My knees hit the asphalt hard enough to feel it through my jeans. The damp seeps through the denim, cold against my skin, but that doesn't matter. None of that matters because Sera is on the ground and there's blood—too much blood—spreading across her shirt in a dark stain that keeps growing while I stare at it.

"Sera. Sera, hey—" My voice comes out wrong. Thin. Like I'm already losing her. "Look at me. Come on, look at me."

The van's taillights are gone around the corner. I heard them screech away, heard the engine roar, but I don't remember registering it. Don't remember anything between the gunshot and finding myself here, on my knees, my hands pressing down on the wet heat of her chest.

Sera's silver-blue hair fans across the cracked pavement like spilled mercury, catching the streetlamp's yellow glow. Her eyes are open but distant, winter-sea color gone hazy at the edges, and there's a tremble in her jaw that makes my stomach drop through the damn pavement.

"Rowan." Her voice is a thread. Barely there. "Rowan, I—"

"Don't talk. Don't you dare talk, just—" I press harder, and the blood wells between my fingers, hot and wet and wrong. My hands are shaking. I can feel the torn fabric of her shirt, the torn skin beneath it, and I don't know how to fix this. I don't know how to—

Her eyes flutter.

"No. No, no, no—" The word rips out of me, jagged and desperate. "Sera, stay with me. Stay with me, please—"

Her lashes sweep down. Once. Twice. Like she's fighting it. Like she's trying.

"SERA!"

The scream tears my throat raw. The streetlamp buzzes overhead. The humid air presses down, thick with the stench of wet garbage and hot asphalt, and somewhere a dog starts barking, distant and irrelevant, because Sera's eyes are closing and I can feel her blood cooling under my palms.

Something in my chest cracks open.

Not like a bone. Not like a wound. Like a kiln door—that heavy iron seal that keeps the heat contained, that says do not open while firing or everything shatters —swinging wide and releasing a pressure I didn't know I'd been holding my whole life.

The gold light pours out of me.

It doesn't hurt. That's the strangest part. It should hurt—it feels like something fundamental breaking, like the universe rewriting its own rules inside my ribcage—but it doesn't burn. It moves, pouring down my arms, through my fingers, into the wreckage of Sera's chest.

I can see it. The light. Like liquid sunlight, pooling around the wound, sinking in —

My hands tingle. Then they burn. Not hot. Something else. Something that makes my teeth ache and my vision swim at the edges.

Beneath my palms, the torn flesh knits.

I feel it. The fibers pulling together, the blood vessels reconnecting, the skin growing back in a warm crawl that shouldn't be possible. I can feel her body responding, cells waking up, the wound closing like it was never there—

The gold light flickers. Dies.

I'm left kneeling in the silence, my hands still pressed to Sera's chest, now whole and unbroken beneath the blood-soaked shreds of her shirt.

She gasps.

A full-body jolt, like being shocked awake. Her back arches, her hands fly up, and she sucks in air like she's been drowning—sharp, ragged, desperate. Her eyes snap open, wide and wild, fixing on me with a focus that wasn't there thirty seconds ago.

"Rowan—"

Her voice is hoarse. But strong. Stronger than it should be.

I can't move. My hands are still on her chest, still trembling, still glowing faintly at the fingertips. The residual light fades as I stare at it, at them, at these hands that just did something I have no name for.

"What did you just do?" Sera whispers.

Her silver-blue hair is tangled and wet at the edges—sweat, or blood, or both. Her winter-sea eyes are locked on mine, and there's something in them I've never seen before. Not fear. Not gratitude.

Recognition.

Like she's seeing me for the first time.

I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again.

"I don't—" My voice cracks. I swallow, taste copper and something else—something sweet, metallic, like lightning trapped on my tongue. "I don't know."

She doesn't look away. Doesn't blink. Just stares at me with those pale, impossible eyes, and I realize I'm still touching her, my palms flat against the ruined fabric of her shirt, where there should be a hole but there isn't. Where there should be blood still pumping out but there's only dry skin beneath the wet cloth.

I pull my hands back like I've been burned.

They leave red imprints on her shirt. My fingers are stained. Sticky. I look down at myself, at the blood on my jeans, on my forearms, splattered across my face—I can feel it drying, tight and tacky on my cheek—and the world tilts sideways.

"Rowan." Sera's hand closes around my wrist. Her grip is strong. Too strong for someone who was dying thirty seconds ago. "Rowan, look at me."

I look at her.

She sits up slowly, wincing, her other hand pressing against her chest. Testing it. Her fingers find the tear in her shirt, the blood-soaked fabric, and she pushes it aside to reveal skin. Unbroken. Pale. A faint pink line where the wound was, already fading like an old scar.

We both stare at it.

The streetlamp buzzes. A car passes somewhere, headlights sweeping across the intersection, not slowing. No one saw. No one knows. It's just us, two girls on a dirty street corner, one of them marked by a miracle she didn't ask for and can't explain.

"You healed me," Sera says. Not a question. A statement, flat and wondering, like she's testing how it sounds out loud. "You—with your hands—you literally just—"

"I don't know what that was." My voice comes out too loud. Too sharp. I pull my wrist free, scramble backward on my knees, putting space between us. The pavement scrapes my palms, and the sting grounds me, reminds me I'm in a body that apparently does impossible things. "I don't—that's not—people can't just—"

"People can't." Sera's eyes meet mine, and there's something careful in them now. Measured. Like she's deciding how much to say. "But you're not exactly people, are you?"

The words hit me like cold water.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

She doesn't answer. Just holds my gaze, her expression unreadable, and slowly, painfully, gets to her feet. I watch her stand, watch her test her weight, watch her press a hand to her chest one more time and find it whole.

I'm still on my knees on the dirty asphalt.

My hands are shaking.

I look at them—at the blood drying in the creases of my palms, at the faint gold residue still clinging to my fingertips—and I don't know them. I don't know these hands. I don't know the thing that lived in my chest and decided, without my permission, to crack open and fix what should have been unfixable.

"Rowan." Sera's voice is softer now. She holds out her hand. "Get up. We can't stay here."

I take her hand. It's warm. Alive. I squeezed it three years ago in a crowded bar, the night we met, and it was just a hand then. Just skin and bone and the start of a friendship I didn't know I needed. Now it's a hand that should be cold, and it isn't, because of something I did.

She pulls me to my feet. My knees ache. My whole body aches. The humid air wraps around me, sticky and warm, and I can smell the blood on my clothes, can feel it drying, stiffening the fabric.

"What happened out here?" Sera asks. She's scanning the street now, her jaw tight, her eyes hard and searching. "The van—it came out of nowhere. Hit me and then—"

"They shot you." The words come out flat. Disconnected. Like I'm describing something that happened to someone else. "The window rolled down, and someone shot you, and then they drove away."

She goes still.

"They shot me."

"I saw it. I saw the gun, I saw—" My voice breaks. I press my palm against my mouth, feel the tacky blood against my lips, taste copper. "I saw you fall."

Sera's quiet for a long moment. Her hand finds the hem of her shirt, lifts it, checks the skin beneath. The pink line is almost gone now, barely a shadow. She lets the fabric drop.

"That van was waiting," she says slowly. "It didn't swerve. It aimed for me."

"What?"

She turns to face me fully, and there's something in her expression I've never seen before. Not fear. Not wariness. A kind of grim certainty, like a door that's been locked her whole life just swung open and now she has to decide whether to walk through it.

"I need to tell you something."

"Sera, what are you talking about? That van—"

"Wasn't a random hit-and-run." Her voice is steady. Too steady. "They were aiming for me. And I think I know why."

I stare at her. The streetlamp catches her silver-blue hair, makes it shimmer like oil on water. The dried blood on her shirt is dark and ugly against her pale blue skin. That's new too, isn't it? Her skin. I always thought it was a fashion choice, some kind of dye or makeup, but in this light, under this buzzing yellow lamp, I can see it's not. It's her. It's always been her.

"Who are you?" I whisper.

Sera's lips twitch. An attempt at a smile that doesn't reach her eyes.

"That's a longer conversation than we have time for right now." She reaches into her jacket—frayed leather, always worn, always familiar—and pulls out her phone. The screen is cracked. Blood smeared across the glass. She wipes it on her jeans and dials. "I'm calling someone. He can help."

"Help with what?"

She pauses. Looks at me. The winter-sea eyes are soft now, worried, and that's somehow worse than the fear was. Because this is Sera worrying about me, and Sera doesn't worry. Sera makes jokes and steals my coffee and drags me to underground clubs where the music is too loud and the air smells like incense and things I can't name.

Sera doesn't look at me like I'm something fragile.

"Help with what you just did," she says. "And help keeping you alive long enough to figure out what it means."

The phone rings against her ear. Once. Twice.

"Kaelen," she says when it picks up. "I need you. Now. And bring a clean shirt."

A pause. I can't hear the voice on the other end, but I watch Sera's face shift, a flicker of relief passing through the tension.

"No, I'm fine. Not me. Someone else." She looks at me, and her voice drops. "Someone who just did something that shouldn't be possible."

Another pause. Longer this time.

"Yeah," Sera says quietly. "That's what I thought too. We're two blocks from the pottery shop on Ash. Hurry."

She hangs up. Pockets the phone. And then she just stands there, looking at me, while the streetlamp hums and the humidity wraps around us like a wet blanket and the smell of blood and garbage fills my lungs.

"Rowan." She steps closer. Her hand finds my shoulder, squeezes gently. "I know you're scared. I know you're confused. But I need you to trust me right now. Can you do that?"

I want to say yes. I've always said yes to Sera—yes to the late nights, yes to the strange bars, yes to the friendship that felt like falling into step with someone who just got it. But this is different. This is blood on my hands and gold light in my veins and a van that aimed for her like she was a target.

"What aren't you telling me?" I ask.

She holds my gaze. Doesn't flinch.

"Everything. But I can't tell you everything on a street corner with blood all over both of us. So I'm asking you to trust me for another hour. One hour. And then I'll tell you whatever you want to know."

I look down at my hands. The blood is drying, flaking, falling away to reveal skin that looks exactly the same as it did this morning. Same calluses from the pottery wheel. Same scar on my thumb from the time I dropped a bowl fresh out of the kiln.

Same hands. Different world.

"One hour," I say.

Sera nods. Her hand drops from my shoulder, and she turns to face the direction the van disappeared, her profile sharp and unreadable in the yellow light.

"They'll try again," she says quietly. "Whoever they are. Now that they know I'm alive, they'll try again."

"Know you're alive?" I shake my head, trying to process. "Sera, they shot you. They had to know—"

"They knew I was half-siren. They knew I was connected to the underground." She says it like it's obvious, like she's been waiting to say it for years. "What they didn't know is that my best friend is a fae with healing magic old enough to wake the dead."

The word hangs in the air between us.

Fae.

"I'm not—" I start, but the protest dies in my throat. I saw the light. I felt it. I felt something crack open inside me that I've never touched before, something ancient and terrifying and real.

"You are." Sera turns back to me, and her smile is tired but genuine. "You just don't know it yet."

Headlights appear at the end of the street. A dark car, moving slow, approaching with a caution that feels deliberate. Sera's hand moves to her boot—I know the knife that's there, have seen her clean it a hundred times—but she relaxes when the car pulls closer and the window rolls down.

The man inside has moss-green skin and horns that curve like ancient oak branches. His eyes are the color of hazelnuts, warm and old, and he takes in the scene—the blood, the torn shirt, the two of us standing on a dirty street corner—without a flicker of surprise.

"Get in," he says. His voice is low and rumbling, like stones shifting at the bottom of a river. "We don't have much time."

Sera opens the back door and gestures for me to climb in.

I look at her. At the man with the horns. At my own hands, still faintly gold at the fingertips.

"One hour," I say.

"One hour," she agrees.

I get in the car.