Page 85 of Shifting Hearts

TWO

Brannan

I woke to the scent of blood, smoke, and sage.

The air was too warm. Not pack-warm, not fire-warm — close, heavy, wet. My body ached like I'd been gutted and stitched together with thorns. My ribs dragged with every breath. Something slick tickled the back of my throat. I swallowed copper.

I tried to move, but the weight of fate held me down.

No, not fate.

A thread.

It hummed along my spine, pulling tight across my sternum, searing through bone and blood. I followed it inward and found her waiting in the dark. Eyes the colour of grave moss. Skin shadowed by candlelight. I didn’t know her name, but I knew her hands — I’d seen them soaked in my blood.

I’d seen her kill me.

My body jerked.

Pain screamed through my side. I wasn’t in the woods anymore.

Not on pack ground. I lay on a cot draped with black wool, the scent of herbs and burnt marrow clinging to every fibre.

Antlers crowned the walls like guardians.

Bundles of teeth hung from iron nails. Thread — red, white, silver — draped the ceiling like a spider’s web.

Magic. Old, ugly and bone-deep magic.

I growled low, throat raw.

She turned. Just a shift of shadow at first, and then the light caught her face, and I stopped breathing.

“You,” I rasped.

Her lips parted, not in surprise, not in fear. No. Recognition. She knew me.

“You shouldn’t be here yet,” she said softly. “It’s too soon.”

My jaw clenched. I pushed myself upright with a snarl, as every muscle locked against the pain that radiated through me.

“Where am I?” I demanded.

“In my home,” she said. “You followed the thread, or maybe the thread followed you. I’m still trying to understand it myself.”

“You stole from me.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I didn’t steal anything from you.”

“One of my teeth is missing. A fang. I dreamed it gone, and when I woke up—” I stopped. My fingers had already gone to my neck, where a string of charms always hung, but one fang was missing.

She didn’t even flinch. “I dreamed of you, and then your tooth was in my hand.”

“You dreamt of me dying ,” I ground out.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. The thread between us — whatever it was — thrummed with more than magic. It pulsed with memory. Like we’d done this before. More than once, and maybe, we had. My death, was tangled in her hands.

She moved closer, cautiously, like I was a wounded thing that might still bite. I bared my teeth, just to prove something. To myself or to her, I didn’t know.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Then stop bleeding on my bed,” she said, her voice flat.

I laughed once. It hurt.

“I didn’t mean to come here,” I said.

She studied me. “But you did.”

I felt it again then. The Wyrd shifting, the way only we who walk its threads can feel.

Something in its weave had changed. Disrupted .

Warped. The moment the fang left me; something had torn open.

I followed the echo of that tear, thinking I’d find a threat, instead, I found her.

The collector of teeth. The girl who wore death on a chain.

I didn’t know her name, not really, but my magic did.

The Wyrd whispered it to me like a secret I wasn’t supposed to hear.

Eris.

And the second I thought it, a memory that wasn’t mine slammed into me — her voice in the dark, chanting my name like a spell. Her hands warm with blood. My chest torn open beneath them. Her lips on mine. Not in a kiss, more like a promise. A tether that screamed: fated.

“No,” I snarled. “No, no, no.”

The thread pulled tighter.

She stilled. “You felt it.”

“I saw it.”

I lunged, not to harm her, not really. Just to touch her… to know , but the second my skin met hers, the vision struck like lightning.

Her face above mine, mouth painted in blood. Her hands driving bone through my heart. Her voice whispering, “Forgive me.”

The pain was real… too real, and I recoiled like I’d been burned. My hand spasmed, and my chest heaved.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to. She’d seen it too.

“You kill me,” I said.

“Maybe,” she whispered. “But not today.”

The thread between us sang like a blade. Every breath I took in that cottage felt borrowed. Like it belonged to her and not to me. The Wyrd whispered that something waited beyond the trees. So, I left, not to run away, not exactly, but to remember why I feared her.

The wards scraped across my skin as I passed the threshold — a whisper of something ancient and cold dragging its claws down my spine. I felt her magic retreat behind me, curling back into bone charms and carved runes, locking me out.

Good.

I didn’t want her too close. Not when every part of me still hummed with the echo of her hands on my chest, her voice in my ear, ricocheting around inside my skull. Not when I could still feel the thread between us.

I didn’t know how to sever it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. That in itself terrified me most.

The forest beyond her cottage was wrong. Not just wild — wyrd .

I’d known it from the moment I'd entered her boundary.

Now I could see the way the air shimmered in places, like heat off summer roads.

Threads of fate tugged at the corner of my vision, not glowing gold like normal — black — the colour of death and decay.

I would have laughed at the irony if fate had chosen to tie me to anyone but her, but of course it had not.

Maybe Eris was right after all, and fate was cruel.

So, I followed the strongest pull. Which led me deeper into the woods, past a tree cleaved by lightning, past a hillock where birds wouldn’t land. The forest fell silent the moment I stepped onto scorched earth.

A field of bones lay ahead. Wide. Bleached white. Stained in places by old magic. A graveyard, but not for humans. These were animal bones — wolf, crow, deer, bear — but laid in shapes. Patterns . Glyphs only the wyrd-born could read.

Spells etched in marrow, and Eris was standing at the centre of it all. Wind tangled her dark hair, revealing the bone knife at her hip. Her back was to me, but she stilled the second I stepped onto the boundary, almost as if she’d felt me coming.

Of course she had.

“You followed me,” she said.

“I didn’t mean to.” My voice was rough. “But the Wyrd did.”

She turned slowly. The light of the dying sun caught on the bones beneath her feet, making her look carved from the same stuff — some half-witch, half-fey goddess in a forgotten shrine.

I should have walked away, but instead I stepped closer.

She didn’t move. “You came to threaten me again?”

“No.”

A pause, and then she asked. “Why are you here?”

I hesitated, for a moment before I uttered the truth. “Because I had to see if you were real.”

That made her flinch. Just a little.

“I am.” Her voice was quieter now. “I didn’t summon you. I dreamed you, yes. And maybe I pulled something through, but not like this.”

“You keep saying it’s too soon.”

“It is ,” she said, panic rising. “I’m not ready, and neither are you.”

A rustle of leaves. A shift in the Wyrd around us.

When I looked up again, she was only feet away. The pull between us was stronger out here — more raw without the wards.

“You said you saw me kill you,” she whispered.

I nodded.

“I’ve seen it too.”

We stood there for a long moment — toe to toe, fate crackling between us like lightning.

I reached out again. I couldn’t help it, and this time, she didn’t stop me as my fingers brushed her collarbone. Her skin was cold where mine burned with heat.

She gasped, and so did I.

It wasn’t a vision this time. It was memory . From before either of us had names. Past lives. Other bodies. Other deaths. Over and over again.

Always her.

Always me.

Always ending in blood.

I yanked my hand back, and she staggered like I’d hit her.

“Fuck,” I breathed.