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“This better not be another lantern situation,” I mutter.

The forest says nothing, which is very on brand.

I follow it anyway because apparently that’s the kind of man I am now, though I take the radio, a knife, and enough irritation to power a small town. Ten yards in, I find yarrow growing in a pale cluster near a fallen log.

Beside it, cedar tips. Farther on, plantain leaves, broad and clean. Nettle near the creek, though I curse that one with feeling when it stings my wrist due to my own stupid mistake. Each thing reveals itself when I need it, as if the forest is highlighting an apothecary list.

I don’t like how much I trust it. I like even less how right it seems.

Once, around dawn on the second day, the bones under his temples push through hard enough that I see the shadow of antlers beneath the skin before he shudders and folds back down into himself with a sound that makes my stomach turn.

Later, Onyx’s breathing steadies when I press crushed yarrow and plantain against the smaller wounds. Cedar steam helps with the fever that isn’t fever. I boil nettle because I remember enough herbal-use basics to know tea might help, then laugh like a lunatic in my kitchen because I am making medicinal tea for a cryptid with instructions from a forest that spent two months gaslighting me.

“You and I are gonna talk,” I tell the trees through the open kitchen window. “Not now, because I’m busy keepin’ your favorite antlered disaster alive, but eventually.”

A breeze moves through the branches.

I choose to take that as attitude.

The fifth day comes gray and heavy, rain tapping soft fingers against the roof. I’m sitting beside the bed, one hand wrapped around Onyx’s wrist because I’ve gotten obsessive about checking his pulse, when the bond changes.

It doesn’t flare this time; it warms. Slowly, carefully, like something wounded lifting its head and seeing daylight. I straighten so fast the chair legs scrape the floor. “Onyx?”

His fingers twitch under mine… then his eyes open. For a second, he just stares at the ceiling, dazed and unfocused, blue eyes too bright in contrast to his exhausted face. Then his gaze turns and finds me.

The happiness that hits through the bond nearly knocks me out of the chair.

It’s huge. Staggering. So pure and relieved that it punches the breath right out of my chest. Onyx makes a broken sound, not quite speech, not quite a sob, and reaches for me with clumsy hands.

I go to him before I can think better of it. He drags me down onto the bed with a strength that should be impossible for someone who spent three days bleeding and five days unconscious, but I don’t fight him.

I land half on his chest, careful of his shoulder, and his arms close around me like the world starts and ends at my back. His face presses into my hair, his body shakes once, and the bond floods around me, warm and wild.

Little Ember. Here. Here.

“I’m here,” I say, and my voice cracks so hard I barely recognize it. “I’m here, you stubborn bastard. You scared the hell out of me.”

His arms tighten. Missed. Hurt. Came back.

I close my eyes, anger and relief tangling until neither has room to breathe. “Yeah, well, you’ve got a lotta explainin’ to do.”

That pulls a flicker of dread through him. I lift my head and look at him. His face is still wrecked. Pale, bruised, bloodless in places, black hair tangled across the pillow.

The markings under his skin are duller than usual, as if some light inside him has been banked low. But his eyes are open. He’s here. He’s looking at me like seeing me is a miracle he almost lost.

“Where were you?” I ask, and I don’t soften it because I can’t. “For two months, Onyx. Where the hell were you?”

Pain moves across his face, and I think he’s going to answer through the bond in words. Instead, he lifts one shaking hand to my cheek. His thumb brushes under my eye, gentle enough to make the hurt in my chest split wider.

I show. Easier. Truer.

I should be wary of that. I probably would be if I hadn’t spent weeks desperate for any answer. I nod once. “Okay.”

The bond opens, and the room disappears. Not fully. I still feel the bed beneath my knee, his hand on my face, and the warmth of his body under mine. But another place rises inside me, dark and root-deep.

I see a black stone circle in the oldest fold of the forest, roots twisting like sleeping beasts, and Onyx bowed there in his true form with his skull pressed to the earth. I feel his fear of what my ex standing on the porch woke in him.

The rage. The possessive desire to erase what hurt me. His terror that liking that rage might make him rotten.