Two

"Ready. You have ten minutes. Hide. The whistle ends it. If you haven't been found, come out when you hear it."

Ten minutes was both a long time and not enough, depending on what you were working with. My senses hadn't shifted the way some of the others' clearly had. A few were already tilting their heads toward sounds I couldn't hear, nostrils flaring, bodies orienting toward something in the dark that I was missing entirely. I didn't need heightened senses to hide. I needed to think faster than they could track. Those were different skills and one of them was mine.

Rachel bolted for high ground before I'd finished standing. Smart for her. Not for me. Not in a pink top, not with the moon this bright, not with a frame that would silhouette against the ridge like a target.

I moved toward the river.

We'd run past it on the trail and I'd clocked it without meaning to, the way I always catalogued things I might need later. The sound of moving water. The bank where the earth went dark and soft. The boulder half-submerged on the near side, large enough to crouch behind, close enough to the waterline that the ambient sound would cover anything small.

Mama is going to make me ride in the truck bed.

I pressed myself into the mud behind the boulder and became still. Real still, not just held-breath still, but the practiced kind, the kind I'd been working on since I was small enough to fit behind the linen cupboard at home and had discovered that nobody looked for what didn't announce itself. The Switch engaged at its edges, not the full suppression, just the quieting of the obvious. I let the ambient sounds layer back over me one by one: frogs first, then crickets, then the soft complaints of fish moving in the shallows, then the distant voices of the other kids spreading out through the trees.

My plan was the same as always. Wait to be found. Be discovered as unremarkable. Go home.

Grow up quietly. Maybe teach the little ones someday, marry some decent lower-rank wolf, have a small life of my own design. Keep the Switch as a useful thing, a practical thing, not the center of anything. That was the plan. That's what Mama had done and she was happy and she was good and that was what mattered.

The footsteps arrived before I finished the thought.

Two sets. Moving carefully, with the specific deliberateness of something that was trying not to be heard and mostly succeeding. Close enough to register as distinct but not close enough yet to be a problem. I pressed my palm flat against the mud and held.

"It's just kids."

"Good. We wait until one comes this way."

"Are you insane?" The second voice was harder, lower, the kind of voice that had been making careful decisions for a long time. "The treaty. They'll have our heads if we touch one."

The accents were wrong. Not from around here. Not from anywhere I recognized, the vowels shaped differently, the rhythm of the words carrying geography I couldn't place.

"Who's going to know?"

"I'm not telling anyone, but if they find us here with a pup in our hands, every alpha in the region comes down on our necks."

"I just want a taste. It's been a while since I had good hot-blooded children."

My heart stopped pretending to be calm.

Hot-blooded. Cold-blooded. Children.

The word arrived quietly and sat there like a stone dropped in still water, spreading its rings outward through everything I thought I knew.

Vampires.

My chest was doing something I had no control over, hammering fast and getting faster, and I pressed my palm harder against the mud and willed myself down, smaller, quieter, nothing, nobody, not here, not real, not worth the attention of whatever was on the other side of the boulder making calculations about hunger.

"What?" The second voice sharpened.

"There's something nearby."

"You're imagining it."

"No. Listen. Past the water. Small heart. Scared."

I stopped breathing.

"Goddammit, Hart. We leave. Now."

"We're not doing anything wrong. Just a stroll under the pretty moonlight." A pause, long and deliberate, long enough to rewrite everything I thought I knew about the shape of the world. "Hunting little children."

The whistle cut through the dark. High and sharp, from somewhere across the clearing.

"Let's go."

"I haven't had dinner yet."

"There's nothing out here." A hiss, low and final, and something old in my body responded to it. Something that predated the Switch and the training and the plan for a quiet life. A wire pulled tight from the base of my skull all the way down to my feet. Ready to run. Knowing I couldn't.

"Oh, there's something out here."

"Hart."

A pause that lasted exactly long enough.

"Fine. Take care, little one. Maybe we'll meet one day."

Then they were gone. The footsteps faded. The frogs came back slowly, one at a time, reclaiming the silence the way living things reclaimed spaces after a threat had passed. I stayed in the mud and let them come back and did not move for a long time.

When I finally stood my legs were shaking. I catalogued that and kept walking.

Jason was talking at me when I reached the clearing. I could see his mouth moving and Kyle standing at the edge of the group with his face doing something I had never seen it do before, something that made him look older than twelve in a way that had nothing to do with height. I knew I should say something. Every time I reached for words the only thing in my head was that voice.

Hot-blooded children.

"Yelena." Jason snapped my name and I flinched.

I shook my head. Pressed my lips together. There were kids all around me, kids with younger siblings, kids who lived near the river, kids who had no idea what had been standing twenty feet from the boulder while they ran through the trees, and there was no version of this where I said the word out loud in front of all of them.

"Hey." Jason crouched into my eyeline and his voice shifted. Not gentle. Quieter. Deliberate, the way you spoke to something you needed to stay calm. "Look at me." He waited until I did. Brown eyes, direct and steady. "You saw something out there."

My throat closed entirely. I nodded once.

He nodded back. Stood. Turned to the group.

"Good work tonight, everyone. Your families are waiting up ahead."

He dismissed them efficiently. I watched the other adults close in around the kids as they moved back through the tree line, flanking them without making it obvious, sweeping the dark without making it a thing anyone had to think about. He had believed me without a single word and was already acting on it. I filed that away.

Kyle stayed. He walked toward our parents when they appeared at the edge of the clearing, Mama two steps ahead of Dad the way she always was, and I watched him talking to her with his hands moving, and I watched her face go from pale to very still.

She reached me in four strides.

"Tell me." No softness. No room for it. She had been a training master before I was born and when she looked at me like that I understood it in my body rather than my head. "Yelena. Speak. Now."

One breath.

One word.

"Vampires."

She believed me without asking anything else. That was the first time I understood what my mother was made of. It would not be the last.