Marks (Melica's POV)

Did I die heroically?

It was my first thought, and I was almost disappointed when my body answered no. Everything hurt. My mouth tasted like burnt sugar and iron, and my arms felt like they had been borrowed from someone smaller. Somewhere deep under my ribs, where a wolf was supposed to be, there was a quiet.

I opened my eyes to a white ceiling and a clock that ticked too loudly.

I remembered the white wolf. The gold eyes in somebody's phone screen, the room going silent, and my mana pouring out of me like water through a cracked cup. I told myself it was the smoke. That a girl who had never ranked above last place did not turn white in front of the entire hall, and that the arms that caught me were just the last thing the candle wanted me to see.

Then I noticed the jacket.

It was draped over me, heavy and warm, and it smelled like woodsmoke and cold rain. I had been told many times that smoke could make you see things. So why was his jacket here?

I turned my head.

Steven was asleep in the chair beside the bed, sitting up, with his chin on his chest and one hand hanging a few inches from the blanket. Not touching. Just near. I looked at that hand for a long time.

It's duty, I decided. Angeline's mate. Keeping watch because Angeline couldn't.

It was a very reasonable explanation.

The door opened a little while later, and Angeline came in with a cup of tea.

She stopped when she saw me awake. Then she saw Steven asleep in the chair, and her eyes went to his hand for a moment before she remembered I was watching. Then she smiled.

I'd seen that smile ten thousand times. The same one the elders gave at funerals. Not completely fake, but never earnest enough either. It always stopped at her teeth.

"You're awake." She set the cup on the bedside table. "How do you feel?"

"Fine," I said. "Thank you."

She knew, said a voice.

It was small and flat. The voice sounded very annoyed, and it came from somewhere under my ribs. I almost dropped the blanket.

Maein?

Who else? The voice sulked. You're welcome, by the way. For the minute.

You can talk?

Only when it's worth it.

I would have liked to have a longer conversation. I'd waited eighteen years for it, and I had questions. I was fairly sure they would be funny. But Angeline was standing there with her hands folded, with the green still faint under her nails. We maintain cordiality.

"Are you in pain?" Angeline asked. "I can look at your wrist if it hurts."

"No, thank you."

"The tea is chamomile. It will help."

"That's kind of you." I held the cup in both hands, and I did not drink it.

She watched me not drink it. She was too clever not to notice, and too frightened to say so. "Melica," she said. She stopped, then started again. "I'm so glad you're okay. I was worried all night. I almost came in a dozen times, but I didn't want to wake you, and Steven was here, and I thought, if she needs anything—"

"I'm fine," I said, in the same voice.

She knew, Maein said. She told you to go.

I know.

Aren't you going to say anything?

What would I say?

"Are you angry with me?" Angeline asked before I even got to argue with my wolf.

It was a very small voice. I looked at her over the rim of the cup. I had spent three years being the girl who forgave her. I had gotten under her on the east stairwell and told her it didn't hurt. I had carried her bags and her vials. Tolerated her on her bad days, and every time she looked at me like that, I had said it's okay. I had always meant it, even with the complete understanding that most of our relationship had been made transactional.

"Why would I be?" I said.

It was perfectly polite. Alpha Arnold would have been proud. I wasn't the girl who lashed out anymore.

Angeline's smile cracked right down the middle. She opened her mouth, and nothing came out. Her hands were shaking. She folded them tighter. I used to hold her hand to ease her panic. This time, I just watched her do it and did not help.

I should have felt something. But I felt tired. And underneath all that, I felt Maein pacing like she wanted to be let out of a cage.

Angeline crossed to the window and stood there with her back to me. She didn't leave.

After a while, Adrian came in, still in the dark suit from the party. Steven woke up. He must have heard Adrian's dragging footsteps.

It all happened quickly. His head lifted, his hand curled into a fist and then opened again, and his eyes found me and went wide for half a second before he schooled them. "You're awake," he said, in a voice like gravel.

"I'm awake."

He stood up too fast. He looked at his jacket on me, and I couldn't read his face. He took one step back, to the wall, and stayed there.

Adrian stopped at the foot of the bed. He had never once come into a room I was in without looking at the exits first.

Then Calix leaned in the doorway.

I hadn't heard him arrive. Calix Montbeau, Steven's friend, Arabella's ex, the boy who leaned on pillars and looked at me like a joke he hadn't decided whether to tell. One hand was shoved in his pocket. The other was pulling his sleeve a little lower over his wrist.

Three of them. One bed.

Nobody sat. Everybody looked at me, and then very carefully at the wall, and then at me again. I had been stared at before. I had never been stared at by three people who looked like they were all holding their breath.

I would have preferred the cake in the face, I thought.

Me too, Maein said.

Healer Odile came in last and shooed no one out. She was old, and gray, and did not seem to like any of us. She took my chin in her fingers and looked into my eyes for a long moment, then let go.

"Your wolf has settled," she said.

"What does that mean?"

"That she has come, and she has gone quiet, and she is waiting to see what you do." She said it plainly, as if it were a weather report. "I cannot tell you more. I do not know more."

She knows more, Maein said.

Hush.

Odile took my wrist.

It started as warmth. A faint, silver heat under the skin, rising slowly, like a tide.

Then a mark came up under her thumb. A crescent, small and delicate, no bigger than a fingernail, glowing softly through my skin.

The room went still.

Steven's back pressed flat against the wall. His face went pale and blank. Then he said very quietly, as if he were reading it off a card, "She has her mate."

I looked at him. I couldn't help it.

But he didn't look at me. Something inside me still cracked. I thought I understood. A goddess-given bond that had never been his to worry about had finally been settled, and he could stop being polite about it. It was a relief, probably. It would be for me, too, in a day or two. Hopefully.

That is not relief, Maein said.

What do you know about it?

More than you, Maein said, and refused to say anything else.

"Marks light when a bond is answered," Odile said, turning my wrist over. "Not when it is found. Answered." She pressed a thumb to the crescent and frowned. "I cannot tell you which of the three threads it is."

"Three," Adrian said.

"Three pulled. I felt it from the corridor." She let go. "The goddess does not explain herself to old women. Nor, I suspect, to young ones."

I had felt them too. Three ropes tied to my ribs, three directions. But I hadn't told anyone, and I wasn't going to start now.

"Mates can be chosen," Adrian said.

He said it calmly. I turned my head to him.

"A mark is a signal. It's not a sentence. The goddess hands out marks. She doesn't hand out marriages. People do." He stared at me. "A claim built on choice doesn't need a mark."

I knew what he meant. Everyone in that room knew.

Alpha Arnold had no son. Adrian was his nephew, and the pack was his to inherit, and I was the daughter taken in off the road, with an eighteenth birthday that had finally arrived. I had overheard it years ago, at fifteen, through a study door. Alpha Arnold and Luna Cordelia, voices low. When she's of age. Nobody had asked me. Ever since my dad died, I had stopped expecting to be asked.

I had never really believed it, either. A stray gets placed wherever there's room, and rooms change. Families rearrange their furniture. If the mark gave them one more reason to rearrange me, I wouldn't be surprised.

Adrian wasn't claiming me. I could see that. He was drawing a line in the air and daring someone to cross it. I had no idea whether he was defending himself or me.

"Adrian," Steven said, very low.

"I'm only saying what's true."

He doesn't know what to do with you, Maein said.

I know.

He's looking at you like he's reading something he didn't expect to understand.

I didn't have a response to that.

Before everyone could reach a conclusion, Calix pushed off the doorframe.

He moved slowly, like he had all the time in the world. He crossed the room, stopped beside the bed, and rolled his sleeve up past his wrist, one fold at a time, and held out his arm.

A silver crescent glowed on his skin. Small. Delicate. Exactly the shape of mine, rising and falling in time with my pulse.

"Mine," Calix said.

That was it. One word. He said it without looking away. There was no gloating in it. No explanation. He didn't say how long he'd known, or why he had kept it hidden, or what he meant to do now. He just stood there, with his wrist out, as if daring me to argue.

Steven went completely still. Adrian's jaw clenched. Odile looked at Calix's wrist and said nothing at all. Behind us, Angeline made a small sound at the window, and I did not turn around to check.

I should have been furious. Calix was mocking me. It was the only explanation that made sense. A boy like him did not choose a girl like me, and the mark was probably just a joke the goddess was playing at my expense.

I wondered why it was warm.

Don't look at it, I told myself.

I will, Maein said.

Odile shooed them all out and told me to rest. I lay there for a while, listening to the clock.

My phone was on the bedside table. It had been buzzing since I woke up. I picked it up just to check.

Two hundred and eleven notifications.

The first was a video. Fifteen seconds, shaky, filmed from somebody's table. A white wolf with gold eyes in the middle of a dining hall, ears forward. Underneath it, a caption asking if the myth was real. I watched it twice. The wolf was bigger than I remembered. She looked proud, and also a little irritated. That must be Maein. All this time, that's what she looked like.

I read the comments, because I was an idiot.

She's real.

Do you think she bites?

That's the Stormborn girl. The stray.

Leave her alone.

Someone should leave her alone.

I scrolled for a long time. Nobody mentioned the cake or the candle. Not even Arabella or the banner. Messages from people I'd never spoken to said hope you're okay and that was incredible and let us know if you need anything. A teacher had already excused me from the whole week. Arabella's group chat had gone silent. Her name did not appear anywhere. It was as if she had been scrubbed out of the day.

I should have been grateful. No one was laughing anymore. Nobody was filming, or sneering, or dragging me through the hallway by my sleeve.

But it wasn't kindness. It was caution. People were being careful with me as if I were a thing that might turn around and bite. And I did not know what to do with a world that had stopped being cruel because it was afraid.

Somebody should answer for that candle, Maein said.

Somebody will.

Not the school.

No, I agreed, and was surprised by how steady it sounded. Not the school.

I put the phone down. The clock ticked. Down the corridor I could hear footsteps, three different sets, none of them walking away.

For the first time in my life, nobody was looking away.