Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 60

**Charlotte**

The whole backyard changes in an instant. One moment, there is laughter under the marquees, the crackle of the firepit, the steady hiss of meat on the barbecue while smoke curls up into the cold evening air. Next, everyone is moving. Mara has one hand out as she starts ushering the nearest mothers toward the house. Her voice cuts clean through the noise, and women move fast around her, scooping up children, catching little wrists, lifting babies higher on their hips as they head for the back door. Every man who is clearly a patrol or warrior moves toward Gareth and Blake. They gather fast near the edge of the light, shoulders squared, faces hard, listening while directions are handed out in short clipped bursts. Men who are not heading for the treeline spread out around the house instead, boots crunching over the thin layer of snow as they peel away from tables and firelight and take up positions along the fence, the deck and the sides of the yard. The easy warmth of dinner folds in on itself and comes back out as something protective and dangerous.

“Alright,” Theo says, voice low now, all the playfulness gone. “We’re going inside.” I barely hear him. My eyes catch on Blake as he turns with the others, already moving, already listening, his body drawn tight and ready. Charlie presses my crutches into my hands. “Lotty.” I blink and look at him, and Theo leans in a little closer, glancing once toward the house, then back at me. “Come on. Mara will kick my arse if I don’t get you to the safest spot possible.” Under any other circumstance, that might have made me smile. Now all I can do is nod. Charlie takes one side of me, Theo takes the other, and we start toward the deck. The pack bond under my skin is suddenly too loud. Fear rushes through it in jagged pulses along with a wave of protective instinct so strong it makes my chest tighten. None of it is mine, and all of it is around me, pouring through links I only opened an hour ago. My breathing goes shallow, and my palms dampen against the grips of the crutches.

We reach the bottom of the deck steps. The back door stands open, spilling warmth across the boards. Mara is inside now, moving women further into the house. One of the older girls is pulling the curtains shut over the kitchen windows, and a younger child clings to her mother’s leg, wide-eyed and silent now. I lift one crutch to take the first step… Then stop. Something tugs low in my chest. I turn my head slowly, looking back across the yard. Most of the warriors are moving east. I can see them between the lights and the shifting bodies, spreading fast toward the fence line where the first alarm must have come from. Blake is with them somewhere in that motion. Lots of big bodies are moving with purpose, boots biting into snow, shadows cutting through the pale dark… But the pull in my chest does not go that way. It pulls left, toward the far northern side of the property where the fairy lights do not reach, and the woodshed sits hunched in the dark.

Charlie nudges my side. “Lotty?” Theo follows my line of sight and frowns. “What is it?” The yard seems to fall away around the edges. The voices from the house are dull. Even the bond quiets for half a second, drawing back just enough for me to only feel Shanti. She moves through me like still water slipping over stone, pale and watchful and impossibly calm. The panic in my chest does not touch her. The noise does not touch her. She unfolds inside me with the patient weight of something ancient. *Shantih (peace, stillness),* she murmurs. I’ve never heard that word before, but something about it is soothing. Theo touches my arm. “Charlotte.” But Shanti turns her attention toward the dark near the woodshed. *There,* she says. My fingers tighten around the crutches. *They chase the cry that was thrown. The quieter shadow waits elsewhere.* A chill slides down my spine. I know, somehow, that she is right. I can feel it. There’s a pull under my skin, a tremor in my soul. I lift my arm with one unsteady finger pointing through the dark. Charlie steps in front of me slightly, trying to catch my face. “Lotty.”

“They’re going the wrong way,” I whisper. Theo’s brows pull together as I look between them. “What?”

I blink, but the feeling only grows stronger, and Shanti rises further in me. *Beneath the torn skin of the beast, the atman still trembles (the soul inside him is still there, still alive beneath what he has become).* She says. The feeling of inhumanity comes with that wild, rotten smell on the wind. It crawls over my skin and makes every instinct in me want to recoil. But beneath it, deeper down, there is something else still flickering… Something human. My breath catches. “There’s someone there.” Charlie finally looks where I’m pointing. “What do you mean?”

“I can feel...” My voice shakes, and I hate it. “I can feel the person underneath it.” Theo and Charlie exchange a glance, and I realise the house behind us has gone quiet now, and Mara stands on the threshold, one hand on the frame, staring at me. Charlie makes me look at him, tapping twice on my shoulder, “Lotty, are you sure?” No. Yes. I do not know. Shanti’s voice lowers, deepening until it feels less like words and more like truth laid straight into my bones. *Even beneath ash, the divine spark does not leave. It waits. It suffers. It remembers. (no matter how broken he is, some part of him is still human).* Theo’s gaze cuts from me to the dark by the woodshed, then toward the east, where everyone else has run. “Stay here,” he says, but Charlie catches his arm. “Theo.”

Theo does not move from the spot, but I see the shift in his face, the moment he pushes something hard through the bond to the others. He goes still, listening to whatever comes back, and Mara is beside me a second later. Her arm comes around my back just as my knees threaten to fold, and she holds me steady. Theo then turns toward the men spread around the house and shouts, voice cracking clean across the yard. “North side. By the woodshed. Move.” Men pivot hard in the snow just as I see a shape breaking from the dark and vanishing again. It's so fast that I almost think I imagined it, but the men's reaction tells me I didn’t. A roar tears across the yard, and the sound rips straight through me. I flinch hard enough that one crutch slips. “Inside,” Charlie says. But I cannot stop staring… Because behind the rage in that sound, behind the violence and the wrongness… I felt it… The soul under it. *He is not lost yet,* Shanti says.