Page 26

I stand at the back window and watch the dark line of trees. Something moves near the fence, low to the ground and quick enough that I only catch the shape before it disappears behind brush. I lean toward the glass, trying to separate animal from shadow.

I don’t remember shifting or opening the back door. One moment I’m at the window and the next I’m bent over the kitchen sink with blood running off my hands. The basin is smeared dark red where my palms dragged across the steel, mud has dried over both knees of my cargo pants, and a chair lies broken against the tile behind me.

I reach for the missing stretch and get nothing. A shift should leave something behind: the wrench through my spine, the burn in my shoulders, dirt against my paws, blood in my mouth. There’s none of it. I’m standing at the sink with my hands dripping red, and I don’t know what I did between the window and here.

“Arlo?” His name comes out wrong, half word and half huff. When he doesn’t answer, my mind puts Arlo’s blood on my hands instead.

I leave the kitchen too fast and shoulder the wall, rattling a picture frame. The office is empty, papers pushed crooked across the desk but no blood anywhere. The bedroom is empty too. I check the bathroom even though the bond tells me he’s still somewhere in the house, because panic has turned everything coming through it into noise I can’t trust. I hit the living room at a run and stop in the doorway so hard that my shoulder catches the frame.

Arlo is asleep on the couch with a book open against his chest, his head tipped toward the cushion and one hand loose near his stomach. I stand there covered in blood and watch his chest fall, then rise again. My knees nearly give out when it rises a second time.

The sound I make wakes him. His eyes open, and the second he sees me he sits upright so fast the book hits the floor. “Orion, what happened?” I cross the room before he can stand and take both of his wrists. There are no cuts, so I push up one sleeve, then the other, before my eyes jump to his throat and jaw. Arlo lets me check until my hands start moving over the same clean skin twice.

Then he closes his hands around my forearms, firm enough that I have to notice him. “This isn’t my blood. Look at me. I’m not hurt.”

I shake my head because the words still won’t settle. His pulse jumps visibly in his throat. I keep two fingers against his wrist anyway, needing to feel the beat there while the bond floods me with the same proof from the inside. Only then does my chest loosen enough to take a full breath.

“You can check again if you need to,” he says. His own fear has started leaking through now, but he keeps his hands steady on me. “Just hear me too. I’m alive, and this blood isn’t mine.”

I look at his face instead of his throat. “I don’t remember.” The words barely feel connected to the blood still drying on my hands, and I keep both palms turned upward between us because I don’t know what else to do with them.

Arlo’s grip changes without tightening. His thumbs settle against the inside of my forearms, where he can feel how hard my pulse is jumping. “What don’t you remember?”

“The kitchen. I was at the window, and then I was at the sink.” I hold my hands between us and stare at the blood caught in the lines of my palms. “I don’t know where this came from.”

Arlo’s thumbs go still against my forearms. Alarm floods his scent, and his eyes cut once toward the open back door before coming back to me. “Show me the last thing you remember.”

We go back to the kitchen together. I point to the window. Arlo looks at the broken chair, the open door, and the bloody smear on the handle, then follows the mud prints outside without asking whether I broke anything.

He starts around the corner of the house ahead of me, and my chest seizes before he makes it two steps. I grab the back of his shirt and hold on. “Stay where I can see you.”

Arlo looks over his shoulder instead of pulling away. He slows until we’re side by side and waits for me to let go of his shirt. “All right. I’m here.”

We find the coyote half on the gravel and half in the grass near the corner of the house. Its throat is torn open and one side of the rib cage has been crushed inward. Rain has thinned some of the blood into the dirt, but the smell is strong enough that I know before I look at my hands again.

Arlo crouches near the body without touching it, studying the mud and the torn grass before he looks back at me. “Do you remember coming outside?”

“No.” I force myself to search the missing stretch again anyway. Nothing comes back no matter how hard I press at it.

Arlo looks from my face to the coyote and back again. He gives me time to search before he asks anything else. “Do you remember seeing it?”

I search the blank space again and find nothing. “No. I remember the window, and then I remember the sink.” The missing stretch stays empty no matter how hard I push at it.

Arlo’s mouth tightens as he looks from the coyote to the mud on my pants. His eyes come back to my face before he asks anything else. “Did you feel the shift starting?”

“No.” The answer is worse than the dead animal. I can usually feel the shift coming, even when I can’t stop it. This time there isn’t anything to remember fighting.

I stare at the coyote until the torn fur blurs. My gaze catches on the crushed ribs before dropping to the blood dried over my hands. “I killed it.”

Arlo doesn’t make the word smaller. “Yes. You killed it, and you don’t remember doing it.” Hearing him say it that plainly makes my stomach turn. I look at the blood on my hands again, then at Arlo, waiting for him to move farther away. He doesn’t.

My attention snaps back to the image of him asleep on the couch, defenseless while I was somewhere outside my own memory. “You were asleep. I could have come back through that door and hurt you before either of us knew I was gone.”

Arlo’s face tightens. “I was asleep, and I didn’t know where you were. That scares me.” His hands stay at his sides instead of reaching for me. “But when you came back to yourself, you ran through the house looking for me, and you checked me for injuries. I’m not going to invent a version where you attacked me just because the blank space is frightening.”

His pulse is still jumping in his throat. I keep looking at it because my body hasn’t caught up with the fact that the skin is clean. I go inside and head for the den, not the woods or the perimeter. The chair beneath the knob scrapes loudly when I shove the door closed. I crawl behind the desk in the bloodied clothes and drop into the middle of the blankets.

My palm lands on one of Arlo’s gray shirts and leaves a red smear across it. I freeze. The fabric normally smells like him strongly enough to settle me, and now coyote blood is spreading through the cotton under my hand.