Chapter 3
Katie
I made it maybe two hundred yards before I realized all I was wearing was approximately forty percent of a hospital gown.
The parking lot gave way to a service road that ran along the back of the hospital complex, lined with dumpsters and delivery bays and other industrial infrastructure.
My bare feet slapped concrete that still held the day’s heat, and my torn gown flapped behind me like the world’s least effective cape.
The night air was cool against parts of me that should not have been exposed to it, and somewhere in the building I’d just fled an alarm was going off that might or might not have been related to my departure.
I didn’t stop. The charred-sage smell was still in my nostrils and the voice inside me, the one that wasn’t mine but lived in me anyway, was still pushing me forward like it had strong opinions about my continued existence.
Go. Don’t stop. Faster.
I turned the corner of the service road and hit the sidewalk running. Downtown Albuquerque at… what time was it? Late. A few cars drifted past on the cross street. A streetlight buzzed overhead, casting a cone of yellow that I passed through and out of.
Where was I going? I had no wallet, no phone.
They’d been in the pockets of the leggings I’d been wearing on the mountain but might have tumbled out during my fall.
My hospital gown was doing less for my modesty with every passing second, the left side flapping open where the latch had torn it.
I had an IV wound on the back of each hand, both oozing thin lines of blood.
I looked like an escapee from a psych ward, which, given the way my last conversation with Detective Cole had gone, was probably exactly what anyone who found me would assume.
I crossed an intersection without looking and a car honked. The driver yelled something I couldn’t hear through the window, but I kept running.
Then I heard it.
Heavy, fast, bare feet on pavement. Behind me, but closing the distance with a speed that suggested the person attached to them was either training for the Olympics or hunting for something far more primal than a gold medal.
I paused for a split second, breathing in deep.
Partly to catch my breath, and partly to decide on my next move.
My first thought was that whatever was chasing me had to be the thing that had been wearing Mark and then the nurse.
But this felt different. There was no charred sage smell, no sense of dread.
In fact, some part of my mind even seemed to want me to be caught.
That couldn’t be right, though. I kept running.
I veered left down an alley between two buildings, then immediately realized it was a stupid choice.
Was I trying to get raped or eaten or whatever on top of everything else?
I skidded to a stop and spun, pressing my back against the brick wall, and whatever was chasing me came around the corner at full tilt and stopped six feet from me.
It was the man from the sketch.
He stood in the alley breathing hard, his chest heaving…
and he was as naked as I remembered. Completely, unapologetically unclothed.
The streetlight at the mouth of the alley caught the planes of his body in intense detail.
The ridged terrain of his abdomen, the heavy slab of his chest, the thick cords of muscle running along his forearms and the dense, scarred landscape of his shoulders.
His eyes were amber, like pine resin held up to sunlight. Exactly the shade I remembered. Exactly the shade I’d described to Chen.
He looked like he was in pain. Like the pain you get from running too fast, but deeper.
His jaw was clenched so tight the tendons stood out in his neck, and his hands were fisted at his sides.
A vein pulsed visibly at his temple. The muscles across his back and shoulders were seized up, rigid, as though his body were fighting some internal war that had nothing to do with me.
“You,” I said, which was maybe not the most articulate opening I’d ever produced, but given the circumstances I felt it covered the essential ground.
“We need to go.” His voice was the same one from the ravine, deep, rough-edged, stripped of pleasantries. “Now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you until you tell me—”
He closed the distance between us in two strides and scooped me up. Not gently, and definitely not romantically. He grabbed me around the waist and threw me over his shoulder like a sack of feed corn, and then he was running.
I reacted like a feral cat that had just been dropped in a bathtub.
“PUT ME DOWN!” I hammered my fists against his back, which was as effective as hammering them against a boulder.
His skin was furnace-hot and slick with sweat, and the muscles beneath it didn’t so much as flinch under my blows.
“What the FUCK is happening? Who ARE you? Put me down RIGHT NOW or I swear to God I will—”
His right hand came off the back of my thigh and landed on my ass with a crack that rang off the alley walls. The sting bloomed across my bare skin—the torn gown had left absolutely nothing between his palm and my backside—and I yelped, more from shock than pain.
“We don’t have time for this.” His voice was tight and strained, but the authority in it left no room for negotiation.
I punched him in the kidney. Or what I hoped was his kidney. It was hard to aim while bouncing upside-down over the shoulder of a running man.
Another smack landed on my bare ass, harder this time, precise and stinging and placed on the exact same spot as the first, and I gasped as my body betrayed me with a flush of heat that had no goddamn business showing up at a time like this.
“Settle down,” he said far too calmly, his feet pounding the pavement with steady rhythm, like he could run for miles and intended to.
“You’re kidnapping me!”
A third spank fell, this one lower, catching the sensitive crease where my ass met my thigh, and I gasped. That one had really stung.
Why the fuck was I getting wet?
“I’m not kidnapping you. I’m saving your life. Be still.”
I was not still. I kicked, I squirmed, I grabbed at his waist and tried to leverage myself upward, which accomplished nothing except changing my viewing angle.
And that was when I noticed his cock.
It would have been impossible not to notice, in fairness.
It swung between his thighs with every stride, thick and heavy and proportional to the rest of him, which is to say it was not a modest organ.
It moved with a pendulous weight and the streetlights we passed through lit it intermittently, like the world’s most obscene strobe effect.
My toes curled as a new wave of arousal rolled through me, and I hated every cell in my body for it.
He ran for what felt like an hour. I stopped struggling partway through, not because I’d accepted the situation but because I was exhausted and also because every time I moved, his cock swung into my field of vision again and my thoughts went somewhere deeply unhelpful.
The buildings thinned. Residential streets gave way to a stretch of scrubby, undeveloped land at the city’s edge, dotted with juniper and the kind of low-slung structures that couldn’t decide if they were houses or sheds.
He turned off the road and crossed a dirt lot toward a small cabin set back from the nearest neighbor by a good hundred yards.
It was dark, with no car in the rutted driveway, no porch light, and no sign of occupancy.
He kicked open the front door, carried me through a short hallway that smelled of dust and old pine, and threw me onto a bed.
I landed on a mattress that was surprisingly clean given the state of the rest of the place, and before I could scramble upright he had already moved to the nearest window and was nailing what looked like two-by-fours to the frame, boarding it up from the inside.
He moved to the next window and did the same, then for good measure he set to work barricading the door as well.
Was he trying to keep something out or keep me in or both?
But I didn’t have much time to worry about that, because his body had started doing something strange as he worked.
The muscles in his back were contracting in ways that didn’t look voluntary, rippling beneath his skin in patterns that suggested his skeleton was trying to rearrange itself.
His fingers, as they gripped the pipe, seemed to elongate for a split second before snapping back.
His jaw kept clenching and unclenching, the bones of his face shifting in ways too subtle to pin down but visible enough to be deeply unsettling.
He braced both hands against the wall beside the door and hung his head, breathing hard. Sweat ran down the groove of his spine. Every line of his body radiated pain.
I sat on the bed with my ruined hospital gown bunched in my lap and stared at him.
“You’re the man from the mountains,” I said. “The one who turned into a wolf. The one who told me to run.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me over his shoulder.
Those amber eyes were bright, almost glowing in the dim light filtering through the boarded windows.
Up close, his face was rougher than Chen’s sketch had captured.
Broader, more weathered and lived-in. His nose sat slightly left of center.
A scar bisected his jawline on the right side and disappeared into the stubble.
He looked like he’d been carved out of something ancient that had resented the process.
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been at the hospital, keeping an eye on me.”
“Yes.”
He straightened up. The rippling in his muscles was getting worse, spreading from his back to his shoulders and arms. His hands flexed and contracted.
“I’m going to shift now.” His voice was raw, stripped even past its baseline roughness, and it sounded physically painful to produce. “You’ll be safe here. There’s food and water in the fridge and the bathroom is down the hall. I’ll explain everything once I’ve hunted.”
“Wait—shift? You mean—”
He dropped to all fours on the cabin floor.
The sound that came from him was not a scream and not a growl, but some hybrid of both.
His spine arched, then stretched, vertebrae pushing against the skin of his back like knuckles pressing through a latex glove.
His shoulder blades cracked outward, widening, reshaping.
Fur erupted along his forearms, not gradually, but in a wave, dark and coarse, racing up his limbs and across his torso.
His face elongated. His jaw extended forward and split into a muzzle, teeth lengthening and reshaping, his amber eyes sinking into deeper sockets as the bones of his skull restructured themselves around them.
It took only moments, but it felt like an hour.
Where a man had been, an enormous wolf now stood on the cabin floor.
Massive, dark-furred, easily two hundred and fifty pounds.
The same wolf from the ravine, the one that had launched itself at Mark—or at least the thing wearing Mark—on the mountain.
It shook itself once, a full-body ripple that started at the ears and traveled to the tip of the tail, and then it looked at me.
It had the same amber eyes. In the wolf’s face, they were even more striking. Luminous, shockingly intelligent, and fixed on me with an intensity that made the back of my neck prickle.
The wolf padded to the door and lay down across it, resting its massive head on its paws. Its ears swiveled, tracking sounds I couldn’t hear, and it huffed once through its nose, a sound that could have been exhaustion or satisfaction or both.
I sat frozen on the bed.
The cabin was silent except for the wolf’s breathing. Outside, somewhere distant, a coyote yipped. A real one, I was fairly sure, though my confidence in my coyote identification abilities had taken a significant hit recently.
I looked at the barred windows, then the door, currently blocked by two hundred and fifty pounds of Winterfell-sized wolf. I looked down at myself, at the torn gown, the IV wounds on my hands, my bare feet, and the rapidly cooling sweat on my skin.
I reviewed the facts as I understood them.
One: Something had killed Mark and then impersonated him.
Two: A man who could turn into a wolf had attacked the impersonator and told me to run.
Three: The same man had apparently carried me off a mountain, checked me into a hospital, sat at my bedside for a week, and just now sprinted through Albuquerque buck-naked to intercept me fleeing from what was almost certainly the thing that killed and then become Mark.
Four: He was now a wolf, and he had told me he’d explain everything after he hunted.
After he hunted.
I pulled the bedsheet up to my chest, tucked my knees underneath me, and stared at the wolf. He stared back. Neither of us blinked for a long time.
“I don’t know if you can understand me in that form,” I said. “But just so we’re clear, I have not agreed to this. I have not agreed to any of this.”
The wolf blinked slowly.
“Also, your cabin smells like dust.”
The wolf’s tail moved. Just once. Just the tip.
I wrapped the sheet tighter around myself and pulled the single flat pillow against my chest. The mattress was more comfortable than I would have expected. I sank down into it, pressing my face into the pillow. I closed my eyes and opened them and closed them again.
My body, apparently deciding it had processed enough for now, began shutting down. The sedative dregs still in my system were working overtime to make friends with the adrenaline crash, and together they made a convincing argument for unconsciousness.
The last thing I heard before sleep took me was the sound of the wolf’s breathing, slow and steady, and the last thing I thought was that I had no idea if I was dreaming or awake or losing my mind, and at this exact moment the distinction mattered less than it should have.
I fell asleep.