Page 96 of Wild Thorns

I hadn't responded. Couldn't find the words. What was I supposed to say? Thanks for revealing you're werewolves in the most traumatic way possible? Sorry I puked after watching you tear someone's throat out? See you at Sunday dinner?

The hysteria bubbled up again, that broken laugh that kept threatening to escape every time I thought about the sheer absurdity of my situation. I'd fled one monster only to move in with three others. Different species, sure, but monsters nonetheless.

Except.

Except they hadn't felt like monsters when Callum's body was a wall between me and danger. When Jasper's voice went gentle and careful as he said my name through the locked door. When Eli offered explanations instead of excuses, calm and measured, even covered in blood.

We would never hurt you, Jasper had said. Just gonna sit out here for a while, and talk a little.

Marcus had never said that. Marcus had been a master manipulator, using guilt to somehow make himself always appear as the victim of my inconsideration.

The comparison sat uneasily in my chest, refusing to resolve into something simple.

Coffee went into the cup. I drank it. Nothing registered but the temperature, the bitterness, the absence of flavor.

The kitchen felt different now. Smaller, somehow. I stood at the counter and noticed things I hadn't seen in the dark. The window latched from outside—their work. The yard below, mostly scrubbed clean—but not entirely. A patch of earth beneath the magnolia tree was darker than the rest, the grass torn and pressed flat where something heavy had fallen. The railing where the creature had hit still bore a crack I hadn’t noticed before. And beneath the sharp green smell of morning dew, something metallic lingered in the humidity—faint, but unmistakable. The violence hadn’t vanished. It had just been made quiet. They must have secured the apartment while I was locked in the bathroom, probably before they'd even washed the blood from their hands.

I didn't know if that made it better or worse; the erasure of evidence, the way they'd smoothed over the violence like it was routine. Maybe for them, it was.

A small piece of paper sat on the counter near the coffee maker. I hadn't noticed it last night. The handwriting was neat, precise, Eli's.

The perimeter is secure. We'll give you space. There's leftover lasagna in your fridge if you're hungry. —E

Leftover lasagna. As if this were a normal morning after a normal night. As if I hadn't watched them transform into something out of a nightmare and tear a creature apart with their teeth.

I opened the fridge. The lasagna was there, covered in foil, still warm.

Still warm.

One of them had been here recently, probably Jasper. Within the last hour, maybe. Checking on me, leaving food, making sure I was okay; all without waking me, without making a sound.

The thoughtfulness of it cracked something in my chest. The violation of it sealed the crack right back up.

I closed the fridge and didn't eat.

The dream kept pushing at the edges of my consciousness.

Darkness. Death. The Prince of Pain.

There was something there. Something important. I could feel it the way you feel a word on the tip of your tongue, almost there but not quite within reach.

A woman. An old woman, maybe, with dark skin and knowing eyes. Had I dreamed of this woman before? Pain lanced through my brain like a hot fire poker.

A kitchen that smelled like coffee, chicory, and something green and herbal. The certainty of it hit me like vertigo, a bone-deep recognition that had no source I could name. My head pounded.

Home, something had whispered in that dream.

Which was insane. I'd never been to a place like that in my life.

But Tara's grandmother had taught her the old ways. A mambo, Tara had called her once, in that half-joking way she had when she talked about her family's traditions.

Tara had given me the charm before I left Atlanta. Had pressed it into my palm with an intensity that had surprised me. Protection, she'd said. Humor me.

In the dream, the charm had been the only thing the shadow and oily darkness couldn't touch.

Sleep wouldn’t come. I tried—lay in the dark for hours, staring at the ceiling, my mind circling the same impossible facts. Werewolves. Claws. Blood. I grabbed my phone and typed “werewolf” into the search bar, then stared at the results—Hollywood nonsense, folklore wikis, Reddit threads full of creepy pasta. None of it matched what I’d seen. None of it captured the sound of bones reshaping, the wet crack of a jaw elongating, the way Callum’s eyes had held mine even as his body became something else entirely.

My chest tightened. A panic attack, building slow and inevitable. I pressed my back against the headboard and counted breaths the way my therapist had taught me—in for four, hold for seven, out for eight—while the walls of my apartment seemed to close in around me. The world I’d believed in, the rational, explainable world, was gone. Replaced by something with teeth.