Chapter 101 Unraveling
Malia's POV
I don't remember going back to my dorm.
One second I'm flat on my back on the ground in the woods, tears on my cheeks, my jeans covered with leaves. Then I’m fumbling with my key card, my hands tremble so severely that I have to swipe three times before it registers.
The lock beeps. Green light. I push open the door and slam it behind me harder than I have to, the sound bounces off the unoccupied room like a gunshot.
My bag falls from my shoulder. It thuds on the ground. I don't pick it up. Just stand there in the middle of the room, chest heaving, trying to remember how to breathe like a normal person, not a hunted animal.
The mirror.
I have to see. I need to find out if the thing I saw in that bathroom was really there, or if it was just another nightmare bleeding into my waking reality.
I dart for my desk, pulling the top drawer open so violently it almost slides all the way out.
Contents scatter — pens, highlighters, a half-empty pack of gum, sticky notes filled with panicked study reminders. I grab the tiny compact mirror I keep stashed in the back, the one with a cracked corner from when I dropped it in my freshman year.
I flip it open with shaking fingers. And I force myself to look.
I crouch, both hands now reaching for the bottle. Maybe if I use both hands, If I’m more careful—
As soon as my fingers make contact with the plastic, I feel it.
Power.
Not the word, the actual emotion. Like electricity but deeper, hotter, alive It cuts up from somewhere in my chest, my chest, my stomach, some place I can’t pinpoint and spills into my hands.
The plastic buckles as if an invisible fist pressed it, water spraying in all directions.
I fall with a strangled noise, clawing at my back until my spine collides with the bed frame.
My hands—
I stare at them, holding them up before my eyes. They look normal. No claws or fur. No claws. No fur. No clear modifications.
But I can feel it. That power, that wrongness, humming just beneath my skin. Waiting. Building. Wanting out.
My wolf whines – high, scared, a noise I have never heard from her before. She's terrified. And if she's terrified—
I look at my palms, really look. The lines remain, the usual map of crevices and calluses. But underneath.
A faint glow. Gold. Pulsating in time with my heartbeat. I make my hands into fists, as if that will make it go away, that will help me push it down into whatever dark hole it climbed out of.
It doesn't listen.
The glow intensifies. Spreads. Up my wrists, and to my forearms, along my veins, like an infection coursing through my bloodstream.
My wolf stirs inside—not the violent thrashing from earlier, but something worse. Unease. Restlessness. Like she's pacing in circles, hackles raised, sensing danger that I can't see yet.
What is happening to us?
I lay my hands flat on my desk and try to steady myself. The wood is solid, cool, real. Focus to that. Focus on—
The hairs on my arms are standing up.
Not figuratively. Really goes up. Each individual strand lifts like I'm standing in an electrical field. Static is sizzling on my skin—invisible but for sure there.
I watch the goosebumps form on my arms as they extend in waves from my wrist to my shoulder.
My throat is dry. Desert dry. I need water. Want something normal, something solid, something that tells me I’m still human, I’m still in charge I’m still—
I turn to the mini-fridge in the corner, where I keep several bottles of water. Take two steps. Pull the handle.
My hand is shaking.
Not the usual tremor of anxiety or fatigue. This is something else. Rough. As if each and every muscle in my hand is firing independently, and they all refuse to coalesce.
I grab a water bottle anyways, my fingers barely able to wrap around it. The plastic crinkles under my hold- too much, too fast pressure. I relax, trying to twist off the cap with my other hand.
It slips.
The bottle falls to the ground, liquid sprays across the linoleum, and into the rug beside my bed.
"Fuck," I breathe.
“Stop,” I whisper frantically. “Stop, for god’s sake, stop—” a plead.
I don’t turn. Can’t move. I’m too overwhelmed with the power running through me, too scared of what might happen if I touch something else, snap something else, harm—
Nothing but my heavy breathing and the drip, drip, drip of water from the crumpled bottle still spilling onto my floor can be heard.
I back up until my back meets the wall, then I slide down and sit with my knees pulled to my chest. The situation from the woods. The form I find myself in when all is too much.
The luminescence in my palms ebbs gradually, folding back within my skin, retreating back down to wherever it goes when I’m not having an anxiety attack.
But I still feel it there. Waiting. Coiled like a spring. Ready to surge again the moment I lose control.
This isn’t normal. It comes through crystal clear right in the middle of the panic.
This is not a late manifestation of hybrid powers. This is something else. Something is off.
My wolf heals that affirmation.
I shut my eyes, rest my forehead on my knees, and try to process the fear.
The nightmares became worse once we returned. The visions, the voices, the sense of being watched and pursued and hunted and pestered by things that don’t have faces.
Then the physical symptoms. The claws in the bathroom that shouldn't have been possible. The shift I nearly lost my mind over. The wolf eyes that hybrids don't have.
Power I shouldn't possess, surging through me without permission, without control, breaking things I touch.
I feel like I'm dying.
No answer comes. Just the silence of my empty dorm room, the steady drip of water, and the sound of my heart too load in my ears.
The faceless woman from my nightmares is constantly whispering through my mind: They'll leave you when they find out what you really are.
I pull my jacket closer. Still it was scented with him--pine and safety and this morning when everything was possible.
The glow in my hands pulses once, distant, barely visible, but unmistakably there.My wolf paces, restless and afraid.
And in the back of my mind, hidden beneath panic and fear and exhaustion, a horrifying idea takes root: Maybe I'm insane?
Maybe I am turning into something… dangerous?
I look at my hands again—the golden color fading, the crumpled water bottle leaking over my carpet.
Power that I should not have, evidence that.
Proof that I am losing control. I close my eyes, I don’t move, I just sit there against the wall as the wreckage of my certainty surrounds me and imagine how long I can keep this up.
How long before the whole school finds out what I’m becoming. How long before I hurt someone I love.
The answer, I suspect, is not long enough.