ONE NIGHT WITH THREE ALPHAS

The dream woke me up at the clinic. That was new. Usually it waited until I was home, until the house was quiet and Ethan's breathing had gone deep and even beside me. Fire. A woman singing something I almost knew. A sound like metal snapping in half. Then the smell — smoke and something sweet underneath it, like pine sap boiling. I sat up on the break-room cot with Biscuit's IV line still taped to my thumb. Biscuit. Broken leg. Truck on Route 9. I'd set the splint myself at midnight and he'd slept through it, which was more than I could say for me. 2:14 a.m. My shift had ended at two. I'd stayed late because going home meant trying to sleep, and trying to sleep meant the dream. The drive home took eleven minutes. Cinder Falls at that hour was all dark windows and one blinking traffic light. I kept the radio off. My head had been aching behind my left eye for three days straight, the kind of headache that made me check the medicine cabinet and find the ibuprofen already gone. I'd bought a new bottle last week. I didn't remember finishing it. Ethan hadn't texted. He always texted — some dumb photo of whatever he was building, a question about dinner. Nothing tonight. I'd told myself he was asleep. Our street was empty. Our driveway was empty. Our front door was open. Not broken. Open. Standing two inches off the latch like it was waiting for me. My keys were already in my hand. I don't remember taking them out of the ignition. The teeth bit into my palm. Every instinct I had said: get back in the car. I pushed the door instead. The hallway smelled wrong. Blood, yes — copper and sharp. Under it, something wild. Like the wolf enclosures at the county fair, that musky animal smell that gets into your clothes and won't wash out. My house smelled like that. My house had never smelled like that. The living room light was on. Three men were in it. Ethan sat on the edge of our couch with a dish towel pressed to his forehead. Blood had soaked through the towel and run down past his eye and into his collar. His shirt was dark with it. He looked up when I came in, and his face did something I had never seen it do in two years of marriage. It folded. The second man stood by the window. Big. Scar through his left eyebrow. He had his arms crossed and he was watching me the way you watch an animal you're not sure is sedated yet. The third man stood by the bookshelf. He was holding our wedding photo. He smiled at me like we were old friends. "You have a lovely home," he said. "Shame about the locks." I noticed the rug first. It was new. I'd bought it in March, gray with a blue border, and Ethan had carried it in from the car and unrolled it in the living room while I made pasta. There was blood on it now, in a spray pattern, near the couch. "Hi," I said. "I'm going to need everybody to start talking, or I'm going to start screaming, and I want it on the record that I gave you the choice." The man with the photo set it down. Carefully. He straightened it, which I found enraging for reasons I couldn't name. Our wedding photo. Ethan in his good shirt, me laughing at something the photographer said. It looked like evidence now. "Riley," Ethan said. He stood up too fast and swayed. The towel came away from his head and I saw the cut — deep, over the eye, still welling. "You need to go back to the car. Right now. Don't — just go." "She stays." Two words. From the man by the window. He hadn't moved. He hadn't raised his voice. Ethan sat back down like the words had weight, like they'd landed on his shoulders. I filed that away. My husband, who once threw a contractor off our porch for shorting us on lumber, had just been sat down by two words. The air went strange. Heavy. It reminded me of the second before two dogs decide — that held-breath moment at the clinic when everything in the room goes still and you know somebody's about to lose an ear. "Who are you?" I said. My voice sounded fine. My hands were shaking so hard the keys rattled. "Elias," said the man by the bookshelf. He inclined his head, polite as a realtor. "This is Luca." A nod toward the window. "And I believe you know your husband." "Know is doing a lot of work in that sentence," I said. Ethan made a sound. Not quite a laugh. "Riley —" "You're bleeding on the new rug." "I know." "Somebody want to tell me whose blood the rest of it is?" Silence. Luca — the big one — hadn't taken his eyes off my wrist. Not my face. My wrist. Specifically the inside of my left wrist, where the crescent-shaped birthmark sat that I'd had since I was a kid, the one I'd shown to three different dermatologists, the one Ethan liked to trace with his thumb when we were falling asleep. It was burning. I looked down. The mark was glowing. Silver light, coming up through my skin like something underneath it had been switched on. It didn't hurt like a burn. It ached like a bruise pressed from the inside. "That's new," I said faintly. Elias stopped smiling. Luca crossed the room in two steps. He didn't touch me. He stood over me and looked at my wrist the way I'd look at an X-ray — professional, intent, like it was telling him something he didn't want to hear. "How long," he said, "has it done that?" It was the first time he'd spoken. His voice was low and rough, like he didn't use it much. "It's never done that," I said. "It's a birthmark. Birthmarks don't — they don't do that." "When did the headaches start?" Elias asked. He was watching me now with a different expression. The charm was gone. What was left looked almost hungry. "How do you know about the headaches?" "Answer the question." "Get out of my house." Nobody moved. "Riley." Ethan was on his feet again. He came toward me slowly, hands out, the way you'd approach a spooked horse. The towel was on the floor. Blood ran down his face and he didn't seem to feel it. "Listen to me. I can explain. I was going to tell you, I swear I was, I just needed —" "Tell me what?" His face did the folding thing again. "You're not human, Riley. You never were." The hallway tilted. I put a hand on the doorframe. The wood was cool and solid and real, and I held onto it because it was the only thing in the house behaving normally. "What am I, then?" Nobody answered. Elias glanced at Luca. Luca's eyes never left my wrist. Ethan found the floor very interesting. The keys stopped rattling. My hand had gone numb around them. "I'm sorry," he said. "I was going to tell you —" "When?" My voice came out flat. Somebody else's voice, almost. "After the divorce?" His mouth opened. Closed. Two years of marriage and I'd never seen him speechless. It didn't feel like winning. Elias laughed. One short breath, surprised out of him. Luca didn't laugh. Luca was still staring at my wrist, and the silver light was getting brighter, and my whole forearm felt like I'd pressed it against a stove. "Take her outside," Elias said quietly. "She needs to see." "I need to sit down," I said, and didn't sit down, and walked to the window instead, because my legs were moving and I didn't know what else to do with them. The treeline behind our house was maybe fifty yards out. I'd always liked that view. Pines, dark even in summer. Ethan and I had talked about a fence. There were wolves in the treeline. A dozen of them. Maybe more — they went back into the dark further than I could count. Every one of them was kneeling. Front legs folded. Heads down. Like they were waiting for something. Or someone. One of them lifted its head. Its eyes caught the porch light — amber, catching it the way a cat's eyes do, wrong somehow. It looked straight at me. Then it lowered its head again. My breath fogged the glass. The mark on my wrist pulsed, once, like a heartbeat that wasn't mine. Behind me, nobody spoke. I could hear Ethan breathing — fast, wrong. I could hear the clock in the hallway. I could hear my own pulse in my ears, too loud, drowning everything out. Then Luca's voice, very quiet, right behind me. "They're afraid of you."