I found the blood first. Not much—but enough. Just a thread spooling over ice-crusted moss, breaking across roots and rot. The sky was the color of bone; the light filtered thin through needles that kept their secrets.
I fit an arrow to my bow. Not a single footfall on frozen leaves. The thread thickened into smears against bark, and followed the forest’s pull to a hand-print sliding down a birch trunk. I knelt, fingers hovering. The blood wasn’t red. It shimmered silver. It caught the light like starlight caught in glass. Shimmering blood belonged to only one kind.
Fae.
The word landed heavy in my chest—wrong, dangerous. I listened carefully to the world around me, waiting.
The tracks pulled me into a hollow where snow had flattened under the weight of a man. He lay half on his side, his body angled wrong, breath hitching raggedly. Armor of unfamiliar cut—black leather banded with pale metal. Court make. Hair tangled with frost and snow. His skin, where it showed at his throat, the faint sheen of fae skin. His blood glittered across the white snow like something that didn’t belong to this world.
I drew the string of my bow back. The arrow’s point hovered at his throat. One more ounce of pressure and the problem would end. Clean. Final. Easy. No one would know I had touched him. No Courts to poke their fingers into my woods. Nobody to tell stories about the ghost girl who wasn’t careful enough to stay a ghost. His eyes opened—barely. He looked at the sky first, then slowly, almost clumsily down the line of the arrow to finally meet my glare and held it. Confusion flared across his face, then fear—then something unreadable.
I exhaled slowly, letting the bow string ease against my fingers. This wasn’t mercy. It was strategy. Mercy got people killed. Strategy kept them alive. He would die here without me. Better to choose the method than let the forest decide.
“Don’t move.” I warned, my voice steady.
I slid the arrow back into my quiver, crouched, and pulled a strip of fabric from the hem of my cloak. The wound was high on his ribs, edged with a bruising and blackening I didn’t like. I pressed hard. Not to save him. Just to keep him from dying too fast, the way you must—before pain turns wild. He hissed, more of a reflex than a sound.
“Quiet,” I murmured, not sure whether I meant it for him, the trees, or me.
His iridescent blood covered my hands. It smelled faintly of metal and something sweet yet somehow sharp, almost clean. My palms tingled—wrong, unfamiliar. Heat flickered beneath the filigree on my wrists answering something in his blood. I kept my eyes on my work, binding his wound tight, used the snow to numb, used a flat piece of bark as a brace. No names, no questions, no chances.
“Sleep,” I muttered. “forget.”
His mouth moved to say a single syllable.
“Kae-…” The sound snagged somewhere in my chest. It might have been a name or it may have been nothing at all. I ignored it.
I rose, wiped my hands on a patch of dead grass until his star-bright blood smeared dull, and stepped backward the way I’d come—heel first, then toe—prints tucked into prints. I left him to the snow and the sky as the forest swallowed me.
The woods did not feel empty when I left. Something followed the space where I had stood.
Not footsteps. Not breath.
Attention.