Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 9

Ryan POV

It was a Tuesday, which seems like the wrong kind of day for a life to fracture.

I was walking home from school along the usual route, the one that takes me past the hardware store and the dry cleaner and the small Filipino bakery that Cass and I have been arguing about for two years because she says their pandesal is better than Delroy's cinnamon rolls and I maintain, firmly and without apology, that she is wrong.

Rhy had been restless all morning. The kind of restless he gets when something is happening that his instincts have registered and my slower human senses haven't caught up to yet. I had put it down to the changing season. The smell of autumn always sharpened both of us, made us want to run, made Rhy pace behind my eyes like a caged thing.

But this was different.

I noticed it when I turned off the main road onto the quieter street that runs behind the bakery. A smell. Underneath the bread and the petrol and the dry-cleaned fabric of the city, underneath all of it, something wrong.

Something chemical.

Something cold.

Something that did not belong in any ordinary street on any ordinary Tuesday.

I stopped walking.

Rhy went completely still inside me, which was worse than the pacing. Rhy still means something has already happened.

I knew the smell.

I had been six years old the last time I encountered it and it had been carried by the wolves that killed my parents. I had tried for years to place it, to identify the component beneath the wolf scent. Something manufactured. Something that sat wrong against the natural smell of a living creature. I had described it to Aunt Joan once, when I was seventeen, and she had gone very quiet and then very carefully changed the subject. I had always meant to press her on it and never quite had.

Standing in the street behind the bakery on a Tuesday in autumn I pressed myself flat against the wall of the dry cleaner and breathed slowly. I had learned a long time ago, in a forest with my sister's hand bruising my arm, that the first instinct when something frightened you was to run. The second instinct, the one that kept you alive, was to stop and understand what you were running from.

The smell was coming from the alley.

And then, underneath it, something else entirely.

Something that had nothing to do with danger and everything to do with what Aunt Joan had described to a six-year-old boy in front of a fire while snow fell against the window.

Like gravity wearing a face.

The pull was sudden and total and I was completely unprepared for it despite having been warned. It was not romantic in the way people mean when they use that word carelessly. It was more fundamental than that. It was the feeling of something in the centre of you recognising something outside of you, the way a compass finds north, without thought, without discussion, simply because that is what it was built to do.

Rhy made a sound I had never heard him make before.

Low. Reverent. Almost pained.

"Mate," he breathed.

I looked toward the alley.

In the shadow at its far end, barely visible, was a figure. Slight. Still. Standing with a stillness that was not human stillness. The kind of stillness that only things built for survival can manage.

And then two eyes opened in the dark.

Yellow.

Bright as struck matches.

Staring directly at me.

For a long moment neither of us moved. The city moved around us, indifferent, and we stood at either end of the alley and looked at each other with the particular weight of two things that the universe has decided belong together.

Then the smell hit me again. Full force this time, without the distance softening it.

The chemical cold. The wrongness. The scent of the wolves that had torn my father apart in the grass and leapt at my mother while she looked only at her children.

The pull snapped like a rope under too much weight.

Rhy howled in protest inside me, furious and heartbroken all at once.

I turned and I walked away.

I walked fast, and then faster, and then I was almost running and Rhy was fighting me the entire way, fighting me the way he had never fought me before, clawing at my control with a desperation that I had no name for.

"She is ours!" he kept saying. "She is ours, Ryan. Turn around. Turn around right now!"

I did not turn around.

I got home and I locked the door and I stood in the kitchen with my hands flat on the counter until they stopped shaking. The counter was cold under my palms. I focused on that. The cold of the stone. The familiar smell of the house. Cass's cardigan draped over the kitchen chair where she had left it Friday morning. The remains of the coffee I had made and not finished.

Normal things. Ordinary things. The texture of a life I had built carefully and with intention, one unremarkable Tuesday at a time.

Rhy was quiet in the way he got when he was grieving something. Not loud grief. The quiet, persistent kind that sits behind your eyes and does not leave.

"She smelled like them," I said to him.

"I know," he said.

"That smell took everything from us."

"I know," he said again, and did not argue with me, because Rhy understood grief and he understood what the smell meant and he also understood, without saying so, that we were not finished with this. That the yellow eyes in the alley were not the end of something. They were the beginning.

Cass was in Chicago for a conference. She would not be back until Friday. I would call her tonight and say nothing about any of this because I did not know what any of this was yet. I would listen to her voice and let it settle me and in the morning I would decide what to do next.

I stood at the counter for a long time.

And I did not notice, because I was so focused on the smell and the memory it dragged behind it, that the yellow eyes had watched me all the way to the end of the street.