Page 31 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“Put the gun down.” Orion’s voice is steady. Calm. Like someone’s pointing a finger at him instead of a weapon. “You don’t want to do this.”

“Shut up.” The man swings the gun between Orion and me, and I feel my whole body seize up with fear. “I said wallets. Phones. Now.”

“There’s cash in the kitchen.” I’m surprised I can speak, surprised my voice works at all. “In a drawer by the stove. Just take it and…”

“You.” The man levels the gun at me. “You come with me. Show me where.”

“No.” Orion’s voice has changed. Lower. Rougher. Almost a growl. “She stays where she is.”

“I said…”

Orion moves.

I don’t see what happens, it’s too fast, too sudden, just a blur of motion, but suddenly the gun is swinging toward me, the barrel dark and terrible, and I hear the shot before I see what stops it.

What stops it is impossible.

What stops it is Orion, except it’s not Orion, not the man I’ve spent four days with. Something else. A shape covered in dark fur, massive, wolf-shaped but wrong, too big, too intelligent, launching through the space between us with a sound that isn’t a growl but a promise.

The bullet hits the creature in the shoulder.

It doesn’t stop.

The man screams, a high, thin sound of pure terror, and drops the gun, scrambling backward toward the door. The creature, the wolf, the thing that was Orion, snarls at him with teeth that gleam white in the candlelight, and the man bolts into the storm, screaming something about monsters, about demons, about the devil himself.

The front door swings shut behind him.

Silence.

Mario is shaking in my arms. Or maybe I’m shaking. I can’t tell anymore.

The creature turns to look at me, and its eyes are gray, storm-gray, impossibly familiar, and I can see where the bullet hit, a dark patch of blood matting the fur on its left shoulder.

Those are his eyes. That’s, that thing has his eyes.

The shift happens in reverse.

It’s not like the movies. It’s not dramatic or drawn-out. It’s just, one moment there’s a massive wolf standing in the middle of the room, and the next moment there’s Orion. Naked. Bleeding. Looking at me with a face caught between apologetic and resigned.

“Huh,” he says, like this is mildly inconvenient. Like he just spilled coffee instead of transformed into a literal monster. “I can explain.”

I open my mouth to respond.

Nothing comes out.

Mario screams.

7

— • —

Orion

The bullet is working its way out.

I can feel it, a dull, grinding pressure in my left shoulder as my body rejects the foreign metal with the efficient brutality it’s used for three centuries. The wound is already closing around the exit path, tissue knitting itself back together, pushing the flattened slug toward the surface like my flesh is spitting out something distasteful.

It hurts. Not as much as it should, pain is relative when you’ve survived plagues and wars and the particular agony of watching empires fall, but enough that I’m aware of it. Enough that I’ll feel it tomorrow.