Six #2
So when another, opposite impulse suddenly wedged up alongside the first—Stop, it urged, Turn around, and, You don’t want to be here—I had to latch on to a tree trunk to curb my momentum. The bark tore through the threadbare fabric of my ancient Jimmy Eat World hoodie.
This feeling, I knew. It was straight out of my nightmares. I had relived this exact moment—feeling a sudden, repulsive fear in these Whispering Woods—in many dreams when I was a child, still bleeding out of the wound my mother’s murder had left behind.
The hair on my arms and neck stood straight.
I knew, beyond doubt, that I had come across a werewolf in my home woods.
Again. Instinct screamed for retreat, but there was still the pull that had dragged me out here.
Beneath the gut feeling—werewolf, werewolf, you’ve lived this before—was another level of familiarity.
Werewolf, there’s a werewolf . . . Also, Mason’s here.
I could do the basic math there, two plus two equals four, but the opposite instincts battling for control over my movements were more pressing. My fingers curled into the bark, and I peered around the curve of the tree.
Skin. Miles of it, it seemed like, stretched out on the forest floor. Skin and blood. The latter made sense to me first: he was in pain. Mason gripped his side, the spaces between his fingers red and wet.
Fighting the terrible flashback feeling of my legs shaking, of growing numb from the ground up like roots were sprouting up through my soles, I managed to take a step around the trunk.
My knees quivered but didn’t give out. So I took another. A mental barrier melted down like a wall turning to water: I was not seven years old, I was not prey, I was not helpless, I would not freeze. I didn’t need my brother pulling my hand to get my legs moving. I ran.
Dropping to my knees at Mason’s side, I gasped out against red, clouding fear. This close, the urge to run was almost unbearable.
Mason’s free hand shot out, and my body braced. He latched on to my forearm. His chest jumped and shuddered with uneven, frightened breaths. His eyes were panicked, blown wide.
They were also gold.
“What the hell is happening?” I asked, shrill. “Why are you here?”
Mason blinked, and his irises were brown again.
“I went for a run,” he wheezed, which explained nothing.
“Why are you naked?”
I only processed this as I said it. My brain finally made sense of all that skin. Before I had crouched beside his torso, there had seemed so much of it.
“That’s . . . harder to explain.”
He didn’t need to. I recalled transformations I’d seen in movies, a body growing grotesquely until the clothes tore off.
Mason’s shoulder jerked and he hissed through his teeth. The pained scrunch between his nose and brows looked too deep, inhuman. His eyes flickered and lightened, turning the color of the moon when it was extra big and yellow. His teeth, in his open mouth, were animalistic.
It was harder not to do the math at this point. Through my sleeve, I could feel the needle-press of sharp claws. My instinct to fight demanded I scratch his face, bite his wrist, kick his wound, anything to get away. Flight cried for me to jump backward; my calves clenched, ready.
Mason’s eyes begged me to stay.
I braced the arm he held on the ground, fingers digging into the dirt to anchor myself in place.
“Let me see,” I said.
Mason lifted the hand on his side. It came up red. The gash was singular, running between two heaving ribs. The edges of the wound had a strange brightness. Smoldering. There was an awful burning smell. It was hard to tell, but the cut seemed to smoke.
Several meters away, nestled at the base of a Douglas fir, was a blade shaped like a spearhead. It glinted metal. There was something else a few feet behind Mason’s head. It was steel and flat, embedded in the forest floor, exposed where Mason’s feet had disrupted the dirt.
When I looked back at Mason, his appearance had returned to normal. I couldn’t feel his claws anymore.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said breathlessly.
I could run back inside and find first aid in the infirmary, but what would that even do?
The wound was long but only surface-deep.
It had already done the worst of its bleeding.
The bigger issue was the smoking, and there wasn’t anything in any of our kits that could treat that.
Brown eyes darted down to my mouth then returned to my eyes, wider on the way back.
That was how I realized that, beneath the acrid burning odor, there was still the sweet smell of Mason’s blood, fresh and sharp without the barrier of his skin.
My free hand flew up to cover my fangs way too late.
I watched him, wary that he might strike out like a cornered animal.
But he only spread the fingers on my forearm as if to grasp on.
“Just—stay there,” Mason said, clenching his jaw and tipping his head back with a muffled keen. His eyes flashed gold, his grip turned sharp, then both reverted in a blink.
I turned my chin into my shoulder, away from him, my hand tight over my mouth and nose to block out the scent as much as possible.
Mason was squeezing my arm tight enough to hurt.
I looked behind myself into the forest, twisting as much as his grip allowed.
My vision caught on metal. On the ground was a contraption the size of a water bottle, with a barrel like a gun or a cannon poised at an angle.
Mind racing, I turned puzzle pieces until one clicked.
The spearhead, the barrel, the steel plate, the smoldering.
I’d bet everything the blade was made of silver.
It was some kind of launcher or spring gun that shot a silver weapon, triggered by a pressure plate.
Someone had set a werewolf trap in our woods.
“Why did you come here?” I asked. Mason was writhing less, noiseless save for occasional sharp breaths and the rustle of leaves whenever he jerked.
“Running. Told you. Anywhere, just—lot on my mind.” His voice was wet, panting.
“Did this help?”
“Feeling way better,” Mason laughed, then hissed, claws digging in and receding in quick succession. “Shit.”