The forest was misty and cold, shrouded in a dark blue light like there was a haze over his vision.

  Ivan could only see the back of the woman's motionless figure. From here he couldn't tell if she was human or a porcelain figment of his imagination. Her shoulders hadn't lifted and fallen to indicate that she was a living, breathing being.

  Her airy dress was white with thin straps and ended just below her knees. Her wavy, black hair was brushing against the bare skin of her back.

  Ivan gripped his chilled arms. How in the world was she not freezing her ass off?

  She turned to him abruptly, giving him only a glimpse of the pale skin of her side profile. Her lips turned up in a smile, and she waved slowly, curling her hand in a gesture for him to follow. When her arm fell gracefully back to her side, Ivan's eyes darted to the black watch on her wrist.

  It was the same decrepit one that he had been wearing daily without fail. The one that his mom had given him for his twelfth birthday.

  Ivan turned to go, but he realised with a panicked jolt that he couldn't turn his body around, the world behind him fading to black in his peripheral vision. Like the map of the forest behind him simply didn't exist anymore. He was being forced to go forward.

  He followed her into the forest.

  She weaved through the trees effortlessly, like a poltergeist phasing through a wall, before eventually disappearing behind a thick wall of trees. The air of grace with which she walked, contrasted by her uncanny presence, made his stomach twist.

  Something seriously wasn't right.

  He pulled back the branches and stepped through into a clearing of space, wincing when a few branches scraped his arms.

  He glanced around the empty clearing, but the woman was nowhere to be found. In the distance he could see a figure lying on the floor, but from here he couldn't tell if it was human or not.

  He walked tentatively to the figure, realising as he got closer that it was, in fact, a human, his back turned to Ivan. His arms and legs were curled in the foetal position, and he was dressed completely in black.

  Ivan frowned at this and crouched down. He needed to get a better look at his face and body. Figure out what had killed him and what he was doing in the forest.

  Ivan gripped his shoulder and pulled him back. The body fell onto his back with a thud, and Ivan recoiled when he noticed the maggots wriggling between his exposed intestines.

  When he managed to get over his disgust, he pinched his nose with one hand and examined the body with the other. He was soaked in scarlet, and deep red runes were carved into the flesh of his arms and legs, a mysterious, black substance leaking out from his eyes.

  The runes were all distinct, so either multiple people had done it or someone had used the exact same spell he had.

  An uncomfortable warmth began to spread across his hand from where he had touched the body, and a cool buzz, stronger than he had ever felt it before, travelled from his chest and down his arm to the palm of his hand. His magic.

  When he glanced down, warm blood was seeping through his open fingers, and he immediately knew that it was the blood of the man lying dead in front of him. Too much blood.

  A sharp shriek filled the room, causing a piercing pain to shoot inside his ears. He clutched at the side of his face, bending over in an attempt to dampen the noise. But through the noise, he could make out that it wasn't just shrieking; it was chanting. Hundreds and thousands of voices.

  Suddenly, in front of him, the body's head snapped to him with a chilling crack. Ivan jumped back, bloody hands still clamped over his ears.

  Its soulless grey eyes flew open, mouth agape in a silent murmur.

  Then it joined in.

  The voices all harmonised into a lethal choir of sound, finally letting him distinguish exactly what they were chanting.

  “WHAT LESSON IS THIS THAT WE HAVE TO LEARN, BE CAREFUL BECAUSE THE TIDE WILL TURN!”

  Ivan shot up.

  He clutched at his shirt, feeling the racing patter of his heartbeat. He glanced down hesitantly at the feel of warm blood on his hands and blew out a sigh of relief at his bare palms.

  “Most answers are in front of our face. Look into the mirror and don’t erase,” he muttered, the rest of the poem fading back into his dream. He was sure that he had read that poem countless times before, but where he had seen it slipped his memory. What was so special about it?

  The sun had just started to rise, so his bedroom was still clouded in darkness, but the blue curtains covering his window provided just enough illumination to make out a shadowy figure standing in the corner of his room.

  He didn't have to ask to know it was Milena, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.

  “Creep,” he muttered into the silence.

  She glided ominously over to him and sat down on the unmade side of his bed.

  “You okay?” She gave him a warm smile, tilting her head at him the way she used to do when he was a child.

  He shrugged, glancing away from her. “It was just a nightmare.”

  Her eyebrows moved together in a frown. “...About what?”

  “I think I killed someone," he said dryly. He waited for her reaction, but her face remained neutral. “My magic was…. There was blood all over my hands. A lot of it. And the runes covering the body were all different…”

  “...Just like the spell I taught you,” she finished.

  Ivan nodded, and she hummed in understanding, her face betraying a hint of concern that she was clearly trying to conceal.

  She shook her head. “That could mean anything, Detochka.”

  He let out a frustrated sigh. “Yeah, but it didn't feel like it didn't mean anything. It felt… I don't know. Important.”

  “Nightmares usually do.” She sighed and shifted on the bed. “Try not to think about—”

  Before Milena could finish her sentence, Ivan's bedroom door flew open, banging into the other side of his wall and causing his heart rate to spike even further. Now what?

  His mom stepped over the threshold, scanning his room nervously before training her eyes on him.

  “Get dressed. Something has happened.” She said in Russian, the urgency in her precarious voice dispelling the fog clouding his brain from sleep.

  Ivan rubbed his eyes, sitting up straighter. “What? What do you mean?”

  “Just get dressed, Vanya. I'll tell you on the way.” She walked out of the room, and Ivan looked around the room for Milena, who had vanished from beside him and was now standing at his doorframe, the top half of her body poking outside of his open door as she watched their mother turn a corner down the hallway.

  Milena turned to him, her confused frown matching his own. “Is she ever this cryptic? What do you think it's about?”

  Ivan couldn't stop the deluge of macabre scenarios that suddenly crowded his mind, each thought growing worse and worse as he got out of bed and robotically pulled his clothes over his body.

  Someone died. There was a fire. One of his friends was dead. Someone knew he and Leo were mates. There was another war starting…

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  He shook his head. Unable to stop his thoughts from spiralling.

  — — —

  “Can somebody please cover this fucking body!” He heard his father call in his usual booming voice.

  “Right away, Sir.” Ivan watched a young man, a warrior in his early twenties, curtly answer before rushing away.

  When there was a death involving the supernatural—which this evidently did—the Alpha, Beta and healers of the pack where the body was found were called to come investigate. The only issue now was that the body had been found in neutral territory, so when one of the patrol warriors had found the body, she hadn’t known who to call and had simply called both of them. That was when the chaos had ensued.

  “No! We’re not moving the body until we know more.” Ivan heard Amirah's mother call.

  “So what, we leave it here to fucking decompose further?“ His father bit back, his face a concerning shade of pink. His hands were clenched at his side, an obvious attempt to hold back his temper, but it clearly wasn’t working.

  “Can we behave like adults?” Alpha Kohli called, throwing himself into the chaos circus.

  The atmosphere seemed to grow even more tense at his arrival as the rival pack members felt threatened by his presence. Him being from another pack was unnerving enough, but being an Alpha added to the intensity.

  But Ivan could tell that the effect clearly didn't extend to the other pack leaders, who immediately roped him into the heated conversation.

  Ivan blew out a puff of air. This was going to take a while.

  When he turned around, he spotted an irritated Cal in a serious conversation with his father, who was simultaneously talking to someone on his cell phone. He would yell an instruction into the phone, then hold it to his chest as Cal gave him updates about the situation.

  “What are the pathologists saying?”

  Cal glanced down at the mini notebook in his hand. “They need to do a full post-mortem to find out more, but they estimate the body's at least a day old, maybe two…and—uh…one of the pathologists can't seem to find where the blood is coming from.”

  Ivan raised an eyebrow at the information. How was that even possible?

  He stepped back, and the rest of their conversation was drowned out in a bubble of noise. He walked up to a taped-off area, stepping to the side of a photographer, whose camera was pointed to splatters of blood on a tree trunk.

  He grimaced and stepped back to let her take more photos, then continued walking until he found himself standing right in front of a dead body.

  He stumbled back with a start and felt his eyebrows pinch together, looking down at the corpse. He had seen dead bodies before, but something about this one felt different, the dissonance of the scene rattling every sense in his body.

  The corpse was young, probably in his early twenties. His clothes were drenched in the cedar hue of oxidised blood, the rest of his body resting on a deathbed formed from the puddle of liquid that had pooled under him and soaked up into the leaves.

  His face was distorted in surprise — a remnant of his last emotions — but as Ivan looked longer, the expression seemed to morph into serenity.

  Thick, black liquid was oozing out of his ears, nose and lifeless eyes, and his body was covered with what Ivan thought were scars, but as he got closer, the sickening realisation hit him. They were runes, carved intricately into the pale-grey flesh of his arms and bare chest.

  Exactly like the body in his dream.

  A chill ran through him, the strength to drag his eyes away from the lifeless body vanishing. How did the body match the one in his dream identically when he had never seen it before?

  Unless he already had.

  A lump formed in his throat, and he could feel the tickle of sweat dripping down his arms and palms, despite the cool morning air.

  What if it was him who had done it? And why didn't he remember?

  He didn't hear the crunch of leaves as someone inched their way towards him, glancing over his shoulder. Somehow, he didn't have to turn around to know it was Leo.

  “Hey, did you see the—” Leo started, but abruptly stopped when his eyes fell on the body.

  Ivan heard him mumble something, but his voice was muddled, as if being projected through water.

  There was silence for a brief moment, then he felt a pleasant warmth on his shoulders. He glanced down, suddenly aware that Leo had gripped his shoulders and was speaking to him. Through the haze, he could feel his legs start to move as Leo had led them to a secluded part of the forest, resting his back against a tree.

  “Ivan.”

  Ivan was just three inches shorter than him, but from their position, from this close up, their annoying height difference seemed astronomically bigger.

  “Can you hear me?”

  Snapping through the haze, Ivan finally glanced up into Leo's brown eyes. The other boy's face was close. Very close. Closer than it had probably ever been before, and it was making Ivan feel… strange.

  “Are you okay?” Leo's voice was a gentle husk, a consequence of how early it was. “You look…”

  Ivan waved a dismissive hand. “Yeah. I'm fine.”

  “Are you sure?” The sincere expression of worry that Leo was giving him was unnerving. “You looked a little freaked.”

  Leo's gaze snapped down, and one of his hands fell from Ivan's shoulder.

  “Hey—what happened here?”

  Ivan's gaze fell to him. “What?”

  Leo gently gripped Ivan's upper arm with one of his hands, caressing the skin with a thumb

  Ivan's skin buzzed, and he shivered involuntarily. Definitely no denying that they were mates now.

  He glanced down at his arm and immediately saw what the other boy was talking about. There were small, thin cuts covering the sides of his arms, the staccato gashes covered in black scabs.

  “Everybody except the investigation team needs to go. Now! We will discuss the matter further privately!” They both heard someone yell from a distance, but neither of them commented on it.

  “How did you get these?”

  I think my nightmare was real.

  “It's nothing.” Ivan shrugged off the other boy's hands. Leo's smile morphed into a sheepish grin, realising that his hands had been on Ivan's shoulder for far longer than necessary.

  When Ivan glanced up, he could see Milena standing just behind a few trees. She was glancing at him anxiously, her hands drumming against the tree trunk. She needed to say something.

  “What are you looking at?” Leo glanced in the direction he had been looking, and Ivan shook his head, glancing back to the now vacant spot where Milena had been standing.

  “Nothing.”

  Leo sighed, defeat painting his face. “Look, I know we're not close or anything, but you can speak to me. You know that, right?”

  “Sure,” Ivan answered, knowing that he would probably never take up the other boy's offer, even if he ever wanted to. Because once you told someone a secret, the temptation to tell them another one increased exponentially. It lulled you into a vulnerability that Ivan couldn't afford to have around Leo. Not when so much was on the line.

  Leo glanced at the source of the earlier voice and turned back to Ivan with a lingering look of sympathy. “I should probably …” He gestured to the trees.

  When Ivan gave no protest, he turned and walked towards the trees, disappearing through where they had come from.

  A few seconds later, Ivan heard a snap of branches to his side and peered up, following Cal's movement towards him. Cal stuck a thumb behind him, gesturing to where Leo had disappeared to.

  “Hey.” Cal said. “What was that all about?”

  He wondered if the brown-haired boy had seen Leo touching his shoulder. Had seen Ivan letting him do it. But he knew that was a crazy idea. If Cal knew, he would definitely know.

  Ivan gave him a half-hearted shrug and rolled his eyes. “He was just giving me crap about another party. You know how he is.”

  Cal glanced disapprovingly at the trees in front of them, like Leo would somehow materialise there. “Such an asshole.”

  When he turned back to Ivan, he scanned his face curiously. “You okay?”

  Ivan walked towards him and clapped a firm hand on his shoulder, leading him out of the clearing. “Let's get out of here.”

  When they made it back to the area with the body, there were only a few people left. Ivan glanced at the body. He was now covered in a large white sheet, one curled hand sticking out slightly. He needed to check if it really was the same body from his dream.

  “You coming?”

  “Uh…you go ahead. “I’ll catch up in a minute,” Ivan replied, and Cal gave him a small sigh of relief.

  “Take your time. We have Chem in ten minutes… I think.” He shrugged. “Either way I'm hoping we'll be late enough to miss first period.”

  Ivan smiled. Of course.

  Once Cal was out of sight, he walked towards the body and crouched down on his haunches, turning around to make sure no-one was paying attention. He grabbed a tissue from his hoodie pocket, using it to lift the dead boy’s hand slightly off the ground. A small ball of paper, dyed brown around the edges, fell from his loose grasp. From his right hand. The same hand as the one in his dream.

  He wrapped the paper in the tissue and stood up, quickly shoving it in his pocket.

  When he finally caught up with Cal, they made the short walk to school, the shorter boy filling the silence with talk about his little sister's sleepover as Ivan remained quiet beside him.

  When they finally reached the school gates, Ivan stopped and turned to him, making Cal's eyebrows scrunch as he scanned the area around them. “What?”

  He hesitated, the tidal bore of nerves he had previously accumulated finally catching up to him.

  He knew that it was stupid. That it would be immensely suspicious that he had somehow figured out what professionals couldn't after being there for less than twenty minutes, especially considering the fact that nobody was even supposed to touch the body.

  But he needed to know what had happened. He had to test his theory. He needed to know that it hadn't been his fault

  He turned to Cal.

  “Tell them to check the stomach.”