Liam's next step did not land.
He stopped.
Everything inside him went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with silence.
The forest continued around him, but his body no longer trusted it. His senses stretched outward, not through Shadow Sight, not through Raven, not through Myst in the ordinary sense. Something deeper moved beneath those things. Smell sharpened. Damp soil, crushed leaves, old bark, distant water, Celia's faint trace, Asher's heat, Raven above. Beneath all of it, something else pressed into the world with intent.
The feeling was familiar enough to name and different enough to be worse.
The first time he had felt something like it had been during the first assessment trial after the academy's one-month training period. The Dire Lynx had stalked him then, and he had known with a clarity deeper than thought that a predator had fixed on him.
This was not that.
This was more deliberate.
More hostile.
