Page 1
Chapter 1
Hewit
Screaming Woods Diner has seventeen tables, and I sit at the same one every morning.
Back corner, two walls behind me, clear view of the door, six feet from the emergency exit. Nobody can come up behind me without climbing through a window, and if somebody is stupid enough to climb through a diner window at seven in the morning, that’s on them.
Marnie stopped asking if I wanted somewhere less gloomy years ago. Now she drops a mug of coffee in front of me without speaking, turns it so the handle faces my right hand, and walks away.
This is why Marnie is my favorite person in Screaming Woods. She knows when to leave a man alone.
The coffee is terrible, which is also why I like it. Nothing unexpected has ever happened while drinking a cup of Marnie’s coffee. It tastes exactly the same every morning: burned beans, scorched pot, and the faint suggestion that someone rinsed the machine sometime during the previous administration.
I take a drink.
Across the room, somebody laughs too loudly, and my shoulders tense automatically.
The wolf doesn’t stir. He hasn’t cared about much of anything in years. Not since the first few months after the change, when every sound was too loud, every smell too sharp, every heartbeat in a crowded room an invitation to lose control. Back then, he was everywhere inside me, throwing himself against bone and skin, clawing for a way out.
Now he’s mostly quiet. I prefer him that way.
“Usual?”
I look up.
Marnie has returned with her order pad, even though she already knows the answer. She’s some kind of bird now. Nobody has ever told me what kind, and I’ve never asked. Brown feathers cover her forearms and disappear beneath the sleeves of her uniform, and a small crest rises from her hair whenever she gets irritated.
It’s up now.
I nod. “Usual.”
“That’s six words already this morning.”
I stare at her. “What?”
She grins, and the crest settles. “Seven,” she says, and walks away.
I drink my coffee.
People in this town think I’m antisocial. They’re right. They’ve also decided I’m mysterious, tortured, dangerous, secretly lonely, possibly cursed, and—according to something I overheard in the Howling Crust last month—“the sort of man who probably needs a really good hug.”
I haven’t been back to the Howling Crust since.
The truth is simpler—I like quiet, and I’ve learned that the simplest way to protect it is to stay away from people. People ask questions. They stare at the scars on my hands and pretend they weren’t looking. They want to know what happened to my hair. And sooner or later, someone always says, you know, Hewit, it’s been years now.
As if I haven’t noticed. As if time is supposed to turn one thing into another merely by passing.
Long enough for Screaming Woods to stop treating what happened here as a catastrophe and start putting cartoon monsters on coffee mugs for tourists.
Long enough for the gargoyles to complain about pigeons landing on them.
Long enough for Gordy to figure out sunglasses so his gorgon stare doesn’t accidentally petrify someone, Gregor to reinforce the suspension on his truck to accommodate his ogre-sized frame, and half the town to stop apologizing every time somebody sprouts claws in public.
People adapt. That’s what everyone says.
I look down at my hand around the coffee mug. Three pale scars cross my knuckles, and another disappears beneath the cuff of my jacket.
I adapted too. Just differently.
