Epilogue
AIDEN
Blood on the moon again.
That’s how the dream started and ended every time. It wasn’t always my blood. Sometimes it wasn’t even my flesh. In the dream, I watched my own teeth shred through muscle and fur, ribs splintering under pressure, the air thick with iron and inherited terror.
My jaw, oversized and monstrous, locked around a familiar muzzle, Kyle’s, always Kyle Grey’s, and when I bit down, his scream curdled into a laugh, the kind that strips hope from marrow.
The sound rang through my skull long after the violence faded, and I tumbled out of sleep, throat raw and lungs desperate for something that wasn’t smoke, blood, or the copper scent of failure.
I woke before the sun, before even the birds decided the night was over.
The cabin’s roof groaned above my head, sweat plastered my back to the mattress, and every instinct I owned, human or otherwise, insisted on movement, on running, on checking the perimeter for threats both tangible and imagined.
It was mid-August, and the night air coming through the open window should’ve been cool, but a wet, muggy heat stuck to my skin. The Catskills breathed humidity that softened the edges of thought and memory, making everything just a little more uncertain.
I pushed up on my elbows, let the nightmare settle on my tongue.
The clock on the bedside table marked just a bit after two when I sat for a moment, listening to nothing.
That was always how it was after one of these: the silence as total as an executioner’s hood, only the roar of my pulse and the echo of Kyle’s voice snapping at my heels.
The floorboards gave a low, complaining creak beneath my feet. I froze, counting four steady breaths until the sound dissolved into the old wood. No movement from the bedroom. No shifting. No sleepy voices. Josie and Mateo stayed undisturbed.
It still felt strange; they still felt strange, in my space.
I hadn’t lived with anyone since I was Mateo’s age, padding around my parents’ house where laughter came easier than silence and someone was always humming in the next room. Back then, warmth wasn’t something you noticed; it was just the air you breathed.
Then life happened.
Years alone in a penthouse with too much glass and not enough living.
So now, standing at the edge of this small, creaking cabin where my happiest memories lived, the presence of two extra heartbeats felt… foreign. Not unwelcome. Just something my body had forgotten how to relax around.
But tonight, at least, the shadows in this house were ours, and for once, no one was here to take that from us.
I padded into the bathroom and splashed water over my face.
The faucet gurgled, the pipes groaned their disapproval; the mountain’s well water tasted like minerals and old snow, sharp and unyielding.
I stared into the mirror. It showed the face I’d always worn but sweat and sleeplessness had made me haggard: my hair stuck to my forehead in half-wild curls, my jaw peppered with the start of a beard I’d shave and regrow a hundred times.
My eyes, usually a nondescript light brown, flashed yellow for just a heartbeat. The wolf was closer to the surface than I liked.
My fingers found the ring that hung on the chain around my neck, my mother’s wedding band, warm from my skin. I didn’t even realize I was touching it until the metal clicked softly against my thumb. Old habit. Older comfort.
There’d never been a wife waiting somewhere, no vows made, no promises exchanged. Just this one bit of gold, the last piece of someone who’d believed the world was gentler than it turned out to be.
Some nights, especially after long, stressful hours, the memories pressed in hard. Not the fights with rogue wolves themselves, I could handle blood and fear, even the way the forest went too quiet before an attack. That was instinct. Nature. Survival.
What lingered was the pettiness of it all.
The way every skirmish felt personal, like a message carved into the dark just for me.
Even in sleep, my mind found ways to dissect that truth and sharpen it again.
And so my hand kept returning to the ring, like it could remind me of who I used to be before all of this.
Before the loneliness. Before the night everything split.
The urge to check on Josie and Mateo clawed at me. If you let yourself imagine all the ways things could go wrong, you’d never let your guard down. Sometimes, that was the only thing keeping any of us alive.
Their room was at the end of the hall, the door left open a crack so Mateo could hear my footsteps at night.
Josie said it made him feel safe, the faint rhythm of my pacing, like a lullaby in wolf’s clothing.
I eased up beside the door, careful not to creak the hinge, and let my eyes adjust to the gloom.
Josie slept with the absolute stillness of someone who’d learned to hoard every scrap of rest. Her hair spilled over the pillow, a dark, tangled river, mouth slack and beautiful in a way that made me ache. Her left arm curled over Mateo, forming a barricade as old as time.
Mateo, on the other hand, slept like a puppy: arms and legs kicked out, blanket gone to the floor, face buried in the soft part of his mother’s neck.
Every so often, he made a sound, as if he was having better dreams than I’d ever managed.
He didn’t look like Kyle. He didn’t look like Josie, either.
Something about him was off the human map, like he belonged to a different category altogether.
Maybe he did.
The Council had been chasing something for years. If the stories about Project Moonlight were even half-true, Mateo was the first of something new, a hybrid in every sense.
Or maybe just a boy who’d been forced to grow up too fast.
I watched them for what must’ve been twenty minutes. The house said nothing. The mountains said nothing. Even the trees outside pressed against the glass in perfect silence. The only proof that time was passing was the shifting moonlight crawling up the walls.
A part of me wanted to wake Josie just to prove she was real, that she hadn’t dissolved back into some better man’s dream. But what would I say? “Hey, sorry, I needed to hear you breathe.” I’d be lucky if she didn’t punch me in the jaw and go right back to sleep.
So I turned away and let the quiet fold back around me.
Back in the living room, I crashed on the couch with a grunt, pulling an old blanket over my knees. The couch was ugly, but it was mine. I stared at the ceiling. Tried to catalog every noise: the fridge ticking over, a far-off owl, the wind muscling its way through the pines.
It wasn’t enough. The wolf under my skin wouldn’t let go.
Outside, the wind changed. The trees started talking again, a soft, secretive hush.
I leaned forward, elbows on knees, and let my head hang.
The old ache in my shoulder pulsed in time with my heartbeat, a gift from the last time I faced Kyle, a memento stitched together by Nana Flo in her kitchen.
The scar ran cold and hot, depending on the weather, but tonight it just felt heavy.
Eventually, my eyes started to close. Maybe sleep would take me somewhere better this time. Maybe not.
I drifted off with the sound of Mateo’s laugh snagged in my chest and the knowledge that for one more night, everyone I cared about was under the same roof.
For now, that was enough.
* * *
I woke up again a little after five. No dream this time, just the persistent itch between my shoulder blades.
Sometimes I wondered if the wolf side of me felt time differently, a calendar written in hunger, a clock that only ticked when prey was near or something old and dangerous lurked just beyond the edge of reason.
The air in the house had gone sour.
It was the kind of thing that would make a normal person crack a window and go back to bed, but for me, it was a neon sign.
I grabbed a t-shirt from the arm of the couch and moved through the kitchen in the dark, boots unlaced but ready.
No lights, not even the little one over the stove.
I didn’t want to tip off whatever was watching.
Because something was, I was sure of it.
Outside, the air was even thicker. The sky was the color of an old bruise, clouds crowding out the stars, moon barely visible behind a haze of pollen and invisible storms. The trees lining the cabin’s clearing stood perfectly still, every needle and leaf on hold.
Normally, I’d catch the night-sounds first: crickets going off like maracas, the predatory wheeze of an owl. Tonight, nothing. Even the creek that ran behind the house sounded muted.
I crossed the porch and stepped into the grass, letting the dew soak through my socks.
My senses dialed up to eleven, every whiff of damp wood, every filament of sound that didn’t belong.
A hundred yards out, something moved. Small, fast, scared.
Probably a rabbit, except rabbits don’t bolt from nothing.
The silence was predatory. If I hadn’t spent half my life learning what that meant, I’d have chalked it up to nerves and gone back to bed.
But I kept moving, out past the wood pile and my father’s dead pickup, which I never bothered to fix.
My heart kept pace with my steps, each one lighter than the last, almost as if I was preparing to lose the human gait entirely.
There was a part of me that wanted it, wanted to give up the question of what I was and just run until my bones forgot about responsibility and the Council and everything in between.
The tree line hovered just beyond the clearing when I felt the shift. Not in me, but around me. A pressure, like the world exhaling. That’s when the wind changed, carrying something I’d never smelled before. It was like burning plastic, but underneath, something worse, something old.