TO LOVE A WOLF

Clara was tired in a way that hid behind her bones. Night shift had been long and small sprains, stitches, a drunk who smelled like old beer and colder things. Her hands still smelled like antiseptic and wet cotton. Rain hit the hospital windows in hard little fists. The town outside was a dark smear.

“Another one,” Mara said, sliding into the doorway with a chart. “Ambulance. Woods. Bad.”

Clara didn’t look up. She pulled her hair into a bun with hands that kept moving like they belonged to someone else. “How bad?”

“Bad enough the driver kept his eyes shut. Maybe animal, maybe fight. Whoever called it sounded like they were still shaking.”

They ran through the routine like they’d done it a hundred times. Sheets, towels, a warm lamp. The gurney came through with a man under a tarp and a smell Clara knew with the sting of wild damp fur, earth, something iron and old. The EMTs had mud in the seams of their gloves and a look that said: don’t ask if you don’t want to know.

Clara saw a shoulder first. Broad, ripped through a jacket, skin pale under blood and leaves. A wrist dangling, hands like they’d been in a fist and forgot how to relax. The face when they uncovered it made her catch her breath and drop into work.

He was young or looked young in the way broken things do twenty-something maybe, but the eyes were old. Grey like winter water. Hair plastered to his forehead, thin cuts along his cheekbone, a dark stripe across the bridge of his nose. He didn’t speak. He was still. Mostly.

“You a nurse?” one of the EMTs asked. He had a voice that wanted to be gentle and failed.

“Trauma,” Clara said. Her voice was steady. Hands steady. “Give me his history.”

“We found him on the road by Black Hollow. No ID. A hunter roused him; said he was dragging himself out of the trees. He’s been out for a while.”

Clara put a hand to his chest. It was warm, and the tremor there made her fingers lift away like she’d touched something hot. The rhythm was thin. She counted breaths without really counting. He breathed, but like someone learning each inhale for the first time.

“Run his vitals,” she told Mara. “Clean him up. He needs stitches, maybe a transfusion.”

They worked in the bright strip of the ER while the storm bit at the windows. The man’s jaw flexed. He made a sound like something small had been crushed. His body had the handprints of violence claws of an animal or a hand that wore nails like teeth. Someone had tried to tear him apart.

“Who would do this?” Mara asked, voice low. It was a question that didn’t need an answer, not in Silverpine.

Clara scrubbed at a long tear down his thigh and found muscle and a sliver of something dark embedded in skin. She frowned. “Foreign. Could be glass, could be” She stopped. The lamp painted his face like a pressed coin. Close up, the grey of his eyes was deeper, a cloud with a bright center. She felt an odd tug in her ribs and told herself it was tiredness.

Once he was patched and stable, Clara watched as the doctor paged for observation. The man’s breathing evened with the oxygen. He had the look of someone who’d been through war and kept the shells. For all their questions, he didn’t give them a name.

“You should take him home,” someone joked, trying to fill the silence.

Clara didn’t laugh. She had a cabin thirty minutes out, a battered wood stove, and a solitude that smelled like pine and coffee. She had come to Silverpine to wake up in her own lungs. This man folded something inside her awake she didn’t want to name. She told herself it was the nurse’s pity, the part of her that didn’t lock up hard.

He’ll be watched, Dr. Wells said, safe and practical, like a father tucking a child under a blanket. “We’ll do the rest in the morning.”

They wheeled him to observation and left him under a gray light. Clara finished her shift on autopilot, the storm a battering drum. Outside the hospital, the world was a smear of water and the headlights of a town that slept badly.

Two days later Clara found him on her path.

She had gone out to get wood and smelled smoke before she saw him. The rain had stopped but the air held the damp like a secret. He was slumped against a tree where the path narrowed, clothes worse and skin paler, eyes half-open and blank. Her chest dropped to the bottom of her.

Hey, she said, kneeling down. Hey are you awake?

His head turned like a wheel with a stuck rim. Grey eyes found hers and something like recognition hammered through her, cold and terrible. She felt her fingers move before she thought. His skin was warm and weirdly dry. Dried blood crunched under her touch.

Who are you? she asked. Her mouth sounded far away.

He tried to speak and made a sound that was both a name and a no. No, he said, voice raw. No

You’re hurt, she said, because that was true. I can help.

He laughed once a small, broken thing and then he went still with a look of sudden, animal alarm. He pushed himself up on one elbow and his other hand found her wrist with too much strength. The grip was rough as root.

Don’t, he forced out. You shouldn’t

You don’t get to tell me what to do, Clara said. Her voice surprised her; it was edged. She had always been the one who did. She looked at his hand on her wrist and felt heat crawl in a line up her arm. There was a pulse there that matched hers in a strange way, and for a second all the sounds of the world fell into rhythm with it.

Clara, he said, like someone reading a word that hurt. The name landed inside her like a stone in a glass. It lodged there and made something ripple.

She didn’t know him. She had never heard that name except as a half-glow of familiarity in a dream once when she was a child and didn’t understand how dreams work. The sound of it made something shiver in her chest that had nothing to do with tiredness.

Do you know me? she asked. Her fingers found his wrist and stayed.

He went quiet then, and for the briefest moment the storm in her mind stilled. The world tightened around that contact and Clara felt, clearly and without any words, a memory that was not hers of moss under bare feet, a full moon like a hot coin, a hand taking another and saying I’m leaving to keep you safe. She flinched as if someone had struck her.

No, she whispered. I don’t

He closed his eyes and when he opened them they were darker, like he had pushed whatever was inside back down. You shouldn’t stay, he said. He tried to push her hand away but failed. His breath hitched and a small, feral sound threaded his words.

From somewhere beyond the trees came a noise that did not belong metal on metal, like bait being readied. A bootstamp? A shout muffled by leaves?

They both turned.

The sound grew.

Clara’s heart jumped to a gallop. The man on the path tightened his grip on her wrist until it hurt which was strange and frightening and made something bright flare in her. He stared at the trees, eyes hard and quiet as a knife.

Get up, he said. His voice was different now, deeper, threaded with something old. Get inside. Now.

Clara wanted to ask why she should. She wanted to ask who he was to bark orders. She wanted to pull away, to go back to the hospital and call someone with a name and a badge.

Instead she did what she always did when the world asked: she moved. She stood, the rain-scented earth under her boots, and let him drag her toward the cabin. The path behind them swallowed the last light, and from the trees came the sound again closer, like a promise or a threat.

He kept his face turned away from her. But when they reached the porch and he let go of her wrist, she saw where he’d been wounded a long, ragged seam of scar across his collarbone and something darker under the skin like a symbol cut in haste and pain. She reached without thinking and brushed her fingers over it.

When her skin met his, something inside both of them arced like a wire being touched, and Clara knew with the small, certain terror of someone who wakes from a dream that she had not been the one who left. She had been left.

From the tree line came a soft step, then a voice, low and carrying: There she is.

Clara froze. The name on his lips on her wrist was not one she knew, but a wind had dug it into the night like a warning. Ash turned to the dark. His silhouette tightened. His jaw clenched.

Hide, he said. Now.