Chapter 6

Zyra's pov:

Kaelen doesn't say a word when he pulls me out of third period. He just appears at the classroom door, speaks quietly to my teacher, and then looks at me with an expression that makes know that I don't a choice.

I gather my things without being asked. The whole class watches and I hate every second of it.

The car ride back to the estate is exactly as terrible as I expect it to be. Kaelen drives. Soren is in the passenger seat and I am in the back.

I watch the road through the window and try to look unbothered. I'm very bothered.

At some point, Kaelen glances at Soren. It's brief, barely a second, but I catch it. Soren gives the smallest nod back. They think I didn't see it.

We get back to the estate and Kaelen says, "Rest," which is his version of a full conversation apparently. Soren disappears somewhere without a word. I go upstairs, sit on the edge of my bed, and stare at the wall for a long time.

They are not going to tell me anything today. That much is obvious. Whatever that look in the car meant, they have decided to keep it between themselves and I am supposed to sit here and be fine with that. Normal people probably would be. I've never been normal, but I am starting to think it runs deeper than I previously assumed.

I lie back on the bed and close my eyes. Rest, he said. Sure.

The problem is that every time I stop moving, my brain starts running and it is not running toward anything peaceful. It keeps circling back to the hallway. The pulse that came out of me that wasn't supposed to come out of me. The way the whole corridor went still and the looks on those two boys' faces when it happened.

I didn't do that on purpose. That's the part that keeps snagging in my head. I didn't do anything. My hands were grabbing and then something inside me cracked open and the air changed and nobody moved and I have absolutely no explanation for any of it.

I sit up.

Lying here is not going to fix anything. It is just giving me more room to panic and that is definitely not helping my mental health right now.

I grab the small notebook I found in the desk drawer earlier, the one that was probably left here for decoration. I open it to the first page and I start writing.

I'm not writing my feelings. Ew..

I'm not doing that. I mean facts. Things I have noticed since arriving here that don't have normal explanations.

The growl I heard on my first night in the temporary shelter, the one that turned out to be coming from inside me. I write that down first.

The way my hearing has been behaving since I got to this estate. Yesterday, I heard Elric close a door on the third floor from two floors below. I thought I imagined it but I didn't. I write that down.

The smell thing. This one is harder to explain even on paper. It started a few days ago. I can smell things now in a way that I definitely could not before. Not just stronger but more specific.

I could tell this morning that Soren had coffee and something else underneath it, something sharper, like tension has a scent. I could smell rain before it happened.

I knew the car they put me in was different from the one they usually use because it smelled like someone else had been sitting in it recently, someone I haven't met. I write all of that down.

The reflexes. The cafeteria situation today, before everything else happened, my hand moved before I consciously decided to move it. That has been happening more and more, my body responding to things a beat before my mind does, like there are two of me operating at slightly different speeds.

The pulse in the hallway.

The fact that those two boys reacted to me like they knew me before I even opened my mouth.

The fact that my brothers showed up within minutes like they had been watching.

On top of all of these, nobody in this house seems to be even fazed.

I look at the list. It fills half a page and it does not look like the problems of a normal seventeen-year-old girl adjusting to a new living situation.

I sit there trying to find the rational thread that ties all of it together into something that makes sense and I cannot find it. I flip the notebook closed and push it under the mattress.

Fine. No rational explanation. Wonderful. Moving on.

Dinner is quiet again and it feels like a performance. Elric keeps glancing at me and then looking away. Soren cuts his food with the specific precision of someone who is thinking about something else entirely. Kaelen eats and checks his phone twice and says nothing of substance.

I eat and keep my mouth to myself.

When Kaelen says goodnight, I say it back and go upstairs and tell myself that tomorrow I will get answers one way or another. I am very convincing.

I don't sleep.

I try for maybe an hour. I lie in the dark, listening to the estate settle around me, and my hearing keeps catching things it has no business hearing. I'd probably run mad at this point.

The low hum of something electrical on the floor below. A window somewhere slightly open, letting in air that smells like pine and cold dirt. The sound of Soren's voice, distant and too quiet to make out words, speaking to someone on the phone.

Then the growl comes back.

It starts the same way it did before, low and distant, like it's coming from somewhere underneath everything else. Except this time it doesn't fade. It builds. It rolls through my chest slowly, steady and deep, and it doesn't feel like a sound exactly.

It feels like a second heartbeat that belongs to something much larger than me pressing against the inside of my ribs like it is trying to remind me it exists.

I press my hand flat against my sternum the same way I did the first night.

It doesn't help.

The growl holds for longer than it has before. Maybe thirty seconds. Maybe more. It's hard to tell when your whole chest is vibrating. Thankfully, it eventually eases off.

I sit up in bed and pull my knees to my chest and breathe. Okay. So that's still happening. Great news.

I reach back under the mattress for the notebook and add a new line at the bottom of the list.

*The thing inside me is getting louder. It feels scary.*

I stare at it for a second. Then I add one more line under it.

*I don't think it's separate from me.*

Because that's the part I've been avoiding writing down. Every time the growl comes, it doesn't feel alien. It feels very familiar.

I close the notebook again.

I do not sleep for the rest of the night. I watch the ceiling instead and I listen to the estate and I run through everything I know, which is not enough, and everything I don't know, which is too much, and I wait for morning the same way I've waited for a lot of things in my life.

At some point, I had to even start watching a new kdrama series I had been postponing. There's steady wifi in this house thankfully.

By the time pale light starts coming through the curtains, I have decided two things.

One: I am done waiting for them to decide I deserve information about my own body.

Two: Soren is the one I'm going after first because out of the three of them, he's the one who already suspects the most and hasn't been as careful about hiding it.

He will not enjoy the conversation. That is almost a bonus at this point.

I get up and splash water on my face and look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror for a moment. My eyes are the same. Brown, slightly tired, nothing extraordinary about them.

Except at the very edge of my irises, so faint I almost dismiss it, there is the smallest ring of silver that I am almost certain was not there yesterday.

I lean closer to the mirror. It's still there. My stomach drops immediately.

"What the fuck is happening..."