Chapter 118: CAUGHT

He doesn’t look away, and somewhere between one heartbeat and the next my body decides for me.

I run.

It isn’t a decision so much as a failure of one; my legs go before my brain can file the objection, and the objection is loud, screaming that there’s nowhere in this forest that isn’t theirs, that I’m surrounded by things that hunt for a living and I’m a girl in borrowed boots who dropped her flashlight somewhere back in the brush. I run anyway. The frozen dirt gives under my heels in crumbling bites, and the tree line is maybe thirty yards out, a black seam between the clearing and everything past it, so I put my eyes on that seam and nothing else.

Behind me the ring moves.

I hear it more than see it, a shift of weight through dead leaves on all sides at once, perfectly timed, like one body adjusting its stance. Not a scramble. Not a chase. They reposition the way a net draws tighter, and the sound of it gets into my shoulders and stays, a cold weight sitting just under the skin.

Nobody comes after me.

That’s the part that scares me most, in the three seconds I have to be scared of anything. They’re letting me run. Whatever this is, it has rules, and the rules apparently include giving the outsider a head start, and I’m already doing the math on what that means while my lungs burn and my braid comes loose against my shoulder.

Then one of them moves.

I don’t look back, and I don’t have to, because there’s a displacement of air behind me, a low rush like something heavy passing through the brush without touching it, covering ground in two seconds that should take ten. My skater’s body knows speed. I’ve spent my whole life measuring it, counting revolutions against the clock, calibrating exactly how fast a human being can travel across a frictionless surface with everything they have.

This is not that.

The tree line is six feet away. Five. I can smell pine and wet bark, and I’m already reaching for the dark between the trunks like it’s a door I can slam behind me...

A hand closes around my upper arm.

It stops me so completely that my feet keep going and my shoulder takes the whole of it, and I swing around and hit something that doesn’t move. The grip doesn’t crush. That’s what undoes me. It’s precise, four fingers and a thumb settling exactly where they need to settle, applying exactly enough force to hold a hundred and twenty pounds of panic, and I can feel the restraint in it like a held breath. He could break my arm. He’s choosing, right now, with effort, not to.

I look up and it’s Puck, and it isn’t.

The gold is full, no human ring left around it, and his face is wrong in a way I can’t itemize: the jaw set too far forward, the lines of him too long, the breath coming out in white plumes on a rhythm I don’t recognize. His hand is hot through my sleeve. Burning hot, the way it was that first day, except now I understand that heat wasn’t a flirtation or an accident or anything I was meant to keep quiet about.

"What are you doing here?"

It comes out below the floor of a human voice. Not a whisper, not a growl, something underneath both, a register that vibrates in my sternum before it reaches my ears, and what I recognize is purely physical, prey-level, the certainty you get in your spine before your mind catches up. The shape of the words is his. The thing making them is not.

I try to answer. My throat gives me nothing.

"Georgia." Lower. Rougher. His fingers flex once on my arm and settle again, deliberate as a man re-gripping a knife he doesn’t want to drop. "Answer me."

Behind us, a howl splits the night.

It goes up from the clearing and opens the dark like a seam, long and rising, and before it finishes a second one answers from somewhere deep in the Hollow, then a third off the ridge, then more, layering across each other until the sound isn’t coming from any direction so much as from everywhere, from under the ground, from the trees themselves. I feel it in my teeth. I feel it in the hand holding me.

Because the hand changes.

Not loosens. Changes. Something moves beneath his skin, a violent coil and slide of muscle rearranging itself under the pressure of all those voices. His head drops, and the breath leaves him in a rough, choked sound. His knee buckles into the frozen dirt. He wrenches his fingers open, ripping his grip away from my sleeve as if touching me burns, and staggers sideways into a tree trunk. The impact cracks against the bark.

"Go," he gets out. It isn’t entirely a human word. It carries a low rattle underneath it, scraping and guttural.

Behind him the howling does not stop. It swells, pulling at the air between the trees, and Puck presses his forehead against the trunk, his shoulders heaving. His spine bends in a sharp, unnatural arch, tendons straining through the fabric of his shirt as if fighting the shape of his own frame.

I don’t move. My feet are frozen to the ground.

"Georgia." He shoves back from the tree, his voice scraping raw. "Run. Now."

"You’re..."

"Don’t look at me."

I do. I can’t look anywhere else. His hands come up between us, trembling with the effort to hold still, and in the cold wash of moonlight I watch the fingers stretch, the knuckles thickening into broad, distorted joints. The nails push out, turning dark and curved, hardening into thick claws right in front of me. He tries to curl his hands into fists to hide them, but the fingers won’t bend flush anymore.

He lifts his head, his golden eyes wide, desperate, and entirely unhuman.

"Don’t," he whispers, trying to step back, trying to force me away with the sheer threat of his posture. "Don’t, just go, please, while I can still..."

My shoulders drop. The fear sharpens into something colder, something undeniable. My breath rises in a pale cloud between us while the howling blankets the clearing, and I look down at the dark claws curving from his hands, then back to the foreign lines of his face.

"It’s really you," I whisper. "You’re one of them."