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Marnie brings breakfast: four eggs, bacon, sausage, fried potatoes, toast, and another cup of coffee. She sets everything down and looks at the empty chair opposite me.

I follow her gaze. “No.”

Her beak—if it can be called a beak when most of her face is still human—twitches. “Maybe I was wondering whether you wanted ketchup.”

“No.”

“That’s eight.”

“Marnie.”

“Nine.”

I huff as I pick up my fork.

She laughs under her breath and leaves me alone.

Good woman.

I eat. Eating gives me something to do besides listen.

The diner wakes around me in layers: cutlery against plates, coffee pouring, the bell over the door, conversations I don’t want but can’t stop hearing.

Mrs. Marrow argues with her husband about guttering. Two builders discuss a roof on Witchhazel Way. A man asks whether the pastries at Conjure and Crumb actually curse people.

“They’d have been shut down by now,” his wife says. “I think the health department would have something to say.”

“The health department’s chief inspector is a banshee,” he points out.

I cut into a sausage.

Screaming Woods—normal enough that people worry about property taxes, and strange enough that the woman collecting those taxes has horns.

I came here before all of that became ordinary. Reid and I came together.

That thought slips in before I can stop it.

I set my fork down.

My wolf moves. Not even movement, really, more like awareness. A low stirring at the back of my mind.

I shut it down. Not today.

Most days, I can go hours without thinking about my brother. Sometimes a whole day. I learned a long time ago not to call that progress.

Reid was beside me in the town square that night. Music, cheap decorations, people laughing under strings of orange lights while Karloff handed out cups of Frankenpunch like he’d invented happiness.

I remember Reid lifting his cup. I remember doing the same. I remember midnight.

After that, the memories come in pieces.

Pain, bone, and blood. Reid screaming. Me screaming louder. White fur where skin should have been. Hands that weren’t hands, and a hunger so violent that I thought it might split me open from the inside.

Then years of making sure Reid never found me.

I stare at my breakfast until the diner comes back into focus. My coffee has gone cold, but I drink it anyway.

The bell over the door rings, but I don’t look up this time. People come in. People leave. That’s another thing I like about this table. I can watch them do both without becoming part of either.