You can’t love her.
Adaline’s words echo in his mind. She is right. He shouldn’t even be here, between two souls that will surely damn him. He shouldn’t be here, his heart strange and raw in his chest, feeling for all the world like a stone, like it will drop out of him and shatter at their feet.
Can’t isn’t the right word.
Shouldn’t.
Shouldn’t love her, shouldn’t love either of them. Shouldn’t exist, a boy made of glass and delicacy, tempting fate by walking up waterfalls and kissing wolves.
She will kill you.
Oh, but every moment exists on borrowed time anyway. They were born entangled and they were born dying, their translucent skin making clear to the world exactly where to cut them.
(Though the way Adaline looks at him and the way he wants to go to her may kill him, too.)
She is dangerous.
A prophecy fulfilled, perhaps, because his gaze goes back to Tyrna and sees her shaking, her mouth bulging and reforming. The air fills with a snap of bones breaking and his gaze whips back to Adaline, convinced she’s shattering before him, but she is whole.
Tyrna is not.
Tyrna is the one changing, warping, from horse to wolf – becoming everything she’d warned of from their first meeting.
The whole thing feels like prophecy, and he stands between them as if he could be a barricade, he stands between them and a thick, dark inevitability creeps over him.
“Tyrna,” he says her name with an ache because he knows she’s in there but he also knows the wolf is hungry, “don’t.”
To Adaline, he says only “run.”
As if wolves can be outrun.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark