Chapter Six — The Woman in the Dark

Tyra could not sleep.

She lay staring at the ceiling with Troy's face burned into her mind. That expression when her hand healed. Still and heavy and full of something that had been sitting in him for a long time.

Tonight. He had said tonight.

Tonight came. Tonight went. Troy never showed up.

She sat up. Looked at the door. Nothing. Just Marren Lane settling into its ordinary night sounds. The butcher shop below. The distant river. The wind moving through the alley.

She lay back down.

Closed her eyes.

She was standing in a forest.

Tall dark trees pressing close on every side. Branches tangled overhead blocking everything except a thin strip of sky the color of something torn open. Deep red. Wrong in a way she felt low in her stomach.

She looked down at her feet. Black soil. Damp. Her boots were leaving prints.

She was not afraid.

That was the strange thing. She was alone in an unfamiliar forest under a sky that was the wrong color and her body felt calm. Like something in her blood knew this place even if her mind had never been here.

She took one step forward.

A branch snapped behind her.

She turned.

A woman stood between two trees.

Tall. Perfectly still. Beautiful in a way that felt slightly wrong, too sharp, too precise, like something that had been made rather than born. Dark hair past her shoulders. Pale skin. A face that hit Tyra somewhere deep and wordless.

She knew that face.

She had never seen this woman anywhere in her life. But something in her chest responded to it the way it responded to things that mattered. A recognition that lived below thought.

The woman's eyes opened fully.

Crimson.

Not human. Deep glowing red lit from somewhere inside, burning steady and old and alive.

Tyra stepped back. "Who are you."

"You already know," the woman said. Her voice was warm and cracked at the edges like something that had been through fire and come out the other side. She moved forward, each step soundless on the black soil. Her crimson eyes moved over Tyra's face with a desperation that was almost physical. Like someone who had been kept from something for so long that seeing it again hurt. "You have always known."

"I have never seen you in my life," Tyra said.

"You have seen me every time you wondered where your eyes came from." The woman reached out one hand. Long fingers. A silver ring on her thumb. "Every time your blood did something it should not. Every time you felt like you were standing at the edge of something enormous that nobody would explain." Her voice broke slightly. "That was me reaching for you. Every single time."

Tyra looked at the outstretched hand.

Did not take it.

"Say what you came to say," she said quietly.

The woman's crimson eyes filled with grief so old it had its own weight.

"I am your mother," she said.

The words landed like stones dropped into still water.

"My mother is dead," Tyra said.

"They needed you to believe that." The woman stepped closer. "They needed you alone. Unprotected. Ignorant of what you carry." Her crimson eyes sharpened. "Your blood is not ordinary Tyra. What happened to your hand is only the beginning. You are something that should not exist and both worlds know it now and they are coming for you from directions you cannot see yet."

"What worlds," Tyra said. "What are you talking about."

"There is no time." The woman grabbed her hand. Her grip was iron. Real. Solid in a way that made everything feel suddenly very serious. "When they come for you remember this. Your blood is not a curse. It is yours. And you are the only one who gets to decide what it means."

The darkness came without warning.

It swallowed the trees first. Then the red sky. Then everything, pressing inward fast and cold.

The woman looked over her shoulder. Her face changed.

"Whatever they tell you about what you are," she said urgently, turning back. Her grip tightened on Tyra's hand. "Whatever they use to make you afraid of yourself. It is a lie. You were not a mistake. You were made on purpose."

The darkness took her.

One second she was there. The next she was gone. Pulled backward into the black like something had reached through the dark and taken her.

"Wait." Tyra ran forward. "Wait I do not understand. What worlds. Who is coming. WAIT."

The forest floor disappeared.

She fell.

She hit her bed so hard her teeth knocked together.

Tyra sat up gasping. One hand gripping the mattress. Heart slamming. Skin cold. The cracked ceiling stared back at her and it took four full seconds to understand she was in her room. Grimwall. Real.

She pressed both hands over her face.

"It was a dream," she whispered.

It did not feel like a dream.

It felt like a place. Real black soil. Real branches. A real grip from a woman with crimson eyes who called herself her mother and whose voice cracked like it had been crying for years.

She got up. Went to the window. Looked down.

The wolf was there.

Right below her window. Looking straight up at her. Those gold eyes burning steady in the dark, patient and fixed on her face like it had been watching her window all night.

She pressed her palm flat against the cold glass.

Then she looked at the windowsill.

A flower sat on the outside ledge.

Dark crimson petals. Almost black at the edges. Fresh and alive on a second floor windowsill with no ledge and no tree close enough to reach. Placed there carefully. On purpose.

The exact color of the woman's eyes.

She looked back down at the wolf.

The wolf looked up at her.

And did not move.

And did not look away.

"What am I," she whispered against the glass.

The wolf held her gaze in the dark and the silence between them stretched long and heavy and full of every answer she did not have yet.

Then from somewhere down Marren Lane came footsteps.

Slow. Getting closer.

The wolf's head snapped toward the sound.

Every hair on its dark body rose at once.

It stepped in front of her building.

And growled.

Low and deep and nothing like the soft sounds it made when she fed it bread at night. This was something old and serious and aimed at whatever was coming down that street.

Tyra pressed closer to the glass.

The footsteps stopped.

Silence.

Then a voice drifted up from the dark street below. Calm. Almost friendly.

"I am not here for the wolf," it said. "I am here for the girl."