Chapter 1: The Fog Valley Taboo (2)

Iris dangled an inch off the ground and still finished her thought: "…advice? Switch brands. Wolf noses, am I right?"

He narrowed his eyes. "You don't fear death?"

"I do." She gasped out a grin. "But I think you're more afraid of me dying in your hand."

His pupils snapped.

Iris had gambled and won. At the peak of his kill-intent, something inside him detonated. The veins on the back of his hand split into black cracks, crawling up his wrist like lava, blood running between his fingers into the rain. A muffled grunt escaped his throat. His grip on her throat collapsed, and he dropped to one knee in the mud, splashing water everywhere.

A curse. Iris coughed, stepped back, and analyzed the situation with perfect clinical calm: this so-called apex predator, mid-kill, was being punished by something inside his own body. She crouched to his eye level, pulled out her phone, and took a photo. Flash. It caught his pale, furious face.

"So you're the Wolf Valley boss, huh?" She showed him the photo. "This is the legendary supreme alpha? Fraud. I'd sue the photographer."

He lifted his eyes. Rain slid off his lashes. Silver fury — and something deeper — churned behind them. He started, hoarse: "Do you know I could crush you with—"

His body seized again. Worse this time. The black cracks climbed half his neck, and his breathing went ragged like an invisible hand was squeezing his heart. Iris watched the most dangerous being alive kneel in the mud, suffering because he'd tried to kill her, and the whole scene struck her as a black comedy masterpiece.

"What…" she asked softly. "What has you chained?"

He didn't answer. Because the fog answered for him.

A howl rolled out of the dark — wrong, not animal — and then a dozen shadows poured out of the rain from every direction. They had no fixed shape: humanoid bodies wrapped in fog, empty eye sockets, claws that could split rock. They were coming for them — for her, for the witch blood.

The man cursed in a language too old to parse and yanked Iris behind him. His right arm still bled, yet he stood between her and the swarm like a black statue in the rain.

"Rogue strays," he said without turning. "Your blood is a feast to them."

"Then you must be thrilled." Iris ducked a claw, drove her scalpel into the thing's empty eye socket. "Kill two birds with one stone."

"Shut up." His voice was flat. "If you die in here, you'll pollute my territory."

"Thanks. So sweet." Her eyes swept the terrain. "Left — behind that dead pine, there's a light. They're avoiding that ground!"

He turned his head, looked at her. It was the first time Iris saw something close to grudging approval on his face. One second later he tossed her toward the dead pine and charged into the swarm himself, tearing a bloody corridor through them with an injured arm.

Iris hit the mud, rolled, and — instead of cursing him out — started running with purpose. Not random: she circled the pine, funneling the things that chased her toward the faint luminous seams in the ground. She'd studied satellite imagery of Wolf Valley before coming; the seams traced a pattern, like the edge of an array. She bet these things blew up if they stepped on it.

The first rogue to hit a seam screamed — a sound like ice dropped in hot oil — and burst into fog.

"Fracture lines!" Iris shouted, delighted. "Old wolf! Over here! Walk the cracks!"

The man stared at her for two full seconds. Then he came. He landed behind her, his arm already half-knitted, the black cracks receding, and grabbed her collar like a kitten, leaping out of the encirclement along the seams.

The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Iris hung off his shoulder, looked back at the fog churning where the swarm had been, heart slamming, mouth still running: "So… you saved me?"

"You're a problem on my territory." He set her down at the valley's mouth, voice flat. "Problems leave my territory. They don't die on it."

"You could have killed me." Iris looked at him and smiled. "Before your curse fired, you had a full second. You've killed a lot of people — a second was enough for ten of me. But you stopped."

He went still.

He turned. Rain ran down his pale face. His silver eyes held her quietly for a long time, long enough for Iris to suspect he might throw her back into the valley. Then he spoke, very softly, like he was saying it to himself:

"I've endured a thousand years of loneliness… and you're the only exception."

Iris froze. He hadn't looked at her when he said it. He'd said it to the valley, to the rain that had stopped, to the sentence he'd been reciting to himself for a thousand years. And she suddenly understood that the man who'd almost killed her was lonelier than anyone she had ever met.

"Destiny is just a lie told by the winners." The words came out of her mouth before she planned them, and they came out more serious than she meant. "If anyone ever uses fate against you, remember I said that. That'll be five dollars."

He watched her. He didn't smile. But something in the ice behind his eyes cracked, hairline-thin.

Then he walked into the fog, and his last words came back to her: "Don't come back, witch blood. Next time, I won't hesitate."

"Okay!" Iris waved at the fog. When he was gone, she let the smile fall and looked down at the fist she'd been clenching all along — a tuft of black fur she'd scraped off his coat during the chaos.

She sealed it in an evidence bag, started back toward town, and her brain kept chewing the data: He knew my blood. He's afraid of something. He's protecting something. Her phone buzzed.

One text. No number.

Welcome home, Iris.

Attached: a photo. Iris standing in the valley rain tonight. Shot from the front. Crisp focus, perfect angle, like someone had stood right behind her all night with a camera.

Iris stopped dead.

Slowly, she raised her head toward Black Pine's windows. Every single one was lit. And behind every single one, she could feel a person standing.

Somewhere in the fog behind her, very faint, something spoke her name.

"Iris…"

A soft sound. Like a sigh.

And Iris was absolutely certain she had never heard that voice in her life.

— End of Chapter One —