The Wolf Beneath

Chapter 3 The Boy Who Returned Bleeding

Leah Carter's Point of View

The figure emerged slowly from the tree line, tall and broad, the edges of his silhouette blurred by the thick morning mist curling through the pines like ghostly fingers. My breath caught in my throat, sharp and painful. My fingers tightened around the edge of the windowsill until my knuckles went white, the wood grain biting into my palm. I knew that cloak, every patch, every faded thread. Caleb's cloak, the one our mother had sewn for him years ago, patched at the shoulder where he'd torn it on a hunting trip, faded near the hem from countless washes.

But it wasn't just the cloak that made my heart hammer against my ribs. It was the way he moved, or rather, didn't move. He just stood there at the forest's edge, half-shrouded in shadow and morning fog, as though caught between two worlds, deciding whether to step fully into our realm of hearth and home or melt back into the darkness of the forest that had claimed him for three endless days.

The silence stretched between us across the meadow, heavy with unspoken dread. Even the birds had fallen quiet, as though nature itself held its breath, waiting to see what emerged from the woods. My pulse thundered in my ears, drowning out all other sound save for the whisper of wind through grass.

Then he stepped forward into the pale dawn light, and my world tilted on its axis.

"Caleb!" The name tore from my throat like a prayer and a curse combined. I was at the door before conscious thought caught up with movement, Emma still mercifully asleep in the loft above, her small form curled beneath quilts that suddenly seemed pitifully thin protection against whatever had returned with my brother.

I threw the door open with such force it slammed against the cottage wall, the sound echoing across the morning stillness like a gunshot. Then I was running barefoot across the dewy grass, my nightgown soaking through instantly, my heart slamming against my ribs like a war drum calling soldiers to battle.

"Caleb!" I screamed again, my voice cracking with three days of suppressed terror and desperate hope. He stumbled toward me, each step labored and uneven, and as the distance closed between us, the full horror of his condition became clear.

Blood soaked the right side of his tunic, the fabric so saturated it had turned from brown to deep crimson, dripping steadily down his arm to leave a trail of dark droplets in the grass. His face was pale as fresh snow, almost gray in the morning light, streaked with sweat and something darker. At first I thought it was mud, but as he drew closer, I realized with growing horror that it was blood, dried and flaking from his temples, his cheeks, even matted in his hair.

His eyes flicked up, meeting mine for the briefest second, and what I saw there nearly brought me to my knees. Pain, yes, but something else, something wild and frightened and utterly lost. They were still Caleb's eyes, the same warm brown I'd known since he was a babe, but there was something different about them now, something that made the hair on my arms stand on end.

"Leah…" he croaked, my name scraping from his throat like broken glass over stone. The sound was barely human, raw and torn, as though he'd been screaming for hours.

Then his knees gave out. I caught him before he hit the ground, but his weight was a shock that nearly sent us both tumbling. He was heavier than I remembered, not just with the dead weight of exhaustion but with something else, his very bones seemed denser, his muscles more solid beneath my grasping hands. His skin burned beneath my touch with a fever so intense I could feel it through his blood-soaked clothing.

"Gods, Caleb, what happened to you?" I gasped, struggling to support him, my arms burning with the effort of keeping him upright. "Where have you been? What did this to you?"

But he couldn't answer. His mouth worked soundlessly, lips moving in shapes that might have been words if he'd had the strength to give them voice. His eyes rolled back, showing only the whites, and for a terrifying moment I thought I'd lost him entirely.

I didn't wait for answers. Couldn't afford to. Whatever had happened to him in those dark woods could wait, right now, my brother was dying in my arms, and that was the only truth that mattered.

I dragged him as best I could toward the house, half-carrying, half-hauling his considerable weight, my muscles screaming in protest with every step. His boots dragged furrows in the soft earth, and more than once I nearly lost my grip on his sweat-slick skin. Each labored breath he took seemed like it might be his last.

"Hold on, Caleb," I panted, sweat streaming down my face despite the morning chill. "Just hold on. You're home now. You're safe."

The lies came easily, born of desperation and love. He wasn't safe, something had torn him apart and sent him stumbling home like a wounded animal. And I had no idea if I could save him.

Inside the cottage, I managed to maneuver him onto the pallet near the hearth, the same place where he'd recovered from childhood fevers and hunting accidents. But this was different. This was wrong in ways I couldn't name, couldn't even comprehend.

Emma hadn't stirred in her loft, thank the spirits, but I knew I didn't have much time before her natural curiosity brought her down to investigate the commotion. I needed to assess Caleb's injuries, to understand what we were dealing with, before my daughter saw something that might haunt her dreams forever.

I pressed a damp cloth to his burning forehead, the fabric heating instantly against his skin. "Stay with me," I whispered, my voice breaking on the words. "Don't you dare leave me now. Not after making it this far."

His lips moved again, barely a whisper, but in the quiet of the cottage I caught fragments: "Eyes… gold… too tall… claws… didn't run…"

The words hit me like physical blows, each one confirmation of my darkest fears. I froze, cloth halfway to his fevered brow, my stomach turning to ice. The same golden eyes Emma had seen in her prophetic dreams. The same claws I'd discovered etched into the pine bark, too high and too deep for any natural creature.

"No," I whispered, the word barely audible even to myself. "No, no, no."

But denial was a luxury I couldn't afford. Whatever had stalked through Emma's nightmares had found my brother in the flesh, had marked him with claws and teeth and left him burning with unnatural fever. The evidence was written in blood across his torn body.

I dashed to the medicine cabinet with frantic energy, pulling down every salve and tincture I'd brewed over the years. Feverroot for his burning skin. Crushed yarrow for the bleeding. Wolf's leaf for infection. My hands shook as I mixed the paste, muscle memory guiding me through preparations I'd performed countless times on injured animals.

But as I began smearing the mixture into the jagged wounds running across Caleb's chest and arms, my healer's training warred with growing horror. These weren't ordinary injuries. The claw marks were too clean to be human, too wide and deep to come from any animal I knew. They ran in parallel lines across his torso, each one precise and deliberate, as though whatever had made them possessed intelligence as well as savagery.

He groaned beneath my ministrations, his body flinching away from my touch despite his unconscious state. "It's burning," he murmured, words slurred with pain and delirium. "Inside… it's burning."

I forced bitter feverroot tea between his lips, watching as he drank in desperate, gasping gulps. The liquid ran down his chin, mixing with the dried blood and sweat to create dark rivulets across his neck. His face twisted with each swallow, features contorting in an expression of agony that cut through my heart like a blade.

"It's not working," he whispered, eyes still closed but face turned toward me with an accuracy that suggested his other senses had sharpened beyond normal human limits. "Make it stop. Please, Leah, make it stop."

"Shh, you're safe now," I lied, wiping fresh blood from his brow with trembling hands. "Just breathe. The medicine will help. Just breathe."

But he didn't calm down. Instead, his distress seemed to intensify, his body beginning to thrash against the pallet with increasing violence. He shouted words that made no sense, names in languages I didn't recognize, phrases that sounded more like growls than human speech. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fit ended, leaving him panting and still, eyes fluttering closed once more.

That's when I saw it, and my world shifted beneath me like sand. His wounds weren't healing. They should have started closing by now, the feverroot was potent, my most trusted remedy, and I'd seen it work miracles on injuries far worse than these. It always worked. Always. But Caleb's skin remained torn and raw, angry red flesh weeping blood and something else, something that smelled of corruption and death.

Worse still, the veins around each wound were turning black, dark lines spreading beneath his skin like ink in water. I sat back on my heels, heart pounding so hard I thought it might burst from my chest.

"This isn't normal," I whispered to the empty room, my voice barely audible above the crackle of the fire. "This is something else. This is…… a curse."

The voice came from behind me, and I spun so quickly I nearly fell. Mira stood in the doorway, the village apothecary's weathered face grave with knowledge I didn't want to possess. I hadn't even heard her approach, hadn't heard the door open or close.

"Elka told me she saw him come back," she said, crossing the room with swift, practiced steps. "I came straight away." Her eyes immediately went to Caleb's prone form, taking in details with the clinical assessment of someone who had seen too much suffering to be shocked by mere blood.

She knelt beside me without invitation, her gnarled hands hovering over his wounds with the care of someone handling venomous snakes. "These wounds…" she began, then trailed off as she took in their full extent.

"I've cleaned and dressed them," I said quickly, desperate to prove I'd done everything right, everything by the book. "Feverroot, yarrow, wolf's leaf, all the strongest preparations I have."

"It's not enough," Mira said simply, pressing her fingers lightly to the skin around one of the claw marks. Caleb jerked away from her touch as though she'd burned him, a low sound rumbling from his chest that was more animal than human. "He's burning from the inside out. This isn't a wound that can be healed with herbs."

"What could do this?" I asked, though I dreaded the answer. "What kind of animal leaves wounds that don't close? That resists every remedy?"

She didn't answer immediately. Instead, she leaned in close, brushing aside Caleb's blood-matted hair to examine his face. As if sensing her scrutiny, his eyes fluttered open, and for one terrifying moment, they glowed with an inner light, gold as molten metal in a forge.

Mira recoiled as though struck, her hand flying to her throat in an instinctive gesture of protection. "Sweet gods," she breathed. "That's not natural. That's not human."

My heart nearly stopped. The golden glow faded as quickly as it had appeared, leaving Caleb's eyes their normal brown, but the damage was done. Another witness to whatever impossible thing was happening to my brother.

"You saw it too?" I whispered. She nodded grimly. "We need to keep him here. Hidden. Whatever did this to him, it left a mark deeper than flesh. Deeper than bone. It's changing him from the inside out."

I looked down at Caleb, his chest rising and falling with labored breaths, his skin pale and fevered but somehow more solid than before, more real. "I won't leave him," I said, the words carrying all the fierce protectiveness of a mother defending her young. "Whatever's happening, whatever he's becoming, I won't abandon him."

"Then I'll bring more herbs tonight," Mira said, rising to her feet with obvious reluctance. "Stronger ones. Older remedies that most have forgotten." She paused at the door, her hand on the latch. "But Leah… if his eyes glow again, if the change progresses too far… you'll need to be ready."

"Ready for what?" I asked, though part of me already knew the answer, dreaded it with every fiber of my being. She didn't respond with words, just gave me a long, sorrowful look that spoke of hard choices and harder truths. Then she was gone, leaving me alone with my brother and the growing certainty that our lives had changed forever.

That night, after the house fell quiet and the last embers died in the hearth, I checked on Emma one final time. She slept peacefully in her loft, small arms wrapped around her carved wolf, blissfully unaware of the crisis unfolding below. Thank the gods for the resilience of children, for their ability to find rest even when the world crumbled around them.

I returned to Caleb's side to find him exactly as I'd left him, motionless on the pallet, fever-bright but unconscious. I settled into the chair beside him, taking up the vigil that had become my entire world.

I sat there through the long hours, wiping sweat from his brow with clothes that dried almost instantly against his burning skin, whispering old lullabies under my breath. The same songs I'd sung when he was a boy afraid of thunderstorms, when nightmares sent him crawling into my bed for comfort and protection. He looked like that frightened child now, vulnerable, fragile, balanced on the edge of something terrible and unknown.

"Come back to me," I whispered into the darkness. "You're not gone yet. You're still my little brother. Still the boy who caught fireflies and made me crowns from dandelions. Come back to me."

At some point exhaustion claimed me, pulling me into a shallow, haunted sleep filled with golden eyes and dripping claws. I dreamed of things stalking through moonlit forests, of my brother's voice calling my name from somewhere far away, of Emma's prophetic drawings coming to terrible life.

A crash woke me, I bolted upright, heart hammering, completely disoriented. Dawn light filtered through the cottage windows, painting everything in shades of gray and gold. The pallet beside me was empty, rumpled blankets thrown aside as though their occupant had fled in panic.

"Caleb?" I called, my voice hoarse from sleep and fear. A sound came from outside, wood splintering, something heavy being overturned. The barn. I grabbed the hearth blade with shaking hands and rushed out into the morning air, the wind biting through my thin nightgown and raising gooseflesh along my arms.

The barn door hung ajar, creaking on its hinges like a mouth opening and closing. Inside, shadows moved in ways that suggested something large and restless, something that didn't belong in the familiar space where we kept hay and feed.

I found him crouched near the back wall like a cornered animal, his shirt torn completely away, his hands pressed against his head as though trying to contain thoughts too large for his skull. Blood smeared his palms, fresh blood that gleamed wetly in the morning light streaming through the gaps in the barn walls.

"Caleb?" I approached slowly, the way I might approach a wounded wild creature, keeping my voice soft and non-threatening. He turned toward me with movements that seemed too fluid, too quick for human joints and muscles. His eyes were wide with terror and confusion, and for one terrible moment they gleamed with that unnatural golden light before returning to their normal brown.

"Leah," he gasped, my name barely recognizable through the raw destruction of his voice. "I can't stop it. It's inside me, changing everything. I can feel it in my bones, in my blood. It's burning away everything I used to be."

He looked truly terrified, not just of whatever had attacked him in the woods, but of himself, of what he was becoming. The fear in his eyes was more heartbreaking than any physical wound.

I stepped forward slowly, hands raised in a gesture of peace. "It's okay. You're safe. Whatever this is, whatever's happening, we'll figure it out together. We'll find a way to fix this."

But he backed away from me, pressing himself against the barn wall as though trying to disappear into the weathered wood. "No, you don't understand," he said, his voice cracking with desperation. "It's changing me. Not just my body, my mind, my instincts, everything. I hear things now… voices in the trees, calling to me. Promising me things."

The words sent ice through my veins. Emma's dreams of voices in the forest, of golden-eyed figures whispering promises in the dark. It was all connected, all part of some vast and terrible design that I couldn't begin to comprehend.

I opened my mouth to respond, to offer some comfort or reassurance, but the words died in my throat as movement caught my eye through the open barn door.

Outside, across the field at the very edge of the pine forest, a figure stood watching us.

He was tall and lean, slightly hunched with age, with long gray hair that hung past his shoulders in tangles. His coat was tattered and patched, and he leaned heavily on a crooked walking staff carved from some dark wood. Mist clung to him like a shroud, but despite the morning chill, he stood perfectly still, unnaturally motionless.

His eyes met mine across the distance, and I felt the full weight of his gaze, piercing, ancient, knowing. Eyes that had seen too much, that held secrets better left buried. And though the morning was cold enough to raise frost, he wasn't shivering, and wasn't showing any sign of discomfort from the weather.

"Who is that?" Caleb asked weakly, following my gaze to the distant figure. I didn't answer immediately. Couldn't answer. Because I knew exactly who it was, and his presence here could only mean one thing, the nightmare was far from over.

"Briggs," I whispered, the name tasting like ashes on my tongue. "The exiled hunter of Silver Hollow." And he was back.