"Stay down."
Rena Grey squeezed the trigger.
The wolf dropped. One shot, silver hollow-point, clean through the spine. It hit the warehouse floor and didn't get back up.
She didn't wait to see if it twitched. She was already moving, boots crunching over broken glass, the sodium lights overhead flickering like they were on their last legs. The thing had been feeding when she'd tracked it here. Some vagrant, maybe. Didn't matter now.
Proof of kill. That's what Marcus wanted.
She crouched beside the body, pulled the pliers from her belt. The wolf's jaw hung open, tongue lolling, blood pooling black underneath. She gripped a canine and yanked.
Wet crack. Tooth came free.
She was dropping it into the evidence pouch when the wolf's eye snapped open.
Not yellow anymore. Human dark.
"Shit—"
Claws came up fast. Too fast. She threw her arm up and the claws raked through her jacket, through skin, hot and sharp like someone dragged a lit match down to the bone.
She didn't scream. She shoved the knife into its throat instead.
The wolf spasmed. Went still.
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. Burning hair and wet dog and something else, something that made her sinuses ache.
"Stupid," she muttered. "Stupid—"
She yanked the med kit off her belt, grabbed the silver salve. It 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, tasted copper, and smeared the salve along the gashes.
The pain got worse.
Something under the skin started to burn, deeper than the cuts, deeper than the salve should reach. It spread up her arm, into her shoulder, crawling toward her chest.
Her 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. She'd checked the intel. Lone wolf, no pack, no Alpha claim on this territory. Just a stray that crossed the border and got sloppy. Clean kill. In and out.
The burn reached her collarbone. Her heart hammered too fast, too hard. She could feel it in her throat.
Rena forced herself to stand. Grabbed her phone with her good hand. Took a photo of the body, tagged the location, sent it.
Her phone buzzed.
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. 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 with her heartbeat.
She made it to her truck, two blocks over behind the old cannery. Her hands shook when she gripped the wheel. She turned the key. 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.
Her 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 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.
It didn't hurt anymore.
That was worse.
The road stretched out empty ahead, headlights cutting through desert dark. The moon hung low and bloated on the horizon, three-quarters full. She'd never minded moonlight before.
Now it made her skin crawl.
She turned on the radio, cranked it loud. Some late-night 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 ops, 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 gonna find out." Another pause, longer this time. "When you get to the clinic, Dr. Liao's gonna 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?"
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. 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. Sickly silver-green.
She could smell everything.
The vinyl seats. Gun oil on her jacket. 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.