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I should remember that. Especially after last night.

CHAPTER 21HAVEN

Dear Mom,

The last letter I sent came back, but I hope you get this one. Dad says that it’s almost time for my first shift. It’ll happen in the next year or so. He says that the first change hurts but that I’ll like it once it’s over. My skin hurts, and I feel like no matter how much I run, it won’t stop. It’s like something inside me is waking up …

I’m scared.

I just wish I was normal. Maybe if I was, you wouldn’t have left.

If I promise never to show you my wolf, will you come back? I’m good at keeping promises. I can do it if you want. Please write back.

Love,

Lyall

—LETTER FROM LYALL COREY, AGE EIGHT, RETURNED UNOPENED

“So,” Lyall begins as Bishop Manor disappears in the rearview mirror behind a copse of trees. “Want to tell me what caused the freak-out?”

I sink farther into the seat. “Not really.”

His lips twitch—he must be amused, I guess. From what I’ve noticed, Lyall rarely looks as if he’s anything else. Perpetually on the verge of laughter, as if the world’s some private joke he’s yet to explain. Maybe it is. Maybe we’re all just punch lines waiting to happen.

Silence stretches between us, broken only by the low thrum of White Zombie on the radio—industrial, gritty, the kind of sound that worms into your bones.

Outside, the wild green of Bishop lands gives way to asphalt, red lights bleeding against the windshield, power lines etching black scars into the sky. The drive takes us deeper into Ipswich, farther from Salem, and with each mile that passes, I expect to relax. I don’t.

I watch the town unfold—modern in shape, but old in the bones. Colonial relics still stand here, shouldering centuries of memory. Some are preserved, polished into museums and tourist traps. People come from across the world to walk where hysteria once reigned. To sleep in the same town where accusations ruined lives and innocent blood soaked into the earth.

Human nature is a broken thing. We dress tragedy up in history books and sell it in gift shops, pretending that we’ve learned our lesson, pretending it can’t happen again. But it does. Will it this time? A shiver skates down my spine and my jaw clenches as I realize that the history of this place is now my history too. My family’s … my dad’s.

Lyall shifts beside me, capturing my attention. He has one hand on the wheel and the other draped casually over his thigh. I catch myself staring a second too long. “Awful dark expression there, Rabbit,” Lyall muses. “Need a penny for those thoughts?”

“Hmm?” I lift my eyes to his face.

Lyall tilts his head in my direction, and I wonder if it’s the human watching me with those keen golden eyes of his, or the wolf. “I know you don’t want to talk about why you were so eager to leave, so I’ll let it go, but you’re thinking awfully hard over there,” Lyall says, voice free of judgment—just quiet curiosity. “I can practically see the steam coming out of your ears. What’s on your mind?”

I blink, caught off guard. “I…” My eyes drift back to the window. We pass a stretch of white fencing that bleeds into wrought iron, and beyond it, a hillside dotted with weatherworn gravestones—gray fingers clawing upward, reaching for the sky. “I was just thinking how strange it is that people vacation here.”

He laughs, sharp and sudden, and I swivel my head to face him again, curious as to what dragged the sound out. “What?” he asks. “You don’t think Salem’s pretty? Just wait until autumn really hits. The colors look like they were brushed on by the Gods themselves.”

I shake my head. “No, that’s not what I meant.”

Objectively speaking—Salem is pretty. Stunning, even. New England feels painted—alive in a way other places aren’t. I’m used to different landscapes. First, the South, where there are only two seasons—cold or hot as fuck. Then New York, which had more variation, sure, but less nature in the part where I’d stayed. Living in the city with my aunt was all steel and stone. There was beauty there, but it was a foreign kind—hard and industrial.

Here, there’s space to breathe. To ache. Even between Salem and Ipswich, the land is a patchwork of wild colors and quiet hills—serene, but haunted.

“That’s not what I meant,” I repeat, softer this time. How can I explain the unease that creeps beneath your skin like a whisper from this place that is still plagued by its own history?

Thankfully, I don’t have to. Lyall’s watchful gaze is sharp as understanding flickers behind his eyes. “Ah,” he murmurs. “You mean the darker aspects.”

I nod, my gaze slipping to his hand—long fingers curled over the steering wheel. He lifts his other arm to rest it across the console, his forearm flexing subtly, muscles drawing tight beneath sun-kissed skin. He tilts his head, those golden-brown eyes cutting toward me. In the dim light of the vehicle’s cab, muffled by the coating on the windows, his pupils stretch wide and black, reminding me exactly what he is.

Then he looks back to the road.

“Everyone’s fascinated by death,” he says in a tone that’s more pensive than I’ve heard from him before. “Especially the kind that history likes to romanticize.”