The Crimson Moon

The forest didn't feel like a dream. Dreams didn't make her lungs burn like this.

Lyra's bare feet caught on roots and broken stone, the cold biting into her skin in a way that should have woken her up by now. It didn't. Branches clawed at her arms, left thin lines that stung, and somewhere behind her something moved through the trees without making a single sound. That was the part that scared her most. Not the running. The silence chasing her.

She broke into a clearing and stopped dead.

An altar sat at the center of it, gray stone half swallowed by moss, older than anything she'd ever stood in front of. Above it, the moon hung low and wrong, a deep, wet red that painted the whole clearing the color of a wound.

A man stepped out from behind the altar. She couldn't see his face. She didn't need to.

He said her name like he'd been waiting centuries to say it.

Lyra sat up in bed so fast her head spun, sheets tangled around her legs, heart slamming against her ribs hard enough to hurt. Her hands wouldn't stop shaking. She pressed them flat against the mattress and made herself breathe until the shaking slowed to something she could pretend wasn't there.

Just a dream. The same dream. Third time this month.

She'd stopped telling Ronan about them a year ago, back when her face would go pale and unreadable every time Lyra described the moon, the altar, the voice. Better to keep it to herself. Better to be normal.

That was the whole plan. Get through university. Get a job that had nothing to do with anything strange. Build a life boring enough that nobody would ever look at her twice.

The plan had never included the three scratches carved into her bedroom window.

She noticed them while reaching to open the curtains, three thin gouges raked across the outside of the glass, deep enough to catch the morning light and throw it in jagged little lines across her wall. Her stomach dropped before her brain caught up with why.

Second floor. Nothing to climb. No ladder marks in the flower bed below, she checked, out the window, in her pajamas, feeling ridiculous and terrified in equal measure.

She told herself it was kids. Some idiot with a rock and bad aim.

She didn't believe it, and some small, old part of her, the part that never fully believed anything was normal, filed the image away next to all the others she didn't talk about. The flashes when she touched certain objects. The night last spring she'd lifted a fallen shelf off her foot without thinking, a shelf that should have needed two people. The way sound sometimes arrived a half second before it should, like her ears knew something was coming before it made noise.

She got dressed anyway. Class started in forty minutes and the world required her to show up for it whether or not something had clawed at her window in the dark.

Ravenmere in the morning always looked harmless. Gray sky, wet pavement, students hunched into their jackets against the wind coming off the river. Lyra kept her head down and her earbuds in, not playing anything, just wanting the excuse not to talk to anyone before coffee.

That was when she felt it. Eyes on her.

She looked up without meaning to, some instinct older than thought turning her head, and found him across the street. A guy, maybe her age, maybe a little older, standing too still for someone waiting on a corner. Dark jacket. Hands in his pockets. Watching her with an expression that wasn't quite curiosity and wasn't quite suspicion. Something colder than both.

She held his gaze longer than she should have. Long enough that he knew she'd caught him.

He didn't look away first. She did.

By the time she glanced back he was gone, swallowed into the crowd crossing at the light, and she told herself that was that. Strange men staring at bus stops weren't exactly a citywide first. Ravenmere had its share of weirdos.

But her pulse hadn't come down all the way from the dream yet, and now it climbed again, and underneath the panic sat something she didn't have a name for. Recognition. Like she'd seen him somewhere before and her body remembered even though her mind didn't.

She made it three more steps before the whispering started.

Not words exactly. Not yet. A murmur under the traffic noise, under the wind, under everything, like a radio tuned between stations. She spun around, certain someone was right behind her, right at her shoulder.

Nobody was there.

The whispering got closer.

A hand closed around her arm.

Lyra's whole body went rigid, some instinct she didn't know she had snapping her elbow back hard enough to connect with something solid before her brain even registered a threat.

"Watch it." A woman's voice, annoyed, rubbing her ribs where Lyra's elbow had landed. Just a stranger. Just someone who'd bumped into her on a crowded sidewalk.

Lyra apologized, mortified, hands still trembling as the whispering finally, mercifully, faded back under the ordinary noise of the street.

She didn't see the man in the dark jacket again that morning.

She had no way of knowing he'd circled back around the block, keeping half a city street between them, watching her disappear through the university gates with the particular focus of someone crossing a name off a very long list.