(Luna) I know something’s wrong the second I wake up.
It isn’t a big thing.
It’s small, quiet, a hum under my skin like I drank too much coffee, except I haven’t had any coffee at all.
My skin feels too tight.
My head feels too loud.
By the time I get to Mountain Ridge and slam my locker shut harder than I mean to, I already know today isn’t going to be a good day.
“Somebody’s grumpy.” Katie leans against the locker next to mine, eyebrows raised over the top of her phone.
“You didn’t even say bye to me yesterday.
Just up and left the second the bell rang.” “I had somewhere to be.” I don’t mean for it to come out as sharp as it does.
It just does.
“Okay.” She holds up both hands, phone and all.
“Didn’t realize I needed a permission slip to talk to you.” “Katie, I’m sorry, I just.” I press my fingers against my temple.
My skull feels like it’s been wrapped too tight in something.
“I didn’t sleep good.
I’m not trying to bite your head off.” “Could’ve fooled me.” I want to apologize again, want to say something that fixes the look on her face, but my hand is still on my locker door and I feel the metal give under my fingers before I understand what’s happening.
There’s a groan of protest, a soft crunch, and when I pull my hand back the handle is bent, warped like somebody took pliers to it.
“Whoa.” Katie’s eyes go wide.
“Did you just break that?” “No.” I stare at my own hand like it belongs to somebody else.
“I mean.
It was already like that.” It was not already like that.
I shove my books into my bag and walk away before she can ask anything else, my heart pounding for no reason I can name, and I spend the rest of the day feeling like I’m wearing somebody else’s skin.
Jace finds me after last period, leaning against the wall outside the gym like he’s been waiting there a while.
“Hey.” He falls into step beside me, easy the way he always is, and bumps his shoulder against mine.
“You’ve been weird all day.” “I have not.” “Luna.
You told Mr.
Danvers his lecture on the Civil War was, and I quote, boring as dirt, in front of the whole class.” “It was boring as dirt.” “It was.
Doesn’t mean you usually say it out loud.” He catches my arm gently, just enough to slow me down, and when I look at him his blue eyes are steady on my face in that way that always makes it hard to keep secrets from him.
“Talk to me.
What’s going on?” I want to tell him about the locker.
About the hum under my skin that hasn’t gone away since this morning.
But it sounds insane even in my own head, so instead I say, “Bad night.
Didn’t sleep much.” “Yeah?” Something shifts in his expression, careful, like he’s deciding whether to say the next part.
“Me either, actually.” “Bad dreams?” “Yeah.” He rubs the back of his neck.
“A lot of them lately.
Since we started dating, if I’m being honest.
Wolves, silver forests, a girl at a crossroads I can never see clearly.” He laughs, though it doesn’t sound like it’s actually funny to him.
“I know.
Sounds crazy.” My stomach drops.
I don’t tell him.
I don’t know why I don’t tell him, except that saying it out loud might make it real, might turn it into something bigger than two people having bad dreams on the same nights for no reason.
So instead I say, “Probably just stress.
College applications, finals coming up.” “Probably.” He doesn’t sound convinced, but he lets it go, because that’s Jace.
He never pushes past the door I close.
He just waits on the other side of it until I open it myself.
I make it through the rest of the day by keeping my hands in my pockets and my mouth shut.
By lunch the next day, the hum still hasn’t faded, and now Jace is the distracted one.
We’re sitting at our usual table outside, the one under the big oak tree that Jace claimed back in ninth grade because he said the shade made his fries taste better, and I catch him sketching without even looking down at the paper.
His pencil moves in quick, sure lines, and when I lean over to look, my chest goes tight.
Wolves.
A whole pack of them, running through trees that look like they’re made of moonlight instead of wood.
“You okay?” I ask.
He blinks, like he’s surfacing from somewhere far away, and looks down at his own drawing with a frown.
“Yeah.
Sorry.
Bad dreams again.
Wolves, silver forests.
Probably just stress, like you said.” I don’t tell him I had the exact same dream two nights ago.
I don’t tell him about the locker handle bent under my fingers, or the hum still sitting under my skin that hasn’t gone away no matter how much I try to shake it off.
Instead I steal one of his fries, because it feels normal, because normal is what I need right now.
“So,” he says, closing the notebook, “University of Tennessee.
You still thinking about it?” The question should feel easy.
It did, two days ago.
Now it sits wrong, like a future that belongs to someone else.
“If I get the track scholarship,” I say, forcing a smile.
“Three seconds, Jace.
I’m three seconds away.” “You’ll make it.” He says it like it’s already decided, like the universe wouldn’t dare argue with him.
“And I’ll be wherever you are.
Studying art, stealing your fries, arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes.” “That sounds like the rest of our lives.” He kisses me then, slow and warm, right there under the oak tree with the whole cafeteria crowd milling around us like we’re not even there.
It tastes like stolen fries and Tennessee summer and a future that feels close enough to touch, three seconds away and closing fast.
For a minute, everything else goes quiet.
The hum under my skin.
The dream.
All of it fades out until it’s just him, just this, just the two of us and a plan that makes sense.
I don’t know yet how much I’m going to want to hold onto this exact moment later.
After school, Jace walks me to my car, and that’s when I see him.
Across the street, half in the shade of the hardware store awning, a man stands still in a way that doesn’t look natural.
Not shifting his weight, not checking his phone, not doing any of the small restless things people do while they wait.
Just standing there.
Watching.
He’s tall, dark hair streaked with premature silver even though he doesn’t look old enough for that, and even from this distance I swear his eyes catch the light wrong, glowing faint and gold for half a second before it’s gone.
My whole body goes cold and then hot in the same breath.
Something in my chest pulls toward him, sharp and sudden, like a hook catching under my ribs and tugging.
“Luna?” Jace’s voice sounds far away.
“You good?” I blink, and when I look back across the street, the man is gone.
Just an empty stretch of sidewalk and the awning shading nothing at all.
“Yeah.” My voice comes out thinner than I mean it to.
“Yeah, I’m fine.
I just gotta get home.” I don’t wait for him to answer.
I get in my car and I drive, my hands too tight on the wheel, my heart doing something fast and uneven that has nothing to do with track practice.
Nana Mae is waiting for me on the porch when I pull into the driveway, a mug of tea already steaming on the little table beside her chair like she knew exactly when I’d walk through the door.
“Sit,” she says, and it isn’t a suggestion.
I sit.
She hands me the tea, and I wrap both hands around the warm mug, grateful for something solid to hold onto.
“Nana, I saw a man today.
Across from school.
Tall, dark hair with silver in it, like he’d gone gray too young.
His eyes.” I stop, because saying it out loud makes it sound impossible.
“His eyes were gold.
Glowing gold, just for a second.
Then he was just gone.
Not walked-away gone.
Gone gone.” The mug slips in Nana Mae’s hands.
Tea sloshes over the rim and onto her wrist, but she doesn’t seem to feel it.
Her face goes the color of old paper, and for a moment she doesn’t look like my grandmother at all.
She looks like someone standing at the edge of something she’s spent her whole life running from.
“Nana?” My voice cracks.
“Do you know him?” “Baby.” Her hand finds mine, gripping hard enough to hurt, her fingers trembling against my skin.
“I need you to listen to me.
Whatever you saw today, whatever you think you saw, I need you to stay away from it.
Don’t look for him.
Don’t go near that hardware store, don’t walk that side of the street, don’t so much as think his – ” She stops herself, jaw tightening like she’s biting back a name that wants to escape.
“His what?
Nana, his name?
You know who he is.” “There are things I have promised not to say.” Her eyes glisten, but no tears fall.
Something harder than grief holds them back.
“Things that aren’t mine to tell, even to keep you safe.
But I am telling you this: if that man is back, then time has run out for pretending we don’t know what you are.” “What I am?” The words come out barely louder than breath.
“Nana, what does that mean?
Does this have something to do with Mom?” Her silence answers before she can stop it, a flicker of something raw crossing her face; guilt, maybe, or grief so old it’s calcified into something else entirely.
Then the shutters come down again, and she’s just my grandmother, tired and scared and holding a cup of spilled tea.
“Drink what’s left of that,” she says, rising from her chair with a stiffness that wasn’t there an hour ago.
“Then come inside.
Now.” I follow her in, my legs unsteady beneath me, and I watch as she moves through the house like a woman preparing for a storm.
The front door, then the back.
The windows in the kitchen, latched one by one, her hands quick and sure despite their trembling.
She pulls the curtains shut over every window facing the street, throwing the living room into a dim, muffled hush.
“Nana, you’re scaring me.” “Good.” She doesn’t turn around.
“Scared means careful.
Careful means alive.” She checks the lock on the front door a second time before finally sitting down across from me at the kitchen table, her hands folded so tightly around each other that her knuckles have gone white.
She doesn’t explain.
She doesn’t say his name.
But I understand, watching her, that whoever that man is, he’s the reason my mother is gone, and Nana Mae has been waiting years for him to come back.
That night, I go to bed early, my body aching in a way that has nothing to do with track.
Somewhere around midnight, I wake up drenched in sweat, my skin burning like I swallowed the sun.
The fever has started.