“Tell me what you are first.”
“Five.”
“Rogue—”
“Four.”
“You absolute—”
“Three.”
She makes a sound that contains every opinion she has ever developed about me, about this situation, about the general concept of people who count down at other people in crisis. Then she takes one deliberate step backward, planting her foot hard into the earth, her hands dropping from defensive position as she forces her body into something close to standing still. The red doesn’t leave her eyes entirely, but it pulls back from its peak, and her fangs retract with the visible effort of someone lifting something far heavier than it looks.
She stands there, chest moving with the ghost of a human reflex, eyes still fixed on my hands as the claws retract.
“There,” I say.
“There,” she repeats, flatly. “Now tell mewhatyou are. Because I swear to God, Rogue, if you count down at me again instead of answering that question, I will find a way to make your lifeextremelydifficult.”
I let the lycan drop back fully, eyes returning, the growl settling to nothing. The forest releases the tension of the last thirty seconds into the canopy above.
“Lycan,” I say.
She stares at me.
“Kind of like a werewolf,” I add. “But better.”
“I know what a lycan is,” she says, with the automated dignity of someone buying time while their brain catches up. “I just…” Another pause. “Werewolves are real?” Her voice is incredulous.
“Yes, werewolves are petulant assholes, butIam a lycan. We are two different species.”
“Right, of course, silly me… vampires are real, lycans are real.” She turns and takes three steps away from me, hands going to the back of her neck, and I watch her work through it, the inventory, the restructuring, the process of a sharp mind dismantling a worldview and rebuilding it around new facts. “What else? What else is real? Dragons? Witches? Is there a… is there a whole—”
“Yes to both. And yes, there’s a whole world of supernatural beings out there.”
She turns back around slowly. “The men at the compound,” she says, and her voice has gone quiet now, the shock settling from acute to something more like depth. “Scorch. The one who looks like he’s made of something older than the rest of them. The one with the ashen marks on his skin.”
“All of it,” I confirm. “Every one of them.”
She absorbs that in silence. Her eyes move to the treeline, then back to me, and I can see her mapping the last two days through the new information, every interaction, every strange moment, every instinct she’s been dismissing as her own paranoia reassembling itself into something that actually makes sense.
“And Crave,” she says.
“Original Vampire. The first of his kind.”
“Of course he is.” She exhales. “Of course. That’s… yeah.” She nods. “That tracks.” She looks at me with an expression I haven’t seen from her before, not anger, despair, or the grim determination she uses as armor, something rawer than all ofthose. “I’ve been so busy trying not to kill anyone that I didn’t stop to ask any of this.”
“Survival narrows focus,” I say.
“That’s generous.” She looks down at her hands, and something moves across her face that she lets go before I can read it clearly. “Okay.” Another sharp breath. “Okay. So, I’m a vampire. You’re a lycan. I’m apparently living in a cabin in the woods with a wolf who is training me not to eat people, and somewhere back in that compound, there is an entire motorcycle club of various monsters who are all somehow—” She stops, and meets my eyes. “Are they all monsters? Or is monster the wrong word?”
“Depends who you ask.”
“I’m asking you.”
I consider that for a moment. “Supernatural. All of us. Monster is a word that means different things depending on the behavior, not the species.”
She is quiet for long enough that the forest settles back into its ordinary sounds around us. “Right,” she says finally, to herself more than to me. “Right. Okay.” She straightens, squares her shoulders, and the armor goes back on with the efficiency of long practice. “Well, I suppose this explains why the meditation is the least weird thing that’s happened this week.”
