I pressed my palms against my eyes until I saw stars, letting myself feel the loss of something that had never really been mineto begin with. I didn’t know what to feel about any of it, and maybe that was the worst part of all.
5
— • —
Lina
The shop was closed but I was still here, wiping down the already spotless counter for what had to be the hundredth time. The wood gleamed under the overhead lights, so clean you could perform surgery on it. Not that anyone would want coffee-flavored surgery, but the option was there.
“Okay, intervention,” Mika announced from where she and Vivi had been watching me clean. “You’ve wiped that table six times.”
“Maybe I like clean tables.” I moved to the espresso machine, polishing its already gleaming surface. My eyes flicked to the windows, and I froze.He was there.Matthias, standing across the street, just watching. My heart hammered as I blinked, but when I looked again, the spot was empty. Just shadows and my overactive imagination.
“Maybe you’re spiraling about Mr. Dramatic Exit,” Mika continued, oblivious to my moment of panic.
I sprayed cleaner with more force than necessary, trying to shake off the feeling of being watched. “I’m not spiraling. I’m maintaining a professional environment.”
“By sanitizing surfaces that could already pass a health inspection blindfolded?” Vivi asked gently, because she was the nice one. “Honey, even the dust is scared to land in here right now.”
I kept glancing at the windows, but the street remained empty. Had I imagined him? Was I so far gone that I was seeing him in shadows now?
“Good. Dust is the enemy of a clean establishment.”
Mika opened her mouth to argue, but a sound cut through our bickering. A wail that started low and built higher, joined by another, then another. Not the fire department. Not the police. The OTHER sound. The one from monthly drills that everyone treated as a joke, rolling their eyes at the old-fashioned tradition.
All three of us froze.
“Is that...” Vivi whispered, her decorating bag dropping from her hand. Frosting splattered across the floor I’d just cleaned. Normally I’d care. Right now I couldn’t move.
The sirens kept building, more joining the chorus until the sound bounced off every building in Pine Valley. My grandmother’s voice echoed in my memory: “When you hear those sirens and it’s not the first Monday of the month, you run.”
“Those aren’t real,” Mika said firmly, but her voice had gone up an octave. “Those are just... they test them. Monthly. It’s tradition. Same as the silver crosses, same as the stupid curfew warnings nobody follows.”
“The test was last week,” I said quietly.
Through the window, I saw Mr. Garrett sprint past. Actually sprint. I didn’t know seventy-year-old men could move that fast. A woman ran behind him, carrying a child, her face twisted in naked terror.
Then I saw why they were running.
The shape moved wrong. Too big to be a dog, too fluid to be a bear. It loped down the middle of the street with horrifying purpose, and even from here I could see the wrongness of it. Patches of gray fur missing. A torn ear hanging at an impossible angle. Dark liquid dripping from its mouth that caught the streetlights.
“Oh my god.” Vivi’s hand found my arm, nails digging in. “Is that-”
The thing’s head swiveled toward our shop. Even across the distance, I saw its eyes lock onto us. Onto me.
“GET TO THE BACK ROOM!” I shoved both of them toward the reinforced storage area we used for expensive inventory. “Go! Go!”
They scrambled but I couldn’t move, transfixed by the nightmare barreling toward my shop. It was massive, the size of a small bear but shaped wrong, moving wrong, existing wrong.This was what parents warned their children about. This was why the crosses. Why the tests. Why the stories whispered in daylight because speaking them at night might make them real.
The stories were real.
Holy shit, the stories were real.
The wolf charged straight at our storefront.
Glass exploded inward in a shower of glittering death. I threw my arms up, feeling tiny cuts bloom across my skin as shards found exposed flesh. The sound was enormous, the end of the world in one crystalline crash.
Up close, the beast was worse than my darkest imaginings. Gray fur matted with substances I didn’t want to identify. Foam dripped from jaws that could swallow my head whole. The stench hit me next: rot and copper and wrongness that made bile rise in my throat.
