Long-press a paragraph to send danmaku
The wolf went down clean. One shot, silver hollow-point, right through the spine.
Rena Grey didn't wait for it to stop twitching. She was already moving, boots crunching over broken glass from the warehouse window she'd come through. The thing had been feeding when she'd tracked it here—some vagrant, maybe, or a runner from the camps south of the border. Didn't matter now. The body was still warm when she crouched beside the wolf, pulling the silver knife from her belt.
Proof of kill. That's what Marcus wanted. Tooth or claw, tagged and bagged.
The wolf's jaw hung open, tongue lolling. Blood pooled black under the sodium lights leaking through the busted roof. Rena gripped the pliers, wedged them around a canine, and pulled.
The tooth came free with a wet crack.
She was dropping it into the evidence pouch when the wolf's eye snapped open.
Not yellow anymore. Just dark. Human dark.
Rena jerked back, but the claws were already coming up, fast, faster than a dying wolf should move. She threw her arm up. The claws raked across her forearm, through the jacket, through skin. Hot pain, immediate and sharp, like someone had dragged a lit match down to the bone.
She didn't scream. She put the knife into its throat instead.
The wolf spasmed once, then went still for real this time.
Rena sat back hard, breathing through her teeth. Her arm was on fire. She peeled back the torn sleeve. Four parallel gashes, deep, welling red. The edges looked wrong. Darker than they should be. And the smell—Christ, the smell was like burning hair and wet dog and something else, something that made her sinuses ache.
"Stupid," she muttered. "Stupid, stupid—"
She fumbled for the med kit on her belt, yanked out the silver salve. The stuff stung like hell on regular cuts. On this, it felt like she'd shoved her arm into a furnace.
She bit down on her tongue hard enough to taste copper and smeared the salve along the gashes.
The pain didn't stop. It got worse.
Something under the skin started to burn, deeper than the salve should reach, deeper than the cuts. It spread up her arm, into her shoulder, crawling toward her chest. Rena's vision blurred. She pressed her back against the warehouse wall, trying to breathe, trying to think.
Wolves didn't get back up after a spine shot. They didn't.
Unless.
No. No, she'd checked the intel. Lone wolf, no pack, no Alpha claim on this territory. Just a stray that had crossed the border and got sloppy. Clean kill. In and out.
The burn reached her collarbone. Her heart was hammering now, too fast, too hard. She could feel it in her throat.
Rena forced herself to stand. The wolf's body was still there, cooling, ordinary. Dead. She grabbed her phone with her good hand, thumbed open the mission log, and took a photo of the body. Tagged the location. Sent it.
Marcus would want the debrief. She'd tell him about the scratch. Protocol said any exposure got logged. She'd done it before—gotten blood on her hands, once a bite that didn't break skin. This was different, though. This felt different.
Her phone buzzed. Text from Marcus: *Cleanup's ten minutes out. You clear?*
She typed back one-handed: *Clear. Scratch on forearm. Treated.*
Three dots. Then: *How deep?*
*Through the jacket.*
The dots stayed there for a long time. Too long.
Finally: *Get to the clinic. Now.*
Rena shoved the phone in her pocket and started walking. Her arm felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. The burn had stopped spreading, but it hadn't faded. It just sat there, hot and wrong, pulsing in time with her heartbeat.
She made it to her truck, parked two blocks over in the alley behind the old cannery. Her hands were shaking when she gripped the wheel. She turned the key. The engine coughed, caught.
The clinic was forty minutes south, back across the state line, tucked behind a feed store that didn't ask questions. Silver Oath kept three doctors on rotation there. They knew what to look for. Infection, poison, the early signs of turning.
Rena's mouth went dry.
No. She wasn't turning. You didn't turn from a scratch. Everyone knew that. You had to be bitten, had to have the saliva in the wound, the enzymes or whatever the hell it was that rewrote your DNA. A scratch was just a scratch.
She looked down at her arm. The gashes had stopped bleeding, but the skin around them looked mottled, veins standing out dark under the surface. She touched one of the cuts with her fingertip.
It didn't hurt anymore.
That was worse, somehow.
The road stretched out empty in front of her, headlights cutting through the desert dark. The moon was three-quarters full, hanging low and bloated on the horizon. She'd never minded moonlight before. Now it made her skin crawl. She turned on the radio, turned it up loud, some late-night talk show host ranting about immigration policy.
Her phone rang. Marcus.
She answered on speaker. "I'm en route."
"How's the arm?" His voice was flat, controlled. Marcus didn't do panic. Twenty years leading Silver Oath's regional operations, he'd seen everything.
"Stopped bleeding," Rena said. "Salve didn't do much."
"Didn't think it would." A pause. "You said it got back up."
"For a second. Maybe reflex."
"Wolves don't reflex after a spine shot, Rena."
She tightened her grip on the wheel. "I know."
"Then you know what that means."
She didn't answer.
"It means it wasn't alone," Marcus said. "It means someone sent it, and they knew you were coming. And it means whoever did it wanted you alive."
"Why?"
"That's what we're going to find out." Another pause, longer this time. "When you get to the clinic, Dr. Liao's going to run a full panel. Blood, tissue sample from the wound. We'll know for sure in six hours."
Rena's throat tightened. "And if it's positive?"
The silence stretched.
"Marcus."
"You know the protocol," he said quietly. "Bitten hunters don't make it to the full moon. They don't get the chance to turn on their own people."
"I'm not bitten. It's a scratch."
"Rena—"
"It's a *scratch*."
"We'll know in six hours," Marcus said. "Get to the clinic. I'll meet you there."
He hung up.
Rena threw the phone onto the passenger seat. Her hands were still shaking. She pressed the accelerator down, watched the speedometer needle climb. Eighty. Ninety. The desert blurred past.
The burn in her arm flared suddenly, bright and vicious. She gasped, swerved, got the truck back under control. When she looked down, the veins under her skin were glowing faintly, a sickly silver-green.
She could smell everything. The vinyl seats. The gun oil on her jacket. The blood dried on her sleeve. And under it all, something wild and sharp, like pine sap and wet earth.
The moon filled the windshield.
Somewhere deep in her chest, something howled back.