18. Wren
WREN
MAN VS. BEAR VS. APPARENTLY THIS
The gray light of a soggy morning filters through the high windows of the trail shelter, making the dying embers in the woodstove look like bruised fruit.
I wake up with my face pressed against the smooth expanse of Rowan’s chest, the scent of cedar and rain still clinging to his skin.
My body feels heavy in that specific, post-demolition way that suggests I’d been through a seismic event. Which, technically, I have.
Rowan’s awake, staring at the ceiling with a look of profound, clinical focus, his heart beating a slow, steady rhythm against my ear. He doesn’t move when I shift, but his hand tightens slightly on my shoulder, a possessive, grounding weight.
“The rain has stopped,” he says, his voice a low vibration that travels directly into my jawbone. “The water levels will begin to recede by midday.”
“Good to know,” I mutter, squinting at the dust motes dancing in a stray beam of light. “Does the mountain’s forecast include anything about how I’m supposed to walk back to the lodge after what you did to my legs?”
He looks down at me, his amber eyes clear and terrifyingly sincere. “You’re physically capable, Wren. I monitored your vitals. You are merely experiencing a temporary depletion of glycogen and a minor inflammatory response in your muscular tissue.”
I push myself up on one elbow, feeling the protest of every joint. “A minor inflammatory response. Right. I’ll be sure to tell the Search and Rescue team that when they find my skeletal remains halfway down the ridge. ‘She didn’t die of exposure, guys, she just had a glycogen incident.’”
Rowan sits up with a fluid, terrifying grace that makes me feel like a particularly uncoordinated potato.
He reaches for his boots, his movements economical and certain.
No awkward morning-after fumbling, no shifting eyes or frantic searches for misplaced underwear.
Rowan is as unbothered as the trees outside.
“We should move while the light holds,” he says, nearly hitting his head against the low rafters as he stands. “I need to check the status of the lower footbridge. If it is truly gone, the hike back will be... significant.”
“Significant is a four-letter word in my vocabulary, Rowan,” I say, dragging myself out of the bunk and searching for my father’s old boots.
I find them by the stove, the leather dry but stiff.
I pull them on, the familiar weight of them a reminder of the world waiting for me back at the lodge—the invoices, the hotline, the tourists who currently thought I was a Bigfoot expert.
Though, I guess after last night, I kind of am an expert.
When I straighten, I catch him watching me, his head tilted slightly, his nostrils flaring as he takes a slow, deep breath. His brow furrows, a small crease appearing between his eyes. It isn’t the usual “I’m irritated by your ring lights” look. No, this is primal.
“What?” I ask. “Do I have moss in my hair? Because that would be your fault.”
“Nothing,” he says, though his voice drops an octave. “The air has changed. We should go.”
The hike starts exactly how every hike in my life starts: with me complaining.
I make it approximately ten minutes out of the shelter before I decide that the concept of uphill is a personal insult.
The trail is a mess of slick mud and tangled roots, the storm having rearranged the forest floor into an obstacle course designed specifically to kill me.
“I hate this,” I announce to Rowan’s broad back. He’s ten yards ahead of me, stepping over fallen logs that I have to climb like a mountaineer. “I hate the mud. I hate the gravity. I hate that every plant in this forest is currently trying to trip me or give me a rash.”
“You said the same thing when you came to fix the camera on the North Ridge,” Rowan says without looking back. “Your consistency is remarkable.”
“It’s a lifestyle choice. I was built for climate-controlled rooms and chairs with ergonomic support. My ancestors didn’t invent the indoor plumbing system just so I could walk through a swamp in boots that are older than my art history degree.”
Rowan stops suddenly, his entire body going rigid.
Turning, he scans the tree line with a frantic, predatory speed.
His form blurs at the edges, his shoulders widening, height stretching toward that impossible nine-foot limit I saw on the ridge.
The air around him begins to hum in a low-frequency vibration that makes the hair on my arms stand up.
“Rowan?” I ask, my voice dropping. I looked around, half-expecting a bear or a particularly aggressive park ranger. “Is there someone here? Did one of the Bigfoot hunters see us?”
He’s moving toward me now, his steps heavy enough to thud in my chest. He looks panicked, like a predator about to lash out. In two strides, he’s in front of me, his hands coming up to hover over my shoulders, not quite touching me, his fingers twitching.
“You are bleeding,” he growls. The sound is deep, resonant, more a vibration than words.
Blinking, I look down at myself. Nothing. No scrapes, no thorns, no blood. “I’m not bleeding, Rowan. I’m just tired and slightly sweaty. It’s a very common human condition called being out of shape.”
“No,” he insists, his voice rising. He’s vibrating now, bark spreading over his skin. “I smell it. Metallic. Copper and salt. Fresh. You are injured. Where is the wound?”
He starts circling me, his eyes wide and frantic, looking like he’s about to rip the forest apart to find whatever had dared to touch me.
He drags in great, ragged lungfuls of air, his jaw tight.
It’s the full Guardian-on-duty mode, the “I will protect my territory and everything in it” instinct dialed up to an eleven.
Then it hits me. The dull ache in my lower back that I’ve been ignoring.
The slight, familiar cramping I wrote off as hike-related fatigue.
Frowning, I do some mental math, counting back to the last time I had to hide a box of Tampax from Walt in the lodge supply closet.
I’m not due for three days. But with the stress, the storm, the...
biological benefits Rowan provided, my body decided today was the day.
I look at Rowan, who’s glaring at a perfectly innocent fern as if it were a lethal weapon.
He’s hyper-attuned to me in a way no human man could ever be.
He doesn’t have a name for what he’s sensing because he’s never been this close to a woman.
To him, the scent of blood on his territory means one thing: a threat.
I burst out laughing. There’s nothing graceful about the wheezing, helpless sound that comes from the sheer absurdity of being hunted by my own biology while a forest god is having a nervous breakdown over it.
“It’s not funny,” Rowan snaps, his voice echoing off the trees, his eyes now glowing like embers in a draft. “You are leaking life, Wren. Tell me where the damage is so I can seal it.”
“Rowan, stop,” I say, clutching my stomach as another wave of laughter hits me. “I’m not dying. I’m not even injured. This is... it’s a scheduled event. A monthly maintenance report.”
He freezes, his large, bark-skinned hand mid-air. “Maintenance?”
“It’s my period, Rowan. I’m starting my period early because, apparently, my uterus wants to join in on the chaos of the last twenty-four hours.”
He’s still in that half-shifted state, looking like a very tall, very confused tree. His head tilted. “Your... period. The cycle of the moon?”
“Close enough. It’s a human woman thing. Every twenty-eight days or so, we... well, we bleed. It’s not an injury. It’s just how the machinery works. You’ve been a Guardian for centuries, how have you never noticed this?”
Rowan slowly returns to his human form, his shoulders dropping, though he still looks deeply suspicious of the entire concept.
“I have stayed away from humans, Wren. And when I have observed them, it has been from a distance. I have never been... this close. I have never been tuned to the specific frequency of a single life before.”
He says it so plainly, with such a lack of artifice, that the laughter dies in my throat. The man just realized he’s spent three hundred years missing the fine print. He looks at me with a mix of awe and lingering terror, his hands finally dropping to his sides.
“So you are not in pain?” he asks softly.
“I mean, my back hurts and I’d currently kill a man for a bag of salt and vinegar chips, but no. I’m not in danger. You can stand down, soldier. The forest is safe from my rogue hormones.”
Rowan lets out a breath that sounds like a gale moving through pine needles. “They always say man vs. bear. Nobody ever mentioned Bigfoot.”
I snort, wiping a stray tear from my eye. “To be fair, the bear would have probably just eaten me and called it a day. You’re the one trying to perform emergency surgery on a hormonal shift.”
He doesn’t move, his eyes searching mine for any sign that I’m lying.
The panic is gone from his face, replaced by a quiet, intense curiosity that’s somehow more intimate than what we shared the night before.
He takes a step toward me, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.
His fingers are warm, the callouses familiar now.
“If it is a cycle,” he says, his voice dropping back to that private, heavy register. “Then it’s something that can be managed.”
I lean into his touch, the ridiculousness of the moment settling into something warmer. “I have Ibuprofen back at the lodge, Rowan. I’ll be fine.”
“You said something else,” he reminds me, a slow, dangerous smile touching the corners of his mouth. “In the shelter. About needing a refill of a prescription.”
Heat climbs up my neck, my own words from the night before coming back to haunt me. I was trying to be funny then, trying to deflect the intensity of what we’d just done, but now, standing in the middle of a damp forest with the man who’d seen every version of me, it doesn’t feel like a joke.