The Cold Spot

LYRA'S POV 

The water's hot enough to fog the mirror before I even step in, and for a minute it's the best thing that's happened to me in two days.

I let it run over my shoulders, my back, the bandage on my palm that I peel off carefully so the cut can breathe. It's healing clean, a thin pink line already knitting itself shut. Ordinary. Unremarkable. Exactly what a cut should look like a few hours after it happens.

Then I notice my arm.

The spot where the gold light rose during the rite is cold. Not cold like the rest of me standing in a warm shower should be cold, cold like it isn't getting the same water as the rest of my skin, like the heat is sliding around it instead of through it. I press my palm flat against it. Nothing changes. I hold it there until my fingers ache from the pressure and the cold underneath doesn't move an inch.

I tell myself it's nothing. Healing feels strange sometimes. Magic feels stranger.

Then it happens again, quick, gone before I can be sure I saw it. The skin darkens, just for a second, a shadow passing under the surface like something moving beneath still water. I blink and it's gone, my arm ordinary again, and I stand there under the spray telling myself I imagined it.

I think about telling Kael. I get as far as picturing the words in my head before I talk myself out of it. He already looked like a man carrying something heavy last night, something he wouldn't hand me even when I asked directly. If I bring him one more thing to worry about, based on nothing but a cold patch and a shadow I can't prove I saw, I'll just be adding weight to whatever he's already holding.

Better to watch it myself first. See if it happens again. Have something real to tell him instead of a feeling I can't even describe properly.

I turn off the water and towel off in the small bathroom that still doesn't quite feel like it's familiar yet. Kael already left a fresh shirt and a pair of pants folded on the edge of the sink, sometime while I was in the shower.

The shirt is big on me, and the pants are loose but comfortable. They smell like him. I don't examine too closely how much I like that.

I leave the room first, with Kael walking closely behind me. Halfway to the stairs, one of the younger wolves catches him by the arm, murmuring something too low for me to hear. Kael's jaw tightens.

"Go on," he tells me. "I'll catch up."

I don't wait to find out what it was.

By the time I reach the stairs, my hair is still damp and my stomach is finally reminding me it's been a full day since I ate anything.

The kitchen goes quiet the second I walk in.

Not the comfortable kind of quiet. The kind where conversations stop mid-word and nobody quite meets my eyes, except that isn't true either, because they do meet my eyes, all of them, at once, and don't look away. Darin's at the table, jaw tight, a mug of something untouched in front of him. Two other wolves I don't know well are standing near the door instead of sitting, like they're not planning to stay long enough to need a chair.

They're staring at me. Not at the room, not at each other. At me, specifically, the way people look at something they're trying to decide whether to be afraid of.

I glance down at myself, half expecting to find something wrong, blood I missed, a tear in the shirt, anything that would explain it. There's nothing. Just Kael's shirt, too big on me, my hair still damp from the shower.

Kael comes down the stairs behind me a moment later, and I feel him notice the room the same way I did, all at once, his whole posture shifting from easy to alert in the space of a breath.

Nobody says anything. The silence stretches long enough that it starts to feel like its own kind of answer, and I find myself holding my breath along with everyone else in the room, waiting to see who breaks it first.

Darin finally looks up at Kael, and whatever's sitting behind his eyes is unreadable. His gaze flicks toward me once, quick and uneasy, then back to Kael.

Kael's whole body goes still beside me.

"Where's Mara?" he asks.