My skin prickles. My heartbeat skitters. Something deep in me cracks open like an egg dropped on tile.
Bolton reaches out. Not grabbing—hovering. “If anything feels wrong...” he trails off.
“Everything feels wrong,” I mutter.
And then it hits.
Not all at once, not this dramatic explosion. It starts with sound. The crackle of the fire separating into parts—the pop of sap, the sigh ofwind, the croak of a frog twenty feet away. Then it’s smell. Everything is suddenly so sharp. Dirt. Smoke. Him.
My knees nearly buckle.
“Maya?” Bolton’s voice cuts through the noise like a rope.
“I—” I clutch my side. There’s pressure, like something inside me just realized the cage door’s open.
I double over, hand digging into Bolton’s arm to keep upright. I can hear people talking now.
“She’s shifting.” “No way.” “That’s not—she’s not one of us.”
My vision goes strange—colors too bright, the fire the shade of metal lava, the forest breathing. I can hear insects blinking. The moon is spotlighting me like it knows.
And… something deeper answers back.
“What is this?” I gasp, but it’s rhetorical. No one here can explain what I already feel in my blood.
Bolton’s grip tightens, grounding me. “It’s real,” he says, his eyes burning like coals. “This is the truth.”
“But I’m not—” I mean to say normal. But the word dies in my throat.
Because I know.
Something is... wrong. Or maybe right. But certainly not normal.
My legs give out and I hit my knees. The cool forest floor rises up to meet me like it’s been waiting. I press my hands into the pine needles and damp earth, heart racing so fast I can’t tell if it’s fear or adrenaline.
For half a second, I swear the ground pulses beneath my fingers.
The crowd murmurs behind me—too many voices, too many emotions. Surprise. Confusion. Maybe even fear. People are saying my name. My mom’s. “Ortiz.” Like it means something. Like it answers a question I didn’t know was being asked.
Why?
Alpha Sharpe steps closer, his voice low—measured and calm,but it carries in the sudden quiet. “The old ways recognize blood, even when it’s hidden,” he says, speaking to the ring. “The signs don’t always show themselves the way we expect. But they show.”
I don’t know what he means. I don’t know what any of this means.
Bolton drops beside me, kneeling as though whatever this is, we’re inside it together. His hand hovers near mine, not touching, but close enough that I feel warmth radiating from him like a lifeline.
“This is just the beginning,” he murmurs.
I turn to him, my breaths coming in shallow, uneven gasps. My chest aches. My hands are shaking. “What’s happening to me?” I ask, but the words come out as air.
Nothing about this makes sense—not the heat crawling up my spine, not the way the firelight flickers like it’s alive, not the way my skin feels like it’s humming from the inside out.
Then everything slows.
Gradually, the strange pressure behind my eyes fades. The sounds fade. The chanting—I only now realize it was chanting—softens and dissolves. My head clears enough to know I’m still me, still here, still breathing.
Whatever that was... it passes.
