Mag-log inNoah"You smell different."Dax says it from the front desk where he’s closing out the till.I’ve just finished disinfecting the mats and mopping the floor. I’m about to start cleaning the weights.Gym's been closed for an hour.Blinds down, doors locked, last member long gone, just me and Dax doing the closing routine.Things have been weird between us for the past four days.Since I came here after breaking things off with Heidi.I haven’t seen her around, which is a relief.The heartbreak is still there, so’s the mourning for what we lost, but I feel lighter too.Lying to her every day and knowing I was deceiving her weighed on my conscience heavily.Dax was surprisingly comforting after the fact, and he hasn’t made a single move to touch me since.He’s not even flirting, which I’m perversely missing."Fascinating," I tell him, pretending not to care."It is."I feel him looking at the back of my neck like a hand laid flat there."There used to be this sharp green note under your n
DaxTwo days.He's gone dark on me for two days and the wolf is climbing the walls of my skull about it.Find him, he keeps saying, pacing. Something's wrong. Go and find what's ours.He's not yours, I tell him, racking weights nobody left out, just to have something to do with my hands.He's a hunter with a complicated life and a phone he's allowed to ignore.He never ignores it. He hasn’t been to work. Find him.The wolf has a point.Noah Hunter answers his phone by the second ring like a man waiting for the world to end, and for two days my texts have gone into a hole.I've checked the thing eleven times since the eight o'clock class.I'm aware of how that makes me look.I've decided not to think about it.The gym's empty and everything’s tidied away.The last stragglers cleared out an hour ago.I should lock up and go home and stop hanging around like an idiot.The door opens and every thought I've ever had walks straight out of my head.It's him. The wolf knew before the latch ev
Noah"Double tape the bottom of this one, it’s going to be heavy once it’s filled with books."She holds a box out across the living room, and I don't take it because my mind’s too busy spiraling to focus on her words.First thing I do wrong tonight.There's going to be a whole lot more.There’s no manual for breaking up with someone who’s absolutely perfect and doesn’t deserve or expect it.Considering my recent track record, if there was one, I wouldn’t have heeded the advice in it anyway.She sets it down to reach for the tape herself, easy, like it's nothing, her tidy block letters marching along the side.She's been packing all week like the move is a countdown to something awesome and she’s too excited to wait.It is. For her."You okay?"She wipes her hands on her jeans."You've been parked in my doorway like a Jehovah's Witness."I rehearsed this in the truck.Rehearsed it sitting at the curb for the last hour with the engine off, watching her shadow cross the blinds, telling
NoahI told Heidi I had a hunt.There's no hunt.Nothing on the boards, nothing called in, no monster out here worth the crossbow on my back.I just couldn't sit in her kitchen one more minute while she planned a whole life with me and I nodded along like a man who's all in.I’ve never hated myself more.So I'm walking the dark with a weapon I won't use, telling myself the direction I picked was random.It wasn't random.I'm well onto the Northgate edge before I'll admit that, and I only admit it because I'm already standing at the rim of a clearing looking at the reason I came.He's crouched in the leaf litter, no shirt on, his blond hair catching the moon.I refuse to notice how good he looks. What I do pay attention to is the fact that he’s investing on his own.He’s keeping something from me and I’m not in the mood for his bullshit.That's the part that gets me moving before my brain signs off on it."You didn’t tell me you were coming out tonight," I accuse.He doesn't startle. H
Heidi"Stop wriggling. You're bleeding on my good dish towel."Leon yanks his hand back like the antiseptic's the thing that might kill him, not the grown men who throw him around a barn three nights a week."It's nothing. Marcus barely caught me.""Marcus is nineteen and built like a brick outhouse. Sit."He always sits, eventually, because under all the swagger he's still fourteen and he still likes being fussed over, even if he'd sooner eat the towel than say so.I dab. He hisses. I dab again, gentler."Dad said I had good footwork tonight."He says it the way other kids announce they made the team. Lit up. Proud. Glowing about the privilege of getting hit in the face."Dad said that. Out loud?"Seems highly unlikely to me. I love my dad, but praise isn’t something he really does."He nodded. Same thing."It is, actually.From our father a nod is a parade. I'd know. I spent a whole childhood collecting them and got maybe three.Here's the thing nobody would ever say out loud in the
DaxAfter four hours of staring at my ceiling without being able to fall asleep, I finally give up.So here I am at the gym before the sun's even thinking about showing its face, beating the heavy bag like it owes me an apology, and my wolf won't shut the fuck up.Tell him, he says. Again. For approximately the nine hundredth time. Tell the hunter what we know. Then claim him and keep him.Right.Brilliant.Walk up to Noah Hunter, a man who has spent his whole life believing werewolves are vicious monsters, and announce that somebody out there is deliberately biting people to make more of us.Watch his face do the thing where the hatred that’s been slowly eroding comes crashing back.Watch him reach for the silver he keeps on every blade he owns and try to kill me, and Finn, and every other wolf he encounters with it.No thanks.I hit the bag harder. The chain screams.The problem isn't even him, not really.Part of me, which could be a stupid part with no sense of self-preservation,
DaxThe wolf wants to turn around.He's wanted to turn around since I cleared the fence, and he isn't being quiet about it, because quiet isn't a thing he owns.He just keeps shoving the same word into the back of my skull like a toddler with a doorbell.Ours.Ours, ours, ours."He's a hunter," I t
NoahThree weeks I've been hunting this wolf, and tonight, finally, he does me the courtesy of holding still long enough to kill.Big of him.He's at the tree line where Northgate's fence gives up and the real woods start, and he's shirtless.Obviously. He almost always is.Cold's got nothing to sa
NoahThe whole building smells like him.Nobody warned me about that part.Twenty steps into Apex Fitness at nine sharp on a Monday and it's wall to wall Dax, sweat and burnt sugar twined with cherry tobacco and warm animal, soaked into the mats, the air, probably the drywall.Eight hours a day. In
NoahTonight I'm doing something no Hunter has done in the history of ever.I'm standing in the open at the Northgate fence, unarmed, waiting for a werewolf to show up.Dad would shoot me himself. Two in the chest, one in the headstone. HERE LIES NOAH. HE WAS ASKING FOR IT.Leaving it behind is a d







