The third man didn’t shoot. He dropped his weapon and ran. I watched him vault the glass-dusted ledge, catching a ragged piece of the curtain with his shoulder. He landed hard on the flagstone path outside, rolled, and made it five steps before the wolf leapt after him. The thing was a blur—nothing left of the animal I’d nursed on the floor, just this engine of hunger and muscle and speed.
I heard the man scream, a thin distant sound, as the wolf caught him by the ankle and yanked him off his feet. He tried to crawl, clawing at the wet stone, but the wolf clamped onto the calf and shook. The leg broke with a crunch I felt in my own bones. Then the wolf tore up the back of the man’s thigh, teeth shredding through the pants and hamstring, leaving a trail of red from the porch to the garden’s edge.
The struggle lasted less than a minute. The wolf dragged him behind a topiary shaped like a rearing horse. The screaming stopped. I stayed seated by the fireplace, hands clamped together, nails digging into the flesh of my palms.
In the aftermath, the only sound was the low rattle of the wolf’s breathing and the slow drip of blood from the second corpse onto the hardwood. A chunk of the man’s ear sat on the rug in front of me, an incongruously pale crescent flecked with dark hair. The stink of copper and burnt powder made me dizzy.
The wolf limped back into the living room, its body shedding clots of blood and strips of fur from where bullets had torn through. The beast’s eyes swept the room, pausing on me. For a moment, the gaze was almost human, something pleading and furious behind the animal anger.
I met its stare and didn’t move. We sat like that—queen and beast, surrounded by wreckage—until the first blue strobe of police lights flickered on the far edge of the drive.
The wolf collapsed onto its side, breathing shallow and wild, chest heaving in quick, panicked bursts. I slid to the floor, back to the cold marble of the hearth, and let my eyes fall closed.
I was alone. No, not alone. I was a witness. And I would not look away.
Time slowed, then stopped. Somewhere outside, a siren started its long, building wail—maybe police, maybe volunteer fire, maybe just the world itself howling in protest at what it saw through my front window. I huddled by the hearth, shivering in my own sweat, the taste of iron thick on my tongue.
The wolf shuddered. Where blood should have drained it, something else flooded in—tremor, spasm, a chaos of muscle. The fur receded in waves, each inch leaving behind raw, pink skin that bubbled and reformed as bone shimmied beneath it. The snout collapsed inward, flattening as the jaw unhinged, then slammed back into a human mouth, teeth clicking like dice in a cup. Limbs jerked, shortened, then lengthened again; the hands split and reknitted their own bones, fingers stretching and clutching at nothing. The wound in its side wept, spat out the bullet with a sound like a cherry pit ejected from lips, then cinched itself closed in a tangle of scar tissue.
And then there was a man on my living-room rug.
Not a “naked man,” not exactly. He was a thing wrapped in a skin that barely contained the violence beneath it. Tattoos as black as midnight rivers covered both arms and most of his back, the shapes primal and jagged. Old scars wove a relief map across his ribs, puckered white against new, healing pink. His eyes were closed, and his chest heaved in a slow, deliberate rhythm, a mockery of sleep. For a moment, I wondered if he was dead—if what I’d witnessed was some hallucination, a nervous collapse staged by my own treacherous brain.
But the man moved. He rolled onto his knees, grunted, and levered himself upright with a sound between a growl and aword. His hair was matted with blood and sweat, face painted in streaks of both, but when he looked at me, his eyes were the same impossible green as the wolf’s.
He got to his feet, slow but steady. His face twitched, lips flexing around syllables he hadn’t used in months. He took a step toward me, and I shrank back, hands up. He didn’t come any closer.
Instead, he pivoted, scanning the room—assessing, calculating, every sense dialed to eleven. He clocked the dead men, the open window, the footprints of blood tracking toward the back path. Then, and only then, did he look back at me.
“You okay?” he rasped.
It took me a second to realize he was talking. To me.
I nodded, but the motion was so slight I doubt he saw it.
The man—monster—exhaled, a sound of pure relief. “Stay behind me.”
I had no plans to do anything else. My knees were useless. My brain had left the building.
He walked to the front window, stepped over the ruined corpse, and peered through the broken glass. His posture was all tension and focus; even at rest, he looked ready to pounce, to kill, to die trying. He swiped the blood from his face, then bent to retrieve a length of the dead man’s torn shirt and wrapped it around his left hand. The movement was quick, methodical, almost military.
Then, as if on cue, three more shadows flickered into view on the veranda. These men didn’t hesitate or announce themselves. They kicked the door off its hinges and came in low, weapons up, barrels glinting in the lamplight.
The first one got a full two steps into the foyer before the naked man met him, bare hands against black rifle. The gun went off, shredding a sconce, but the man was already inside the guard, smashing the rifle upward with his bandaged forearm andburying his fist in the assailant’s throat. The man went down, choking, both hands at his neck.
The second invader went to fire but hesitated—maybe not wanting to hit his partner, maybe just shocked by the spectacle of blood, tattoos, and nakedness. It was enough. My wolf-man seized him by the barrel, jerked it sideways, and brought his elbow up so hard into the guy’s jaw that his head snapped back, helmet flying, neck arcing at a wrong angle. He collapsed, gun still spasming in his hands.
The third man tried to run. The wolf-man let him. He watched the man trip over the splinters of the door and half-crawl into the kitchen. I heard the scrape of boots on tile, then the telltale click of someone trying to chamber a new round with bloody fingers. The wolf-man padded after him, silent and efficient, pausing in the archway.
A single shot rang out, splintering a cabinet and sending a hail of flour and glass across the granite. The wolf-man flinched, then launched himself across the kitchen, slamming the man into the fridge with enough force to leave a dent. The struggle was brief: two sharp blows, the sound of teeth snapping together, a wet cough. The invader slid down the stainless steel, head lolling, hands clutching his gut.
The wolf-man stood in the kitchen, chest heaving, blood leaking from his knuckles and streaking his thighs. He looked back at me. “More?”
I shook my head. My throat wouldn’t make words.
He took a shaky breath and limped back into the living room, picking up a throw pillow to hold over his bullet wound. He looked around at the carnage, the blood, the ruined antiques.
“You got a phone?” he asked.
