Chapter 119: THE WALK BACK

Every nerve screams the same single order to run, yet my boots stay locked to the frozen dirt like something has nailed them there. Puck’s spine is wrong; that is the detail my mind keeps snagging on, the way it curves outward from the trunk at an angle no human back can make. The joints in his hands have swollen to twice their size, dark curved nails splitting through the skin where fingertips used to be. I cannot look directly at his face anymore, at those gold-lit irises that have stopped being Puck entirely and turned into something older and far less patient.

"Georgia." The word comes out broken, scraped along gravel. "Run."

I don’t.

Reason fails to cut through the sheer terror pinning me down. The reality is that I know him, or I believed I did, and I cannot reconcile the two realities within one frame: the boy who skated beside me in the dark versus this creature braced against the bark, shoulders warped and breath tearing out in ragged pulls that fog the freezing air between us.

He makes a low, tearing sound, like cartilage giving way from the inside out.

Then he starts fighting it.

I watch the change occur and I cannot look away; the arch in his spine reverses by degrees, each shift accompanied by a sharp crack that registers in my sternum before it reaches my ears. His jaw pulls back from its extended length; the knuckles contract slowly, claws still dark and curved but visibly shorter than they were moments ago. The effort wracks his entire frame in visible tremors, his teeth clenched so hard the muscle along his jaw jumps with the strain.

The howls in the trees do not stop.

He gets upright. He is nowhere close to human, but he stands, oriented toward me; when he reaches out and wraps a hand around my wrist, the grip clamps down hard. The skin against mine burns with a heat that has nothing to do with warmth.

He pulls.

My boots finally tear free from the dirt. I yield to the momentum - not because I trust what he’s become, but because standing alone in the dark while that pack closes in is suicide.

Puck’s grip around my wrist hasn’t loosened. Then he stops dead, yanking me hard against his chest behind the broad trunk of an oak. Across the path ahead, a low silhouette streaks through the brambles, swift and massive, vanishing into the brush. A sharp spike of howls rises immediately to our flank, loud enough to rattle through my teeth. Puck pins me behind his shoulder, muscles locked like iron, his breath shuddering through bared teeth as he fights the tremor running through his spine, forcing down the answering snarling surge that claws to tear out of him. I track the pressure of it the way I track the ice beneath my blades; it is constant calibration, cataloging what the contact tells me. The heat coming off his skin is wrong, too high and too steady. The fingers curving around my pulse point are not entirely fingers yet, but I do not look down. I keep my attention fixed on the path ahead, watching dark shapes of trees resolve and dissolve as we move through them, and I breathe.

His breathing stays controlled in the way that brute effort stays controlled. Deliberate. Measured. Every exhale feels like a small decision made against something larger pushing back.

The howls have dropped behind us, but not far enough. I feel them more than hear them now, a low vibration registering deep below my sternum, like the pack has moved from sound into frequency.

I don’t ask him anything.

The silence settles between us like a physical weight. The Georgia who drove under these trees three weeks ago would have been cataloging questions already, building the list, pressing for the explanation that would make all of this legible. Right now, I have nothing. It is not because I have stopped wanting answers; I understand, with sudden and cold certainty, that asking him anything right now could shatter what little control holds him together.

He knows what I saw. I know what he is. Whatever comes next, it doesn’t start with explanations.

"Keep moving," he says. The words are rough, ground down to gravel, barely louder than the brush scraping against our legs.

"I am," I tell him.

A branch cracks to the left and his grip tightens fractionally, a single reflexive clench; his pace shifts instantly, steering our line right without breaking stride. I follow the redirect without pulling against it. My boots find purchase on the frozen ground and I match his rhythm, shorter steps against his longer reach. Both of us cut across the dark in a silence that has stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like agreement.

The cold bites at my face, my ears, the exposed strip of wrist between his hand and my sleeve. I focus on that sharp edge of sensation because it keeps me present; it keeps me from spinning back toward the clearing, back toward the sight of his spine arching away from bark in an impossible arc.

That is the single fact I keep returning to, checking it like an edge on steel: the person who traced my turns on the black pond, who pressed a burning palm flat against my back to steady me, that was not an illusion. It was just half the truth.

The trees thin ahead, and through the gaps I catch the first faint bleed of campus light against the sky, pale and artificial after the dark.

Puck’s hand tightens around my wrist once, barely, and then releases me completely.

The cold rushes in where his heat was.The campus lights bleed pale and artificial through the trees ahead, and we walk toward them without speaking.

Puck keeps a half-step ahead of me, not leading, just present, his shoulders still carrying a tension that hasn’t fully unwound. I measure the space between us like a fracture in thin ice; I catalog every inch without crossing it. The howls have gone quiet somewhere behind us, swallowed by distance or decision, and the silence left in their wake feels enormous.

My boots find the gravel without my attention. I give it all to him instead, cataloging what I can from the side: the hard line of his jaw, his hands hanging stiff at his sides, and the occasional flex of his fingers that tells me the sheer effort of staying human is costing him blood and bone.

I ask nothing.

The red brick face of the dorm building resolves through the bare branches, ordinary and jarring at the same time. The low electric buzz of the motion sensor rattles overhead just before the bulb clicks on, flooding the concrete landing in harsh white glare. Puck stops dead at the bottom step.

His grip breaks from my skin.

The sudden drop hits like an adrenaline crash. Shivering sets in so hard my knees buckle, my breath tearing out in ragged, stuttered gasps that smoke in the cold. My fingers shake uncontrollably until I clamp one hand around the frozen iron handrail, letting the bite of the metal and the solid, familiar brick anchor me. Proof that I am standing here, that I made it out alive.

He keeps his chin lowered at first.

When his face lifts, the gold in his irises has receded enough that I can almost find the boy I knew underneath it, almost. There is something raw in his expression, stripped down like a shout ripping through an empty hallway.

"I need you to give me until tomorrow," he says, the words scraping out rough, reduced to raw gravel. "Can you do that? Please."

Dread sets like stone behind my sternum.

There are a dozen demands I want to throw at him. Questions I spent weeks assembling, stacked careful and precise, now collide like cars skidding across black ice. What I know, what I saw in that clearing, what it means that he hauled himself back from the brink of absolute violence just to bring me home safely; none of it fits into speech. My ribs ache under the crushing pressure.

"Tomorrow," I say, and nod.

It is a single, deliberate gesture, but it costs more strength than I expect.

Something flickers across his features, gone too fast to track. He locks onto me for another endless second, long enough that the weight lands hard in my chest, and then pivots away. He retreats into the shadow of the pines before any plea escapes me, long before I summon the breath to drag him back or demand truths he cannot survive tonight.

The sensor light clicks off.

I stand alone in the freezing air, my wrist still burning where his palm lingered, waiting for tomorrow to come.