DEAD MAN'S CUT

Chapter One: Ash & Leather The town smells like my brother. Not him, exactly, not his deodorant or the motor oil he never fully washed off his hands. It's something underneath all of that — something ancient and animal and wrong — and it hits me the second I step off the bus and onto the cracked sidewalk of Harlow Creek, population four thousand and shrinking. I stand there with my duffel bag and my two garbage bags of everything I own and I breathe it in. Pine. Rain. Something feral. Wyatt. I shove the thought back down where it lives. Aunt Drea's house is eleven minutes from the bus stop if you walk fast and don't look at anything too long. I learned that from the satellite view on my phone because I have never been to Harlow Creek. Wyatt never brought me here. He kept this place separate from everything else — from our mom's apartment in Raleigh, from the person he was at home where he made me birthday pancakes and fixed my bike chain and called me 'little wolf' like it was the most natural thing in the world. He kept this place separate because this place was where he was someone else. I pass a gas station. A dollar store. A taxidermist. I keep my head down. Eleven minutes exactly. Aunt Drea's front porch light is on even though it's two in the afternoon. The door opens before I reach the steps. She looks like Wyatt. Same jaw, same watchful eyes. It hits me in the sternum like a fist and I stop walking for a second before I remember how to do it again. "Rowan." She says my name carefully, like she's not sure I'm real. "Hey, Aunt Drea." She pulls me inside and doesn't make me talk about it. I decide, standing in her small warm kitchen that smells like coffee and old wood, that I might survive this after all. Then she says, quietly, not looking at me: "They know you're here." I set my duffel bag on the floor. "Who?" She doesn't answer. She just presses her mouth flat and turns back to the stove. I already know. Harlow Creek High School. Monday morning. I show up in the clothes I have — dark jeans, worn boots, a hoodie that used to be Wyatt's — and I sit in the back of every class and I don't say a single word to anyone. People look anyway. I don't know what they see. A girl with her dead brother's name. A girl who transferred junior year from three states away with no explanation. A girl who looks too much like someone they used to know. By lunch I've been pointed at six times. By the time I reach the cafeteria I've stopped counting. I find a corner table near the emergency exit — habit, not strategy — and I open my phone and I pretend to read something. Around me the cafeteria noise builds and builds and underneath it, underneath the trays and the laughter and the squeaking sneakers, there's that smell again. Pine. Rain. Animal. Stronger now. I look up before I mean to. He's standing in the doorway. Not in it — filling it. Like the door was built around him as an afterthought. He's got dark hair that needs cutting and a jaw that looks like it was carved by someone who was angry about something, and he's wearing a leather cut over a plain black tee and the patch on the back reads IRONCLAD in letters I can see from thirty feet away. Below the name: a crescent moon split by a single claw mark. The same mark that was on my brother's cut. The one they buried him in. Every single table nearest to him shifts. Not obviously. Not like they're scared — more like a current moving through water, everyone unconsciously realigning around the direction he's standing. He doesn't notice or doesn't care. His eyes are moving across the room in one slow sweep and when they reach my corner they stop. On me. I don't look away. I don't know why. Every single smart instinct I have is screaming at me to look at my phone, at the table, at literally anything else, but my body has apparently decided it's done listening to my brain. He stares at me for three full seconds. Then something moves across his face — fast, gone before I can name it — and he walks away. I breathe. First time I've breathed in maybe two minutes. The girl who sits down across from me thirty seconds later is small and freckled and apparently unbothered by personal boundaries. "That's Beckett Vane," she says, like I asked. "He's the Alpha." "I don't know what that means," I say, which is a lie. I know exactly what that means. She gives me a look that says she knows I'm lying. She opens a bag of chips. "He looked at you like he knew you." "He doesn't know me." "He looked at you like he knew your name before you told it to him." I say nothing. She eats her chips. "I'm Petra," she says. "And you're Rowan Ashveil. Wyatt's little sister." My name in her mouth sounds like a stone dropping into still water. Rings spreading outward that I can't stop. "How do you know that?" She looks at me for a long moment, and what I see on her face isn't gossip. It's something older. Something sorry. "Because he told us about you," she says. "Before he died. He made Beckett promise." The cafeteria keeps going around me — trays, laughter, squeaking sneakers — and I sit very still in the middle of it while the world does something strange and tilted. "Promise what?" Petra glances toward the doorway where Beckett Vane disappeared. She doesn't answer. She doesn't have to. I find him after school. Not hard. The parking lot. Five bikes lined up like a sentence. Four guys who go quiet when they see me coming. And him — leaning against the last bike, arms crossed, watching me walk toward him like he's been expecting me since this morning. Maybe longer. I stop three feet away and I look him in the eye and I say: "What did my brother make you promise?" Up close he's worse. Not because he's scary — though he is, technically, in the way that things with teeth are scary — but because he's watching me with this expression I can't decode. Like I'm a problem he already has the solution to and he's just waiting for me to catch up. He's also, and I hate this, wearing Wyatt's patch. Not his cut. His specific patch — the one with the frayed bottom corner from the time Wyatt caught it on a fence in our backyard when he was seventeen and I was twelve and I sat on the porch watching him curse at it for ten minutes straight. I know that frayed corner like I know my own name. Beckett Vane sees me looking at it. Something shifts in his jaw. "He gave it to me," he says. Voice low. Careful. "Before the run that killed him. He said — " He stops. Starts again. "He said if his sister ever came to Harlow Creek, she'd need someone in her corner." "I don't need anyone in my corner." "I know," he says. "That's what he said you'd say." I hate that. I hate how accurate that is. I hate that my brother knew me well enough to predict me from beyond the grave. I hate that the boy wearing his patch is looking at me like he already understands something about me that I haven't said out loud. What are you? I ask. Because I need to hear him say it. I need to know if this town, this pack, this place my brother loved and died for — I need to know if it was real or if it was just another thing I didn't understand about him. Beckett Vane is quiet for a moment. Around us his pack stays still. The air smells like pine and rain and that feral thing underneath. He looks at me — really looks at me — and I feel it somewhere deep, somewhere below thought. A recognition that makes no sense because we have never met. A pull. Like something in my blood saying: oh. There you are. I shove it down hard. "You already know what I am," he says. He's right. I do. I've known since the bus stop. Since the smell hit me and my body went quiet in that way it only goes quiet around one specific kind of thing. Wyatt was one. My brother — my big brother with his birthday pancakes and his gentle hands and his laugh that shook the walls — was one of them. And now the boy who has his patch is standing in front of me and looking at me like I matter, like I'm already part of something I never agreed to join, and I don't know what terrifies me more: That he might be right. Or that some part of me — the part that still wakes up at three in the morning reaching for a phone to call a brother who will never pick up — some part of me already wants him to be. I walk home alone. He doesn't follow. I check twice. But when I get to Aunt Drea's porch and sit on the steps in the dying afternoon light, I realize I've been gripping the strap of my bag so tight my knuckles are white. I loosen them one by one. Breathe. Above me the sky goes orange and purple and the first star blinks on, and somewhere across town I can feel — I know this is impossible, I know, but I can feel it — the exact moment Beckett Vane looks up at the same sky. I go inside before it means anything. But the door doesn't close fast enough. I already felt it.