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Smoke thick enough to chew. Voices shouting, dozens of them, a sound like a crowd that's stopped being people. My knees hit cold dirt.

This isn't Bell & Bone. It's night, and it's old, and it's wrong.

A woman screams.

The woman from the photograph. Same dark hair, loose now and matted. Two men drag her toward a bonfire by her bound wrists. Blood runs from her mouth. Her bare feet plow furrows in the mud.

"No." I try to run to her. "No, stop, let her go."

My body won't move. My arms are pinned, and they aren't quite my arms. I'm behind someone's eyes, looking out, held back by hands that aren't mine holding a body that isn't mine.

The woman lifts her head and looks straight at me.

Her cracked lips move.

Run.

A man near the fire throws up his arm and roars a single word.

"Witch!"

The flames leap for the wood at her feet. She screams, and the sound goes into me and stays. Then her eyes find mine again through all that smoke, and against every impossible thing, she says my name.

"Maren."

The vision shatters like dropped glass.

I slam back into the floor of my shop. The necklace is still choking me. Real, cold, tightening.

I can't breathe. My nails tear at the chain and it won't give. Black crowds are at the edges of everything.

Sid yowls, a raw shriek I feel in my back teeth.

The front door explodes inward.

Gage crosses the shop faster than a man that size should be able to move. One second he's a shape in the doorway, the next he's on his knees over me, hands at my throat.

"Don't," I rasp. "It's hot, don't touch it."

Too late for that too.

The metal flares red under his fingers. Gage snarls, and his skin starts to smoke.

He doesn't let go.

"Gage." It comes out as nothing, no air behind it.

He hauls. The chain bites, then breaks, and cold air rips down into my lungs so fast it hurts. He hurls the necklace across the room. It cracks against the wall and lies there, oozing a thread of black smoke.

Then both his arms are around me and he pulls me off the floor and into him.

"Breathe," he says into my hair. "I've got you. Breathe."

I inhale deeply and then start to cough. I fist both hands in his shirt as I try to breathe again and I don't argue. Not this time.

His chest is a wall. His hand cradles the back of my head like I'm something that breaks. He smells like cedar and cold wind and the outside dark, and every stupid cell in my body reads it as one word. And it feels like we belong together.

Safe.