The broken wolf

"You did it again last night. Mara's voice cut through the diner noise like a blade through silk. I looked up from my coffee, and the steam curled between us like something alive. "Did what?" I asked, though I already knew. "Screamed." She didn't say it unkindly. She said it the way you'd tell someone they had spinach in their teeth matter-of-fact, a little worried, ready to move on the second I gave her permission. "I heard you through the wall. Sounded like you were being torn apart." I wrapped my hands tighter around the mug. The warmth didn't reach the cold sitting low in my stomach. "Bad dream. That's all." "That's what you said the last time. And the time before that." Mara leaned forward, her dark braid falling over one shoulder, and lowered her voice even though the diner was nearly empty at six in the morning. "Ivy. It's been happening for months. You wake up gasping, your sheets are soaked, and last week I found scratch marks on your headboard. Actual scratch marks. Like claws." "I bite my nails when I sleep. Bad habit." "You don't bite your nails. You never have." She said it flatly, daring me to argue. I didn't, because she was right, and because the marks in the wood had been too deep, too deliberate, four parallel grooves gouged into oak like something had raked it in fury. I'd stared at them for a long time before I painted over them with white primer and told myself it didn't matter. Nothing about the dream ever felt like it belonged to me. That was the part I couldn't explain to Mara, couldn't explain to anyone. It wasn't a nightmare in the way normal nightmares worked, all falling and drowning and teeth in the dark. It was the same dream, every single night, wearing a slightly different face. Some nights it started in a house I'd never lived in, with a woman's voice calling my name from a doorway I could never quite reach. Other nights it began mid-run, my bare feet tearing across frozen ground, my own breath sawing in and out of me like I'd been running for miles before the dream even started. But it always ended the same way. It always ended in the trees. A forest. Black trees stitched together by fog. And a wolf, enormous, silver-furred, its eyes burning the exact blue of a gas flame — standing just beyond the treeline, watching me the way you'd watch someone you loved come home from a war. Wake up, it always said, though wolves don't have mouths that shape human words, and I never understood how I heard it anyway. Wake up, before they find you. I always woke up before I learned who "they" were. I always woke up with my throat raw, as if I'd been the one who said it, screamed it, screamed something. "It's stress," I said instead, because it was easier than the truth, easier than admitting I didn't have a truth to give her. "Rent's due. My review's in two weeks. I haven't slept right in a month." Mara didn't look convinced. She'd been my best friend since we were twelve years old, since the year my mother packed us up and moved to this gray, unremarkable town with no explanation beyond we need a fresh start. Mara had grown up beside me through braces and breakups and one particularly disastrous attempt at highlighting my own hair, and there wasn't much I could hide from her. Except this. Except the wolf. Except the low, coiled thing under my skin that had been waking up a little more every year, like an animal stretching in its sleep. "Fine," she said, backing off the way she always did when she saw me shutting the door. "But if I find you sleepwalking into traffic, I'm blaming myself for not saying more." "Noted." She checked her phone and swore under her breath. "I've got the morning shift. Walk me?" "I've got work too." I glanced at the clock above the counter — 6:14, and my shift at the bookstore started at seven. Outside, the sky was still bruised with the last of the night, that strange hour where the streetlights hadn't yet given up and the sun hadn't yet won. We split on the corner of Ninth and Larch, the same corner we always split on, and Mara pulled me into a hug that smelled like her vanilla shampoo and the diner's burnt coffee. "Happy almost-birthday," she said against my shoulder. "Twenty-one in four days. We're doing something stupid to celebrate. I don't care what your review says." "Wouldn't dream of stopping you." She laughed and walked away, and I stood on the corner a moment longer than I needed to, watching my breath fog in the cold morning air, feeling that low, restless thing under my ribs shift again — the way it always shifted when I was alone. The bookstore was quiet, the way it always was before opening. I liked it that way. I liked the smell of old paper and the particular hush of a room full of unread stories, and most days it was the only place I felt like the walls weren't pressing in on me. Not today. I felt it the second I stepped inside — a wrongness, faint but unmistakable, like a note played slightly flat in a familiar song. The hair on my arms rose. My pulse ticked up before my mind caught up to why. "Hello?" I called, flipping on the lights. No answer. Rows of shelves stood exactly where they should, dust motes drifting in the pale light from the front windows. Everything looked ordinary. Everything felt wrong. I made my way to the back office, telling myself it was nerves, telling myself Mara's talk of scratch marks and screaming had gotten into my head. But my body didn't believe the lie. My heartbeat had climbed into my throat, quick and hard, and beneath it something else stirred — that same coiled, restless thing that lived under my ribs, uncurling now like it recognized the air in the room. My keys jingled in my hand as I reached for the office door — and stopped. There was a man standing at the end of the fiction aisle. I hadn't heard the bell over the front door. I hadn't heard footsteps. He was simply there, tall and still, dressed in a dark coat that seemed to drink the little light in the room rather than reflect it. His face was turned toward the shelf, like he was reading spines, but something about the set of his shoulders told me he wasn't looking at books at all. "We're not open yet," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. He turned. And every rational thought I had emptied out of my head at once, because his eyes were the exact blue of a gas flame. The same blue from my dreams. For one suspended second neither of us moved. The keys slid from my fingers and hit the floor with a sound too loud for the silence around us, and the stranger's gaze followed the motion down, then lifted slowly back to my face — and I watched something shift behind those impossible eyes. Recognition. Shock. Hunger, maybe, though I couldn't have said hunger for what. "You," he said, low, disbelieving, like the word had cost him something to say. "It's really you." "I don't know you," I whispered, though my body was already backing toward the door, though every instinct I'd spent twenty-one years ignoring was screaming that I did, that I'd known him in a hundred silver-forested dreams I'd never once believed were real. He took a step closer. The floor didn't creak beneath him. Nothing about him moved the way a person should move — not a hesitation, not a sound, like he'd simply decided to be nearer and the space between us had folded to obey him. Up close, I could see the sharp angles of his jaw, the exhaustion carved into his face like he hadn't slept in years, and beneath all of it, something achingly familiar, something that made my chest hurt in a way I had no right to feel for a stranger. "No," he agreed quietly. "Not yet. But you will." "That's not an answer." My back hit the edge of the checkout counter. I hadn't realized I'd been retreating. "Who are you? How do you know my—" I stopped myself before I said dreams, horrified at how close I'd come to admitting it out loud, to a stranger, in an empty store, at seven in the morning. Something like sorrow flickered across his face, there and gone. "You don't remember any of it yet. I know. I'm sorry." His voice dropped lower, rough at the edges, like the words were being dragged up from somewhere he didn't visit often. "But you're running out of time to stay asleep, Ivy. Four days. That's all you have left before everything you think you know about yourself comes apart." My name. He'd said my name like it belonged to him too. And then, from somewhere behind him — deeper in the shelves, in the dark I hadn't thought to check — a second voice spoke, rougher, colder, edged with something like violence. "Step away from her, Kade. She's not yours to claim first." The stranger's — Kade's — jaw tightened, and for the first time since he'd turned around, he looked afraid. Not of me. For me. "Ivy," he said, fast, urgent, already moving between me and the dark, "whatever happens in the next sixty seconds — don't scream, and don't run." Somewhere behind the shelves, something growled