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My mind split in two.

One half screamed—help her, save her now.

The other whispered—help her… so you can taste it yourself.

Another shape lumbered from the trees.

Bigger.

Worse.

They looked like monstrous dogs at first, until you noticed the faces. Too human. Their backs rose unnaturally high, shoulders shaped wrong, while their hind legs were pure wolf, thick, powerful, twitching with hunger. Each stood nearly three times my size. The teeth froze my blood. Long. Razor-sharp.

Valentina cried out again as claws drove deeper into her back, and that sound snapped something inside me. She didn’t deserve this. My feet moved before my mind could stop them.

A hand seized my wrist, yanking me back hard. Mark stepped in front of me, gripping my shoulders. “Go, Alex! Go!” he shouted. Our eyes locked. There was no fear in his expression, only certainty.

I hated myself for it, but I ran. I fled down the path toward home, heart hammering, lungs burning. I didn’t think. I just knew I didn’t want to die out there. Whatever those things were, they were stronger than me. For now.

Hours later, the door burst open.

Twilight had bled into night, streaking the sky with bruised gold. Mark carried Valentina inside, her body limp, breath shallow.

“Clear the pillows,” he said. I sprang forward, tearing them away as he laid her on her stomach. Deep gashes scored her back, already beginning to knit. When she shifted to adjust herself, they tore open again. She looked wrecked. Mark didn’t look much better, but he was still standing. I knelt beside her, taking in the damage. White hair stained red. Shirt shredded. She hissed, trying to lift her head, and I pressed her gently back down.

“Don’t move.”

“Trust me,” she gritted out, “I’m trying.”

After a beat of silence, I asked quietly, “What were those?”

“Werewolves,” they groaned in unison.

TAINTED | CHAPTER 3

Enchanted stories

I lay in my bed the next morning, eyelids pressed tight together. Flashes of memory seeped through my waking consciousness. My mother’s accepting expression swirled into the darkness like a taunt. How weak I had been to let her be devoured by a stranger. I stood there in my memory, watching it happen like a helpless child. Had I not defended her the way I should have?

The way her hazel eyes had glistened back at me, pleading for my submission, had broken something in my chest. I should have been stronger. I shouldn’t have let her throw her life away like it meant nothing, because it meant everything.

Through that haze of doubt and murky foresight, white curls and caramel skin intruded on my thoughts. My ego. Valentina. She got under my skin in a way that unsettled my own body. She felt like a threat and a sin all at once, and I hated that I couldn’t tell which terrified me more.

I needed to be guarded around her. She pulled me out of focus, and I despised not being in control.

The last twenty-four hours had been completely out of my reach. I didn’t have the capacity to be that open. I didn’t want my norm to change, to lose university, to stop being around my friends. I had been managing grieving Mark, holding on to school, keeping life tangible. That kind of pain, with compromise, made sense. It was crushing. Even in the thin haze between sleep and consciousness.

Red hazed my vision as sunlight flooded through the window, warming my cheeks and making the heat in my veins as tangible as the temperature against my skin. Anger surged through me, staining every part of me crimson. It rattled my bones and sank low in my belly, a hunger that demanded satisfaction.

It wasn’t just because mythical creatures had proven to be as real as hummingbirds. As idiotic as it sounded, that revelation wasn’t as far-fetched as the horror that followed. The thing I had believed belonged to science fiction and fantasy alone. Even in those stories, death was unavoidable. But for Mark…it had become a loophole.

He had been alive, well, thriving even. His skin looked refreshed, untouched by stress or age. No wrinkles carved by time. No exhaustion clinging to his eyes. Somehow, I knew he had escaped to his version of better. There had been a glint in his gaze when it landed on mine, something relieving, almost hopeful; but it vanished the moment my shock registered.

And between the two revelations, it was my father’s return that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Did he know how deeply this would hurt? How badly it would fracture an already shattered system? I had been grieving him every single day. Not one thought passed where he wasn’t seeded into it. I ran on fumes for weeks after it happened, missed assignments, failed tests, and at night school just to stay afloat. I had barely started to feel whole again.

So yes, this hurt.

How does a man leave his family and become a ghost? He’d been gone an entire year. And now, now, just as I was becoming this… thing, he showed up out of nowhere. Everything about it felt wrong. The blood boiling beneath my skin screamed a warning I couldn’t ignore.