Chapter Five: My patrol found the blood this morning.

Someone had been following me since the library.

Not obviously.

Whoever it was knew what they were doing.

A shape at the edge of my peripheral vision.

Gone when I turned.

Footsteps that stopped a beat after mine.

The particular prickling at the back of my neck.

I'd learned, in twenty-three years of being the kind of person who noticed things, to take it seriously.

---

I bought a sandwich from the diner.

Ate it on a bench in the square.

Watched the town watch me.

Two people.

Rotating shifts.

One would drift away.

Another would appear.

Never the same face twice in a row.

Coordinated.

Patient.

I finished my sandwich.

Walked north.

---

If Marcus had found something worth hiding, it would be outside the town's center.

He was methodical that way.

He'd always gone to the edges of things.

While I went straight to the source.

Between us, we'd usually found what we were looking for.

---

The north road narrowed after ten minutes.

Became a trail.

Became the suggestion of a trail through underbrush gone orange and brittle with October.

The forest pulled at me the same way the town had when I arrived.

That low gravitational hum.

As if the ground remembered something I'd forgotten.

My skin prickled.

The smell intensified.

Pine and cold.

Beneath it something darker, earthier, alive.

I didn't hear them following anymore.

I didn't know if that was better or worse.

---

The trail opened onto a ridge.

Below, Ashveil sat in its valley.

The maples blazing red.

I found the blood twenty feet from the ridge line.

Not a wound.

A site.

Something had happened here and been partially cleaned.

The way you clean when you want to remove evidence but are working fast.

Dark staining on the rock.

Disturbed earth.

A broken branch at the wrong angle.

The kind of break that happens when weight falls rather than when wind pushes.

---

I crouched.

Made myself look at it methodically.

My brother's name was in my throat.

I swallowed it back down.

*Evidence first. Fall apart later.*

The staining was days old, not hours.

More of it than a small injury would explain.

But no drag marks.

Whatever had happened, Marcus had either walked away.

Or been carried carefully enough to leave no trace.

Both possibilities sat in my chest with equal weight.

---

I photographed everything.

Then widened my search in slow spirals the way Marcus had taught me when we were kids.

*The thing you're looking for is never exactly where you think.*

On the third spiral, I found his jacket.

Folded deliberately.

Collar turned in.

Sleeves crossed.

The way Marcus always folded things.

Left on a flat rock like a marker.

Inside the breast pocket, a piece of paper with my name on the outside in his handwriting.

---

My hands were steadier than I expected when I opened it.

*Selena — if you found this, you came anyway. Of course you did.*

*I can't explain everything here. But you need to know: you are not who you think you are. Neither am I.*

*What's in this town — what these people are — it's real, and it's old, and it has something to do with us. With our blood.*

*I'm not dead. I don't think. But I'm not free either.*

*Find Blackwood. Not to trust him — to read him. He knows what you are. Watch his face when he looks at you and you'll understand.*

*Don't let them mark you before you know what it means.*

*— M*

---

I looked up from the paper.

Kael was watching my hands.

The letter in them.

With an expression I hadn't heard him arrive to wear.

His jaw was tight.

His fingers were doing that thing again.

The rhythm I'd catalogued on the library steps.

Curling closed.

Releasing.

Curling again.

Like pressure applied to something that must not open.

*Mark.*

The word landed differently than it should have.

Not bureaucratic.

Not procedural.

Something older.

Something that made my skin heat and my spine pull in two directions at once.

"What does it mean," I said.

"To be marked."

His eyes found mine.

The gold didn't flash this time.

It stayed.

---

"You found it," he said finally.

His voice was careful in the way voices are careful when the speaker is managing something large.

"You knew it was here."

"My patrol found the blood this morning."

He stopped.

Recalibrated.

I could see him doing it.

The slight adjustment behind the eyes.

"I was going to tell you."

"Were you."

He didn't answer immediately.

Instead he took one step.

Not toward me.

Toward the bloodstain.

And the movement was wrong.

Too measured.

Like he was choosing a direction deliberately.

The way you choose a direction when your body is pulling toward a different one entirely.

"Yes," he said.

"I was."

---

Something in his voice made me believe him.

I resented that.

Believing anything about this man felt like losing ground I couldn't afford.

"Selena."

My name.

Without the formality of *Ms. Holt*.

And something in my chest turned over at the sound of it.

Slow.

Irreversible.

Like a key in a lock.

"What did the note say?"

*Watch his face when he looks at you and you'll understand.*

I watched.

The controlled fury was still there.

But stripped now.

Something visible beneath it.

Strain.

Cost.

A man holding a door shut with both hands.

The door winning.

"He says you know what I am," I said.

Kael closed his eyes.

One breath.

When he opened them the gold was still there.

Steadier than before.

More real.

Less possible to explain away as a trick of light.

"Yes," he said quietly.

"I do."

---

I glanced past him.

Above the tree line the moon hung pale in the afternoon sky.

Not yet full.

But close.

Its outline sharp enough to see clearly even now.

His gaze followed mine.

Just for a moment.

And I watched his shoulders tighten at the sight of it.

"Time matters," he said.

Not looking at me.

"More than you know."

The wind moved through the trees.

Below us, invisible, Ashveil waited.

"Then tell me," I said.

---

He looked at the ridge.

At the town.

At the charged space between us that had stopped feeling like distance.

And started feeling like something else entirely.

"Not here."

His voice had dropped.

Rough in a way that caught against my nerves.

"They're watching."

"They always watch."

A pause.

"Come to the house at the edge of town tonight."

"Come alone, and I'll—"

He stopped.

I watched him pull the words back.

Replace them with something safer.

"I'll explain what I can."

---

He turned.

Walked into the trees without waiting for an answer.

The pull followed him.

That tide in my chest.

The door swinging open again.

Reaching toward his retreating back with something that had nothing to do with logic.

And everything to do with the letter folded against my ribs.

*Don't let them mark you before you know what it means.*

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum.

Where the paper was.

I didn't call after him.

But I already knew I would go.