In my defense, nobody told me not to go into the woods.
Diane told me to be careful. Paula told me — when I mentioned it over breakfast, which in retrospect was my first mistake — that the wolfkin huntress was "a feral menace with no respect for civilization," which from Paula sounded less like a warning and more like a product review. The town's position, as expressed by three separate people while I bought supplies, was that the woods north of Millbrook belonged to a beast, and that any sensible person would stay out.
I am not, as established, a sensible person. Also, I had a theory.
The theory was this: in a world where everything I found beautiful was locally classified as a tragedy, a wolfkin huntress — strong, wild, all teeth and muscle — was probably, by my completely unbiased and medically sound assessment, going to be gorgeous. And if she was out there stealing chickens and scaring travelers, maybe she was just hungry and lonely, which were two problems I had recently developed some experience solving.
So I packed a bag with bread, cheese, and a whole roast chicken I definitely did not steal from Diane's kitchen (I left a note; the note said "business expense"), and I walked north out of Millbrook into the treeline, whistling, like a man who had learned nothing from any story ever told.
The woods were beautiful in the way woods are when no one's charging you admission. Old trees, moss, a stream that made the exact sound streams are supposed to make. I walked for maybe an hour, eating the cheese, feeling extremely pleased with myself, and composing, in my head, the opening line of my triumphant return: *fear not, Millbrook, I have befriended the beast.* Paula was going to be furious. Diane was going to laugh. I was having a great morning.
That was when I noticed the silence.
If you've never been in a forest when it goes quiet, it's hard to describe. It's not the absence of sound — it's the presence of attention. Every bird in a half-mile radius had simultaneously decided it had somewhere else to be. The stream kept gurgling, oblivious, the idiot.
"Okay," I said out loud, to no one. "That's either a bear or — "
Something hit me from the side at approximately the speed of a falling piano.
I went down in a tangle of leaves and limbs and *fur*, and there was a weight on my chest, and claws — actual claws — pricking through my shirt, and a face about six inches from mine, and my first coherent thought was: *Diane was right, she doesn't talk first.*
My second coherent thought was: *Oh no, she's beautiful.*
She was — by my standards, and therefore by no one else's in a fifty-mile radius — stunning. Late twenties, all lean muscle and wildness, with a mane of dark auburn hair that had leaves in it, amber eyes with pupils that had gone wide and round, and the ears. The ears were the giveaway, of course — tall, pointed, furred, laid flat back against her skull in a way that suggested extreme agitation. A tail, bushy and auburn, lashed behind her. Her clothes were leather and practicality, and she was straddling my chest with a knife at my throat, and I had never been so glad to be mugged in my life.
She sniffed me. This is not a metaphor. She leaned down and *sniffed* my neck, my jaw, my collarbone, her nose nearly brushing my skin, and made a low sound in her throat that I felt more than heard.
"You're not from the town," she said. Her voice was rough, like she didn't use it much. "You smell like bread and smoke and — " She sniffed again, deeper, and her ears twitched. "And *her*. The tavern woman."
"I work there," I said, very carefully, because there was a knife at my throat. "Ethan Parker. I'm — I'm not here to hurt you."
"Nobody comes into my woods to not hurt me," she said. "They come to hunt me or preach at me." The knife pressed a fraction closer. "Which are you?"
"Neither," I said. "I brought chicken."
There was a pause. The knife did not move, but one ear swiveled forward, which I chose to interpret as interest.
"Chicken," she repeated.
"Roast chicken. Whole. In my bag. Which you are currently sitting on."
She looked down. She was, in fact, sitting on my bag. She shifted her weight — the knife never wavering — and I heard the bag crinkle, and her nostrils flared, and the most extraordinary expression crossed her face: suspicion warring with hunger, with hunger clearly winning on points.
"You poisoned it," she accused.
"I did not poison it."
"How do I know?" Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
"Because," I said, with the patience of a man explaining things to a very dangerous toddler, "if I wanted to poison you, I wouldn't walk into your woods alone, unarmed, whistling. I'd be up in a tree with a crossbow like a sensible assassin."
She considered this. The knife lowered — not away, but to a less immediately fatal angle.
"Eat some first," she said. "Then I'll decide."
"You're going to let me up to eat the chicken I brought for you, to prove it's not poisoned, and then you'll *decide* whether to kill me."
"Yes."
"That's — " I searched for the word. "That's actually fair. That's a fair system."
She got off my chest — I sat up, wheezing slightly, because she weighed more than she looked like, all that lean muscle — and watched me with those amber eyes while I dug the chicken out of the bag. I tore off a leg and ate it. It was good chicken. Diane's kitchen did not mess around.
The wolfkin watched me chew with the intensity of a judge at a baking competition. Then she snatched the rest of the chicken out of my hands with a speed that suggested teleportation, retreated three paces, and proceeded to demolish it with a focus that was honestly inspiring. Bones cracked. She ate like the chicken had personally offended her family.
"Okay," I said, when she'd reduced it to a pile of picked bones and was licking her fingers. "So. Not poisoned."
"Not poisoned," she agreed, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand, and looked at me, and I saw the exact moment the food stopped being the most interesting thing in the clearing. Her ears came up. Her pupils went wide again. She took a step toward me, then another, and sniffed the air, and made that low sound in her throat again, deeper this time.
"You're doing the sniffing thing again," I said.
"You smell like *want*," she said bluntly. "Not hunger-want. The other kind." She circled me, slow, and I turned to keep facing her, because turning your back on a predator felt like a bad idea even when the predator was beautiful. "The tavern woman. You were with her. Last night. I can smell it on you."
Heat climbed up the back of my neck. "That's — that's a very personal observation."
"Willa," she said.
"What?"
"My name. Willa." She stopped circling, directly in front of me, close enough that I could see the flecks of gold in her amber eyes. "You brought me chicken and you didn't flinch when I put a knife to my throat. Most men flinch. Most men scream. One man wet himself."
"I'm choosing to take that as a compliment."
"It wasn't," she said, but one corner of her mouth twitched, and I caught it, and filed it away. "Why did you come here, Ethan Parker?"
And here was the thing. I could have lied. I could have said I was just hiking, or lost, or conducting a survey of local poultry theft. But I'd spent the last week in a world that lied to itself about everything that mattered, and I was tired of it.
"Because I heard you howling last night," I said, "and everyone in town calls you a beast, and I thought — " I shrugged. "I thought you might be lonely. And hungry. I was right about the hungry."
She stared at me. Her tail had gone still — I hadn't realized it was moving until it stopped. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
"Nobody," she said slowly, "has ever come into my woods because they thought I might be lonely."
"Well," I said. "I'm new here. I don't know the rules yet."
"The rules," Willa said, "are that the town hates me, the Temple says I'm an abomination against grace, and travelers either run or shoot." She took another step closer. Close enough to touch. "You're not running. You're not shooting. You're standing here smelling like want and telling me I'm lonely."
"I'm very bad at rules," I admitted.
She reached out — fast, but not knife-fast, hand-fast — and caught my wrist. Her grip was strong, callused, warm. She turned my arm over, exposing the inside of my wrist, and ran her thumb over the veins there, and her eyes never left mine.
"Do you know what the claiming is?" she asked. "The town talks about it. They say we mark our mates like animals."
"I've heard the word," I said. "Nobody's explained it."
"Because nobody asks." Her thumb pressed a little harder on my wrist, right over my pulse. "It's not what they think. We don't — it's not ownership. It's a promise. A scent-mark, here — " she touched my wrist, " — and a bite, just enough to break the skin, so the pack knows. It says: this one is under my protection. This one I would fight for. It's the most serious thing my people have." She looked up at me. "We don't do it lightly. We do it once. It doesn't fade."
My pulse was hammering under her thumb, and she could feel it, and her pupils were huge now, and I understood, with total clarity, that this was a moment with exactly one correct response and about four hundred ways to ruin it.
"Willa," I said.
"Yes?"
"Is this the part where you bite first and talk later?"
She laughed — a real laugh, startled out of her, rough and bright — and the tension in the clearing broke like a wave.
"I like you," she announced, as if this were a formal finding. "You're strange. You smell good. You bring chicken." She looked down at my wrist, still held in her hand, and then back up at my face, and her expression shifted into something serious and intent. "Ethan Parker. I'm going to claim you now."
"Now?" I said. "Right now? Should we — is there a form to fill out, or — "
"Hold still," she said.
She lifted my wrist to her mouth. I felt her breath on my skin, warm, and then her teeth — sharp, careful, deliberate — closed on the inside of my wrist. Not a mauling. A precision instrument. There was a bright flare of pain, quick and clean, and then her tongue, warm and rough, over the mark, and the pain went strange and hot, spreading up my arm.
She lifted her head. There were two neat punctures on my wrist, welling the smallest beads of blood, and she looked at them with deep satisfaction, and then at me.
"There," she said. "Mine."
And then — because the universe has a sense of humor — that was the exact moment we both heard it: hoofbeats on the forest path, and voices, and through the trees I caught a flash of white and gold cloth, Temple colors, and a woman's voice calling out, clear and official:
" — seen a stranger in these woods, a man, we have questions about the man with the corrupted taste — "
Willa's ears flattened. Her hand tightened on my wrist — on the mark, possessive, instinctive.
"Stay behind me," she growled, low, and stepped in front of me, and her tail bushed out to twice its size, and I realized, standing in a forest clearing with a wolfkin's teeth-marks fresh on my wrist and the Temple's people closing in, that my life had become exactly as complicated as I'd been afraid it would.
And I didn't want to be anywhere else.