“So look at me. Watch my hand.”
She held it up as she spoke. Then she did something she remembered from TikTok: close your hand into a fist as you breathe in, slowly unfurl it as you breathe out. Only she forgot the instructions, and he couldn’t concentrate anyway, and oh god she was about to get eaten in the woods by a werewolf.
“No no, that’s making it worse. It’s getting worse. It’s getting really intense. Oh no, oh wow, that is so much heat. I think I just need to, like. Take my clothes off,” he said. And it was funny, the way he did it. It was hilarious—like watching someone stoned out of their mind come up with an idea that only they thought was smart.
But the problem was: it was also him stripping off.
When she had barely been able to cope with his bare body, in the best of circumstances.
And that really put a dampener on her urge to laugh. “No no no, don’t do that. Don’t do that. I can just fan you,” she found herself babbling as he attempted to get out of his shirt by pulling at the buttons with his teeth. But of course fanning him with her hands wasn’t going to help him. And not just because it was incredibly silly.
Oh no—there was also the fact that it put her extremely close to him.
Her. A juicy whole person. Who he had almost eaten the last time.
“Cassie, stay where you are,” he snarled the second she got close. Those teeth flashing, eyes suddenly stark, bones pressed against his skin even more brutally than they had before. Then he skittered away from her, half on all fours and half upright. Like he was almost mostly animal.
Though, thankfully, he was still human enough to search his pockets. And he found what he was looking for: a bottle full of the stuff. Her medicine, she knew.
Only his hands were shaking too badly to unscrew the cap.
He kept trying and failing to get a grip. And then he got a grip,finally, and misjudged the pressure. The bottle somehow flew out of his hands, so close to the edge of the cliff it almost went over. He had to scramble to get it back, and even after he managed he still couldn’t do it.
And now it was making him angry. It was making him frustrated, in a way that definitely wasn’t helping the state he was in. As she watched, his plaid shirt—drawn taught over his hunched back—seemed to ripple right down the center. Like something was pushing against it from the inside, to the point of popping the seams.
So she took a deep bracing breath, and stepped closer. One tentative foot after the other, until finally she was next to him. Then she crouched, close enough that he definitely registered her presence. He grasped what she was doing, through the haze of whatever this was. And he tried to scrabble away from her immediately.
But he was too frantic, and too clumsy. He barely managed an inch.
She didn’t even have to reach to take the bottle from him, and unscrew the cap, and offer it back. And doing it wasn’t scary either—not even when he snarled and snatched it off her. Because, true, she saw those rows of extra teeth. Yes, the sound was deeper and more guttural than any human could have managed.
But he didn’t do anything except drink, deeply.
And as he did, she got to see a million things she’d been too afraid to take in that night in the basement. Like the way his face had been completely reshaped. How those heavier bones turned his cheeks from sharp to something bulkier and more brutal.
Something that should have been ugly, really.
But somehow it wasn’t ugly at all.
And the eyes were even less ugly than that. They flicked to her as he drank. Watchful, she thought. Like the beast inside him believed that she might steal the bottle back. Like it was guarding its prize. And oh, it was something to see. The flicker of light in them, dancing over the water-pale color. The black of his lashes and his brows, against that nothingness.
He was beautiful like this, she realized.
Even as her heart tried to shy away from that idea.
You’ve got to be a little bit afraid, and not just of the wolf, that wounded part of her tried to say. But even as it did, she was reaching forward. Because she’d seen something underneath his suddenly shaggier hair, and for just that one moment it overrode every bit of sense in her.
She had to look.
And when she did, there it was: the curve of his ear, now a sharp little point.Like a Vulcan, she thought, and couldn’t help letting out a little sound of delight. Plus she knew she was grinning goofily. She couldn’t seem to budge it from her face.
But it was fine, it was fine. Because he didn’t seem to care.
Instead he turned his head into the fingertips that were still touching his hair. The way an animal did when it wanted to be stroked. And sure enough, the moment she pushed her hand into that thick fur, he rubbed into it. He made a sound, low down in his throat. A warm rumble, of the kind anyone would have called a purr.
Though god, it was amazing to know it was.
And so much so that it was almost a disappointment, after that, to see the wolf start to dissolve. Those bulky bones seemed to ripple, strangely, before they slowly sank back to something like normal size. Color bloomed in his eyes, like ink in water; those ears cracked and snapped and returned to a smooth curve.
