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Every question I dodged, every time she asked what I was and I wouldn’t tell her. It all lands at once, and her hand starts to fall.

"No," she whispers.

Ours. Please. My wolf whines, high in his chest, a sound I've never made for anyone.

Her gaze moves over all of me. The bulk of what I am. The scar splitting the fur above my left eye.

The same scar she traces with her eyes every time she thinks I'm not watching.

The poker lowers.

"It’s you," she says.

I can't answer. Not in this shape. I have no words like this, and I wouldn't know which ones anyway.

"Gage?"

My name in her mouth, careful, breaking on the end of it. My wolf lowers all the way to the grass and holds still, offering her the only truth we have left.

And behind her, past the reach of the porch light, in the dark at the edge of the garden, something else moves.

12

MAREN

STILL NINE DAYS UNTIL HALLOWEEN

My neighbor is a wolf shifter.

I'll have my breakdown about that later.

Right now there's a second thing in my garden, and I smell it before I see it. Wet ash. Something sweet underneath it, gone bad.

The wolf's head snaps up.

He's between me and the dark before I finish turning, all that brown fur planting itself over my bare feet, and the sound he makes isn't a growl. It's a promise.

The shadow uncoils out of my hydrangeas.

Too many joints. Yellow eyes set wrong in a face that keeps changing its mind about where the mouth goes. It pours across the grass like spilled oil.

It isn't looking at the wolf.

It's looking at me.

"Nope," I say.

It jumps.

I've been holding a fireplace poker for roughly ninety seconds, and I’ve never hit anything in my life. I swing anyway. The poker passes through it like a stick through smoke, and my arm goes numb to the elbow, cold as a walk-in freezer.

Then the wolf takes it from the side.

They go over the flower bed together. My porch light dies. Tearing. A shriek that scrapes the inside of my skull. I stumble back into the patio table hard enough to lose my breath.

Something wet and black splatters my ankle and burns like a struck match.

"Ow! Gage!"