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“There’s someone,” Bear said finally. Quiet. Careful. “A… friend. She’s never had a real Christmas. And I thought—”
“Say absolutely nothing else,” Isabelle cut in, already vibrating with purpose. “I’m coming. Give me a couple days. I’ll handle everything. Tell your mama I cannot wait to see her, and please — please — talk to Brutus about personal space. He followed me for three days last time.”
A beat. Something softer entered Bear’s voice. “It… shouldn’t be a problem this time.”
Isabelle’s eyes cut to Michael’s. A look passed between them — that familiar wordless shorthand they’d developed over years.
“Yeah! It’ll be fun,” Michael said. “I have Tokyo first, but I’ll come straight after.” He paused, thinking out loud. “Isabelle will have to take the jet, and I guess I’ll have to take a commercial flight… hopefully they have an adapter for my Nintendo Switch.”
“You don’t have to—” Bear started.
“I want to,” Michael said simply. Because it was true.
Isabelle smiled, warm and bright. “We both do, Bear.”
After they hung up, the kitchen fell quiet. Isabelle was already reaching for her laptop, opening tabs with frightening speed, becoming the unstoppable force she always was.
Michael watched her for a long moment. The way her long brown braid fell over one shoulder, (like Princess Leia). The soft curve of her waist as she leaned over the counter. The focused furrow between her brows. The graceful strength in her hands as her fingers flew across the keyboard.
He felt… something.
A strange, unsettled feeling he couldn’t quite label. It wasn’t professional admiration. It wasn’t simple fondness. It was something that made his chest feel too tight and his thoughts too scattered, and he had no idea what to do with it.
I can go to Tokyo by myself, he thought. It’ll be fine. I’m totally capable.
Michael sighed.
Yeah… right.
20
SAGE
The dream started warm.
That was the cruelest part. It always started warm.
She was in the barn, but not quite the real one — a dream-version stitched together from memory and longing. The air smelled of sweet hay, woodsmoke, and something large and living. Golden light poured from nowhere and everywhere, soft and amber, turning every surface into something sacred.
And there was the bear.
Her bear. The one from her fevered delirium that first night — enormous, impossibly solid, fur catching the golden light like it was holding onto it for her. His massive chest rose and fell with slow, tremendous patience. And in the center of that chest, visible through the thick fur, his heartbeat glowed steady and golden, pulsing like a lighthouse in the dark.
She wasn’t afraid. She had never been afraid of him.
She walked toward him through the dream-barn and he watched her come with those dark, patient gray eyes. The heartbeat in his chest pulsed gold-gold-gold like a lighthouse, like a fixed point in the dark, like the only navigation she had ever truly needed. She pressed her hand against his warm side and felt the heat of him soak into her palm, travel up her arm, and settle deep into her chest where the cold had lived for so long, and she thought —
Safe.
The word bloomed in her like the sunrise. The only word that mattered. The one she hadn’t dared speak out loud since Felicity, because saying it meant believing it, and believing it meant it could be ripped away.
Safe.
Then the dark came.
A ragged wound tore open in the air behind the bear — a perfect circle of absolute terror. Not gradually, but suddenly, as if it had always been there, deep down, creeping at the edges like a cursed predator waiting for its moment. It was black and total, not just the absence of light but the absence of everything. A darkness so absolute that even sound and memory would be lost inside its eternity. And it devoured — pulling… consuming… voracious. The golden glow beginning to flicker out like a candle between wet fingers. Even the air in her lungs was turning thin and metallic, as if the void was already trying to pull the very breath from her body.
He threw out his massive paws as if to shield her, trying to push the darkness back, to keep it away from her. A desperate, protective gesture that made her heart twist.
