MARKED BY THE ENEMY

Elira's POV The tree line marking Reyes territory was supposed to be empty at midnight. That was the whole plan. I'd crossed the border creek twenty minutes ago, my boots soaked through, my phone flashlight buried in my pocket so the glow wouldn't give me away. Three weeks since Mara disappeared, and the official story from Ashwood that she had run off with some boy, that she'd come back when she felt like it had stopped making sense around week two. My sister didn't run from anything. She ran toward things, usually things that got her hurt. The last ping from her phone had put her half a mile inside Reyes land. Nobody in Ashwood wanted to talk about that. So here I was, alone, breaking every rule my town had about staying on our side of the creek, because apparently I was the only person willing to. I heard the crowd before I saw it. Not a crowd like a party quieter than that, and wrong. Dozens of voices, all low, all still, gathered in a clearing up ahead where firelight flickered orange against the treetops. I dropped low and moved between the trunks until I found a fallen log to crouch behind, close enough to see, far enough I hoped not to be seen. What I saw didn't make sense at first. People stood in a loose circle around the fire, maybe fifty of them, silent, watching a man kneel in the dirt at the center. His hands were bound behind him. His shirt was torn open down one side, and even from here I could see he was shaking. At the front of the circle stood another man, and the second I looked at him, I understood without anyone telling me that everyone else in that clearing was afraid of him. He wasn't shouting, he wasn't even raising his voice. He said something low to the kneeling man, something I couldn't hear, and the kneeling man started to sob, started begging, the words please and I didn't the only ones that carried far enough to reach me. The standing man didn't blink. I watched his jaw tighten, watched something pass over his face that wasn't anger, anger would have made more sense. It was colder than that, decided already, a door already closed. He said one more thing, quiet enough that fifty people leaned in to hear it, and then he moved. I didn't understand what I was looking at until it was already over. One second the kneeling man was a person. The next, there was a sound I will hear for the rest of my life, and the man standing over him wasn't a man anymore not fully something larger, something with claws where his hand had been a heartbeat ago, and then it *was* over, and the clearing went dead silent except for the fire. My hand flew to my mouth too late. The sound that came out of me was small. It shouldn't have carried twenty feet through wind and trees and fifty other people's breathing. It carried and every head in that clearing turned at once. I was already moving before I finished thinking, run, scrambling backward off the log, my palm splitting open on a root I didn't see, pain barely registering because my whole body had turned into one single instruction. “Move, Move, Move.” Branches tore at my arms. I didn't look back, I'd seen enough nature documentaries to know you don't look back, except this wasn't a documentary, this was real, and the thing I'd just watched happen to a kneeling man with his hands tied could happen to me in about four seconds if I didn't. Something hit me from the side hard enough to knock the air out of my lungs, and the ground came up fast, and I was on my back in wet leaves with a weight over me that hadn't been there half a second ago. He wasn't the thing from the clearing anymore. He was a man again, tall, dark-haired, breathing hard through his nose, one hand closed around both my wrists and pinned above my head like it cost him nothing at all. Up close his eyes weren't cold. They were furious, and something else underneath the fury that I didn't have a word for yet. "Human," he said, like it was an accusation like it explained everything wrong with the night. "Let go of me." My voice came out steadier than I felt, which surprised both of us, I think, because his eyes narrowed like I'd done something unexpected by not screaming. "You were on my land." Not a question. His grip didn't loosen. Behind him, I could hear footsteps crashing through the brush more of them, closing in, and whatever calculation was happening behind his eyes, I watched it finish. "Kane." A voice, close now, urgent. "What do you want done with her?" The man on top of me, Kane, apparently, and something about hearing a name attached to what I'd just watched made it worse, not better didn't look away from my face while he answered. "She's mine to deal with," he said. "Nobody touches her." "She saw everything", the voice came again. "I know what she saw," he replied coldly. The voice keep quiet and everyone went silent. His eyes finally left mine to sweep the tree line, the men gathering at his back, waiting on a word from him the same way the clearing had waited a minute ago. Whatever he decided next, I understood with total, bone-deep certainty, was not going to involve letting me walk back across that creek tonight. He looked down at me again, and for one second, something in his expression wasn't fury at all. Then it was gone, and his hand tightened on my wrists, and he said the last thing I heard before the world tipped sideways into darkness: "You're not going anywhere, little wolf hunter. Not until I decide what you're worth to me."