What the Blood Remembers

Grayson didn't die.

He would think about that moment for the rest of his life, the half second where the Hollow's jaw closed around empty air an inch from his throat, because something yanked him sideways with a force that didn't belong to any hand he could see.

He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up already reaching for a blade he no longer had.

Everly was standing over him, both palms out, shaking, staring at her own hands like they belonged to a stranger.

"I didn't do that," she said. "I didn't touch you."

But she had. He'd felt it, a pull like a rope tied around his ribs, and the Hollow had felt it too, because it had stumbled mid-lunge, its white eyes snapping to Everly with something that looked almost like confusion.

"Your blood," Marcus said, somewhere behind them, voice gone hoarse. "It's doing something."

Everly looked down at her own wrist, at the thin line of silver still welling from the guard's earlier cut, and for the first time since the knife had touched her throat, she felt something other than fear move through her. It felt like waking up in a room she'd lived in her whole life and only just noticing the walls.

The Hollow shook its massive head, once, hard, like it was clearing water from its ears, and made a sound that wasn't quite a growl and wasn't quite a whine.

"It's confused," Grayson said, dragging himself upright, one hand pressed to his ribs where the tree had caught him. "Why is it confused?"

"Because I told you." Marcus hadn't moved from where he stood frozen at the treeline. "It wasn't made to hunt her. It was made to protect her. Somewhere in whatever's left of that thing, some old instinct just recognized what she is, and it doesn't know whether to finish what it came here to do or die for her."

"That's not comforting," Grayson said.

"It wasn't meant to be."

The Hollow's white eyes fixed on Everly again, and this time it didn't lunge. It lowered its massive head, slow, deliberate, and made a sound low in its chest that raised the hair on every arm in the clearing.

It was waiting.

"What does it want," Everly whispered.

"I think," Marcus said carefully, "it wants you to tell it what to do."

Everly's heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her throat. She had spent nineteen years being told to disappear, to take up less space, to want nothing and expect nothing and never, ever draw attention to the thing running silver under her skin. Nobody had ever once asked her to give an order in her life.

"Go," she said, and her voice cracked on the single word. "Just — go. Don't hurt anyone."

For a long, terrible second, nothing happened.

Then the Hollow turned, unhurried, and walked back into the trees like it had never been there at all, and the clearing went so silent Everly could hear her own pulse hammering in her ears.

Grayson stared at the space where it had disappeared, then at her, and something in his face had changed completely from the boy who'd raised a blade to her throat twenty minutes ago.

"It listened to you," he said.

"I don't know why."

"I do." Marcus's voice had gone strange, hollow in a different way. "There's only one bloodline a Hollow answers to without a fight. Everyone in this pack was told that line ended three hundred years ago."

"Then everyone in this pack was lied to," Grayson said quietly.

Everly's legs finally gave out, and she sat down hard in the frost, silver blood drying dark on her collarbone, and for the first time in her life she understood that the thing she'd spent nineteen years being ashamed of wasn't a curse her father had been forced to hide.

It was a crown he'd spent nineteen years making sure she never found.

"We need to move," Marcus said, glancing at the trees. "If that thing found her, others will too. Word travels fast among things that were built to hunt one bloodline."

"She's not going back to your pack." Grayson's voice left no room for argument. "Not after what your Alpha just tried to do to her."

"And she's not going with you either," Marcus snapped. "Your family's spent three generations trying to finish what tonight started."

"My family was wrong."

"Your family doesn't know that yet."

Everly looked between them, two men from two packs that had spent three hundred years hating each other over her, and felt something cold settle low in her stomach that had nothing to do with the blood loss.

"There's a third option," she said quietly.

Both of them looked at her.

"I go somewhere neither of you can follow, and I figure out what I actually am before anyone else decides for me."

"That's not safer," Grayson said.

"Nothing about tonight has been safer."

Somewhere far off in the trees, faint but unmistakable, a second horn answered the first, and this one Grayson recognized immediately, because it was the sound his own father made when he'd found something worth hunting.

His face went white.

"That's not the Hollow anymore," he said. "That's my father. And if he finds you before I get you out of here, he won't hesitate the way I did."