Midnight Debt: Never His, Always His

REINA

I should have taken the main road.

That's the thought that keeps circling back to me now, sitting on my bathroom floor with my back against the cold tub and my knees pulled to my chest. I should have taken the main road. It adds seven minutes to the walk home from the bakery, and after a nine-hour shift my feet always hate me by the time I reach the front door, but seven minutes and sore feet is a small price to pay for staying alive.

I should have taken the main road. But I didn't today.

I press the back of my head against the tub and close my eyes and try to put the last forty minutes in order because my brain keeps skipping over certain parts like I’m beginning to develop amnesia.

I was almost home. The bakery smell was still in my hair and I was thinking about nothing more significant than whether there was anything left in the fridge worth eating when I heard them.

Not footsteps. Not voices. Something lower than both. A sound that didn't belong on a city street, in a residential neighborhood, at ten thirty on a Tuesday night.

I stopped walking.

Then three of them stepped out of the shadows between two parked cars.

I don't have clean words for what they were. I've spent my whole life knowing that the wolf world exists, you can't grow up in my family and not know, not with the weight of what we owe pressing down on every dinner table conversation, every hushed argument behind closed doors, every careful thing my father never quite said out loud. I know they exist the way I know certain dangerous things exist.

My brain said run and my legs said where and the answer to that was nowhere because they were already close, already spreading out in that particular way that meant they'd done this before, that this wasn't panic or instinct, this was organized, and the only thought I had time to complete was this is how it ends.

And then something else came out of the dark.

I can't describe it properly. I've tried three times in my own head and I keep running out of language. Enormous. Dark. Moving with a speed that made everything else in my field of vision look slow and clumsy. It went through the three of them the way a stone goes through water and when it was over, when the sounds stopped and the night went back to being just a night, they were gone and I was still standing.

Shaking. But standing.

It shifted then. I don't have a better word. It rearranged itself from something I had no category for into the shape of a man, tall, broad, the kind of size that makes a doorway look smaller and it crouched down to where I'd apparently ended up on my knees.

I couldn't see his face. Maybe the angle was wrong, or the light was wrong, or I wasn't working well… probably all three. I felt hands. Large ones, checking my arms, my shoulders, moving to my wrist to find my pulse with a carefulness that made absolutely no sense given what I'd just watched those same hands do.

"You're safe, but don't move yet."

I thought about saying something sharp back. I'm not someone who receives instructions quietly, even from things that have just saved my life on a public street. But my voice wasn't cooperating, so I just looked at the shadow of him in the dark and thought about how I'd spent my entire life hating what he was, and how that hadn't stopped him, and how I didn't know what to do with that.

He helped me to my feet.

That's the last clear thing. His hand around my wrist, steadying me, and then a sound somewhere to the left pulled his attention away and he moved toward it, because of course he did, because whatever he was, he moved toward danger.

I stumbled until I got to my own front door and got it open and got inside.

Then I went to the bathroom and sat on the floor and that's where I still am, turning the night over and over, trying to find the part where it makes sense.

My wrist feels strange.

I look down at it and understand why.

My bracelet is gone. The thin gold one my mother gave me three years before she died, the one I've worn every single day since Oh no

I press my thumb to the bare skin where it used to sit and try to calm myself. At least, I’m alive.

My eyes are burning but not from the cold, it’s the voice that’s still sitting somewhere in my chest “you're safe, don't move” in a tone I've never heard directed at me before.

I don't know his name.

I don't know his face.

But I know exactly what he is, and I have spent my whole life knowing that people like him, things like him are exactly why my family has been drowning for years in a debt we can never repay.

I press my thumb to my bare wrist again before I finally drag myself upright, deciding that I will never say what happened this night out loud to anyone.