Chapter 1 The Wolf That Bowed

Aurora's POV

“Where is Ivy?”

I shouted it at every face I passed, whether they knew who Ivy was or not. Nobody answered. They were all running too.

The street was on fire. Cars sat in the road with their doors open, and some of them were burning. Smoke covered the sun and turned the sky a dirty orange. Broken glass cracked under my shoes. Ahead of me, a crowd was banging on the doors of an office building, begging to be let in.

“We have kids in here!”

“No more room!”

“Get back!”

I understood them. Everyone wanted to live. I wanted to live too, but mostly I wanted it for one small girl in a yellow coat.

A woman grabbed my sleeve as I ran past. “You’re a doctor, aren’t you? You have the badge. My husband can’t breathe.”

“I’m not that kind of doctor,” I said. I hated how it sounded.

She let go. And I kept running.

I had studied the Mars Virus for six years. I knew how fast it spread and how a simple fever could empty a hospital ward in a day. I had written the warnings myself. People read the first page and nodded, and then the first hospital filled up, and then the next one, down to the last.

My husband, Damian, had been gone for two months. He had said he would be home for dinner and never came. No note, no call, nothing. I had stopped waiting for him and started running.

I stopped at a corner to catch my breath and searched the crowd for a yellow coat. There were only strangers and smoke.

That morning I had left her at the shelter on Alder Street and gone to the lab for my samples. When I came back, the doors were broken and the building was empty.

What kind of mother leaves her child to chase a cure that never came?

'Don't think,' I told myself. 'Just find her.'

A scream came from the street behind me.

I turned around. A man was on the ground, shaking so hard his shoes scraped the pavement. A woman knelt next to him and tried to hold him still. I knew those signs. I had written them down a hundred times.

Then, suddenly, his back bent the wrong way.

I heard bones crack. A wet, ugly sound came out of his throat, and the woman jumped back. His fingers twisted and his nails grew long and black. When he looked up, his eyes were gold.

“What the hell is that?” the woman whispered.

I could not move. None of my notes had this in them. His spine rose under his shirt. His jaw pushed forward. Fur broke through his skin, and in a few seconds he was down on both hands and legs, and he was not a man anymore. It took about eleven seconds. I counted, because counting was the only thing my mind could still do.

He was a wolf, and he was huge.

It looked around the street as if it was deciding something. Then it jumped at the nearest person.

I ran with the crowd. I did not think about my research or what it meant. Viruses make people sick. They do not turn them into monsters. Unless this had never been only a virus.

“Ivy!” I screamed. “Ivy!”

A growl rose up from behind me. I turned back and saw the wolf coming for me, and two more beside it. One of them had a metal band around its back leg that flashed in the firelight. A thin strip of metal with a number scratched into it. Wild animals do not wear numbers.

I could not outrun three wolves. I looked for a door, a car, anything. My foot caught on a crack in the road and I fell on a wrecked taxi.

That was when I saw him.

A man stood alone in the middle of the street with a steel pipe in his hand and blood soaking his shirt. Three wolves were circling him.

I knew his face and his name. Caden Blackwood. But I had never spoken to him. He did not look afraid, he looked angry, like this was a fight he had expected.

The first wolf jumped. He swung the pipe and knocked it into a parked car so hard that the door folded in. The second came from the side. He ducked and hit it too. He moved faster than any man I had ever seen.

I had known brave men before. But this, this was not courage. It looked more like habit.

'What is he?'

The third wolf crept closer, low to the ground. Caden stared straight at it. The wolf stopped. Then it lowered its head until its nose touched the road.

My mouth fell open.

Caden looked at the other wolves. One at a time they went quiet and still, their gold eyes were on him, as if they were waiting for his word. He did not seem surprised, he just looked tired.

'Why are they listening to him?'

Then he looked up and found me across the street.

“Aurora!” he shouted it like he had been looking for me.

My whole body went stiff. How did he know my name?

Before I could say anything, I heard another voice. It was small and shaky, and I knew it better than my own.

“Mom!”

I turned so fast I almost fell.

Ivy was standing on the other side of the street in her yellow coat, zipped to her chin the way I always made her wear it, her cheeks were wet and dirty.  But there was no time to care. She was alive, and that was all that mattered.

I ran for her with my arms already open. I did not feel the cold or the broken glass. I thought about every night I had held her after a bad dream and told her monsters were not real. I had lied to her.

Then I heard another growl. One wolf had slipped away from the rest, and it stood right behind my daughter, its golden eyes fixed on her back, its lips pulled away from its teeth.

It was already crouching to jump, and Ivy had not even seen it.