Chapter 2:Those eyes

 

Emily could not move.

Not would not — every signal her brain sent to her legs, her arms, her fingers curled into the mud, arrived and simply went nowhere, like a phone ringing in an empty house. She lay there in the rain, half-propped on one elbow, staring up at the broad black shoulders of the wolf that had just spoken a word no wolf should know how to say.

It hadn't moved either. Not away from her.

It had turned.

Where a heartbeat ago its enormous body had loomed directly over her, now it stood between her and the ring of glowing red eyes closing in through the trees, head low, hackles raised, a wall of muscle and fur angled outward like a shield. The creature that had chased her through half the forest, that had torn a man apart in front of her, was now positioned like it would tear apart anything that came near her instead.

None of it made sense. None of it was supposed to be happening at all.

---

More shapes peeled out of the darkness — four, then six, then more than Emily could count, each one as impossibly large as the first, each one silent as smoke until they weren't. As they drew closer, one by one, they lowered their massive heads. Not in fear. In something that looked, unmistakably, like reverence.

He's their leader, she thought, distantly, from somewhere far outside her own body. He's the Alpha.

One of the wolves — leaner than the others, its eyes a duller, more restless red — didn't bow. It paced at the edge of the clearing, and when it spoke, the sound crawled up out of its throat in the same broken half-human growl the black wolf had used.

"We must take the girl. Before it's too late."

The Alpha's answering growl didn't sound like language at all. It sounded like the forest floor cracking open. Every wolf in the clearing flinched back a full step, ears flat, tails dropping low — even the lean one that had spoken, which bared its teeth once, defiantly, before backing down into the tree line with the rest.

Emily's mind, still trying and failing to process any of this as real, latched onto the only thought it could hold.

They talk. They actually talk.

She pinched the soft skin of her inner arm, hard, half-expecting to wake up in her bed with her biology notes still open on her phone. Pain flared bright and immediate. She didn't wake up. There was nothing to wake up from. The rain kept falling, the eyes kept glowing, and somewhere behind her still-elbowed body, the world she'd believed in an hour ago had quietly, permanently ended.

Werewolves are real.

The thought landed with the flat, stunned weight of a fact, not a fear. There was no room left for disbelief. Disbelief was a luxury for people who hadn't just watched a wolf the size of a horse speak a full sentence.

---

The Alpha's head turned back toward her — just for a second, just a glance — and in that glance Emily saw something that didn't belong on the face of a monster.

Conflict.

His golden eyes found hers and held there, and beneath the wildness in them she could see something straining, like two currents pulling in opposite directions inside the same body. Every line of him seemed to want to close the distance between them, to plant himself at her side and never move again. And yet each time he leaned even an inch that way, something else in his gaze pulled taut, uncertain, almost suspicious — like he was scenting something in the rain-soaked air around her that didn't add up.

She smelled human. She was human, obviously, she wanted to scream at him, whatever he thought he'd caught a whiff of. But some older, more animal part of him wasn't convinced. Underneath the ordinary smell of rain and sweat and fear, there was something else threaded through her scent — something that didn't belong to an eighteen-year-old girl who'd spent the night quizzing her best friend on the Krebs cycle. Something that, whatever it was, made the Alpha go rigid every time it hit him fresh.

He didn't understand it. Emily could see that much even through her own terror. He didn't understand her at all.

And for exactly as long as he stood there, torn between instinct and doubt, no one in that clearing was looking at Emily.

---

She moved before she'd even decided to.

Her hand found a fallen branch half-buried in the mud beside her, and she hurled it sideways into the trees with everything her shaking arm had left. It cracked against a trunk and clattered down through the underbrush, and every red eye in the clearing snapped toward the sound at once, a ripple of low snarls breaking out across the pack.

It was maybe two seconds. It was enough.

Emily scrambled up and ran.

She didn't look back — couldn't, wouldn't, some deep animal part of her own certain that looking back would be the last thing she ever did — and she didn't hear the Alpha's paws pounding after her the way they had before. No footsteps. No breath at her heels. Just her own ragged gasping and the slap of her shoes through the mud as the tree line finally, mercifully, broke open onto the street at the edge of town.

Behind her, in the clearing she'd left, the black wolf stood exactly where she'd fled from him, watching the space where she'd disappeared into the dark. He did not follow.

He simply watched, golden eyes narrowed, torn between two decisions he had no intention of explaining to anyone — least of all himself.

---

Emily didn't stop running until she hit her own front door.

She fumbled the key twice before it caught, threw herself inside, and slammed the door so hard the frame rattled. Lock. Deadbolt. Chain. She went down the hallway checking every window on the ground floor, yanking each latch shut with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, until the house felt less like a house and more like a fortress with entirely too many soft spots.

"Emily?"

Her mother stood in the kitchen doorway in her work uniform, mug of tea halfway to her mouth, eyes going wide at the sight of her daughter — soaked through, streaked with mud, a thin red line scored across one cheek where a branch had caught her.

"I fell," Emily said. The lie came out steadier than she expected. "On the way back from Sarah's. It's nothing, Mom, I'm fine."

Her mother didn't look entirely convinced, but three years of double shifts had taught her which battles she had the energy to fight at midnight, and this — thankfully, mercifully — wasn't one of them. She made Emily promise to put something on the scratches and go straight to bed, and Emily promised, and meant absolutely none of it.

---

She didn't put anything on the scratches. She sat on her bedroom floor with her back against the door and her phone screen washing blue light across her face, typing search after search with fingers that still hadn't fully stopped trembling.

Giant black wolves Blackwood Forest.

People seeing monsters in the woods.

Wolves that talk.

Nothing. A decade-old forum thread about hikers going missing, half the replies mocking the other half for believing it. A handful of grainy videos exactly like the one she'd laughed at hours earlier, filed under conspiracy and urban legend and things sad people believe, comment sections full of crying-laughing emojis. Nothing that looked like what she'd seen. Nothing that explained a word, spoken low and impossible in the rain.

Mate.

She closed the tab and sat there in the dark, staring at nothing until when sleep caught up to her.