Page 38 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Took a bullet for me. Just. Threw himself in front of it. Like it was nothing.

How old IS he. He said three hundred plus but what does that even MEAN. Has he seen the Civil War? The BLACK PLAGUE? The invention of PIZZA???

Why does he keep showing up???

WHY DO I KEEP THINKING ABOUT HIM???

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MY LIFE

The last three entries are underlined multiple times, because those are the questions that keep me up at night. Not the wolf thing. I’ve made my peace with the wolf thing, mostly, in the way you make peace with anything impossible. You accept it. You move on. You don’t think too hard about the laws of physics you’ve just watched get violated.

What I haven’t made peace with is the way he looked at me before he shifted. The way he stepped between me and that gun without hesitation. The way he said I wasn’t going to let him hurt you like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

And the way I felt when I realized he wasn’t human.

I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t horrified.

I was fascinated.

So I went looking for answers the only way a bookseller knows how: I asked the town.

Mrs. Delgado’s bakery smells like cinnamon and yeast, and she leans over the counter the second I mention the name, lowering her voice as though the muffins might report back.

“The Hallorans?” she says. “They’ve owned that mountain forever, honey. Since before my grandmother’s grandmother. Strange folks. Keep to themselves.”

“Strange how?” I keep my voice light. Casual. Just a curious newcomer, definitely not confirming whether the man who took a bullet for me sheds seasonally.

“Well, they don’t age right, for one thing.” She sets a muffin on a square of wax paper, warming to it. “My mother swore Orion Halloran looked exactly the same when she was a girl as he does now. Said he came into town when she was five, and again when she was fifty, and he hadn’t changed a whisker. Same face. Same eyes. Same…”

She stops.

The muffin is halfway to the bag, and her hand just… stalls in the air. Her eyes lose their focus, sliding off my face to some middle distance, and her other hand drifts up to her temple, pressing there like she’s holding something in.

“Mrs. Delgado?”

“…same everything,” she finishes, but slower now, uncertain, the words coming apart in her mouth. “Same. I’m sorry, what was I…” A small laugh, thin and confused. “Would you listen to me. What were we talking about, honey?”

The bakery is very quiet. The muffin is still in her hand. She’s looking at me like I just walked in.

“The Hallorans,” I say carefully. “You were telling me about the Hallorans.”

“Was I?” Her brow creases, working at it, and I watch something go out behind her eyes, some door swinging quietly shut. “Nice family, I’m sure. Keep to themselves.” She brightens, back to safe ground, and pushes the bag across the counter. “Three muffins, was it?”

I pay. My hand isn’t quite steady.

I’ve read about this now, in the dark, on my phone, in the forums where people trade stories they’re afraid to say out loud. A thing that lives in the mountains and edits the people who see it too clearly. I told myself it was folklore. Message-board nonsense.

And I just watched it happen. Watched a memory get eaten out of a woman’s head mid-sentence, gently, like it was nothing, like it was mercy.

They forget, I think, walking home too fast with a bag of muffins I don’t remember wanting. The whole town forgets. Something makes sure they forget.

And the part that keeps me up isn’t the forgetting.

It’s that nobody’s tried to make me forget anything at all.

It’s almost eleven when I hear the sound outside.

It isn’t a knock. It’s softer than that: a shuffle, a whine.