Chapter 5 Lina
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Lina
The shop was closed but I was still here, wiping down the already spotless counter for what had to be the hundredth time. The wood gleamed under the overhead lights, so clean you could perform surgery on it. Not that anyone would want coffee-flavored surgery, but the option was there.
“Okay, intervention,” Mika announced from where she and Vivi had been watching me clean. “You’ve wiped that table six times.”
“Maybe I like clean tables.” I moved to the espresso machine, polishing its already gleaming surface.
My eyes flicked to the windows, and I froze.
He was there. Matthias, standing across the street, just watching.
My heart hammered as I blinked, but when I looked again, the spot was empty.
Just shadows and my overactive imagination.
“Maybe you’re spiraling about Mr. Dramatic Exit,” Mika continued, oblivious to my moment of panic.
I sprayed cleaner with more force than necessary, trying to shake off the feeling of being watched. “I’m not spiraling. I’m maintaining a professional environment.”
“By sanitizing surfaces that could already pass a health inspection blindfolded?” Vivi asked gently, because she was the nice one. “Honey, even the dust is scared to land in here right now.”
I kept glancing at the windows, but the street remained empty. Had I imagined him? Was I so far gone that I was seeing him in shadows now?
“Good. Dust is the enemy of a clean establishment.”
Mika opened her mouth to argue, but a sound cut through our bickering.
A wail that started low and built higher, joined by another, then another.
Not the fire department. Not the police.
The OTHER sound. The one from monthly drills that everyone treated as a joke, rolling their eyes at the old-fashioned tradition.
All three of us froze.
“Is that...” Vivi whispered, her decorating bag dropping from her hand. Frosting splattered across the floor I’d just cleaned. Normally I’d care. Right now I couldn’t move.
The sirens kept building, more joining the chorus until the sound bounced off every building in Pine Valley. My grandmother’s voice echoed in my memory: “When you hear those sirens and it’s not the first Monday of the month, you run.”
“Those aren’t real,” Mika said firmly, but her voice had gone up an octave. “Those are just... they test them. Monthly. It’s tradition. Same as the silver crosses, same as the stupid curfew warnings nobody follows.”
“The test was last week,” I said quietly.
Through the window, I saw Mr. Garrett sprint past. Actually sprint. I didn’t know seventy-year-old men could move that fast. A woman ran behind him, carrying a child, her face twisted in naked terror.
Then I saw why they were running.
The shape moved wrong. Too big to be a dog, too fluid to be a bear.
It loped down the middle of the street with horrifying purpose, and even from here I could see the wrongness of it.
Patches of gray fur missing. A torn ear hanging at an impossible angle.
Dark liquid dripping from its mouth that caught the streetlights.
“Oh my god.” Vivi’s hand found my arm, nails digging in. “Is that-”
The thing’s head swiveled toward our shop. Even across the distance, I saw its eyes lock onto us. Onto me.
“GET TO THE BACK ROOM!” I shoved both of them toward the reinforced storage area we used for expensive inventory. “Go! Go!”
They scrambled but I couldn’t move, transfixed by the nightmare barreling toward my shop.
It was massive, the size of a small bear but shaped wrong, moving wrong, existing wrong.
This was what parents warned their children about.
This was why the crosses. Why the tests.
Why the stories whispered in daylight because speaking them at night might make them real.
The stories were real.
Holy shit, the stories were real.
The wolf charged straight at our storefront.
Glass exploded inward in a shower of glittering death. I threw my arms up, feeling tiny cuts bloom across my skin as shards found exposed flesh. The sound was enormous, the end of the world in one crystalline crash.
Up close, the beast was worse than my darkest imaginings. Gray fur matted with substances I didn’t want to identify. Foam dripped from jaws that could swallow my head whole. The stench hit me next: rot and copper and wrongness that made bile rise in my throat.
We screamed. All three of us, a harmony of terror that would have been funny in literally any other circumstance.
The wolf’s massive head swiveled toward us, lips pulling back to reveal teeth longer than my fingers. But its eyes, those horrible wild eyes, locked on me specifically. Nothing but feral hunger and terrible purpose in that gaze.
“Run!” Mika grabbed Vivi with one hand and me with the other. “Go go go!”
We scrambled for the alley door, feet slipping on glass and foam and things I refused to think about. Behind us, the beast lunged forward, claws scraping on my hardwood floors with a sound that would haunt me forever.
The alley door loomed ahead. Just ten feet. Five. We burst through into the narrow space between buildings, and I spun around.
“Go!” I shoved them toward the street. “Call the police! Get help! I’ll hold the door!”
“Are you insane?” Mika tried to grab me but I was already slamming the reinforced door shut.
“RUN! Get help!”
They ran. Good. At least they’d be safe.
I fumbled with the lock, hands shaking so badly I could barely work the mechanism. The reinforced door was supposed to protect against break-ins, not... this. But maybe it would buy them time. Maybe it would-
The door exploded off its hinges.
I flew backward, concrete rushing up to meet me. Pain shot up my arm where I landed wrong, skin scraping away in a burn of agony. My jeans tore at the knee, more skin sacrificing itself to the alley floor.
The wolf stalked through the ruined doorway, taking its time now that its prey was cornered. Foam dripped from its muzzle onto my legs, and I scrambled backward on my ass because dignity was for people who weren’t about to die.
Nowhere to go. Brick wall behind me, monster in front. The beast loomed over me, so close I could see myself reflected in its crazed eyes. This was it. This was how my parents died, torn apart by things that shouldn’t exist while camping in woods that supposedly held no danger.
“Please,” I whispered, though I knew it wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t care.
The wolf lunged.
I closed my eyes, not wanting its face to be the last thing I saw.
A massive impact shook the alley, but not on me. Snarling erupted, vicious and violent. My eyes flew open to see another wolf, this one pure black and even larger than the gray, slamming my attacker into the alley wall with devastating force.
They fought with violence that belonged in nightmares. The black wolf moved with deadly grace, keeping itself between me and the rabid gray. When it glanced back at me, just for a second, my heart stopped.
Gray eyes. Intelligent, aware, familiar gray eyes in a wolf’s face.
But before I could process that impossibility, hands grabbed me.
“MOVE!” Mika and Vivi hauled me to my feet, because of course they hadn’t actually run for help, the beautiful idiots.
They dragged me back through the destroyed doorway while the wolves tore into each other behind us. We stumbled through my ruined shop, glass crunching under our feet, and I caught one last glimpse through the shattered window.
The gray wolf lay still in the alley. The black wolf grabbed it by the throat and began dragging it toward the tree line that bordered the back of the buildings, those gray eyes scanning the street once before disappearing into the woods entirely.
We huddled in the shop for another thirty minutes, listening to sirens wail their warning to a town that had forgotten monsters were real. My arm throbbed where I’d scraped it raw, blood seeping through my torn jeans, but I was alive. Somehow, impossibly, we were all alive.
I pulled out my phone with shaking hands, texting Sarah first: “I’m okay. At the shop. Are you safe?”
Her response came immediately: “Thank god. I’m fine, doors locked. Stay inside sweetheart.”
I texted everyone else I could think of, needing to know they were safe. The relief as each response came through was overwhelming. Mika and Vivi did the same, the three of us creating a weird texting circle of reassurance.
The news trickled in through messages and social media. Sightings across town, people reporting massive wolves in the streets. But from what we could tell, my shop had taken the worst hit. Lucky me.
“That’s it,” I announced once the sirens finally went quiet. “You two are taking a cab home. Together.”
“Like hell,” Mika crossed her arms. “We’re not leaving you here alone with that window blown out.”
“I’ll be fine. I need to board it up anyway since I live upstairs.”
“Then we’ll help,” Vivi said firmly. “That’s what friends do.”
“No.” I shook my head, already pulling up the cab app on my phone. “There could be more of those things out there. You need to get home safe while the streets are clear.”
“Lina…”
“Please.” I grabbed Mika’s hands, then Vivi’s. “I can’t worry about you two on top of everything else. I’ll be fine. The shop is secure once I board the window, and I have the apartment upstairs. But you two need to get home.”
They argued for five more minutes, but I kept insisting. Finally, I practically shoved them into the cab when it arrived, making the driver promise to take them straight to Vivi’s apartment building.
“Text me when you get there,” I called through the window.
“You’re an idiot,” Mika called back, but there was affection in it. “A noble idiot, but still an idiot.”
I waited until the cab turned the corner before surveying the true extent of the damage.
The front window was completely gone, nothing but jagged edges clinging to the frame. The alley door hung off its hinges at a drunken angle. Books scattered across the floor, their pages soaking up liquids I didn’t want to identify. A few tables had shattered from the impact.
But it was fixable. I’d survived worse, even if that worse hadn’t included actual monsters.
I trudged upstairs to grab supplies, returning with a kitchen knife that probably wouldn’t do much against a werewolf but made me feel better.
The irony of fixing my door twice in one week wasn’t lost on me as I began boarding up the window with plastic sheeting and wood salvaged from the broken tables.
My hands worked on autopilot while my mind raced. Those eyes in the black wolf’s face. The way it had protected me, put itself between me and danger with obvious intent. That split-second glance that felt impossibly familiar.
No. I was in shock, seeing connections that weren’t there. Wolves didn’t have human eyes. Wolves didn’t protect random humans. Wolves didn’t...
But I couldn’t stop thinking about Matthias.
He’d left just hours before the attack, told me to stay away for my own good.
Was he safe? Had he made it to wherever he was going before the sirens started?
The worry gnawed at me as I hammered plastic into place, which was stupid.
He’d made it crystal clear I was to stay away. His safety wasn’t my concern.
Except I kept remembering that surge of emotions when we’d touched. The protective rage that had felt overwhelming and focused. The desperate want mixed with self-loathing. What if he’d known? What if somehow he’d sensed this coming and that’s why he’d pushed me away?
I was being ridiculous. People didn’t sense werewolf attacks. People didn’t share emotions through touch. People didn’t have connections to giant black wolves that saved them from certain death.
By the time I finished the temporary repairs, exhaustion weighed down every limb. The espresso machine sat unharmed in its corner, because apparently it was too mean to die even when faced with werewolves. Small miracles.
I checked the locks three times before finally accepting I’d done all I could. The shop would survive until morning when I could call proper repair people. I would survive too, even if my brain kept replaying gray eyes in both human and wolf faces.
At midnight, I crawled into bed still wearing my torn jeans because taking them off required energy I didn’t have.
My body ached in places I didn’t know could ache.
But under the physical pain was a different sensation, a tingling in my hand where Matthias and I had touched hours ago.
The ghost of electricity that shouldn’t still be there but was.
Sleep pulled at me, and I let it. My last coherent thought was of gray eyes, both human and wolf, and the impossible feeling that somehow, in ways that defied logic and reason, they were connected.
My hand tingled with phantom electricity as darkness finally claimed me.