Chapter 14 Waking

Chapter 14 Waking
Scarlett
It started with the noise.
She noticed it first on Wednesday morning, three days after the conversation with Dale, two days after Caden had sat on the porch with her until midnight and she'd told him everything. She was walking to school with her earphones in and she took them out to cross the road and the world was suddenly, overwhelmingly loud.
Not loud like a sound had gotten closer. Loud like a dial had been turned up on everything simultaneously. The crunch of gravel under her feet. A conversation happening behind a closed window thirty feet away, every word distinct. Birds in the trees above her, individual wingbeats. The low hum of a car engine two streets over.
She stopped in the middle of the pavement.
Put her earphones back in.
It didn't help.
She made it to school with her jaw set and her shoulders up around her ears and told herself it was stress. It was clearly stress. She had found out she was a supernatural hybrid, confronted her father, learned her mother was alive and imprisoned, and watched a boy she was increasingly unable to be sensible about drive away to face the man responsible. Stress was a reasonable response. Heightened senses were probably--probably — a stress response. Completely normal. Medically explicable.
She sat down in English and the fluorescent light above her desk buzzed at a frequency that felt like it was happening inside her skull.
By lunch she had a headache that was less a headache and more a full sensory experience she hadn't consented to. Maya put a tray down across from her and Scarlett smelled the food from three feet away with a clarity that was frankly unnecessary and pushed the tray to one side.
"Okay," Maya said, sitting down and looking at her with those sharp bright eyes. "What's wrong."
"Nothing. Headache."
"It's not a headache face. It's a something else face." Maya tilted her head. "You've had the something else face since Monday."
"I found some things out. About my family." Scarlett kept her voice even. "It's been a lot to process."
"Okay." Maya accepted this with the grace of someone who understood that people were entitled to their own timelines. Then she leaned forward slightly. "Can I say something without you taking it the wrong way."
"Probably not, but go ahead."
"Your eyes are doing something."
Scarlett went still. "What."
"They keep......" Maya made a gesture. "Shifting. Like the colour changes. In certain light they look almost silver and then sometimes...." She paused. "This is going to sound strange."
"My threshold for strange has moved considerably this week."
"Sometimes they look like there's a light behind them," Maya said carefully. "Like something is lit up that shouldn't be."
Scarlett stared at her.
Maya stared back.
"How long have you known," Scarlett said slowly. "About Ashveil. About what it is."
A beat. Then Maya said, simply, "My whole life. My mum is pack." She paused. "I'm not, I didn't get the wolf. Just the human half of a half-wolf mother, which means I got good instincts and a very complicated relationship with full moons." She looked at Scarlett steadily. "I knew something was different about you the first day. I didn't know what. Caden asking about you at Maya's movie night kind of confirmed the direction."
Scarlett put her face in her hands briefly.
"The number of people in this town who knew more about me than I did," she said into her palms.
"To be fair I didn't know specifically,"
"Maya."
"Yeah okay. Sorry." A pause. "Are you alright? Actually alright."
Scarlett lifted her face from her hands and looked at her friend — her actual friend, she was realising, the real kind, the kind that sat across from you in a cafeteria and told you your eyes were doing something instead of pretending not to notice.
"No," she said honestly. "Something is happening to me and I don't know how to stop it and it's getting louder."
It got worse by Thursday.
She woke at four in the morning with her heart hammering and her hands gripping the mattress and the absolute certain animal knowledge that something was outside.
She was at the window before she'd made the conscious decision to move, and that was new, the speed of it, the way her body had simply gone without consulting her, like something else had taken the wheel for three seconds. She stood at the glass breathing hard and looked out at the street below.
Nothing. Fog. The orange blur of the streetlamp.
But she could smell something. Cold and dark and faintly metallic, threading through the ordinary damp-pine smell of Ashveil's night air like something that didn't belong.
She didn't sleep again.
She called Caden at seven.
He picked up on the first ring, which meant he hadn't been sleeping either, which meant he already knew something was wrong.
"Something was outside last night," she said, without preamble.
"I know." His voice was careful. "Pack caught a scent on the eastern boundary around three. We don't think they came into town but" A pause. "I'm coming over. Don't go to school yet."
He was there in ten minutes.
She met him on the porch and he looked at her face in the morning light and something moved in his expression, concern and something else underneath, something that looked like awe which she didn't know what to do with.
"Your eyes," he said.
"Maya told me."
"They're more silver than grey now." He said it gently. "It's the awakening, Scarlett. It happens when a hybrid's bloodline starts to surface. Usually it's gradual, triggered by emotional stress, or proximity to others of the same kind, or—"
"All of the above," she said flatly.
"All of the above," he agreed. He sat down on the porch step and she sat beside him and he turned to look at her with those steady honey-dark eyes. "I should have warned you this might happen. I'm sorry."
"Stop apologising and tell me what's coming."
A pause. She watched him decide to just say it.
"Your senses will keep sharpening for a while. Hearing, smell, sight. You might find yourself moving faster than you expect. Your strength will change." He paused. "You might feel emotional things more intensely, the bonds, the pull toward people you're connected to. It can feel,"
"Overwhelming."
"Yes."
She looked at her hands in her lap. They looked exactly the same. They didn't feel the same.
"Dorian," she said.
Caden went still.
"He's gone," she said. Not a question. "I can feel it. There's a....gap. Where he was." She shook her head. "That sounds insane."
"It doesn't." Caden's voice was careful. "The mate bond works differently with vampires than with wolves. It's less, warm. More like a frequency. You feel the signal when it's there and you feel the absence when it's not."
"So he is my"
"I think so. Yes."
She sat with that. The boy who had put his hand around her throat and called her an abomination. The boy who had walked away with something shifting behind his eyes that she'd filed away and tried not to examine.
"Where did he go," she said.
Caden exhaled slowly. "His father summoned him. Dorian came to me before he left, told me he hadn't filed the report. Told me he was going to find out what Aldric knows and how much time we have." He paused. "And he's going to try to see your mother."
Scarlett turned to look at him.
"He knew who she was," Caden said. "He recognised her bloodline from yours. Evangeline Ashford has been at Aldric's estate for nineteen years, Scarlett. Dorian saw her once as a child. He put it together."
She felt the information settle into the place where she kept things that were too large for immediate processing. Her mother. Dorian in the same building as her mother.
"He went there on purpose," she said slowly. "Knowing his father summoned him. He went anyway."
"He went anyway."
She looked back at the fog moving through the pine trees at the edge of the street and thought about a cold, precise boy sitting in a tower room with her mother and found that the word abomination sat a little differently in her memory than it had three days ago.
Not better. Not forgiven.
Different.
"How long has he been gone," she said.
"Two days."
"And the scent on the eastern boundary last night,"
"Could be scouts. Could be nothing." Caden's voice was steady but she could hear the thing underneath it. "I'm not going to tell you not to worry because you're going to anyway. But I will tell you that you are not facing this alone. Pack is on every boundary line. Maya knows. Jace knows. Nobody is getting into this town without us knowing about it."
She looked at him. This boy who had known what she was since the night she arrived and had chosen, every single day since, to show up and be steady and give her space to find her feet.
"Thank you," she said. Meaning all of it.
He looked at her with those eyes. "Always," he said simply.
From inside the house she heard Dale moving around in the kitchen — the new sound of him, the one she was still getting used to, the slightly more present version that had emerged from the wreckage of their conversation on Monday like something that had needed breaking open to breathe.
The fog moved through the pines.
Somewhere three hours north, in a tower room she'd never seen, her mother was alive.
Somewhere in that same building, Dorian Blackthorn was doing something she hadn't asked him to do and hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with.
Something in her blood hummed low and steady and she was done pretending she couldn't hear it.
Wake up then, she thought, to whatever was stirring underneath her skin.
We're going to need you.