CHAPTER 1 - THE WORST DAY
The car door closed with a soft click.
It was such a small sound.
Too small to carry the weight of what had just happened.
Lin Wan stood on the side of the empty road, her fingers still resting on the handle, her body refusing to accept what her ears had heard only seconds ago.
Her boyfriend did not look at her.
He kept both hands on the steering wheel, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed forward as if she had already stopped existing the moment she stepped out of that car.
"I didn't mean for it to happen," he said.
That was the last thing he said.
Not I'm sorry. Not I didn't want to hurt you. Just that. One sentence sitting in the air between them like it was supposed to be enough.
Lin Wan waited.
She did not know what she was waiting for. Maybe for him to laugh and say it was a joke. Maybe for him to panic and beg her to stay. Maybe, in some quiet corner of herself she was not proud of, for him to choose her.
He didn't.
The engine hummed.
The tires rolled.
And then he drove away. Just like that. No hesitation. No backward glance. The car grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared completely, swallowed by distance and indifference.
Silence fell.
It pressed against her ears until it hurt.
Her chest tightened. Her throat burned. Her knees weakened but she did not fall. Not yet. Not until she was completely sure he was not coming back.
He was not coming back.
Then the first tear fell. It slipped down her cheek quietly, almost politely. More followed. Her vision blurred. Her breathing came apart. She pressed her hand hard against her mouth but it did nothing to stop the broken sound that escaped her as her mind pulled her back to what had happened not long ago in that car.
"I have something I need to tell you," Chen Wei had said.
His voice came out quieter than usual. Careful in the way of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a long time and had finally decided today was the day to put it down.
Lin Wan had pulled her gaze from the window. "Okay," she said.
He kept his eyes on the road. She watched the side of his face. The tension in his jaw had moved to his throat, the way it did when he was trying to get something out and his own body was fighting him on it.
She did not help him. She waited.
"You know Xiao Rui," he said.
Of course she knew Xiao Rui. Xiao Rui was her best friend. Had been since they were twelve years old and ended up seated next to each other on the first day of middle school, and Xiao Rui had leaned over and whispered that the teacher's shoes did not match and Lin Wan had laughed so hard she got in trouble. That Xiao Rui. The same one who had hugged her at her birthday dinner two weeks ago and said right into her ear that she deserved every good thing coming her way.
"Yes," Lin Wan said. "I know Xiao Rui."
Chen Wei's grip on the steering wheel shifted. Just slightly. "We have been seeing each other. The two of us. For about four months now." He stopped. Then added, like the addition was supposed to help somehow: "I should have told you sooner. I know that. I just. It never felt like the right time and then too much time had passed and."
He stopped again.
Lin Wan sat very still.
She was aware of the road moving under the car. She was aware of the biscuits in her purse and how she had packed them that morning thinking about him. She was aware of the window, the trees, the pale sandy edges of this road that she did not recognize going anywhere she did not know.
Four months.
Xiao Rui had hugged her two weeks ago. She had said she deserved every good thing.
She had not said anything else after that. She could not remember deciding to get out of the car. She only remembered that the door handle was in her hand and then the road was under her feet and the door was closed behind her and Chen Wei was still sitting there with both hands on the wheel looking forward.
She had stood there and waited.
He drove away.
Now she stood in the silence he had left behind and she breathed through it. Just once, slow and deliberate, all the way down through her chest. She pressed her fingers into the strap of her purse and looked at the road ahead and told herself very firmly that she was not going to fall apart on the side of an empty road for Chen Wei. He did not deserve that from her.
She pulled out her phone.
No signal.
She pressed the emergency call icon anyway. Nothing connected. She tried again. The screen blinked back at her with one grey bar that could not hold itself together. She lowered the phone and looked up at the sky.
The sky had changed without her noticing. There were clouds now that had not been there before, dense and moving faster than clouds usually moved, darkening from white to a flat heavy grey in the time it took her to watch them. A low sound moved through the air, not quite thunder, something like it but deeper, like the sound was coming from the ground as much as the sky.
The single bar on her phone disappeared entirely.
She put the phone back in her purse.
She looked at the road behind her. Empty. She looked at the road ahead. It stretched forward and curved and disappeared behind a low rise and on the other side of that rise, far in the distance, she could see the dark shape of trees. A proper tree line, not the scattered ones she had been passing. A forest edge. And before it, open ground that looked pale and sandy and flat.
Behind her was nothing.
Ahead was something.
She started walking.
At first it was manageable. She had worn soft shoes that morning, not heels, and the road surface was still mostly paved even if the edges had gone to sand. She kept her pace steady and her chin up and focused on the tree line in the distance and she did not think about Xiao Rui. She did not think about the birthday dinner. She did not think about the way Chen Wei had said I should have told you sooner like that was the apology, like timing was the thing that needed forgiving.
She did not think about any of it.
She walked.
An hour passed. Maybe more. The sun moved and she moved and the tree line got closer without ever seeming to actually arrive. The road beneath her feet had stopped being paved somewhere along the way. Now it was packed earth and sand, the kind of surface that pulled slightly at each step, not soft enough to sink into but not firm enough to push off cleanly either.
Her mouth was dry. Her feet had started to protest quietly. She was not going to stop. She told herself she was not going to stop.
The sky was doing something unusual now. The color had shifted from heavy grey to something she did not have an exact name for. Not orange. Not purple. Something between the two, sitting above the horizon ahead of her like the sky itself was unsure what came next. The light it cast made the sandy ground look almost gold.
If she had not been exhausted and alone and increasingly worried, she would have thought it was beautiful.
She kept walking.
And then she heard it.
Water.
She stopped moving.
The sound was faint. A soft rushing sound like a stream moving over smooth rock, coming from the left, somewhere below the level of the road, hidden behind a low ridge of pale stone she had not paid attention to before. She stood still and listened and yes, there it was. Consistent. Real.
And with it, barely noticeable but unmistakable once she was aware of it, the faint cool touch of moisture in the air against her dry face.
She moved off the road toward the ridge.
The ground sloped down on the other side, gentle and uneven, covered in low scrubby growth and loose stones. She picked her way down carefully with one hand out for balance and her purse swinging at her side, and at the bottom the slope opened out into a wider space and there was the water.
A pool, wide and still at the edges with a thin stream feeding into it from somewhere in the rocks further up. The surface was clear. She could see the pale stones at the shallow edge and the deeper darker center and she stood there for exactly one second before she closed the distance and dropped to her knees at the bank.
She scooped water to her mouth with both hands.
It was cold. Clean. With a faint sweetness she did not question. She scooped again. And again. Water running down her chin and her wrists and she did not care at all. She was so thirsty that the sound she made on the first mouthful embarrassed her and she was grateful there was no one around to hear it.
She scooped a fourth handful.
The pool exploded.
The force of it knocked her backward. She landed hard on the wet bank with water cascading down over her and scrambled upright with her heart hammering so hard she could feel it in her ears.
Something was standing at the edge of the pool.
Someone.
No.
Something.
She saw the tail first. Dark and scaled and massive, cutting through the falling water before it curved and vanished back beneath the surface. Her brain registered it and then refused it and then registered it again. A tail. Long. Powerful. There and then gone in the space of a blink.
And standing where the tail had been, standing at the shallow edge of the pool with water streaming off every surface of him, was a man.
A very large man.
A man who did not appear to own any clothing beyond the piece of dark animal hide folded on a rock nearby, which he was reaching for now, completely unbothered by the water, the noise, or the girl sitting in the mud staring at him with her mouth open.
He wrapped the hide around his waist. Secured it. Shook the water from his hair with one clean efficient motion.
And then he looked at her.
Dark eyes. Direct and still and sharp in the way of something that had never needed to pretend to be less than it was. Three bold stripes across his upper arm that she registered automatically as tattoos because that was the only category her mind had available for them right now.
He looked at her sitting in the wet mud at the edge of his pool.
She looked at him.
Neither of them said anything.
The strange sky pressed down around them and the pool settled back into stillness and somewhere in Lin Wan's chest her heartbeat was doing something complicated and loud and she was ninety percent sure that what she had seen before he stepped out of the water had been a tail.
A tail.
She pressed her lips together.
And then a sound rang out inside her mind. Clean and clear and completely interior, like someone had tapped a small bell directly behind her eyes.
Beep.