low, controlled — the voice of a man holding something back with both hands. "The girl was found near the Shadow Lands and has bite marks on her wrists."

Viktor's voice came from farther away, near the window. "I agree. The whole situation is dangerous, not just for the girl on the bed but for Etheria as a whole. Someone brought her here. Which means magic was used."

A scoff. Nyima. "So what you're hinting at is that someone from my coven did this."

"I'm not hinting at anything, Nyima. I'm stating facts. The girl didn't just fall out of the air."

The silence that followed was the kind that had edges. Wren knew that silence. It was the silence between people who trusted each other enough to say hard things and respected each other enough to let the sting land.

She filed it away. Trust, but tension. Old friends with a new problem. The problem being her.

Nyima's voice softened. "Well. We could just ask her. She's been awake for some time."

Wren's stomach dropped.

She felt two sets of eyes turn toward the bed. She considered holding the act — she'd held it through worse, through louder, through hands reaching for her in the dark — but the woman with the amethyst eyes had already called it, and there was no point in playing dead for an audience that had already seen you breathe.

She opened her eyes.

The room came into focus. Stone walls, warm with firelight. Heavy curtains the color of deep wine. A ceiling high enough that the shadows gathered in the corners like something living. The bed beneath her was wider than any surface she had ever slept on, and the sheets were softer than anything she had ever touched, and both of those facts made her want to bolt.

She shifted until she was sitting up, her back pressed against the headboard, her knees drawn toward her chest. As far from the three of them as the bed would allow.

Declan was in a chair beside her. He hadn't moved when she opened her eyes, but something in his posture had changed — a stillness that deepened, the way water goes still before it freezes. His ice-blue eyes were on her. They weren't glowing now, but they were watching her with an intensity that made her feel like she was standing in a searchlight.

There was something about him she couldn't place. Something beyond the size of him, beyond the impossible stillness, beyond the way the room seemed to arrange itself around his presence. It was older than recognition. It was the feeling of a word she'd forgotten — sitting right there, on the tip of her tongue, refusing to come.

She looked away.

The room was not ostentatious, but it was more decadent than anything she had ever seen. More decadent than the nicest foster home. More decadent than the hotel lobby she'd once slept in before security found her. Everything in it was real — real wood, real stone, real fire — in a way that made the world she'd come from feel like a photocopy.

Nyima smiled at her. It was warm, unhurried, the smile of a woman who had centuries of practice at putting frightened things at ease.

"Do you know how you came to be here?"

Wren looked at her. "Here in the room, or here in general? Because currently neither makes sense, and I just want to go home."

Nyima's smile faltered, just a fraction, before she recovered it. "Let's just start with how you came to be in Etheria, shall we?"

Wren sighed.

Despite every effort — despite every instinct that had kept her alive on the streets of New Orleans for years — she couldn't stop the pull. It was there, constant, like a current running beneath her skin, drawing her toward the man in the chair. She forced it back. The last time she'd let it in, she'd ended up vomiting on a forest floor and then curled up in the grass while a man turned into a dragon. She was not doing that again.

"I honestly don't have a clue," she said. "Last thing I remember, before running for my life, was walking home from a local establishment. I was on Bourbon Street. Everything was quiet — too quiet for the area, but whatever, New Orleans always shifts her sounds." She paused. "Next thing I know, it got really, really cold. Like I could see my breath cold. And it's summer in Louisiana, so that was just freaky. All of a sudden everything went blurry and I blacked out."

She was watching their faces as she spoke. Reading them. It was a habit she couldn't turn off — the constant calculation of who was safe, who was lying, who was about to move.

"I woke up in a dark room with lots of candles and a Bram Stoker feel. Found the door and ran. Unfortunately, I ran into a walking wall." She paused again. "And now I'm here. Past that, I can't tell you anything."

Nyima's face fell. Not dramatically — she was too composed for that — but the warmth drained from her expression and was replaced by something harder. Something clinical.

"She's been mesmerized," Nyima said, to no one in particular.

Both men looked at her. The room changed. Wren could feel it — the way the air tightened, the way Declan's hands went still on the arms of his chair, the way Viktor straightened near the window. Whatever mesmerized meant in this world, it was bad.

Declan spoke. His voice was even, but there was something beneath it — something that sounded like a fault line under pressure.

    "So what you're saying is either Cassius or Valkin stole my mate from her realm, then tried to force a bond with her via magic and feeding."

Viktor said, "That's some theory. And if correct, the implications could have devastating complications for all of us. This should be handled delicately."

Declan and Nyima both nodded. The agreement was immediate, which told Wren that whatever was happening was bigger than her — bigger than a girl on a bed in a room she didn't belong in.

She didn't care.

"Hold up," she said. All three of them looked at her. "I'm not trying to be part of anything. I just want to go home." She ran a hand through her tangled hair. "Hell, I knew I should've listened to Ailia when she told me not to go out, but no — Wren knows everything. Now I'm here in a room, in a realm, with people who are supposed to be dead. Way to go, Wren."

Declan smiled at her. It was small, almost involuntary, and it did something to his face that she refused to think about. She had spirit. She had fire. She was sitting in a room with three of the most powerful beings in Etheria and she was annoyed at herself for not listening to her friend.

Viktor cleared his throat. "Well, old friend. She's certainly your match."

Nyima tilted her head, studying Wren with those amethyst eyes. "What do you mean, you should have listened to your friend?"

Wren looked at her. The calculation ran — trust or don't trust, speak or stay silent. The same math she'd been doing her whole life.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because you implied your friend has the gift of sight. Which is rare. And shouldn't be occurring in the human realm."

Wren rolled her eyes. "Ailia is — well, she's — I wouldn't call her a witch, but she does seem to have the gift of knowing things. She's been on about destiny and fate and darkness for me for months. Then out of nowhere she told me to stay at either her home in the French Quarter or another friend's home near the docks." She shrugged. "I chose neither, because I had plans. Not good plans, but plans. So I left, and now I'm here."

Nyima's expression didn't change, but her eyes sharpened. She filed the name away — Wren could see her do it, the way a person pockets a key they know they'll need later.

Wren shifted on the bed. The pull toward Declan was getting worse. She crossed her arms over her chest, as if she could physically hold herself in place.

"Question," she said. "Rather, questions. First — can I go home? Back to my perfectly not-perfect life where normalcy is?" She looked between them. "Second — what's a mate, or beloved, or whatever the hell it is, and what does it have to do with me? I'm no one. I'm just a street kid from New Orleans. I'm nothing special."

Declan looked at her. Something moved behind his eyes — not pity, not sympathy, but something fiercer. As though the words *I'm nothing special* had landed on him like a blow.

"I can answer part of your questions," he said. "A mate is someone that the fates themselves have decreed are meant to be together. They are, for all intents and purposes, the other half of each other's souls. For my kind — Lycans and wolves — our mates are our very lives. As men, our women are more important than our own lives."

Viktor spoke from the window. "It's the same with dragons. We have one mate. They complete us. Without them, our lives are grey."

Nyima smiled. "They're being rather coy about things, but yes — for their two sides, a mate is everything. Most importantly, however, is that without their mate, there are no children. The gods designed it that way, as a means to keep things in order."

Wren stared at them. The information was landing in pieces, like debris from an explosion she hadn't heard yet.

"As for getting you home," Nyima continued, and her voice gentled in a way that made Wren's chest tighten, because gentleness before bad news was something she recognized. "If you weren't Declan's mate, sending you home would be easy. However — it isn't possible for you to ever go back to the human realm. For that, I am truly sorry."

The room went white.

Not literally — the walls were still stone, the fire still burned, the curtains were still wine-dark — but something inside Wren went white, the way a screen goes white before it crashes.

"So let me get this straight," she said. Her voice was rising. She could hear it rising and she couldn't stop it. "I'm abducted. Essentially raped. Tossed into a world where men can be dragons, or Lycans, vampires exist, and you're telling me I can never go home?"

The three of them watched her. None of them moved.

"Fuck that. No. No thank you. I want no part of this. Just undo this whole mate bond thing and send me home."

The silence that followed was not the edged silence from before. It was the silence of people who had no answer to give, because the answer had already been given and it was the one she couldn't accept.

Then the headache hit.

It came like a fist behind her eyes — sudden, blinding, so sharp that she gasped and grabbed the sides of her head. The room tilted. The fire blurred. And then she was somewhere else.

Trees. Burning. The sky was orange and black and the air was thick with smoke and the sound of screaming — not one scream but many, layered, a chorus of terror that came from every direction. Chaos. Bodies moving through the smoke like shadows. And then a single scream, higher than the rest, a woman's voice breaking on a name she couldn't hear.

A white wolf.

Enormous. Pale as bone. Standing in the center of the burning world with its head raised and its eyes — ice blue, glowing, the same eyes that had found her across a marketplace — locked on something she couldn't see.

Then darkness.

Declan reached for her.

"Don't touch me!"

The scream tore out of her before she knew it was coming. She recoiled against the headboard, shaking, tears running down her cheeks. Her hands were trembling. Her whole body was trembling. The vision was gone but the smoke was still in her lungs and the screaming was still in her ears and the white wolf's eyes were still burning behind her own.

Nyima moved. Quietly, without urgency, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Not close enough to crowd. Close enough to be present.

"Wren," she said. "How long have you been having these bouts? These flashes?"

Wren looked at her. Her grey eyes were bright against the red from the tears, and her voice, when it came, was raw.

"Just since meeting him." She pointed at Declan without looking at him. "They all started after he touched my arm."

Declan looked to Nyima. The question was in his eyes — *do you know what's happening to her?*

Nyima smiled. It was the smile of a woman who knew more than she was ready to say.

"Just rest," she told Wren. "I'll be back a bit later with some calming tea."

Wren didn't argue. She was too tired to argue. She pulled the covers up to her chin and turned on her side, facing away from all of them, and closed her eyes. Not to sleep. To stop seeing the white wolf.

Nyima escorted Viktor and Declan out of the room. She pulled the heavy door closed behind them, and the sound of it settling into its frame was the sound of one conversation ending and another beginning.

She looked at Declan.

"You feel it, don't you? This girl's soul." Nyima's voice calm and quiet, just for them