It would have been impossible not to notice, in fairness. It swung between his thighs with every stride, thick and heavy and proportional to the rest of him, which is to say it was not a modest organ. It moved with a pendulous weight and the streetlights we passed through lit it intermittently, like the world’s most obscene strobe effect. My toes curled as a new wave of arousal rolled through me, and I hated every cell in my body for it.
He ran for what felt like an hour. I stopped struggling partway through, not because I’d accepted the situation but because I was exhausted and also because every time I moved, his cock swung into my field of vision again and my thoughts went somewhere deeply unhelpful.
The buildings thinned. Residential streets gave way to a stretch of scrubby, undeveloped land at the city’s edge, dotted with juniper and the kind of low-slung structures that couldn’t decide if they were houses or sheds. He turned off the road and crossed a dirt lot toward a small cabin set back from the nearestneighbor by a good hundred yards. It was dark, with no car in the rutted driveway, no porch light, and no sign of occupancy.
He kicked open the front door, carried me through a short hallway that smelled of dust and old pine, and threw me onto a bed.
I landed on a mattress that was surprisingly clean given the state of the rest of the place, and before I could scramble upright he had already moved to the nearest window and was nailing what looked like two-by-fours to the frame, boarding it up from the inside. He moved to the next window and did the same, then for good measure he set to work barricading the door as well.
Was he trying to keep something out or keep me in or both?
But I didn’t have much time to worry about that, because his body had started doing something strange as he worked. The muscles in his back were contracting in ways that didn’t look voluntary, rippling beneath his skin in patterns that suggested his skeleton was trying to rearrange itself. His fingers, as they gripped the pipe, seemed to elongate for a split second before snapping back. His jaw kept clenching and unclenching, the bones of his face shifting in ways too subtle to pin down but visible enough to be deeply unsettling.
He braced both hands against the wall beside the door and hung his head, breathing hard. Sweat ran down the groove of his spine. Every line of his body radiated pain.
I sat on the bed with my ruined hospital gown bunched in my lap and stared at him.
“You’re the man from the mountains,” I said. “The one who turned into a wolf. The one who told me to run.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me over his shoulder. Those amber eyes were bright, almost glowing in the dim light filtering through the boarded windows. Up close, his face was rougher than Chen’s sketch had captured. Broader, more weathered and lived-in. His nose sat slightly left of center. A scar bisected his jawline on the right side and disappeared into the stubble. He looked like he’d been carved out of something ancient that had resented the process.
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been at the hospital, keeping an eye on me.”
“Yes.”
He straightened up. The rippling in his muscles was getting worse, spreading from his back to his shoulders and arms. His hands flexed and contracted.
“I’m going to shift now.” His voice was raw, stripped even past its baseline roughness, and it sounded physically painful to produce. “You’ll be safe here. There’s food and water in the fridge and the bathroom is down the hall. I’ll explain everything once I’ve hunted.”
“Wait—shift? You mean?—”
He dropped to all fours on the cabin floor.
The sound that came from him was not a scream and not a growl, but some hybrid of both. His spine arched, then stretched, vertebrae pushing against the skin of his back like knuckles pressing through a latex glove. His shoulder blades cracked outward, widening, reshaping. Fur erupted along his forearms, not gradually, but in a wave, dark and coarse, racing up his limbs and across his torso. His face elongated. His jawextended forward and split into a muzzle, teeth lengthening and reshaping, his amber eyes sinking into deeper sockets as the bones of his skull restructured themselves around them.
It took only moments, but it felt like an hour.
Where a man had been, an enormous wolf now stood on the cabin floor. Massive, dark-furred, easily two hundred and fifty pounds. The same wolf from the ravine, the one that had launched itself at Mark—or at least the thing wearing Mark—on the mountain. It shook itself once, a full-body ripple that started at the ears and traveled to the tip of the tail, and then it looked at me.
It had the same amber eyes. In the wolf’s face, they were even more striking. Luminous, shockingly intelligent, and fixed on me with an intensity that made the back of my neck prickle.
The wolf padded to the door and lay down across it, resting its massive head on its paws. Its ears swiveled, tracking sounds I couldn’t hear, and it huffed once through its nose, a sound that could have been exhaustion or satisfaction or both.
I sat frozen on the bed.
The cabin was silent except for the wolf’s breathing. Outside, somewhere distant, a coyote yipped. A real one, I was fairly sure, though my confidence in my coyote identification abilities had taken a significant hit recently.
I looked at the barred windows, then the door, currently blocked by two hundred and fifty pounds of Winterfell-sized wolf. I looked down at myself, at the torn gown, the IV wounds on my hands, my bare feet, and the rapidly cooling sweat on my skin.
I reviewed the facts as I understood them.
One:Something had killed Mark and then impersonated him.
Two:A man who could turn into a wolf had attacked the impersonator and told me to run.
Three:The same man had apparently carried me off a mountain, checked me into a hospital, sat at my bedside for a week, and just now sprinted through Albuquerque buck-naked to intercept me fleeing from what was almost certainly the thing that killed and then become Mark.
