Rumi woke to darkness and the sound of her own heartbeat.
The clock on the nightstand read 2:47 AM, the numbers glowing red in the blackness of the bedroom. Beside her, Mira was a motionless lump under her covers, breathing the deep, even breaths of someone fully asleep. Across the room, Zoey had kicked off her blankets again, one leg hanging off the side of the bed.
Everything was normal. Everything was fine.
Except Rumi's arms were burning.
Not painfully—not like touching a hot stove or scraping against concrete. But burning nonetheless, a warmth that radiated from the marks on her forearms and spread through her entire body. She pushed back her sleeves in the darkness, half-expecting to see the marks glowing like they had in her imagination earlier.
They weren't glowing. But they were warm to the touch, warmer than the rest of her skin, and when she pressed her fingers against them she felt... something. A pull. A direction. A certainty that somewhere, something was happening that she needed to see.
She should stay in bed. She should go back to sleep. She should absolutely not sneak out of the house in the middle of the night to go wandering in the forest alone.
But her feet were already on the floor. Her hands were already reaching for the jeans she'd left draped over her desk chair. Her body was moving before her mind had fully caught up, driven by an instinct she didn't understand but couldn't ignore.
The house was silent as she crept through it. Celine's door was closed, no light showing underneath. The kitchen was dark except for the glow of the microwave clock. The back door opened with only the softest click, and then Rumi was outside, barefoot on the cool grass, the night air raising goosebumps on her arms.
She should be afraid. Twelve-year-old girls didn't wander alone in the dark. Twelve-year-old girls stayed safe in their beds, protected by locks and lights and responsible adults.
But Rumi had never been particularly good at doing what she should.
The forest was different at night. The familiar paths were strange and shadowed, the trees looming like giants, their branches reaching across the sky to block out the stars. Every sound was amplified—the rustle of leaves, the snap of a twig, the distant hoot of an owl. Rumi's heart hammered in her chest, but her feet kept moving, following that inexplicable pull toward the clearing.
Toward Cro.
She knew he'd be there. Knew it with the same certainty she'd felt earlier, lying in bed. He was there, and something was happening, and she needed to see it.
The clearing appeared suddenly, just as it had that afternoon. One moment she was surrounded by trees, and the next she was stepping into open space, into moonlight that seemed brighter than it should be, illuminating the impossible flowers and the ancient oak and—
Movement.
Rumi froze at the edge of the clearing, her breath catching in her throat.
Cro was there, but he wasn't sitting peacefully under the oak tree. He was moving—no, fighting. His body flowed through forms and stances that looked like dance but felt like violence, each movement precise and controlled and deadly. He wore no shirt, and in the moonlight Rumi could see the marks on his skin, geometric patterns that covered his arms and chest and back, glowing faintly with a light that definitely wasn't her imagination.
And he wasn't alone.
The thing he was fighting barely looked real. It was shadow and smoke and wrongness, a shape that hurt to look at directly, that seemed to exist slightly out of phase with the rest of the world. It had too many limbs and too many teeth and eyes that glowed red in the darkness.
A demon.
The word came to Rumi unbidden, from some deep place in her mind that recognized what her eyes were seeing even though her rational brain insisted it was impossible. Demons weren't real. Demons were stories, myths, things that existed in books and movies and nightmares.
But this was real. This was happening.
Cro moved like water, like wind, like something that had been fighting for far longer than his apparent age suggested. He dodged a strike that would have torn him in half, rolled under a sweeping limb, came up with his fist glowing with that same strange light that covered his marks. When his fist connected with the demon's body, the creature shrieked—a sound that made Rumi's teeth ache and her bones vibrate—and dissolved into smoke.
For a moment, there was silence. Cro stood in the center of the clearing, breathing hard, his body tense and ready for another attack. The marks on his skin pulsed with light, then slowly faded back to their normal appearance.
Then he turned and looked directly at where Rumi was hiding at the edge of the trees.
"You shouldn't be here," he said quietly.
Rumi stepped into the clearing, her legs shaking but her voice steady. "What was that?"
"Dangerous," Cro said. "You need to go home."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only answer you're getting tonight." He moved toward her, and Rumi could see the exhaustion in his features now, the way his shoulders sagged slightly. "Please, Rumi. Go home. It's not safe."
"Not safe from what?" Rumi pressed. "From those things? Do they come here often?"
"Often enough," Cro said. "Which is why you can't be here. Especially not at night. Especially not alone."
"But you're alone," Rumi pointed out. "You're here alone, fighting those things alone. Why?"
"Because it's what I do," Cro said simply. "It's what I've always done."
"Why?" Rumi asked again. "Why do you have to fight them? Why are they here? Why—"
"Too many questions," Cro interrupted, but his voice was gentle. "Questions I can't answer. Not now. Not yet."
He was close enough now that Rumi could see the marks on his chest clearly, could see how they matched the patterns on her own arms. Not identical, but complementary. Two halves of something.
"Your marks," she said. "They're like mine."
Cro's expression shifted—surprise, recognition, something that might have been fear. "Show me," he said quietly.
Rumi pulled up her sleeves, exposing her forearms. In the moonlight, her marks seemed to glow faintly, responding to Cro's presence the same way they had that afternoon. But stronger now. More insistent.
Cro stared at them for a long moment, then reached out slowly, carefully, as if asking permission. When Rumi didn't pull away, he touched his fingertips to her forearm, tracing the patterns there.
The moment his skin made contact with hers, the marks flared bright. Both of them gasped—Rumi from the sudden warmth that flooded through her body, Cro from what looked like recognition or realization or shock.
"Impossible," he whispered.
"What?" Rumi asked. "What does it mean?"
But before Cro could answer, the air in the clearing changed. The temperature dropped. The flowers that had been glowing softly dimmed. And from the darkness at the edge of the trees came a sound that made Rumi's blood run cold—a low, rumbling growl that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Cro's hand tightened on Rumi's arm. "Run," he said.
"What—"
"Run!" He pushed her toward the path, his voice sharp with urgency. "Go home. Now. Don't look back. Don't stop. Just run."
Another growl, closer this time. And then another. And another.
Multiple demons. More than one. More than Cro could fight while also protecting her.
Rumi ran.
She crashed through the forest, branches whipping at her face and arms, roots trying to trip her feet. Behind her, she heard sounds that would haunt her dreams—snarls and shrieks and the unmistakable sound of impact, of fighting, of violence.
She wanted to look back. Wanted to see if Cro was okay, if he was winning, if he needed help.
But she kept running, because he'd told her to run, and some instinct deeper than thought told her that looking back would only make things worse.
She burst out of the forest and into her backyard, her lungs burning, her legs shaking. The house was still dark, still silent. No one had noticed she was gone.
Rumi collapsed on the back steps, gasping for air, her whole body trembling. Her arms were still warm, the marks still tingling, but the pull she'd felt earlier was gone. Or maybe not gone—maybe just satisfied, now that she'd seen what she needed to see.
Cro was fighting demons. Real demons. Things that shouldn't exist but did.
And he'd been doing it alone.
For how long? How many nights had he stood in that clearing, protecting... what? The forest? The town? Them?
Rumi looked down at her arms, at the marks that matched his, and felt something shift in her chest. Understanding, maybe. Or purpose. Or just the beginning of a question that would take years to answer.
She wasn't normal. She'd always known that, had always felt different, other, like she didn't quite fit in the world she'd been born into.
But maybe that was because she wasn't meant to fit. Maybe she was meant for something else. Something that involved impossible clearings and boys who fought demons and marks that glowed in the moonlight.
Maybe she was meant to be part of whatever Cro was.
The thought should have terrified her. Should have sent her running inside to wake Celine, to tell someone, to get help.
But instead, it felt like relief. Like recognition. Like finally understanding a truth she'd been carrying her whole life without knowing it.
She sat on the back steps until her breathing calmed and her legs stopped shaking. Then she crept back inside, back to her bedroom, back to her bed where Mira still slept peacefully, unaware that anything had happened.
Rumi pulled the covers up to her chin and stared at the ceiling, her mind racing.
Tomorrow, she'd bring cookies. Tomorrow, she'd ask more questions. Tomorrow, she'd start to understand what all of this meant.
But tonight, she'd seen the truth. Tonight, she'd witnessed what Cro really was, what he really did.
And tomorrow, everything would be different.
Tomorrow couldn't come fast enough.