Chapter 9 The Night I Turned Twenty

Chapter 9: Chapter 9 The Night I Turned Twenty

Talia’s POV

The first night on the road had passed without attack, though none of us slept much, and the day after it was long and quiet. Now, as the sun sank on the second evening, Silas called the halt.

We stopped at dusk in a clearing ringed by old pines. Silas said we would reach Blackmoor Valley by noon tomorrow, and the way he said it, like a man reporting weather, made it sound less like good news and more like a threat.

The air was colder here; my thin white gown was not built for it. I wrapped my arms around myself and tried not to shiver where anyone could see.

Kaelen spoke without turning around.

"You are shivering."

"I am fine."

"You are shivering."

He reached behind his seat, pulled out a thick blanket, and tossed it to me without a word. I caught it against my chest. It was warm—not from the sun. From him.

"Thank you," I said.

"Do not thank me. Just stay warm."

Jax laughed, quiet. "That is the nicest thing I have ever heard you say."

"Shut up, Jax."

We made camp at the edge of the clearing. Jax built the fire, Silas tended the horses, and Cain vanished into the trees without being told. I sat on the ground away from the others, chewing dried meat that was tough and salty, and I had eaten worse.

It came to me somewhere between the second bite and the third.

I had left Cresswood two mornings ago. Tonight, I turned twenty.

No one wished me anything. No one knew, or if they knew, they did not care. But I sat there in a stranger’s blanket by a stranger’s fire, twenty years old, and the strangest thing happened—I felt the charm against my collar and thought, ’I could take it off now.’

The deadline was past. My mother’s words had an ending, and I had reached it. Whatever price the charm had demanded for those early, stolen glimpses was paid in full—it had no more teeth. I could take it off freely, whenever I chose. No dimming. No scorch mark. No cost.

Somewhere ahead of me, in Blackmoor Valley, there would be a door I could close and a mirror that belonged to no one, and for the first time in fifteen years I could look at my own face whenever I chose.

My hand rested on the collar for a long time.

’Not tonight,’ I told myself. ’Wait until you are alone. Wait until you are safe.’

Kaelen stood up.

The fire popped, and sparks climbed into the dark, and he stood the way a blade rises from a sheath—without effort, without warning.

"Stay by the fire," he said. "Do not move until I return."

"Where are you going?" I asked.

He tested the edge of his sword with his thumb.

"Something has been following us since Cresswood."

My blood went cold. "What?"

"I do not know yet." He turned toward the trees. "But I intend to find out."

Then the darkness took him.

Jax was gone. Silas was gone. Cain was gone, and I was alone with a fire that suddenly felt very small.

And then I heard it.

A howl. Long, low, and wrong. Not a wolf. Something else. Something far worse.

I stood. My legs shook, but I forced myself to stay still. He had said do not move, so I did not move.

The bushes at the edge of the clearing parted.

It came out low and fast, wrong in every way a thing could be wrong—too many joints, too little sound, and where a wolf’s eyes should have been, there were two flat dull pits. It did not look at the fire. It did not look at the cart.

It looked at me.

At my throat.

I did not think. Fifteen years of learning how to be hurt made the choice for me—turn the body, drop the chin, let the shoulder take what is coming. Its claws opened my arm to the bone, and I screamed into my own teeth, but my other hand was already moving, closing around the charm beneath my collar, holding it like it was the only thing in the world that was mine.

Piper’s knife came out of my shawl and went into the thing’s side.

It shrieked. Not a wolf’s sound. A sound like tearing metal.

And then Kaelen was there.

He did not arrive. He fell on it the way winter falls on a valley—silent, total, absolute. One stroke. Then another. The thing came apart under him without ever touching me a second time.

It was over before I understood it had begun.

He stood over it breathing, sword dripping black into the grass, and for a moment he looked less like a man and more like the answer to something. Then he wiped the blade, sheathed it, and walked back to the fire without looking at me.

"They are dead," he said. "Cain took the second one at the tree line."

"Who were they?"

"Whoever they were, they will not follow us again."

"What were they?" My throat was tight. "Those were not wolves."

"No," he said. "They were not."

He stood with his back to me, watching the trees, and then he said it—quietly, like a verdict he had reached and did not care to explain.

"They did not come for all of us. They came for one thing."

I waited for the question that had to follow. The obvious one, the one Vivienne would have thrown at me without drawing breath: What is there about you worth hunting?

It never came. He only watched the trees, as if the answer were something he already had.

The fire crackled. My arm throbbed where I had wrapped it in the hem of the gown.

Somewhere behind me, I heard the soft sound of cloth being torn. Then a clean strip of linen landed on my lap. Kaelen had not turned around. Had not looked once.

"Bind that," he said. "We reach Blackmoor Valley tomorrow. We will be safe there."

"How do you know?" I asked, and I moved a little closer to the fire. To him. I told myself it was the fire.

His jaw tightened. "Because I am the Alpha. And no one threatens what is mine."

He looked at me when he said it.

Then he looked away. "Rest. I will watch."

I bound my arm with hands that would not stop shaking, and I sat with my back against the cart, and I did not sleep.

I thought about my twentieth birthday. About how, this morning, the charm had felt like a door I was finally allowed to open.

Then I thought about what had come out of the trees tonight. It had not gone for my throat to kill me. Nothing kills by trying to take a thing carefully. It had reached for the charm. For what was under it.

For my face.

My mother had not hidden me to spare me embarrassment. She had hidden me from this—from whatever knew enough to hunt me on the one night I was finally allowed to be seen.

I wrapped my fingers around the charm and made my choice.

I would keep it on. Not because I was afraid. Because I was done letting anyone take things from me in the dark. The face underneath belonged to me, and if I ever showed it again, it would be when I chose, and to whom I chose, and not one second before.

The fire burned down to embers, and Kaelen sat between me and the darkness with his sword across his knees, and he did not sleep either.

I closed my eyes with my hand still closed around the charm, and one thought circled and circled until dawn.

My twentieth birthday was the day I was allowed to show my face.

And something out there had known it too.