The morning looked offensively normal.
Sunlight spilled lazily through my curtains, warm and forgiving—as if a storm hadn't split the woods open, as if I hadn't run from a god calling me by a name that wasn't mine, as if something with too many eyes hadn't whispered through my window in the dark.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, trying to breathe past the tightness under my ribs.
The same place the sigil had flared blue.
At some point during the night, the music box had started on its own.
But the lullaby hadn't.
It hummed faintly in my skull, soft and wrong, like someone murmuring through a locked door.
It's just a song, I told myself.
But the words—love will remember what you are meant to lose—pressed against the back of my mind like they'd been written for me. Like they were instructions.
I moved through the morning on autopilot. Shower. Coffee. Mascara thick enough to hide the fact that I hadn't slept.
Nothing grounded me. Nothing felt real.
Every step felt half a beat out of sync with my body, like I was walking beside myself.
I tried to drown myself in routine.
Routine didn't fight back.
Days blurred. I felt restless and hollow—like some essential part of me had been left behind in the hollow, still awake, still pulsing faint blue.
My birthday was in just over a week.
I should've cared.
I didn't.
Will hadn't called.
No texts. No messages. Not even a ripple of that strange electric pull I hated noticing.
Every time my phone lit up, my pulse spiked—then crashed.
I told myself I didn't care.
That he was lying.
That he'd manipulated me.
That he'd made me feel things that weren't mine.
And still—some traitorous part of me kept reaching.
By Monday, I was snapping at people who didn't deserve it and falling asleep mid-lecture.
My mother's voice looped in my head: Quit wallowing and live your life.
Right. Because that fixes cosmic implosions.
A full week of silence.
A full week for the world to feel… wrong.
Too still.
Too watchful.
Like something was waiting for me to step off an edge I couldn't see.
When my phone buzzed during lunch, my spine went rigid.
Not Will.
Shelby: Are you alive? Or should I bring caffeine and holy water?
Despite myself, I smiled.
Me: Barely. Caffeine required.
Shelby: Good. Because the Masquerade Ball is in two weeks and your dress still looks like a Victorian ghost lost a fight with hot glue gun. Get over here.
Me: Fine.
Distraction was better than listening to my bones hum.
Shelby's room looked like a unicorn had detonated: glitter, tulle, ribbon, sequins—chaos with opinions.
We sat cross-legged on the floor, pretending we were fixing my dress instead of aggressively hot-gluing it into submission. Shelby rambled about masks and sparkles and birthday nonsense.
Normally, her chatter anchored me.
Today it barely muffled the static under my skin.
And then I noticed it.
Shelby kept glancing at me. Quick looks. Sharp ones. The kind that catalog damage.
After the fifth, I sighed.
"Hey," I said softly, brushing a strand of hair from her face. "If you're going to assess me like a crime scene, at least narrate."
She didn't smile. Didn't joke. Just kept working the bedazzler like it was the only thing keeping her hands busy.
"Okay," I said. "That's new. Spill."
She froze mid-glue, eyes lifting to mine like she'd already decided something and was bracing for the fallout.
"Evan told me not to tell you."
I crossed my arms. "Shelby."
She exhaled sharply. "Yeah, yeah, I know." Then, deadly serious: "But before I say anything—you good?"
The question landed heavier than it should have.
"I'm fine."
Her gaze sharpened. "That wasn't the question."
Something in my chest tightened.
"I'm… here," I said finally.
She nodded once. Accepted it. No pushing. No prying. Just recalibrating, like she'd adjusted her stance to stand a little closer.
"Okay," she said. "Then I'm staying."
I blinked. "Staying?"
"With you. Mentally. Physically. Spiritually. However this shakes out." A beat. "You don't get to disappear on me, Ang. That's non-negotiable."
I laughed, shaky and surprised. "Since when do you talk like a knight in a bad fantasy novel?"
"Since my best friend started looking like she's holding a secret that bites."
That did it. The laugh that followed scraped its way out of me—raw, fragile, alive.
Shelby softened immediately, like she'd been waiting for proof I was still in there.
"You don't have to tell me anything," she said quietly. "Ever. But whatever this is? You're not carrying it alone."
For one dangerous second, I almost told her everything.
The storm bending around me.
The sigil burning blue.
The thing at my window.
Will's voice breaking when he said I won't survive losing you again.
Then Shelby squinted at me. "Also—you absolutely cannot freak out."
"I can't promise that."
"Cool. Love honesty." She paused. Lasted five seconds. "Okay fine—Evan said Will said he's—"
She inhaled like she was about to jump off a cliff.
"—already in love with you."
I blinked. Hard. "He what?"
"Oh yeah. Full-on. Apparently fell in love at first sight and then went home to 'give you space.'" She made violent air quotes. "SPACE. You give strangers space. You give soul-altering women flowers and emotionally questionable devotion."
"Shelby—"
"I told Evan to tell Will that if he disappears, I'll come for him. That leaving you isn't an option."
She met my eyes, unblinking. "Alive or not. And that I don't miss."
Against my will, I laughed–short and breathless. Something in my chest unclenched, not because things were okay, but because for the first ime in a week, I wasn't facing them alone.
The static didn't vanish. It quieted.
And for the first time since the storm, I was fully here–inside my body, behind my eyes, braced but standing.
And Shelby—still watching me like she was keeping guard—didn't look away.
And then the glue gun slid off the table.
Not bumped.
Not nudged.
It moved.
Shelby didn't notice—she was elbow-deep in tulle.
But I froze.
The plug had been slack.
The table steady.
The air still.
The glue gun had reacted—immediately—the instant relief bloomed in my chest.
The same way the storm had reacted when I whispered Enough.
Cold crept up my spine.
Coincidence.
It had to be.
Except—
This wasn't the first time.
Not the storm.
Not the lullaby that felt like instruction.
I reached for ribbon like nothing happened. My fingers shook.
Shelby kept talking—masks, shoes, boys not worth mascara.
But beneath her voice, something thrummed.
A pulse.
A presence.
Awake.
Aware.
Waiting.
Not Will.
Not the Keres.
Something older.
Something that had been sleeping under my skin for twenty years—five hundred and twenty in Will's reckoning—and was finally stretching, cracking its knuckles, blinking into the light.
The ripening.
The reason the Keres whispered at my window like starving things.
I swallowed.
Normal wasn't just gone.
Normal had been written for me.
And it was unraveling.
Not after that storm.
Not after that kiss.
Not after those eyes in the dark.
And not after a glue gun obeyed a feeling I hadn't meant to have.
Something inside me was waking up.
And the world already knew.