MoonBound

SCENT OF SOMETHING WRONG

Ivy Calder had exactly one rule for surviving Blackthorn Woods after dark: don't stop walking.

She'd broken smaller rules before. Don't take the shortcut past the old quarry. Don't answer if something calls your name and you don't recognize the voice. Don't look too long at the tree line when the fog comes in low, because sometimes the fog moved wrong, folding back on itself like something breathing underneath it. Blackthorn had its own logic, and everyone in Alder Creek learned it young or they didn't stay long enough to learn anything else.

Tonight she broke the only rule that mattered.

The smell hit her thirty yards from the tree line — copper and pine and something underneath that made the hair on her arms rise before her brain caught up. Blood. Fresh enough that the cold hadn't dulled it yet. She told herself it was a deer, a hunter's kill left to bleed out under the birches. She told herself a lot of things in the three seconds before she saw him, and every single one of them was a lie she'd chosen because the alternative was standing still in the dark with her heart trying to climb out through her throat.

He was on his knees in the frost-crusted grass, one hand pressed hard to his ribs, dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat despite the cold. Even folded in on himself like something breaking, he had a stillness that didn't belong to an ordinary man — the stillness of something that knew exactly how dangerous it was and was spending everything it had to keep that danger leashed.

"Don't." His voice came out low and wrecked, more growl than word. "Don't come closer."

"You're bleeding."

"I know what I am." He lifted his head, and his eyes weren't right — amber where they should have been brown, pupils blown wide and wrong in the dark, the kind of wrong that made her step back before her mind had finished deciding to be afraid. "Go home, Ivy Calder. Now. While I can still let you."

The sound of her name in his mouth should have frightened her more than the eyes did. She had never seen this man before in her life.

"How do you know who I am?"

Something rippled under his skin — not metaphorically. She watched the muscle and bone of his shoulder shift, subtle and wrong, like a hand moving beneath a sheet that shouldn't have anything alive under it. He made a sound low in his throat, pain and warning both.

"Because I've been dreaming about you for eleven years," he said. "And I am about three breaths from tearing this forest apart. So run."

She didn't run.

She would replay the moment a hundred times later, trying to locate the exact instant she chose to crouch in the frozen grass instead of bolting for the tree line. The honest answer was that some part of her — old, unreasonable, entirely unbothered by things like sense — recognized him. Not his face. Not the name she didn't yet know was Rowan Ashworth, or that it would come to mean funerals and firelight and a debt she'd spend the rest of her life trying to repay.

She recognized the shape of him. Like a word she'd had on the tip of her tongue for eleven years, finally spoken out loud.

"What's happening to you?" she asked, instead of running.

"The moon is happening to me." A laugh cracked out of him, humorless, more breath than sound. "Every month. Tonight it's happening badly, because you're standing six feet away smelling like—" He cut himself off. His jaw worked, muscle standing out along the bone. "You need to leave. I have never wanted anything the way I want you not to be standing there right now, and that should terrify you more than my eyes do."

"You said you've dreamed about me for eleven years."

"Yes."

"I'm twenty-three."

"I know exactly how old you are." He pressed his forehead briefly into the frost, breathing through something that looked like it hurt worse than the wound in his side. "I've known since you were twelve and your family moved into the Hollis place at the edge of my territory. Eleven years of staying away from you, Ivy. Tonight the wolf doesn't care about eleven years of anything."

The wind shifted, carrying his scent to her — woodsmoke, rain, and beneath it the same wrongness she'd tracked through the trees, except up close it didn't smell like blood at all. It smelled like something she'd been missing her whole life without knowing there was a shape missing from it.

"Rowan." His name arrived in her mouth like she'd always known it, though she couldn't have said how.

He went rigid at the sound of it. Whatever leash he'd been holding gave way — spine arching, that terrible rippling beneath his skin building fast now, less like a man and more like a held breath finally releasing.

"Ivy." Her name broke in half, part word, part something closer to a howl. "Run."

She did. She didn't get far.

She got exactly to the fallen oak at the edge of the clearing before the ground behind her exploded with sound — not the crash of a man rising to his feet, but something bigger, faster, wronger, four-footed and enormous and gaining. She had time to think, with strange clarity, this is how it ends, and then something slammed into her from the side and knocked her flat into the leaf litter — not teeth, not claws. A shoulder. A body throwing itself between her and whatever had been coming.

She looked up in time to see two shapes tear past the clearing's edge, snarling, and vanish into the dark.

The second wolf had eyes the color of old blood.