Wolfsong (Green Creek 1)

I HAD just turned twenty-two when monsters came to town.

For all Gordo’s warnings about how big and scary the world could be, for all Thomas’s notions of a territory protected, nothing had ever happened. No one came. Nothing attacked. I never asked questions about other packs or what else existed if werewolves were real. I lived in a bubble in a small town in the middle of the mountains and I thought that’s where I’d always be.

Everything was good. Everything was fine.

Carter had just graduated and moved back to work with his father.

Kelly was taking online courses so he didn’t have to leave the pack.

Joe was sixteen and still waited for me on the dirt road almost every day.

Gordo was thinking of opening another shop in the next town over.

Mom smiled when she ran with the wolves at night.

Jessie moved back to Green Creek and was a teacher at the school.

Tanner, Rico, and Chris took me out for beers, and we ate our weight in buffalo wings.

Mark was close to telling me about him and Gordo.

Elizabeth was painting in pinks and yellows.

Thomas smiled out to the trees, a king content with his domain.

I should have asked more questions. About what was out there. About what they could want. But I was naïve, and dangerously so.

I was walking toward the diner for lunch. I rubbed the grease from my fingernails. My hands were callused, signs of hard work. I marveled at how I had a place here. In Green Creek. My father had said I was gonna get shit, but he was dead and I had a place. Friends. Family. I had people. I was something. I was somebody.

It was a bright June day and I was alive and happy.

And then a woman said, “Well. Hello.”

I stopped. Looked up.

She was wrong. Off. Dark. Beautiful with red hair and pale skin and a shark’s smile on her face, all bite and teeth. She wore a pretty summer dress, blues and greens. She was barefoot, and I wondered if her feet burned on the cement from the sun.

“Hello,” I said. There didn’t seem to be anyone else on the sidewalk.

She took a step toward me. She cocked her head to the side and I thought, Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. “My name is Marie,” she said. “What’s yours?”

“Ox.”

“Ox,” she breathed. “I do like that name.” She was close enough to touch and I didn’t know how that had happened.

“Thank you,” I said. “That’s very nice of you.”

She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “You smell like….”

“Like?”

She opened her eyes. They flashed violet, like an O

mega. “Human. Tell me, human. You play with wolves?” She took another step toward me.

I took an answering step back. In my head, Thomas was telling me to remember my training. To remember what he’d taught me. I didn’t think it was really him, but I couldn’t be sure. I knew Gordo had wards up all over town, so surely he would have known if another wolf had breached them.

“You should leave,” I told her. “Before.”