The night my life finally cracked open didn’t start with howling.
It started with burnt coffee and the stale hum of fluorescent lights, the kind of small-town dead-end quiet I’d spent eighteen years plotting my escape from.
“Eva, you gonna marry that textbook or actually help me close?”
Rae’s voice floated from the other end of the diner, muffled by the clatter of plates. I blinked down at my anatomy notes, the words blurring: scapula, humerus, escape.
Right. Escape. Two more months and I was gone.
“Textbook is a better kisser,” I called back, snapping it shut. “Doesn’t make me clean grease traps.”
“Textbook doesn’t pay you,” she said, appearing beside my booth with a tray on her hip and an eyebrow ring catching the neon. “Clock out, Dalton. You look like death microwaved.”
“Wow,” I said. “Romance really is dead.”
She snorted and nudged my foot with hers. The diner door chimed, a cold draft sneaking in. Instinct made me glance up, the way you do when you think you’ve felt eyes on the back of your neck.
Empty doorway. Just a gust of October sliding across the tiles.
Still, something prickled along my skin, like a static charge under the surface.
Rae followed my stare. “Hoping for a late-night prince? You know it’s just truckers and drunks after ten.”
I shoved my notes into my bag. “I’m hoping for tuition money and a bus ticket out of here.”
“Right. Ms. Future Big-City Surgeon.” She leaned in, her voice dropping. “Your dad good with that plan yet?”
The question was light, but it landed heavy. Thomas Dalton wasn’t really good with anything that involved me leaving his line of sight. Or, more accurately, his line of control.
“He doesn’t get a vote,” I lied. “We had the argument. I won.”
Rae gave me that look that said she didn’t believe me but also knew better than to poke the bruise. “Then you better get some sleep so you can dazzle the admissions gods. Go. I’ve got close.”
“Love you.” I kissed her cheek and headed for the back, untying my apron. The office smelled like printer ink and cheap air freshener, a far cry from the ghost of gun oil and metal that haunted my actual house. Dad’s smell. Hunter smell, my brain supplied, then promptly rolled its own eyes.
“You’re not twelve,” I muttered at my reflection in the office mirror. “Wolves aren’t real, and Dad’s just a paranoid prepper with too many guns and not enough therapy.”
The lie settled over me like an old, fraying blanket. Familiar. Never warm.
I clocked out and stepped into the alley behind the diner. The autumn air slapped my face, cold and clean, scraping away the smell of fries. Above, the sky was a black bowl dusted with stars, the kind of pretty that shouldn’t feel threatening. But the hairs on my arms rose anyway.
The dumpster hummed with a buzzing fly choir. A cat knocked over a bottle somewhere, glass chiming as it rolled. Ordinary sounds. Ordinary night.
Then the wind shifted.
I froze.
It wasn’t the temperature—though the air seemed to drop ten degrees in an instant—it was the scent that punched through me. Not the sour of trash or the metallic tang of the diner’s back door. Something wild. Earth after rain. Pine sap. Smoke. Under it all, something that made my throat tighten and my heartbeat stumble like I’d tripped.
