Chapter Text
Martyn found the cairn three miles past the old road, half-swallowed by moss and bramble and six hundred years of Oakhurst pretending nothing had ever existed beyond its borders.
At first glance, it looked like little more than a hillock of stone.
A strange one, admittedly. Too deliberate to be natural, too old to belong to the ruins in town, with flat stones stacked in careful, weather-battered rings around a low entrance almost completely hidden by roots. The trees around it grew crooked, their branches bowing inward as if trying to shield it from view. Poppies bloomed in scattered patches between the stones despite the lack of sunlight, red petals trembling in the still air.
Martyn stopped.
For a moment, the forest was too quiet.
Then his lantern guttered.
A sound trembled through the stones. Not a voice, not quite a bell, but something faint and thin and dying. A magical chime, maybe, though it was so distant and frayed it could have been mistaken for wind passing through a crack in the rock.
Martyn stared at the cairn.
The sound came again.
Softer this time.
A warning, perhaps, if one was feeling charitable.
Martyn was not feeling charitable.
“Well,” he muttered, adjusting his grip on the lantern. “That’s not suspicious at all.”
He had come looking for something useful.
Anything useful.
A weapon, preferably. A charm. A scrap of writing. Some clue to the cure Legundo had been searching for before everything went wrong. Something to kill Scott Goldsmith, if killing him was what it took. Something to kill the rest of the vampires, too, if Oakhurst was already too far gone to save cleanly.
He had not expected to find a grave.
Still.
Graves had things in them.
Old things. Valuable things. Useful things.
Whoever had been buried here had been dead for centuries, at least. Long enough for the stones to sink and the roots to claim them. Long enough that any grieving family would have joined them in the dirt. Long enough, Martyn reasoned, for ownership to stop meaning much of anything.
“Sorry,” he said, without much feeling.
Then he ducked inside.
The passage beyond was narrow and damp. His shoulders brushed stone on either side as he squeezed down the sloping entryway. Something flaked beneath his fingers when he touched the wall, old carved lines worn almost smooth by time. Symbols, maybe. Writing, maybe. It was impossible to tell.
The faint ringing followed him.
It grew weaker with every step.
At the bottom, the cairn opened into a small burial chamber.
Martyn lifted his lantern higher.
The crypt was not grand. That surprised him a little. With the magic, the hidden entrance, the eerie flowers, he had expected treasure. Gold, maybe. Jewels. Some ornate coffin fit for a king.
Instead, there was a stone slab in the center of the room, low and plain, with the long-collapsed remains of a wooden coffin resting atop it. A skeleton lay beneath the rotted planks and the scraps of what might once have been a cloak, though very little remained but brittle bone and dust. The skull had fallen slightly to one side. One hand rested near the chest, fingers curled around nothing.
The other hand was missing entirely.
Martyn grimaced.
“Right,” he said under his breath. “That’s unpleasant.”
But his gaze had already gone to the smaller box near the skeleton’s ribs.
Unlike everything else in the chamber, it had survived.
Dark wood, sealed with blackened metal, its edges carved with curling patterns that made Martyn’s eyes ache if he looked at them too long. The top was marked with a simple symbol: a heart. Not anatomical. Not decorative. Just a clean, stylized heart, split faintly down the center by age.
The ringing in the walls stuttered.
Martyn stepped closer.
The old bones shifted under his boot.
He ignored them.
The box was locked, but the lock was old. It took only the edge of his axe and one good, sharp twist before the metal snapped with a sound like a bitten-off gasp.
The ringing stopped.
For one breath, nothing happened.
Then the box opened.
Inside was a necklace.
The pendant was shaped like the heart carved into the lid, small enough to fit against someone’s chest. Its surface glowed a dim, pulsing red, barely brighter than an ember beneath ash. Beneath it lay a journal wrapped in oilcloth, a pressed poppy gone fragile and dark with age, and eight red crystals arranged in a careful circle.
Each crystal gave off the same faint glow as the pendant.
Pulse.
Pause.
Pulse.
Like a heartbeat.
Martyn stared.
Then, slowly, he smiled.
“Oh,” he whispered. “Now that looks useful.”
He did not open the journal.
The necklace was warm when he touched it.
The crystals were warmer.
For a moment, Martyn thought he heard someone inhale.
He glanced back at the skeleton.
It remained, of course, only bones.
“Finders keepers,” Martyn said, because the silence had begun to feel accusatory.
He packed the box beneath one arm and left the cairn behind him.
Outside, the poppies bowed in a wind that did not touch the trees.
Far away, too far away for the dying spell to properly reach, Scott Goldsmith paused in the dark forest with fresh blood on his tongue and one hand pressed suddenly to his chest.
For no reason he could name, he felt cold.
Then the feeling passed.
And because he had lived centuries by ignoring ghosts when they had nothing useful to say, he went back to hunting.
~~
By the time Martyn returned to Oakhurst, he had convinced himself the find was a victory.
A strange victory, certainly. A probably cursed victory. But a victory all the same.
He came through the old road with the box hugged under one arm, dirt on his boots, brambles snagged in his sleeves, and the bright, restless expression of a man who had either discovered salvation or made a terrible mistake.
Possibly both.
Apo spotted him first from near the square.
They took one look at him and stopped walking.
“What did you do?”
Martyn scowled. “Why do you always start with that?”
“Because you always look like that when you’ve done something.”
“I found something,” Martyn said, lifting the box slightly. “Something old. Magical.”
Apo’s eyes narrowed.
Old and magical were not, in their experience, comforting words.
“Old magical things are usually old and hidden for a reason.”
“Or,” Martyn countered, “they’re old and hidden because someone wanted to keep them from people who might actually use them.”
A few heads turned at that.
Oakhurst was never as empty as it looked. The town had a way of listening. Faces appeared in windows, doorways, along the edges of the square. Drift looked up from where she had been speaking quietly with Avid. Pearl stopped mid-sentence beside Cleo. Abolish, who had been near the beacon with his usual unsettling stillness, turned his head just enough to make it clear he had been listening the whole time.
Avid’s gaze dropped to the box.
Then to Martyn’s dirt-stained hands.
Then back to the box.
“Where did you find that?”
Martyn shifted it higher under his arm. “In the woods.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting.”
Avid’s mouth tightened.
Drift put a steadying hand on his sleeve, though her own expression had sharpened behind her monocle.
“Martyn,” she said carefully, “what exactly did you find in the woods?”
“A cairn,” Martyn said. “Ancient. Enchanted. There was a crypt inside.”
The square changed.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
But the air altered.
Cleo’s eyes narrowed. Pearl made a face. Apo went very still. Avid’s hand moved toward the crossbow on his back.
“A crypt?” Drift repeated.
“A grave,” Avid said.
Martyn waved a hand. “An old one.”
“That does not make it less of a grave,” Drift said.
“It was abandoned,” Martyn snapped. “Centuries old, probably. Whoever it belonged to is dust. Anyone who cared about them is dust. I’m not robbing someone’s grieving widow.”
“That is a very specific defense,” Apo muttered.
Martyn ignored her.
Abolish said nothing, which was worse somehow.
Martyn set the box down on the edge of the fountain near the center of town, close enough to the beacon that its light spilled across the dark wood in a pale column.
The moment it touched the carved heart, the box pulsed.
Once.
Hard.
The beacon answered.
The air snapped tight.
Avid yanked his crossbow free. “Martyn– ”
The heart pendant inside the box began to click.
Not loudly.
Not like metal.
Like bone settling into place.
The crystals flared red.
The beacon flashed white.
And every person in the square froze.
~~
They were not in Oakhurst anymore.
They were in a forest.
No.
Scott was in a forest.
That was the first impossible truth.
They were standing and not standing, breathing and not breathing, watching and not watching. They had no bodies, and yet they had hands. Scott’s hands. Pale, strong, unbloodied hands, rough with work and cold at the fingertips.
They had Scott’s breath in their lungs.
Scott’s heartbeat in their ears.
Not the slow, dead rhythm of a vampire.
A living heartbeat.
Fast.
Controlled.
Afraid.
The forest around them was rocky and dense, the ground uneven beneath worn boots. Pine needles crushed underfoot. The air smelled of damp soil, smoke, sap, and animal blood. Somewhere nearby, a stream ran over stone. Somewhere farther away, something watched.
Scott knew that.
They knew that because Scott knew it.
It pressed against the back of his neck. A constant attention, vast and patient and amused. The feeling of eyes in the sky. Eyes behind the leaves. Eyes in places eyes had no right to be.
He did not look up.
He had learned not to look up too often.
Instead, he kept moving.
He chopped trees until his shoulders ached. Gathered wood. Dug into the hillside with quick, efficient motions. Killed a rabbit with a stone axe and field dressed it beside a flat rock, jaw tight with distaste but hands steady. Every motion was practical. Familiar. Too familiar.
The sun moved wrong overhead.
Not truly wrong, perhaps, but too noticeable. Too deliberate. Too watched. The whole world felt held inside a glass bowl, and beyond the bowl something enormous leaned close.
At the edge of the trees, the air shimmered.
Scott paused.
Through his eyes, Oakhurst saw the border.
It rose like a wall where no wall should be, faint and rippling, bending light into a translucent curtain. The forest continued beyond it, but it might as well have been painted there. Untouchable. Unreachable. A world pretending to be larger than it was.
Scott stared at it for a long moment.
His pulse picked up.
No exit.
The thought was not spoken, but everyone heard it anyway, tucked beneath the memory like a second voice.
No exit. Of course there’s no exit.
Then Scott looked away quickly, as if the border might notice his attention and punish him for it.
By dusk, he had made a small camp beneath a cliff outcropping. It was not much. A campfire, a rough shelter, a little food cooking over flame. His hands shook only once, when the forest darkened too quickly and the shadows beneath the trees grew long.
The necklace around his neck hummed.
It had been humming all along, Oakhurst realized suddenly.
A faint vibration against Scott’s chest. A magical pulse, synchronized with his heartbeat, warm enough to be uncomfortable. He had ignored it while working. Now, as the sun slipped lower, it clicked.
Scott went still.
Click.
He looked down.
The heart pendant at his chest glowed red.
Click.
Yellow.
Click.
Light green.
Click.
Dark green.
Click.
Yellow.
It stopped there.
For a heartbeat, Scott did not move.
Then he grabbed the pendant with both hands.
“NO!”
The shout tore out of him with such force that several people in Oakhurst would have flinched if their own bodies had been theirs to control.
Scott’s voice rang through the memory, familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Younger, maybe. Not in age, exactly, but in texture. Less polished. Less careful. No velvet laid over the blade.
“Oh my goodness,” he said, staring down at the yellow heart in horror. “I can’t believe I got two. So many people got so many more lives! What do you mean, two?!”
Lives.
The word landed strangely.
No one in the memory explained it.
Scott already knew what it meant.
And because they were Scott, everyone else felt the meaning without understanding the shape of it.
Two was bad.
Two was dangerous.
Two meant one mistake could become disaster. Two meant every shadow mattered. Every alliance mattered. Every fall, every arrow, every careless step near a cliff.
Two meant fear.
Scott buried his face in his hands.
He breathed in once.
Out.
Again.
Again.
The panic did not leave. It folded itself smaller. Tighter. Manageable.
“This is a disaster,” he said finally, voice muffled against his palms.
He dropped his hands and stared miserably at the cooking rabbit.
“I’m gonna have to be so safe. Everything is terrifying now. Everything is scary. I hate it here.”
The words were dramatic.
Almost funny.
The terror underneath them was not.
He poked at the fire with a stick, muttering half-formed plans under his breath.
“Food first. Shelter. Then maybe I can find someone sensible. Pearl, maybe. Or Cleo. Someone who won’t immediately try to murder me for fun. Maybe. Hopefully. Probably not, actually, knowing everyone.”
A laugh almost escaped him.
It died before becoming sound.
Above the trees, the sky deepened.
Scott did not look up.
The memory faded.
~~
The square returned for less than a second.
A basket slipped from someone’s hands and spilled apples across the stone.
Avid inhaled sharply.
Drift stumbled sideways, catching herself against the fountain with one hand pressed to her mouth. Her hazel eyes were wide behind the glint of her monocle.
Apo had gone very still.
Not frozen anymore. Not magically.
Soldier still.
The kind of stillness that came from deciding panic could wait until there was no longer an immediate threat.
Avid was not so composed.
His crossbow was still in his hands, but he was not aiming it at anyone. He was staring past the beacon, past the box, past Martyn.
His throat hurt.
That was impossible. His throat always hurt, in its own familiar way, under the tight bandage. But this was different. This was remembered breath catching in a living body. This was Scott’s fear lodged beneath Avid’s ribs, sharp and humiliating and impossible to shake loose.
“What was that?” Apo demanded.
Martyn looked between them wildly. “I don’t know!”
“You brought it here!”
“I didn’t know it did that!”
“You brought an enchanted grave-box into the center of town and placed it beside the beacon!”
“I thought the beacon might tell us something useful!”
“It did,” Abolish said quietly.
Everyone looked at him.
He was staring at the box.
His expression was unreadable, but one gloved hand had drifted toward the silver cross at his ear.
Apo’s jaw tightened. “That is not comforting.”
The crystals pulsed again.
Avid took a step back.
“No,” he said.
The beacon flared.
And Oakhurst was dragged under again.
~~
In the castle, Shelby dropped a book.
It hit the stone floor with a flat, ugly slap.
She did not hear it.
One moment, she had been kneeling on a rug in one of the half-restored upper rooms, surrounded by stacks of salvaged books and scraps of old fabric, cheerfully trying to convince Pyro that the castle library needed “a cozy academic cryptid corner.”
The next, she was in a forest.
Scott was in a forest.
Scott had hands that were warm and alive, and a heart that beat too fast, and fear tucked behind his teeth like something he was trying to smile around.
When the memory released her, Shelby came back to herself on the floor with both hands pressed to her chest.
Across the room, Pyro stood statue-still near the window.
Owen, who had been leaning against the far wall pretending not to listen to either of them, had gone rigid.
For a long moment, no one moved.
Then Shelby sucked in a breath.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god. Was that Scott?”
Pyro did not answer.
Shelby turned toward him, eyes bright and frightened behind her glasses.
“That was Scott, right? That had to be Scott. But he was– he was alive. I could feel his heartbeat. Could you feel his heartbeat? Why could I feel his heartbeat? Why was he in a forest? What were those hearts? Why was he so scared?”
Pyro’s mouth moved.
No sound came out.
That, more than anything, frightened her.
Pyro always had something to say. Usually something dramatic, biting, or just mean enough to make them feel less vulnerable than they were. Pyro did not stand silently with their eyes fixed on nothing.
“Pyro?” Shelby asked, softer.
Owen pushed away from the wall.
His eyes were dark and sharp.
“That was not a fledgling bond.”
Shelby looked at him. “What?”
“A sire bond, fledgling bond, blood echo, whatever name you want to give it.” Owen’s voice was rough, irritated by the fact that he sounded unsettled at all. “That was not it.”
“But Pyro saw it,” Shelby said.
“So did you.”
“And you.”
Owen’s jaw clenched.
That was the problem.
Pyro finally blinked.
Their eyes had gone red without them noticing.
“I felt him,” Pyro said.
Shelby went still.
Pyro’s hand rose slowly to their own chest, fingers curling into the front of their coat.
“Not just the memory. Not just seeing. I felt him.” Their voice turned thin. “The bond did something. It knew him.”
Owen’s expression shifted.
Only slightly.
But Shelby saw it.
Owen was not frightened, exactly. Owen did not seem to allow himself fear unless it came out as violence. But there was something there. Discomfort. Recognition, maybe. The awful awareness that something old enough to reach across the castle walls had just touched all of them without permission.
From below, somewhere deep beneath the rebuilt stones, the castle beacon hummed.
Shelby turned toward the sound.
“The beacon,” she whispered.
Owen’s gaze followed hers.
The castle had more than one old wound beneath it. Crypts. Tunnels. Buried rooms. Stones that remembered Scott’s rule better than any living person did. They had rebuilt walls, patched roofs, hung curtains, dragged furniture across floors, and made a home out of ruins.
But the castle had belonged to Scott first.
Maybe it still did.
Maybe some part of it had always been listening for him.
Shelby swallowed hard.
“Is he doing this?” she asked.
“No,” Owen said immediately.
Pyro looked at him.
Owen scowled.
“If Scott wanted to make a spectacle of himself, he would be there to enjoy it.”
Shelby almost laughed.
It came out as a shaky little breath instead.
The beacon below hummed again.
Brighter this time.
Pyro flinched like something had pulled a string beneath their ribs.
Shelby barely had time to reach for him before the second memory took them.
~~
Night had not fully fallen yet.
Scott walked quickly through the same rocky forest, a torch in one hand and a stone axe in the other. The moon had begun to rise, silvering the branches above. The pendant rested warm and yellow against his chest.
He kept touching it.
Not often enough to look nervous.
Often enough that everyone knew he was.
“I don’t see any caves I can use,” he muttered, pushing through a narrow gap between two stone outcroppings.
He peered over the edge of a cliff.
Too far over.
Avid felt Scott’s stomach drop at the sight of the rocks below. Felt the immediate flash of calculation: height, angle, chance of survival, how embarrassing it would be to die before the first proper night.
Then Scott jerked back.
“And the idea of being outside at nighttime is slightly horrifying.”
A light moved in the distance.
Scott froze.
Torchlight.
Not his.
His grip tightened around the axe.
For a moment, all the levity vanished. His thoughts went quiet and sharp. He shifted his weight back, ready to run, fight, smile, lie – whichever the situation demanded first.
Then the figure stepped between the trees.
A willowy brunette woman in a dark hooded cloak, her own heart pendant glowing a deep, steady green.
Scott’s relief hit so suddenly it almost hurt.
“Pearl!” he called, brightening with an enthusiasm that was only partly performed. “Hello!”
The woman turned.
“Scott, hi!” she said, equal parts surprise and delight. “How’s it goin’?”
“Awful,” Scott said immediately. “I’m yellow.”
“Oh, you are yellow!” Pearl’s gaze dropped to his necklace, and even through Scott’s relief, Oakhurst felt the flicker of fear that crossed her face. “I’m- I’m pretty green right now.”
“I know you are.” Scott walked closer, shoulders relaxing despite himself. “You’ve got three-plus hearts! I wouldn’t know what that’s like.”
“Yeah,” Pearl said, a little awkwardly. “I got quite a lot of lives.”
There was that word again.
Lives.
Scott made a wounded noise and drifted toward the small campfire she had already made, as if proximity to warmth and another person could make the pendant at his chest less yellow.
“How many do you have?” he asked. “How many?”
Pearl winced. “Are you sure you wanna know that, Scott?”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t wanna know.”
“Is it six?” Scott demanded. “Do you have six?”
Pearl laughed.
It was a nervous laugh. Sympathetic, yes, but nervous too. Like Scott had named something dangerous by saying it aloud.
“Maybe,” she said. “Yeah, yeah.”
Scott stared at her.
The unfairness of it rose through him so sharply that for one ridiculous second it nearly overwhelmed the fear.
“What would it take,” he asked, hope creeping into his voice despite his best efforts, “to convince you to give me one?”
Pearl tilted her head.
Something shifted in her expression.
Mischief, yes.
Calculation too.
Affection under both.
“I don’t know…” she said slowly. “Do you wanna old pal buddy up with me for a little bit?”
Scott gasped.
Not subtly.
Not with dignity.
“Yes,” he said instantly. “I would do that. A hundred percent.”
Pearl grinned.
“I can protect you for a little bit and you can protect me.”
“Yup.”
“And, uh, if we survive at the end of this, I’ll give you one of my lives.”
If we survive.
The words passed lightly.
They did not feel light.
Scott surged forward and wrapped her in a hug.
Pearl laughed, startled, but hugged him back.
For a moment, the watching presence receded. The forest was still trapped, still strange, still bordered by impossible magic, but Scott had another person beneath his hands.
Warm.
Alive.
Familiar.
Someone who knew the rules even if Oakhurst did not.
“Okay,” Scott said, squeezing her once before pulling back. “Okay, okay. That’s fair. That’s fair. I like that.”
“You are so dramatic,” Pearl told him fondly.
“I have two lives, Pearl.”
“I know.”
“Two.”
“I know.”
“That is a very small number.”
“It is a small number,” she agreed, though there was a tremor in her smile now.
The humor thinned.
Only for a moment.
Then Scott looked toward the darkening trees, took a breath, and forced himself bright again.
“Right,” he said. “Mining?”
Pearl lifted her torch. “Mining.”
“Lovely. Nothing bad has ever happened underground.”
“Definitely not.”
“Perfectly safe activity.”
“The safest.”
They were both smiling as they gathered their tools.
They were both afraid.
The memory faded.
~~
Oakhurst came back all at once.
Sound returned like shattering glass.
Several people stumbled as their own bodies became theirs again. Someone cursed. Cleo caught Pearl by the arm when she swayed. Apo took two sharp steps back from the beacon as if it had bitten her.
For one long second, no one spoke.
Then everyone did.
“What was that?”
“Who cast that?”
“Was that Scott?”
“What does yellow mean?”
“Why could I feel him?”
“Why was there a wall in the forest?”
“Who was watching?”
Pearl ripped her arm from Cleo’s grip and stared at the beacon, face pale.
“Who the heck was that?” she demanded. “Because that wasn’t me.”
Cleo, who looked less frightened than deeply offended by the entire experience, shook her head slowly.
“I don’t know,” they said. “But she had your face. More or less.”
“That is not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Martyn rounded on the nearest cluster of townsfolk, one hand clenched tight around the edge of the box.
“What plot is this?” he snapped. “Who cast that magic?”
Apo stared at him.
Then at the open box.
Then back at him.
“I’m fairly certain the magic came from you.”
“I didn’t cast anything!”
“You carried it here.”
“That isn’t casting!”
“You opened a crypt, stole from the dead, carried the enchanted contents into the center of town, and put them beside the beacon.”
Martyn opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
“Fine, when you say it like that– ”
Drift gave him a look of such profound disbelief that even Martyn faltered.
Avid had not moved.
His gaze was fixed on the heart necklace in the box, then on the beacon, then on the woods beyond town.
“What do you think?” he asked quietly.
Drift glanced at him.
Avid’s voice was careful.
Too careful.
“Do you think this is some vampire trick?”
For a moment, Drift said nothing.
Then she looked at Martyn, at the box, at the stirred-up square full of panicking people.
“I think,” she said, “it was something unintentional done by an idiot.”
Martyn threw up his hands. “Oh, brilliant. Thank you.”
Avid did not laugh.
His mind was elsewhere. Still in the forest, maybe. Still in Scott’s body, feeling the hammer of a living heart against ribs. Still hearing the panic in Scott’s voice when the pendant turned yellow.
Everything is terrifying now.
Everything is scary.
I hate it here.
That was not the voice Avid knew.
No.
That was not true.
That was the problem.
It was the voice Avid knew, stripped of six hundred years of velvet and charm and blood.
Apo crossed her arms tightly.
“I do not like this,” she said.
“No one likes this,” Cleo replied.
“Scott might.”
Pearl looked at Avid sharply.
Avid’s fingers tightened around his crossbow.
Then, slowly, he shook his head.
“No,” he said.
The certainty surprised even him.
Drift’s expression softened with concern. “Avid?”
Avid swallowed.
The bandage at his throat felt too tight.
“He was afraid,” Avid said. “That was not staged.”
No one seemed to know what to do with that.
Least of all Avid.
~~
In the castle, Shelby came back to herself with a sob caught halfway up her throat.
She barely managed to swallow it.
Pyro did not.
They made a small, wounded sound and turned away sharply, one hand braced against the window frame hard enough that old stone cracked beneath their fingers.
Owen watched them.
Shelby watched Owen watching them.
No one said anything for several seconds.
Then Shelby whispered, “That woman looked like Pearl.”
Owen’s mouth twisted. “Not our Pearl.”
“No,” Shelby said. “But Scott knew her.”
Pyro laughed once.
It was a horrible sound.
“Apparently Scott knows everyone.”
Shelby frowned. “Pyro.”
“No, really. Why not? Why wouldn’t he have an entire secret forest full of secret people with our townspeople’s faces? Why wouldn’t he have old magical necklaces and living heartbeats and memories that make the castle beacon light up like it missed him?”
“Pyro,” Owen said.
Pyro rounded on him.
“What?”
Owen’s stare was flat. “Stop panicking so loudly.”
“I’m not panicking.”
“You are cracking the wall.”
Pyro looked down.
The stone beneath their hand had split.
They snatched their fingers back.
Shelby stood slowly.
Her legs felt unsteady, but she crossed the room anyway and stopped beside Pyro, not touching this time. Not without warning.
“He was scared,” she said.
Pyro’s jaw flexed.
“He was alive,” they said.
Shelby nodded.
“I know.”
“You don’t.” Pyro’s voice sharpened. “You felt it like a memory. I felt it in my blood.”
Owen looked toward the door.
Toward the hall.
Toward the old stairs that led down, down, down to the beacon chambers beneath the castle.
“Whatever that was,” he said, “it is not only happening here.”
Shelby went cold.
“You think the town saw it too?”
Owen did not answer.
He did not need to.
Pyro’s eyes went wide.
For a moment, all the anger drained from their face, leaving something smaller and much younger behind.
“If the humans saw that…”
Shelby finished the thought silently.
If the humans saw Scott afraid.
If Avid saw Scott afraid.
If Martyn saw Scott afraid.
The castle beacon hummed again.
Owen snarled at it, low and animal.
“That is enough.”
The beacon did not care.
The red glow deepened beneath the floor.
Shelby reached for Pyro’s hand this time.
Pyro let her take it.
None of them knew where Scott was.
None of them knew what had started this.
None of them knew why the castle itself seemed to be remembering him.
But as the light rose again, Shelby had one clear, terrible thought.
Scott was going to hate this.
Then the next memory took them.
~~
Far beyond the town, deep in the trees, Scott Goldsmith straightened.
The deer at his feet twitched once and went still.
Scott lifted his head.
For a moment, he thought he heard bells.
Not real bells. Not church bells, not alarm bells, not anything so solid as sound.
A thread of magic, stretched impossibly thin.
Familiar.
Broken.
Dying.
His hand rose slowly to his chest.
There was nothing there now, of course.
The necklace was long gone.
Buried.
Safe.
Scott’s fingers curled against the front of his shirt.
The forest around him was dark and ordinary. No world border. No watching sky. No laughing gods beyond the trees. Just Oakhurst’s woods, damp and hungry and full of small mortal things pretending they understood fear.
Scott exhaled.
Then he smiled at nothing.
“Well,” he murmured, voice very soft. “That’s not good.”
He turned toward town.
He did not know yet.
Not that Jimmy’s grave had been opened.
Not that the box had been taken.
Not that Oakhurst had seen him scared and living and young beneath a sky that hated him.
Not that Pyro had felt his heartbeat.
Not that Shelby was already worrying.
Not that Avid was rethinking every certainty he had ever built around the name Scott Goldsmith.
Not that by the time he returned to the castle, nothing would be as he had left it.
Scott only knew that something old had woken.
And old things, in his experience, never woke gently.