Silver Howl

Secrets and Shadows

The dawn found Selene restless. Sleep had not come easily after her encounter in the forest. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw those glowing eyes staring back at her. The image was burned into her memory, sharp and unrelenting. She had hunted rogues before, but never one who moved like him. Never one who made her question whether she was a hunter at all.

She sat up in the narrow bed of her cabin, the quilt tangled around her legs from a night of tossing and turning. The faint light of morning filtered through the shutters, brushing across the worn wooden walls and the weapons hung neatly in their places. Her father had once told her that order kept the mind steady in chaos. She clung to that lesson now, even when her thoughts felt anything but steady.

Pulling on her boots, she fastened her belt and let her hand linger on the knife at her side. The cold metal was reassuring, a reminder of purpose. She pushed the door open and stepped into the brisk morning air. Mist curled low across the village rooftops, and the scent of wood-smoke drifted from the chimneys. To the people here, it was just another day. They would fetch water, trade at the market, and tend to their flocks. None of them knew what lurked in the forest beyond the ridge. None of them knew how close danger had come.

They depended on her and the other hunters to keep them safe. They believed she was fearless, unshaken, relentless. She let them believe it.

At the hunters’ outpost, the familiar scent of oil and steel filled her nose. She laid her weapons on the long table. Her silver knife, the tranquilizer gun, and a pouch of wolfsbane dust tied with a string. Each tool bore the scars of use but was cared for meticulously. She took pride in that care, in the discipline it required.

The headhunter, Garrick, stood across the room, sharpening a blade. His eyes, gray and hard as stone, flicked toward her. There was always something unreadable in his stare, a mixture of suspicion and pride. “You tracked it last night?” he asked, voice low and steady.

“Yes,” Selene said, forcing calm into her tone though her pulse betrayed her. “But it wasn’t an ordinary rogue. It was fast. Intelligent. Different.” Garrick’s brow furrowed, and for a moment, the grinding of the whetstone against steel paused. “Different how?”

She hesitated. How could she put into words the unnatural stillness, the way he had looked at her as though he knew her name, her soul? She could not admit that she had felt drawn to him, that his presence unsettled her in ways she did not understand. So she settled for what she could say.

“Precise,” she murmured. “Controlled. It knew I was there, and it let me see it.” The whetstone rasped against the blade again. Garrick’s jaw tightened. “That’s no rogue. That’s something else.”

The words sank heavily into her chest. She had prepared her whole life for rogues, beasts driven by madness, creatures of hunger and fury. She knew how to fight those. But this was different. This was calculated. This was deliberate. The rest of the day stretched slowly and uneasily. Selene tried to busy herself with small tasks, checking snares, restocking arrows, running drills, but her thoughts never drifted far from the treeline. Every gust of wind seemed to carry whispers. Every shift in the shadows made her heart beat faster.

By the time dusk painted the sky in streaks of crimson, she could not resist the pull any longer. She told herself it was duty, that she was making sure the threat was not still near the village. But deep down, she knew it was more than that. She wanted answers.

The forest greeted her with silence. No crickets sang, no owls called. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The quiet pressed against her ears until she could hear her own heartbeat, quick and insistent.

She followed the path to the ridge where she had last seen him. Kneeling low, she brushed her fingers over the soil. Impressions marked the ground, light, impossibly so, as if the creature barely touched the earth when it moved. Her stomach tightened. These were no ordinary tracks.

“You came back.” The voice was smooth, low, and impossibly close.

Selene froze. Her hand went to her knife, her pulse surging hot in her veins. Slowly, she turned. He stood only a few feet away, framed by the silver light of the rising moon. His human form startled her more than his wolf might have. Tall, broad-shouldered, with dark hair falling carelessly across his forehead. His face was sharp, his jaw strong, his mouth set in a line that was neither smile nor frown. But his eyes betrayed him. They glowed faintly, unmistakably.

Selene’s breath caught. Werewolves could hold their human forms, yes, but never with such ease beneath the moon’s pull. Not like this.

“You can speak,” she said, though her grip on the knife tightened until her knuckles whitened. He tilted his head, studying her with a quiet intensity. “Of course. I’m not the mindless monster you’ve been taught to kill.” Her chest ached, her mind racing. “Then what are you?”

For a heartbeat, something flickered across his features, pain, maybe, or memory, but it vanished as quickly as it came. “A survivor.” The word unsettled her more than she wanted to admit. Survivors had stories, histories written in scars. And she could feel his story pressing against her like the weight of the forest itself.

Silence stretched, thick and suffocating. Selene forced herself to breathe evenly. She needed information, not distraction. “If you’re not a rogue,” she said carefully, “then why follow me? Why reveal yourself at all?”

His gaze deepened, dark and unreadable. “Because you’re not like the others. You sense it, don’t you? That thread between us.” Her pulse stumbled. He had felt it too. The invisible tether, the strange connection she had tried to dismiss.

She swallowed hard, hiding the shake in her voice. “All I sense is danger.”

“And yet,” he murmured, stepping closer, “you didn’t run.”

The ground seemed to narrow beneath her boots. The moonlight carved him into something both terrifying and impossibly magnetic. She told herself to raise the knife, to strike while she could. Instead, she stood rooted, breath shallow, caught in his pull.

He stopped just outside the reach of her blade. His voice was steady, low, but threaded with something she couldn’t name. “You’re not ready for the truth. But soon, you’ll see that I’m not your enemy.” Before she could speak, before she could force the questions from her tongue, he moved. A blur of shadow, he vanished into the trees, leaving only the whisper of leaves in his wake. Selene lowered the knife slowly, her fingers trembling despite her efforts to stay composed. The forest exhaled around her, alive once more with rustling leaves and distant night calls. She stood in the middle of it, heart pounding, a single truth settling heavy in her chest.

She had gone into the woods hunting a rogue. Instead, she had found something else, something she could neither explain nor deny.

And that terrified her more than any beast ever could.