Page 84 of Shifting Hearts

ONE

Eris

I ’ve held thousands of teeth in my lifetime. Milk teeth tied with thread, molars stolen from graves, fangs still slick with blood, but none of them ever pulsed.

This one throbbed like a heartbeat in my palm — not magic, not memory. Presence.

I didn’t need to read the ridges to know who it belonged to. I’d seen his face in my bones. Dreamed of his death more times than I cared to count.

And now the Wyrd Wolf was here.

I woke gasping for air, the scent of pine smoke still clinging to my skin like sweat, as my heart hammered against my ribs as if trying to claw its way out.

The room was quiet, shadows danced across the walls, like spidery fingers. Only the candle I’d forgotten to snuff out burned low on the altar, flickering madly.

The dream lingered like blood in my mouth—Brannan on his knees, chest torn open, silver thread curling from the wound. I had watched it happen. I had felt it.

I sat up, fingers going to the dreambone necklace that never left my throat. Baby teeth — my own, lost in childhood — each bound with silk and time. A charm, a curse, a tether to the between. I wore my past like armour.

At twenty-one, I was old enough to understand the weight of fate, and young enough to still feel the sting of it.

My skin, pale and iridescent like weathered bone or old moonstone, caught the candlelight, faintly glowing with a cold, otherworldly sheen.

My eyes — milk-glass grey — seemed to flicker and shift, pupils sometimes vanishing when the magic stirred beneath my gaze.

And my hair—jet black, streaked with silver like pulled threads from a skull — fell over my shoulders in loose waves.

Small teeth and bone charms were braided into the strands, woven like armour.

My nails were bone-coloured and sharp, naturally grown — tools of my craft.

But something was wrong. The string had grown heavier in sleep. My fingers closed around the new weight, as a sharp edge pricked my thumb.

The fang was real. Still warm and still humming with energy.

“No,” I whispered.

This wasn't how fate worked. When the dreambone offered glimpses, they were shadows, warnings—never physical. Never real.

I stumbled to the altar, knocking over a tin of salt and scattering black feathers across the floor. My bones clattered in their bowls—ribs, knuckles, a crow’s skull yellowed with time. I threw the fang into the centre dish and lit the other three candles with trembling hands.

The air around me smelled faintly of mint and decay, and something else both sweet and wrong—like blood on candy.

“Speak,” I told it.

The flame flickered blue, then green, then bone-white.

Nothing.

I ground grave-dust into the blood smear on my thumb and touched the fang with it.

The hum grew louder.

Still not memory. Still not magic… at least not quite.

I couldn’t make sense of it. Unless... he wasn’t dead. Unless this wasn’t a warning, but a summons. I pressed both palms flat to the altar, forcing my breathing to slow, and tried to focus. The ritual was old, drawn from bone and blood, and not without cost.

I laid out the four teeth that made the cardinal points of my working—two human canines, a hare’s incisor, and the molar of a drowned man. I wrapped a silver thread around the new fang, binding it thrice, then knotted it into the centre of my circle.

“Tell me,” I breathed. “Does fate bind him to me?”

The wind outside picked up, slamming against the window. The flame stilled. The fang pulsed once — twice.

And then I saw him again.

Brannan, not broken this time. Standing in the woods with his eyes aglow, mouth curled in a snarl. The threads of fate glowed around him like spider silk, stretching across realms, crossing into mine.

But one ran straight through me — from my sternum to his.

A tether. A mark.

Fated.

I staggered back. “No. No, no?—”

I hadn’t asked for this. Had spent my whole life hiding from exactly this. I didn’t want to be tied to anyone, least of all to a Wyrd Wolf with death on his heels and fate in his veins.

And yet… I could still feel the fang pulsing.

Beating away like a second heartbeat.

I should’ve buried it.

Tucked it beneath the roots of the ash tree out back, where the earth stays wet and worms devour secrets. I should’ve scattered salt and bonemeal and walked away.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I carried it to the mirror.

The frame was carved from yew wood and ringed in rusted nails. Not glass—a sheet of still water held in place by spells older than I was. I’d bound it to the wellspring beneath my house, where the dead liked to whisper and time forgot it was meant to run in a straight line.

I lit the last of the tallow candles and scraped a sliver of skin from my palm, pressing it to the surface.

“Show me the Wyrd Wolf,” I said, low and sure.

At first, only mist. Then shadows. Branches. A flicker of fur.

Then him… Brannan .

He moved like he was built for war—fluid, silent, a silver-bladed knife wrapped in human skin. Tall, dark, and wild in the way feral things are. He was in a forest I didn’t recognise

, but the trees bent toward him like they knew him. Like they feared him.

He paused, turned, and stared straight at me.

I gasped, stumbling back, the mirror rippling like it did when someone disrupted a still pond.

Impossible. The looking glass was one-way. Always had been.

Unless... unless he wasn’t just fated to me. Unless the thread went both ways.

My hands shook. The room tilted, and I sank to my knees on the floorboards, still clutching the fang.

I should’ve buried it.

But it was too late now.

I had been marked.

Marked by fate. By bone. By him.

The knock came at midnight.

Three short raps — like nails on wood, like claws.

I rose slowly, blood pounding behind my eyes, every instinct screaming: don’t answer.

But I did, of course I did.

The cottage door creaked open on hinges crusted with rust. Cold air spilled inside, sharp as knives, but there was no one standing on the threshold, only a lump, a crumpled heap on the ground, near the purple heather.

I’d planted it deliberately by the threshold for protection.

Threaded it with rosemary and lavender, like I knew I’d need it one day.

I stepped outside barefoot. The night bit hard, but I barely felt it. The threads had pulled tight, dragging me forward.

He lay sprawled on his side, shirt torn and blood soaking his ribs. Silver glinted at the edge of the wound — a sliver of cursed iron.

His hand curled around something.

I knelt beside him, gently prying his fingers open.

A tooth. One of mine.

A milk molar I’d lost when I was six, long before I knew what I was. Long before I began trading in the currency of enamel and sorrow.

One I hadn’t seen it in so long that I’d honestly thought it lost.

But here it was.

In his hand.

Still warm… still pulsing.

I reached for him before I could think better of it. My fingers brushed his jaw — stubble-rough, blood-slick — and his eyes snapped open.

Bright. Gold. Glowing with something not quite human.

“Found you,” he rasped.

And then he passed out.

Dragging a full-grown wolf-shifter inside was no easy task. Especially one laced with iron and dripping with fate.

I laid him out on the stone floor beside the hearth, lit every candle I had left, and began the work of undoing the damage.

The iron had gone deep. Whoever did it had meant him to die slowly.

I muttered spells between clenched teeth, grinding dried rowan bark with wolf’s milk and ash. I cleansed the wound with smoke and saltwater, poured powdered antler over the puncture, and bound it with thread made from my own hair — bone-coloured and sharp where the ends had calcified.

The pain should’ve killed him, but he didn’t even stir. Not until I reached for the fang again.

The second I held it to the wound, the hum sharpened — like a tuning fork struck hard.

His body arched.

His mouth parted in a snarl — teeth sharper than normal, just enough to catch the light.

And his hand clamped around my wrist.

“You,” he growled, voice ragged. “I dreamed of you.”

I didn’t so much as flinch.

“So did I.”

When he finally came to, hours later, he sat up too fast and vomited blood into one of my offering bowls.

I handed him a rag and poured him black tea laced with willow bark and nettle. He drank without bothering to ask what was in it.

Smart man.

Or maybe he was just too tired to care.

We sat in silence for a time. Him watching me like I might disappear. Me watching him like he might bite—which in truth he might.

Eventually, though, he broke it. “You have my fang.” A simple statement. No malice, maybe a hint of confusion, but otherwise calm.

“You had my tooth,” I returned, slightly less calm. More panic. I didn’t understand why, and I wanted to, needed to.

His lips curled at that. Not a smile, not quite… not with teeth bared. His wolf was close.

“Fate’s funny like that,” he said.

“No,” I said. “Fate’s cruel. There’s a difference.”

He looked down at the stitched wound, flexed his fingers, and winced. “You saved me.”

I shrugged. “I was curious.”

“You stitched me with your hair,” he said. His tone was a mix of awe and accusation, as though he couldn’t quite decide whether to worship me or curse me.

“And you bled on my altar,” I deadpanned.

Another beat of silence passed. The air was thick with all manner of unspoken things.

“What are you?” he asked finally.

“Half bone-witch,” I said. “Half dark fey.”

His eyes darkened. “That explains the teeth.”

“And the dreams, and the death.”

He nodded slowly. “You feel it too, don’t you? The thread binding us together.”

I hesitated, just for a moment. The truth lodged like a shard between my ribs, one I wasn’t sure I should voice but did, anyway. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we’re fated. It could still change.”

“You sure about that?” he asked. It felt almost like a challenge. One I wasn’t sure I wanted to pick up. So, I chose truth… again.

With a shake of my head, I looked him dead in the eye and said. “No.”

He slept again before dawn, this time in my bed, body wrapped in old quilts and spells of protection.

I sat beside the hearth, staring at the fang in my palm.

Still pulsing.

Still tethered.

I could burn it. Snap the thread. Sever the bond. There were rituals for that. Costly ones. Bloody ones, but as I stared into the flame, I knew I wouldn’t, because whatever Brannan was… whatever was chasing him… it was bigger than just him.

Fate hadn’t found me by accident.

It never did.

And deep down, in the part of me that still listened to bones and shadows and dreams…

I knew this wasn’t the end.

It was only the beginning.