Page 69 of A Lady’s Guide to Werewolves

No one was left. Only cobwebs and Sorcha and blood on the floor. No Elderberry. Her chest was empty, no magic, only blood pumping too fast.

Only paper birds approaching from every direction, filling the sky, the kitchens, clogging the chimneys, perching on the barn roof. Each one seeking her help, paper wings rustling, rustling. They were caught in her hair, piling around her like snow, burying her. Pressing her down, choking the breath from her lungs.

She fell to her knees when her legs shook too hard to hold her up. The tower ground was hard and cold and shocked her back into herself, for just a moment.

The tower, the Nightmare. Those were real. Abandoned Nettlestone was not. A thousand paper birds were not.

She struggled to catch her breath.

She needed her grandmother and her birds and her animals. Black Shucks needed raw meat, and the thrill of the chase. Wolves needed moonlight.

And she had been wrong before. Nightmares needed something as well. Something more than just fear—they needed to stoke that fear, to make it grow, sometimes from nothing.

They needed shadows.

“Aidan,” Sorcha croaked. At least, she hoped there was sound coming from her raw throat. The Nightmare’s hooves crashed down next to her, sending sparks that made her chest seize. “Sunlight. We need sunlight.”

She still couldn’t see him, could barely gasp out his name, but she had to trust that he could hear her. “Aidan.”

Aidan’s worst fear was coming true.

The wolf roared up inside him, refusing to be denied. There was no calm, no discipline, no willpower to contain him.

Being a curator meant nothing; being an earl meant less.

There was only the wolf and the moon.

The Nightmare’s breath blew over him and Aidan was back in Orkney, searching for an amulet that had been buried centuries ago and recently dislodged. Not by Aidan, not by his mentor, Professor Galloway, digging with his students. Not even by the Iron Crows that harassed the island for amulets to steal.

By a wolf who could not be stopped.

There was only the churning ocean, the rocky shore, the snow on the wind.

And the wolf who cornered him under the full moon.

The wolf who had ravaged a village, his muzzle still stained with blood. The wolf who’d attacked travelers on the roads, pulled witches from their beds to tear at their throats.

Aidan had had this nightmare every night for a year and a day, after he was first bitten.

This was not how the Nightmare would trap him. He knew this landscape, the wild silver eyes glinting, the pain of teeth ripping through his flesh, the fear of being left to bleed out in the snow. The howl of a wolf no longer at a distance, but inside his own chest. His own head.

The fear that caught him was the horror that his wolf might be too much like the wolf that had turned him.

Feral, remorseless. Cruel. Uncontrollable.

He’d built walls and safeguards, researched binding magics, moon madness. His mother had wept and called him a monster. He’d made himself smaller, calmer, quieter.

All while the terror that it would not be enough ate at him.

Wolfsbane did not scare him, nor iron chains, nor a cage. But now his wolf smelled his real fears on the breath of the Nightmare, felt his freedom. Aidan had been shifting without the moon for some years now, but suddenly it flooded the tower, blinding him. His bones cracked, re-formed. He landed on four paws, fur bristling. His lips lifted off his sharp teeth.

The wolf craved the moonlight, reveled in the twitch of his ears at every sound, his muscles ready to carry him across the moors. A howl built in his throat.

But mostly, his wolf saw Sorcha. Slumped, her red hair tangled with sweat, her fingers shaking. She was gasping.

The wolf stepped closer.

Aidan reached for those silver chains, the ones he wrapped around himself every day. The ones that kept the wolf under his command.