Bitten
The creature had me pinned against the alley wall before I could scream.
Its eyes — amber, glowing, completely wrong — stared into mine. Hot breath hit my face. It smelled like blood and wet earth and something I had no word for.
I stopped breathing.
It bit me.
The pain was so total, so absolute, that my body just — shut down. I felt my knees go. Felt myself sliding down the brick wall. Felt the warm spread of blood soaking through my jacket.
And then, from nowhere, something slammed into the creature and ripped it away from me.
***
Twenty minutes earlier, my biggest problem was the stack of unpaid invoices on my desk.
I owned a small bookshop on the edge of Crestwood — the kind of town where nothing interesting ever happened, which was exactly why I'd chosen it. Sterling & Stone. Named after my grandmother, who'd left it to me three years ago along with a note that said simply: Don't let them sell it, Amara.
I hadn't.
I'd also, in three years, barely managed to keep it alive. But it was mine, and it smelled like old paper, and on bad days that was enough.
The bad day had started around four p.m. when a man walked into my shop and made the air feel wrong.
I noticed him the second the door opened. Tall. Dark. The kind of still that didn't feel natural — like a predator pretending to be at rest. He moved through the shelves slowly, his eyes running over the spines, but he wasn't reading titles.
He was watching me.
"Can I help you find something?" I asked. My voice came out steadier than I felt.
He looked at me directly. Dark eyes. Unreadable.
"Not yet," he said.
Then he left. No purchase. No name. Just walked out, and the bell above the door chimed once, and I stood there with my heart beating too fast for no reason I could explain.
I should have locked up early.
Instead I stayed until eight, walked my usual route home — down Harrow Street, through the alley behind the old mill — and didn't think about him again until the creature stepped out of the dark and I realized, too late, that I had been followed all day.
Just not by who I thought.
***
I was on the ground. Shoulder on fire. Vision going dark at the edges.
I heard snarling — real, violent snarling — and the sound of something large hitting the ground hard. Then silence.
Footsteps. Slow. Deliberate.
Someone crouched in front of me.
It was him. The man from my shop.
Up close, I could see the blood on his jaw. The torn sleeve. He'd been fighting — I'd heard it — and he didn't even look winded. He looked at me the way you look at a problem you need to solve before you can do anything else.
"How bad?" he asked.
"I was just bitten by a—" I stopped. My brain refused to finish the sentence.
"A werewolf," he said. Calm. Like he was telling me it was raining. "I know. How bad is the wound?"
I stared at him. "Did you just say werewolf?"
"Yes. How bad is the wound, Amara?"
That stopped me cold. "How do you know my name?"
Something moved through his expression — not guilt, exactly, but close to it. He pulled off his jacket and pressed it hard against my shoulder. The pressure made me gasp.
"I'll explain everything," he said. "But not here. Can you stand?"
"I don't know. Who are you?"
"Damian Blackwood." He slid an arm under mine without waiting for permission. "And if we don't move right now, the rogue that bit you isn't the last thing you'll have to worry about tonight."
He pulled me to my feet.
I didn't have the strength to argue, and honestly? The way he said it — certain, clipped, like he'd already calculated every outcome and none of them were good — scared me more than the creature had.
I let him half-carry me out of the alley.
My shoulder was burning. Not just pain — something deeper. Something that felt like a fire spreading through my veins, slow and deliberate, like it knew exactly where it was going.
I didn't know it yet, but so did everything else that hunted in the dark.
I had just become the most valuable thing in Crestwood.
And the most wanted.
