Emory clapped along half a beat behind the fight song and used the noise as cover to think about a coyote.
The bleachers were packed, sweat and floor wax and three hundred bodies crammed too close.
Somewhere across the student section Lydia Martin was clapping along with surgical precision that suggested she’d rather be removing her own molars.
Emory sat wedged between a sophomore who wouldn’t stop drumming on his knees and Scott McCall, who was trying very hard not to stare at Allison Argent four rows down.
Emory should have been paying attention to that.
The hunter’s daughter and the other bitten Beta, the whole soft-canon Scott-and-Allison thing that he was pretty sure still held even though his own existence had already bent half the timeline into shapes he didn’t recognize.
Should have been cataloguing who was where, which Argent was watching, whether Stiles three rows up had clocked Scott’s hand twitching toward a shift he couldn’t suppress yet.
He wasn’t.
He was thinking about a coyote.
About her yanking free of the snare with a sound he’d felt in his own chest, a trapped-animal panic too sharp, too human for a creature supposed to be all instinct and teeth.
About the empty clearing he’d walked past this morning on his way to school, the den by the stump cold and abandoned, her scent forty-eight hours old and fading.
The cheer squad launched into something that involved a pyramid and the band hit a crescendo that made the bleachers shake, and Emory felt the Hum idle under his sternum like an engine at a red light, faintly bored.
The crowd the far-off crowd, the Watchers in their realities with no Beacon Hills didn’t care about pep rallies.
They wanted the woods.
The coyote.
They wanted him to go back and fix it, which was exactly why he’d stayed away for two whole days, because the moment he couldn’t tell whether an impulse was his or theirs was the moment he’d stopped being able to trust his own hands.
“You good?” Scott said, low, under the noise.
Emory blinked and turned his head.
Scott was looking at him with that open, worried thing he did, the puppy-got-kicked face Stiles had described once with alarming accuracy, and Emory made himself smile.
“Fine,” he said.
“Just loud.”
Scott nodded like that made sense fair enough, they were both running new senses without a manual, and a gym full of people hit like a chemical attack some days.
But Emory caught Scott’s eyes flicking toward Allison again, his whole body angling toward her even sitting still, and thought, you’ve got a person.
A North Star.
An Anchor you don’t even know you’re building.
Emory had a coyote who wouldn’t let him within fifty yards and a tree that paid him to hurt himself for an audience, and the difference sat in his gut like a stone.
The rally finally let them out at lunch.
Emory skipped the cafeteria, bought a bag of chips from the vending machine by the gym, and ate them standing at the edge of the student parking lot where he could see the tree line past the lacrosse field.
The Preserve started a quarter-mile south of the school, a dark stretched spine of woods that ran all the way to the heart of Beacon Hills, and somewhere in there was a sunk clearing over a buried stump and a coyote who’d learned what his hands could do to a snare.
He hated that she’d learned that.
He hated worse that he’d taught her.
Stiles found him there, which Emory should have expected.
Stiles had a radar for people being weird in his vicinity, and Emory had been checking out mid-conversation all morning.
“Okay,” Stiles said, no preamble, arms folded.
“What’s in the woods?”
Emory ate a chip.
“Trees, mostly.” Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“You’ve stared at that tree line four times today.
I counted.
So either there’s something out there or you’re having an extremely boring existential crisis, and I feel like I’d know if it was the second one because you’d be doing that thing where you make a joke about breakfast.”
Emory looked at him.
Stiles looked back, all wiry intensity and a stubbornness that never quit, and Emory thought, you’re going to be a problem.
Not yet.
But soon.
“Nothing’s in the woods,” Emory said.
Which was true.
She wasn’t there anymore.
She’d made sure of it.
Stiles narrowed his eyes, opened his mouth, and then the bell rang and saved them both.
Stiles pointed at him, the universal gesture for we’re not done, and jogged back toward the building.
Emory watched him go, finished the chips, and spent fifth period econ staring at Coach Finstock’s chalkboard while his mind was a hundred yards deep in the Preserve, walking ground he’d already memorized.
\*
The wolf came back.
She smelled him before she heard him the strange wrong wolf-scent that wasn’t wolf, or wasn’t only wolf, threaded through with human-sweat and something green and cold she had no name for.
He came from the ridge side, downwind, his steps deliberate and too slow, and she went low in the bracken fifty yards out and watched.
He stopped at the clearing’s edge.
Didn’t cross into it.
He carried a dark limp shape, and he crouched and set it down on a flat stone at the tree line, then backed away.
Five steps.
Ten.
He sat down against a cedar, still as the trunk behind him, and did nothing.
She waited.
The wind held steady.
The wolf never moved.
The thing he’d left smelled like blood and fur, fresh-killed, still warm.
A rabbit.
He’d brought her a kill.
Predators never did that.
Predators chased and cornered and caged, and this wolf had done that her back leg still remembered the burn of the soft-wrong cord tightening but now he sat unmoving at the edge of her ground with his scent downwind and an offering on the stone, and she could not parse the shape of it.
She circled wide, belly to the dirt, every step tested.
His eyes never tracked her.
Just sat.
The rabbit waited where he’d left it, gutted clean, her territory’s scent all over it now that it had been there long enough.
The wolf made a small sound, low, not a growl.
Just sound.
She froze. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
He said something in the human-words she’d lost, a soft string of noise that meant nothing and sounded like the tone her den-mother had used once, before the sharp-loud and the red and the forgetting.
Then he stood, slow, and walked away.
Back toward the ridge.
Did not look at the kill.
Did not look at her.
She stayed low until his scent faded past the ridge.
The rabbit still sat on the stone.
She approached it from downwind, every muscle coiled, but no trap sprang.
There was no trap.
Just meat, and her hunger, and the memory-that-wasn’t-a-memory of a person who used to leave food on a plate and never ask anything back.
She left it.
Not while the sun was still up and the woods could be lying.
But when the dark came full and the owl called twice from the hemlock and the wolf’s scent was hours old and cold, she went to the stone and tore into the kill and ate it down to bone, the confusion beating alongside her own pulse, refusing to be outrun.
\*
Emory sat against the cedar for two hours before he gave up and went home.
She never came close.
Never showed herself.
He hadn’t expected her to.
The Hum stayed warm the whole time, the Watchers leaning in, waiting for the moment the reunion, the reconciliation, the beat where the wild thing forgave him and the frame could close and he felt the collective frustration build when he finally stood and left without ever calling her, without ever stepping into the clearing, without giving them a single satisfying beat to land on.
Good.
Let them be frustrated.
Let the Ember income sag.
Two weeks of this had taught him the Feed paid when he bled and when he performed and now a third rule, uglier than the other two: it paid even harder when he refused to perform what they wanted most.
His restraint was the content.
What he wouldn’t give them was the hook.
Ugly, how well he understood it.
Uglier still it was working.
The truck coughed twice before it caught, and Emory sat in the driver’s seat with his hands on the wheel and the pine-and-iron smell of the Preserve still in his jacket, and let the guilty satisfaction settle he’d just played the long game on a crowd that wanted the shortcut.
His phone buzzed.
A text from his mother, three hours old: Soup in the freezer cariad.
Lock the door.
He texted back a thumbs-up, pulled out of the parking lot, and drove home through a town that had no idea a coyote in the woods had just eaten what he’d left her and taken the first hairline step toward maybe, eventually, not running.
It was past midnight when he finally tried to sleep, and the last thing he thought before he went under was that he’d go back tomorrow and do it again leave the kill, keep the distance, give her nothing but proof that he could be trusted to stay gone and the Watchers could scream all they wanted.
She wasn’t theirs to ship.
She wasn’t even his, not yet, maybe not ever.
But if she ever let him close again, it would be because she chose it, and that would be the only version that mattered.
The Hum idled low and sulking under his ribs, and Emory closed his eyes and slept better than he had in days.