THE WOLF THAT WALKED

Chapter 1: Waking in Blood

Cold was the first thing I knew. Not the clean cold of winter air but the wet, seeping cold of earth that had been frozen and thawed and frozen again. It was in my hair, crusted along my scalp, pressed into the hollow of my throat where my chin had been tucked against my chest.

I opened my eyes to gray light and bare branches. Oak trees, mostly. The kind that grew in the forest preserves ringing the western suburbs of Chicago. I knew the shape of them from years of driving past, not from any love of nature.

My mouth tasted like rust and salt. I spat and watched a dark string of something hit the frozen leaves. Not spit. Not exactly.

I pushed myself up on arms that trembled like they belonged to someone else. My hands were filthy. Dirt packed under every nail, blood in the creases of my knuckles. The blood was dry but not old. A few hours, maybe. I didn't know whose it was.

The deer was ten feet away.

It lay on its side with its legs stiff and its belly torn open. A wound I couldn't look at for more than a second. The cavity was empty where the heart should have been. Something had reached in and taken it. Something with hands. Or something that knew exactly what it wanted.

I sat there in the dead leaves and waited for the panic to come. It didn't. That was worse than the alternative.

This was the third time this month.

The first time, I'd woken up in a drainage ditch behind a Shell station on Roosevelt Road. My clothes had been torn at the seams, not cut but ripped outward like my body had gotten too big for them. I told myself I'd been mugged. I told myself a lot of things.

The second time I'd come to in the bed of a parked pickup truck three miles from my apartment with a dead raccoon next to me and no memory of how either of us got there. I threw the raccoon into a dumpster and walked home barefoot because my boots were gone.

Now this. The deer. The heart.

I got to my feet and the world tilted. My balance was wrong, like my center of gravity had shifted an inch to the left. It always felt that way after the blackouts. I braced a hand against a tree trunk and waited for the spinning to stop. The bark was rough against my palm, and I could feel every groove, every ridge, like my skin had been sanded raw.

My clothes were wrecked. Jeans split at both knees and along the inner seams. Jacket torn across the shoulders. My shirt was just strips of fabric hanging from my collar. No shoes. My feet were black with mud and blood and my left big toe was missing the nail. I couldn't feel any pain from it. That wasn't a good sign.

I started walking.

The forest gave way to a service road, and the service road led to Roosevelt, and Roosevelt led east toward the city. The sun was coming up somewhere behind the cloud cover, turning the sky the color of a day-old bruise. Cars passed without slowing. A man in shredded clothes walking along the shoulder at dawn wasn't something anyone wanted to see. I understood that. I wouldn't have stopped for me either.

The walk took forty minutes. By the time I reached my building, the cold had settled so deep into my bones that I couldn't remember what warm felt like. Three floors up. Apartment 3B. The stairs were empty. The hallway was empty. The fluorescent light above my door flickered in a rhythm I'd memorized months ago.

I reached for my keys and stopped.

My keys were gone. Of course they were. I'd woken up in a forest. Keys don't survive whatever happens to me in the dark.

I'd hidden a spare in the stairwell fire extinguisher cabinet. I retrieved it, cold metal against my frozen fingers, and slid it into the lock. The door opened with the same creak it always made, and I stepped inside and closed it behind me and leaned against it with my eyes shut. Safe. Home. The word felt absurd.

I stripped in the bathroom. What was left of the clothes went into a black garbage bag. The shower was scalding and then freezing and then scalding again, the water pressure uneven, the pipes groaning in the walls like the building itself was unhappy about being awake this early.

When I got out, I stood in front of the mirror and forced myself to look.

I was twenty-four years old and I looked forty. Hollow cheeks. Dark circles that had become permanent. A thin scar across my left eyebrow from a foster home I didn't like to remember. Bruises blooming across my ribs in colors that shouldn't exist outside of a paint store.

And on my left forearm, the bite.

Three months ago it had been a crescent of puncture wounds, scabbed and angry. Now the wounds were gone, replaced by something worse. The scar tissue had spread. Dark lines radiated outward from the original bite like roots pushing through soil, following the path of my veins. They'd grown maybe half an inch since the last time I'd checked. I'd measured them with a ruler from the drugstore. The lines were at forty-one millimeters now. Two weeks ago they'd been at thirty-six.

I touched one of the dark tendrils and felt nothing. The skin was numb. Whatever was spreading through my arm had killed the nerves along the way.

I pulled on clean clothes. Jeans. A thermal. A heavy sweater my last girlfriend left behind, the one who'd stopped answering my texts two weeks after the attack. I didn't blame her. I'd stopped being good company.

The kitchen was small and dirty and smelled like coffee grounds I'd forgotten to throw out. I opened the refrigerator and stared at the empty shelves. A carton of expired milk. Half an onion. I closed the door and leaned my forehead against it.

I didn't know what was happening to me. I had theories. I'd spent hours online, late at night when sleep wouldn't come, reading about neurological conditions and dissociative disorders and prion diseases that turned brains to sponge. None of them fit. None of them explained the deer. None of them explained the hunger that was building in my stomach like a second heartbeat.

I turned away from the refrigerator and headed for the front door to deadbolt it, to seal myself in for the day, to pretend I was a normal person with normal problems who just needed a few hours of sleep.

That was when I smelled it.

Coffee. Fresh coffee.

And something else underneath it, something old and wild, like wet fur and smoke and earth that had never seen sunlight.

Someone was in my apartment.

I stopped breathing. My eyes found the front door. The chain I'd forgotten to latch. The scratches on the strike plate that I hadn't noticed before, the kind of scratches a lockpick leaves behind when the user is in a hurry.

Someone had been here. Someone was still here.

I took a step back toward the kitchen, toward the knife block, toward the fire escape, toward anything that might get me out of this alive.

A voice came from the direction of my living room. Low. Dry. Almost amused.

"You can put the phone down, Caleb. I'm not here to hurt you."

I hadn't touched my phone. He'd heard me think about it.

"Who the hell are you?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.

The voice made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Come sit down. We have things to discuss. Twenty-nine days, to be precise. That's how long you have until the next full moon."

I didn't move. The smell of coffee was making my stomach clench. The other smell, the wild one, was making something deeper than my stomach do the same.

"I made enough for two," the voice said. "Milk, no sugar, the way you drink it. I've been watching long enough to know."

I walked into my living room and found an old man sitting in my chair, drinking from my mug, watching me with eyes the color of tarnished silver.