Emory scrubbed at the dirt under his nails with the locker room sink’s industrial soap the cheap grainy kind that smelled like fake pine and watched the water run brown.
It had been there since Tuesday.
It would be back by tomorrow, because he’d be back at the clearing by tonight.
Third trip this week.
Fourth if you counted the failed one where he’d stood at the ridge for twenty minutes and chickened out before even leaving the kill.
Small Draws, all of them.
A scent-mask charge Monday.
A stamina edge Wednesday that he told himself was for lacrosse and knew was for the hike.
This morning, another mask-charge he absolutely did not need, bought with Ember he’d sworn he was saving for a real ward or the next moon or anything that wasn’t a guilt-driven apology to an animal that couldn’t understand him.
The reserves in his gut the coal-sense he’d learned to count like cash sat lighter than they had two weeks ago, and it was his own damn fault.
“Voss!”
Emory’s head snapped up.
Coach Finstock stood in the locker room doorway, whistle around his neck, clipboard under one arm, wearing the expression of a man who’d just found evidence of a problem he didn’t want to solve.
“Yeah, Coach?”
“You look like hell.
Not metaphorical hell.
Actual, geographical hell.
The kind with coordinates.” Coach stepped into the room, letting the door slam behind him.
“You sleeping in a ditch?
You got a ditch?
Is that where you keep going?”
Emory blinked.
“I what?”
“Don’t ‘what’ me.
You show up looking like you spent the night in a washing machine full of gravel, you run like something’s chasing you which I love, never stop but then you zone out halfway through plays I know you know because I watched you nail them last week.” Coach jabbed the clipboard at him.
“So either you’ve got a very distracting new girlfriend who lives in the woods, or you’re doing something stupid that’s gonna get you benched, and I don’t bench people I like, Voss.
It depresses me.
Do you want to depress me?”
“No, Coach.”
“Good.
Stop doing whatever you’re doing that makes you look like a before picture.
Greenberg’s already cornered the market on looking terrible.
We don’t need two.” Coach turned to go, paused.
“Seriously, kid.
Get some sleep.
Life’s short and mostly disappointing.
Don’t waste the good parts looking like you’re haunted.”
The door slammed.
Emory stood there with soap still on his hands and the word haunted lodged somewhere under his ribs, refusing to be swallowed, and thought: close enough.
He rinsed.
Dried his hands.
Checked the time he had forty minutes before the next class, which meant Stiles would already be camped at the diner with a window booth and a basket of curly fries, because that was the routine they’d fallen into on Fridays without either of them naming it a routine.
Emory’s phone buzzed.
Diner.
Fries.
You’re late.
He swore under his breath, grabbed his jacket, and went.
Stiles had claimed the corner booth and ordered for both of them fries for himself, coffee and toast for Emory, which was both thoughtful and unnerving because it meant Stiles had been paying attention to what he ate.
“You look like you got in a fight with a lawn and lost,” Stiles said by way of greeting, shoving the fries to the center of the table.
“Dirt.
Right there.”
Emory scrubbed at his face with one hand and felt the grit flake off.
Great.
Fantastic.
He’d washed his hands and forgotten the rest of him.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me, fix it.
You’re making me look bad by association.” Stiles waited exactly three seconds.
“So where were you?”
“When?”
“This morning.
Yesterday.
Tuesday.
The last week, Emory, where have you been?
You smell like outside.” Stiles leaned forward, elbows on the table, doing his best impression of a casual guy asking a casual question.
It would’ve worked on someone who didn’t spend half his life reading people for tells.
Emory took a sip of the coffee.
Bought time.
“I’ve been running.”
“In the woods.”
“Yeah.”
“The Preserve specifically.”
Emory looked up.
Stiles’s eyes were sharp, interested, the kind of interested that meant he’d already made a list and Emory had just confirmed the top bullet point.
“Why the Preserve?” Stiles said.
“We’ve got a track.
A nice, flat, non-muddy track with lines and everything.
Very civilized.
Zero chance of, I don’t know, getting mauled by wildlife.”
“I like the woods.”
“You like the woods.
Okay.
Cool.
Normal thing to like.” Stiles stole a fry off Emory’s untouched plate.
“What’s in the woods, Emory?”
The question landed like a hook in the water, and Emory felt the pull to answer to say something true just to stop carrying it alone and bit it back hard.
“Trees,” he said.
“Dirt.
The occasional judgmental squirrel.”
Stiles snorted, but his eyes didn’t leave Emory’s face.
“You’re spending a lot of time out there for squirrels.”
“It’s good for clearing your head.”
“Is your head unclear?”
“Everyone’s head is unclear.
That’s the whole feature of being a person.” Emory stole the line and the deflection both, and watched Stiles clock it.
“Right.
Yeah.
Casual.
Light.
Then, like it had just occurred to him: “What’s out in those woods worth all this?”
The coffee tasted like burnt nothing.
Emory set the cup down and met Stiles’s eyes and knew cleanly, coldly that his private harmless indulgence had a witness now, and a pattern, and a question he couldn’t answer.
The Hum under his sternum idled cool and low.
The Watchers weren’t leaning in.
They didn’t care about this part.
This was just two guys in a diner and one of them running out of cover, and there was no Ember in it, no heat, nothing worth paying for.
Which meant Emory was on his own.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Just space.”
Stiles looked at him for a long three-count.
Then he sat back, shrugged, and went back to his fries like he’d decided to let it go.
Emory knew better.
Stiles didn’t let things go.
Stiles catalogued them, added them to the list, and came back later with a fuller picture and a trap question Emory wouldn’t see coming.
He’d just bought himself time.
That was all.
His phone buzzed again his mother, three hours late: Soup in the freezer cariad.
Lock the door.
He thumbed a reply he didn’t read and pocketed the phone and ate half a piece of toast he didn’t taste, and the whole time he could feel it the pull toward the clearing, the woods, the coyote who wouldn’t come close and wouldn’t leave his head.
Stiles was still watching him.
Not obviously.
Just aware.
“You okay, man?” Stiles said, and it almost sounded like he meant it.
“Yeah,” Emory said.
“Just tired.”
“You look it.”
They sat there in the booth with the fries going cold and the diner’s fluorescents buzzing overhead and the late-afternoon light slanting through the window, and Emory counted it out in his head the way he always did: one lie Stiles didn’t buy, two more trips to the Preserve he couldn’t afford, three days since the last body dropped in the Alpha’s spree the thing he was supposed to be focused on, the Siege that didn’t slow down just because he was busy feeding a coyote.
The reserves in his gut sat too light.
The dirt was already back under his nails.
And Stiles’s question hung in the air between them, unanswered, logged, waiting:
What’s out in those woods worth all this?
Emory didn’t have an answer he could say.
He just knew that tonight he’d go back to the clearing anyway, leave another kill he couldn’t afford, and keep paying a price that wasn’t buying him anything but the faint, irrational hope that a wild thing might one day forgive him for the cage.
He ate the rest of the toast.
Stiles talked about lacrosse and homework and something Scott had done that was either brave or stupid, Stiles couldn’t decide.
Emory listened with half his focus and spent the rest doing math he didn’t like: how much Ember he had left, how much the next moon would cost, how long he could keep this up before something broke.
Not long, his gut said.
Not long enough, the woods said back.
When they left the diner the sky had gone orange and cold, and Stiles clapped him on the shoulder in the parking lot and said, “Seriously, man.
Get some sleep.
You look haunted.”
Second person today.
Emory watched Stiles’s jeep pull out onto the street and disappear around the corner, and then he stood there alone in the lot with his truck’s keys in his hand and the Preserve pulling at him like a tide, and he knew exactly what he was going to do.
The same thing he’d done every night this week.
The wrong thing.
He got in the truck, turned the key, and drove toward the woods while the sun set behind him and the Hum stayed cool and bored and every instinct he had that was worth listening to told him to stop.
He didn’t stop.