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I stopped, and every sensible thing in me said to back away slowly and quietly and get up the slope to the lights. Unfortunately the sensible thing in me had been underfunded since birth.

We watched each other. My breath came hard off the run, and sweat cooled at the base of my neck and down my spine in a cold line. The woods behind the wolf, or whatever it was, were silent, too silent maybe, or maybe I’d just gone dramatic on myself because I was standing in the twilight near a wolf the size of a small horse trying to work out whether eye contact counted as rude. Or was it the only thing keeping it from attacking me?

“Okay,” I said, and my voice came out thin.

The wolf’s ears shifted forward. Wonderful, it understood my tone.

“That’s not better,” I told it.

It tilted its head to the side. Not quite like a dog and not cute, but slow and considering, the way a person tilted their head when a new piece of information had just changed everything they thought they knew about the situation in front of them.

The hair rose along my arms.

I knew I should have run, but I couldn’t, not because I thought it would chase me, but because it seemed like it was just curious and had come to investigate. I knew that in the same irrational place that had known the cards belonged in separate stacks and Cormac’s glove had touched something other than my skin. That place had been right more often than it had any right to be, and I had learned grudgingly to listen when it spoke.

The wolf, for lack of a better term, took one step closer, and I lifted a hand. “No.”

It stopped, just stopped, as if the word had been a boundary it had already decided it would honor before I even spoke it. That scared me more than a growl would have.

Neither of us moved. Behind me the school lights came on one by one, warm yellow squares climbing the dark stone. The woods had gone so dark that they were almost black now and the wolf stood with me between the two, the lit school and the dark trees. It watched me with eyes that caught none of the light.

“You’ve seen me,” I said, because apparently I’d decided conversation was a survival strategy. “Congratulations.”

Its breath huffed out in a cloud once in the cold, and I did the thing I always did when I was scared, which was talk, because talk kept the fear from settling into my mind. “I’m not food,” I told it. “I’m ninety percent flannel and bad decisions. You’d regret it.”

It blinked, slowly, and I would have sworn on my mother’s tea that the blink was patient. Not hungry-patient or a predator waiting out its dinner, but patient like Ms. Mercer had been patient when she helped me learn how to read. That, more than the size of it, was what kept my feet where they were.

Because I had felt watched like this exactly once before, on my own street through smoke-streaked glass, a small straight-backed woman under a dead streetlight lifting one hand like she was marking my place on a page. This was that, not an animal deciding whether to run me down but something older, taking a reading.

“Okay,” I said, quieter.

A sound startled me and my head snapped toward it before I could stop it. A bird broke from the branches behind it. When I looked back barely even a second later the wolf was gone. Not running or slipping away into the brush but completely gone, and the space where it had stood held nothing but roots and shadow. I hadn’t even heard it move.

I walked back to the east range, which felt important because walking was a decision, and showed that even though I was shaken by the surprise of the wolf, I wasn’t scared of it.

I told no one about what I’d seen.

The choice was instant. I mean, who would I even tell? Kit, who’d joke and tease me about it? Pippa, who’d earnestly explain which rule I’d broken by being looked at by wildlife? Cormac, who’d write the wolf into a report under subject displays attraction to unclassified threats and underline it twice? Linden, who’d go quiet and make me want to fill the quiet with everything I knew? No. Æscholt had kept a hundred secrets from me since the gate, and this would be one of mine.

The next night I ran, and the wolf wasn’t there. I told myself I was relieved.

Lie.

I hated admitting it even inside my own head, but the disappointment was real and specific, a small hollow where the dark shape should have been.

When I ran the night after that, I saw it again, standing at the same bend, watching. “You’re persistent,” I said, slowing to a stop.

It sat, actually sat, folding down onto its haunches, like this was an appointment we’d both agreed to keep and it had simply arrived on time.

I put my hands on my hips and got my breath back. “I don’t have food.”

The wolf looked unimpressed.

“Or answers.”

Somehow it looked even more unimpressed with that, which surprised me.

It stayed until I’d finished catching my breath and then was gone between one blink and the next, the same way it went before. It wasn’t there every night but often enough. While I ran the wolf watched, sometimes from the treeline, sometimes from farther down by the low wall where the old roots had broken the stones apart and pushed them up out of the earth. It never came close again and it never threatened. It simply existed at the edge of my hour like a dark mark of punctuation, closing off the end of a sentence I couldn’t read.