The first time the mark burned, I thought I was having a stroke.
It was just after three a.m., the ER humming with the soft, exhausted chaos of a Tuesday night—flu kids, a bar fight, someone’s granddad who “didn’t feel right” and definitely should have come in twelve hours ago. The fluorescent lights made everyone look sick. The air tasted like antiseptic and old coffee.
I was charting vitals when pain lanced up my left forearm, white-hot and wrong. The pen dropped from my fingers.
“Shit.” I clutched my arm to my chest.
“Selena?” Dr. Patel glanced up from his computer, brows pulling together. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” The word scraped out. I forced my shoulders to relax. “Pins and needles. Probably my body rebelling against twelve-hour shifts.”
He gave me the you-should-take-a-break look I’d been ignoring for months, then got called away by a wailing toddler and his panicked mother. The moment his back turned, I slipped into the nearest empty exam room and shut the door.
The tremor in my hands wasn’t from caffeine.
The pain pulsed again, under the skin, like something was carving me open from the inside. The overhead light buzzed faintly, too bright, haloing the bed with harsh white. I yanked up my sleeve.
For one long second, I forgot to breathe.
A sigil blazed on the underside of my forearm, lines of silver-white light etching themselves in looping, deliberate strokes. It didn’t sit on my skin so much as in it, light trapped under flesh, like a tattoo drawn by moonlight and lightning.
Not just any shape. I’d seen it before. In dreams.
“No.” The whisper tore free before I could swallow it. Panic tasted metallic on my tongue. “No, no, no.”
The mark was only half-formed, the lower curve bright and complete, the upper arc stuttering out in a series of broken strokes that fizzled and dimmed. The pain followed, flaring with each new line, a brand from the inside out.
For a heartbeat, the room wasn’t white and stainless steel anymore.
It was trees and darkness and the copper smell of blood. Moonlight poured down through ragged clouds, catching the silver coat of a massive wolf sprawled in the mud. His fur was matted with red-black, his side torn open. My hands—my dream hands—pressed uselessly against the wound as he panted shallowly, golden eyes fixed on me with a desperate, human intensity.
“Wake up,” I whispered to him. “Please.”
He never did.
The vision snapped away so violently I grabbed the edge of the bed to steady myself. The paper crinkled under my grip, loud in the small room. My arm throbbed again, then the light in the sigil sputtered out and left behind faint, silvered lines, ghost-pale on my skin.
Not gone. Just sleeping.
I stared at it, my heart knocking against my ribs. The half-formed mark from my nightmares. The same one that curled over the shoulder of the girl in the old painting at Gran’s house—the one no one in my family would talk about.
My phone buzzed in my scrub pocket. I jumped.
Eva: you alive or buried under paperwork?
My fingers fumbled over the screen.
Me: Currently reconsidering the whole "human body" concept.
Eva: aw. u DO have one. thought u were just a stethoscope in scrubs.
