Inicio / Werewolf / When the Alpha Howls / Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

Todos los capítulos de When the Alpha Howls: Capítulo 11 - Capítulo 20

39 Capítulos

CHAPTER 11 — Closed Doors Don’t Keep Out the Dark

Blocking someone is supposed to feel clean. A boundary. A line in ink. A door shut with a firm click.But the next morning, I woke with the taste of it in my mouth anyway. Metallic and sour, like I’d swallowed a coin and it had lodged in my throat.The house was quiet in that particular way that only happens after crying hard: the air feels rinsed, and you feel wrung out. My eyes were puffy. My head ached. I moved through my kitchen like I was borrowing someone else’s body.Kettle. Tea. Sugar. Too much sugar. My hands remembered the routine even when my heart didn’t want to.Out in the garage, the thrush blinked up at me, alive and unimpressed by human drama. Her little chest rose and fell with steady determination. When I offered food, she pecked like she meant it this time, sharp and purposeful.“Look at you,” I whispered. “Healing like a little champion.”She flicked her beak as if to say, Obviously. I checked her wing wrap an

CHAPTER 12 — Silver in the Grass

The fox slept like something that didn’t trust the world enough to truly let go. Even under the light sedation his body stayed tense. Muscles jumped beneath fur. His ears twitched at every creak of the house, every sigh of wind against the garage wall, every distant call from the forest like the woods were speaking a language his bones still understood.I checked the bandage again. The cut was clean now, flushed and wrapped. The bleeding had stopped, but the skin around the wound looked angry, redder than it should have been, swollen in a way that didn’t match a simple wire bite.My eyes drifted to the snare coil on the concrete floor. Pale. Too pale. Silver had a certain kind of wrongness to it. Not mystical. Not magical. Just… bright in a way that didn’t belong in dirt. It looked like moonlight pretending to be metal.I crouched and picked it up with gloved hands, turning it under the workbench lamp. No rust. No grime embedded into it the way you’d expec

CHAPTER 13 — The Snareline

Colton held the second snare up in the porch light to show proof.The wire glinted pale, moonlight’s cruel twin, looped and ready to cinch around anything warm blooded and unlucky. My stomach rolled as if I could already feel it tightening.I opened the door only after I’d checked the lock twice, because my body was stubborn that way. Colton stepped inside without a word, boots leaving dark prints on my porch boards.His gaze moved past me to the garage like he could see through walls.“The fox?” he asked.“Sleeping,” I said, throat tight. “I sedated him lightly.”Colton nodded once, approval flickering in the set of his jaw. Then he looked down at the snare in his hand, and something hardened in him, quiet rage packed tight.“How many?” I asked.His eyes lifted to mine. “Three on your side of the treeline. One closer to the road.”My breath caught. “That’s.”“An over kill, I know,” he finished, voice low.I turned and led him into the garage, because the fox was there and the thrush

CHAPTER 14 — What the Night Dragged to My Door

After Colton left, the house stopped feeling like a home and became a shelter. There is a difference. A home breathes with you. It holds your routines, your mugs, your books with bent spines, your favourite blanket folded over the couch like a promise. A shelter is temporary. Every window becomes a question. Every creak in the walls becomes a warning dressed as sound.I locked the garage door behind him and stood with my hand on the bolt until my knuckles whitened.Then I moved. Fast. The only way I knew how to survive fear without drowning in it.I brought the thrush’s box into the laundry nook off the kitchen because the garage suddenly felt too exposed. I carried the rabbit in second, wrapped in a towel, his tiny body trembling like a heartbeat gone wrong. The fox was heavier, limp with sedation, a burden warm and vulnerable in my arms.I set them up as best I could in the house, heat pad on low, dim light, water within reach, my emer

CHAPTER 15 — Proof Is a Thin Thing

Grace and I called the sheriff just after eight. By then the sun had climbed high enough to bleach the terror out of the yard, leaving only the facts behind. Mud churned by boots. Blood dark on leaves. The cameras Colton had installed in the night, small and watchful on the porch beam and back trees. My fox sleeping under sedation. My rabbit rigid with shock. My thrush alive because stubbornness is one of God’s smallest miracles. Sheriff Bell arrived in a dusty cruiser with a deputy young enough to still look surprised by things. Bell was broad through the middle, weathered by years and routine, with the kind of face that had learned to flatten itself against other people’s panic. He took off his sunglasses when he saw the blood near the treeline. His eyes slid over the yard, the cameras, my house, me. “Morning, Grace,” he said first, because of course in Moonbrook the hierarchy began with old roots. “S

CHAPTER 16 — Bitter Things

The coffee sat on my counter all night like an insult. Dark blue thermos. Loosened lid. Steam long gone by the time morning dragged itself over my little house and poured grey light across the kitchen. Everything looked tired in that hour, my lilac wall, my half finished shelves, me. I stood in my socks with my tea mug warming my hands and stared at the thermos like it had personally offended my bloodline. I hated coffee. Hated the smell of it, the bitterness, the way Kyle had always drunk it black and acted like that made him complicated instead of just unpleasant. There had been mornings in that apartment where the scent of coffee had come braided with tension, with the scrape of his voice, with the wrong kind of silence. Still. The thermos remained. Proof of a man who had stood outside my house in the dark and left me something warm with a note that said, in his own strange language, I was here, and I didn’t ask anyth

CHAPTER 17 — Black Coffee and Daylight

The first night with the motion lights felt like sleeping beside a nervous god.Every shift in the yard became illumination. White bursts through the curtains, brief and sharp, followed by my heart trying to escape through my throat. At 11:14, a raccoon tripped the back sensor and sent me upright in bed with my hand wrapped around the trauma shears I’d set on the nightstand like that was a sane thing to do. At 1:02, a deer lingered too close to the road facing camera and turned the porch beam into daylight for ten long seconds.At 3:27, I checked the monitor and saw a dark figure moving along the back line. Broad shoulders. Quiet stride. Colton. He didn’t look at the house. Didn’t knock. He simply walked the perimeter once beneath the silver wash of moonlight, then vanished into the trees again like he’d been cut from them.I should have felt unsettled. I did. I also slept after that. The realisation tasted complicated.Morning came with the soft

CHAPTER 18 — Folklore and Fear

By the time Colton’s truck disappeared down the road, the lemon cake in my hand had gone warm. I stood on my porch far longer than necessary, staring at the place where he had been as if the gravel might offer commentary. The motion lights sat quiet under the eaves, harmless in daylight, but I felt them anyway. Like small eyes, patient and awake.Inside, the house smelled like tea, clean bandages, and the faint bitter ghost of coffee. I set the cake box on the counter and looked at my phone.Bailey’s number sat in my contacts now, absurdly labelled in my own hand as Bailey (maybe still annoying).My thumb hovered over it. I could leave it. Keep the number like an emergency flare and never touch it. I could block it again.I could pretend I wasn’t lonely enough to miss someone who had barged into my life like a brass band and then turned out to have been sent there for reasons she should have confessed.Instead, because apparently I enjoye

CHAPTER 19 — A Wolf at the Door

The wolf sat on my porch steps with an unnatural patience. I stood on the other side of the door with my forehead resting against the wood, one hand still wrapped around the knob, and tried to make my breathing sound less like fear.Outside, the porch light cast him in soft gold and shadow. Black fur. Broad chest. Massive shoulders. The old silver scarred place along his ribs visible when he shifted, pale against darkness. And those eyes. Blue, impossible and watching me with a stillness that felt more like listening than waiting.He did not scratch at the door. Did not whine. Did not do anything except remain exactly where he was, as though he understood that the choice had to be mine.That, more than anything, undid me a little. Kyle had never understood closed doors. A closed door to him had been a challenge, an insult, something to rattle until it gave way.I could still hear it if I let myself. The hard metallic shake of the handle. His voice

CHAPTER 20 — What My Bones Know

I did not sleep so much as surrender in pieces. At some point after the wolf left, I curled up on the couch with a folklore book face down on my chest and the porch light still burning outside like a promise I hadn’t meant to make. I woke at dawn with a crick in my neck, my mouth dry, and one impossible truth pressing at me from every direction. He had been here. It was not a dream. Not grief. Not exhaustion making stories out of shadows. There was mud on the kitchen floor in the shape of a massive paw print half smudged by my own sock. A black hair clung to the hem of my cardigan. And on the floor near the laundry nook, where the wolf had lain while I cleaned his side, there was the faint scent of pine and wild fur and that same dark, rain smoke smell that clung to Colton whenever he stepped into my space. I stood in the kitchen barefoot and stared at the paw print until my heartbeat turned loud and strange. “No,” I whispe

ANTERIOR

SIGUIENTE

ESCANEA EL CÓDIGO PARA LEER EN LA APP

DMCA.com Protection Status