Page 43 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

Coffee at six, exactly twenty-two grams, the same chipped mug I’ve drunk from since 1987. It tastes like nothing. Locks checked at seven, three times each, because three is the number my brain accepts before it lets me move on, and I’ve never in three hundred years found a better answer than that. This morning I check them a fourth time, and it doesn’t help, and I stand with my hand on the deadbolt understanding exactly what’s wrong with me and unable to fix it. The rituals are all still here. The point of them has gone somewhere down a mountain road in a woman’s rearview mirror.

Pack reports by eight. Theo’s voice in my head, steady and reliable: Territorial boundaries secure. No unusual activity. The human from the break-in has been released, memory adjusted, no lasting harm. He’s telling people he had a strange dream about wolves. Standard response.

Good, I send back. And the other matter?

Still watching. Whoever was on that ridge hasn’t come back. Might have been random patrol that didn’t realize they weren’t supposed to be there.

Or might have been something else.

Or might have been something else, Theo agrees. I’ll keep eyes on it.

I end the connection and stand in my kitchen, surrounded by the precise order I’ve spent decades cultivating, and feel absolutely nothing.

I have survived plagues. Wars. The fall of empires and the rise of nations. I survived the Spanish flu and the Inquisition and both World Wars. I survived the invention of the automobile and the telephone and the goddamned leaf blower, that noise, that infernal noise, every autumn for the past sixty years.

Three hundred years of survival and adaptation and control, and one human with sticky notes and chaos shelves has completely dismantled my ability to function.

I pour the rest of the coffee down the drain.

Go to check the locks again.

Stop myself with my hand on the front door.

This is ridiculous. You checked them. They’re locked. You know they’re locked. You watched yourself lock them three times.

I check them anyway. The fourth time doesn’t feel as satisfying as the first three.

She’s keeping her distance.

I expected that. Hoped against it, maybe, somewhere in the irrational part of my brain that doesn’t understand concepts like “space” and “processing time.” But expected it nonetheless. After what she saw, what I showed her, distance is reasonable. Healthy. Smart.

She needs time to decide if she can accept the impossible.

I hate every second of it.

Give her space. She asked for space. Respecting her boundaries is the bare minimum you owe her after showing up at her back door naked.

I respect her space.

I also patrol the perimeter of her building every night, because respecting her space doesn’t mean I have to stop keeping her safe. Those two things can coexist. I’m a multitasking alpha.

It’s on day nine that I find the paper.

I’m in lycan form, padding through the shadows behind Fable Tales, when I catch the scent of fresh ink and her particular blend of coffee and anxiety. Something new. A trace that wasn’t here last night.

I shift, quickly, quietly, and follow the scent to her back door. There, tucked under a rock, a kept secret, is a folded piece of paper.

My name is written on the outside. In purple ink. With a small drawing of what might be a wolf or might be a very fluffy dog, she clearly wasn’t sure which.

My chest does something complicated, a warmth and a tightness at once, a feeling I haven’t experienced in so long I’ve almost forgotten what it’s called.

Hope.

I sit on her steps, human form, clothed, respectable, and unfold the paper.

LYCAN FAQ FOR THE CONFUSED HUMAN Please answer honestly. I will know if you’re lying. (I won’t, actually, but it sounded threatening.)

I read the questions.