“By mating with what?”
“With females like you.” His voice had gone tight, each word costing visible effort. “If it mates with you, you won’t survive. Its offspring would—” Another ripple, this one running up his shoulder and into his neck. His jaw clenched so hard I heard his teeth grind. “Fuck.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been in human form too long.” He sat up, and I watched the muscles in his back seize and release over and over. His hands fisted in the sheet. “I’m too far from my territory. I can’t?—”
“Wait. You can’t just sayits offspring wouldand then just leave me hanging.”
He turned to look at me over his shoulder. Pain had drawn his features tight, deepening the lines around his eyes, but underneath there was something warm and almost amused.
“I will explain everything. But right now I cannot hold this shape any longer.” He stood, and his body was already starting its terrible rearrangement, the shoulders widening, the spine elongating. “Stay on the bed. Stay in the cabin. I’ll be back.”
“How long?”
“I need to hunt.” His voice was distorting, dropping registers as his throat restructured. “Few hours. Don’t—” His knees buckled and he caught himself on all fours. Fur surged across his forearms. “Don’t leave.”
And then the wolf was standing on the cabin floor, shaking itself.
It stopped and looked back at me with those amber eyes. The same ones that had pinned me to a wall and fucked my brains out.
“You could not have waited ten more seconds?” I demanded.
The wolf blinked unapologetically.
“For the record,its offspring wouldis the worst unfinished sentence anyone has ever said to me, and I once had a professor who stopped midway through explaining a final exam question because he got a phone call from his divorce lawyer.”
The wolf huffed through its nose.
“And just so we’re clear, therapy for the fact that you just had sex with me and then turned into a dog is going be very expensive. I’m talking years of it. Decades.”
The wolf held my gaze for another moment, then turned and bounded off down the hall.
Where the fuck was he off to? Was there another way in and out? I hadn’t seen one yet.
I thought about getting up and following him, but instead I just sat there on the bed and listened to the cabin settle back into silence.
Right.
So.
I was in a barricaded cabin on the outskirts of Albuquerque with no phone, no ID, no shoes, and the residual physical evidence of the most disorienting sexual experience of my twenty-three years on this earth drying on my thighs. A man who could rearrange his own skeleton had just told me I was being hunted by an ancient death-spirit that wanted to impregnate me and then turned into a wolf and left.
This was fine. Everything was fine.
I got up and took a shower, my second of the day, because if there was one thing I’d learned during the years I’d spent patiently untangling my orphan-specific brand of anxiety, it was that hot water helps.
There was a clean flannel shirt in the dresser and a pair of men’s sweatpants with a drawstring I could cinch down to my waist. Both were enormous and smelled faintly of pine and something warmer underneath that made my stomach do an unhelpful flip. I rolled the sweatpants up four times and found a pair of thick wool socks stuffed in the back of the dresser drawer, which explained the mystery from earlier.
He’d put socks on me while I slept.
I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and thought about that for longer than was strictly productive.
Then I found my phone.
It was in the nightstand drawer, which meant he must have retrieved it during one of his mysterious hunting expeditions. The battery was dead, but a charger I scavenged after a brief search of the place solved that problem. I plugged it in and waited for it to power on.
A deluge of notifications awaited me, but amid the countless missed calls, voicemails, and texts from my study group, my professors, and a host of other names I recognized, one from a number I didn’t know stood out.
