The wolf is already there when I close my eyes.
He waits at the edge of the treeline, fur soaked in moonlight, scar cutting a brutal line from his left brow into the hollow where his cheek should be. His eyes are white—no iris, no pupil, just twin, glowing wounds locked on me like he’s trying to hold me together by looking hard enough.
“Harper,” he says without moving his muzzle.
It’s not a sound. It’s a pressure in my chest, a remembered voice stitched together from all the pieces my brain refuses to show me.
I wake with my hand pressed over my sternum like I’m holding in a knife.
The motel room hums around me—buzzing neon from the sign outside, the distant shush of the highway, the fridge ticking in the kitchenette. Damp air clings to my skin. The clock on the nightstand insists it’s 3:12 a.m.
“Perfect,” I mutter. “Three hours. New record.”
My throat burns like I’ve been screaming. I sit up slowly, the cheap sheets rasping against my bare legs, and stare at the dark window. My reflection stares back—pale, damp hair stuck to my temples, the faint silver line of the scar along my own jaw. Different shape, different story. That’s what the neurologist said about the white wolf my brain invented.
Trauma dreams. Misfiring neurons. The mind trying to make sense of what it lost.
The white eyes that feel like home.
The thought rises uninvited and I shove it down so hard my head throbs. I swing my legs off the bed and stand, ignoring the way the room tilts for a heartbeat before settling. I know the drill: grounding exercises, water, distraction until sleep gives up on me for the night.
The carpet is thin and rough under my feet as I cross to the window. Outside, the motel parking lot stretches in a warped reflection of the highway—mostly empty, save for my dented Civic and a long, black truck I don’t recognize. Ocean mist rolls in low from the coast, turning the streetlights into hazy halos.
Briny air seeps through the cracked seal of the window, salt and wet asphalt and pine. Home, my brain supplies, even though this is just a stopgap room on the edge of town because my mother couldn’t stand the sound of me not sleeping anymore.
“You need space,” she’d said last week, fingers white-knuckled around her coffee mug. “And I need to not jump at every noise. Just for a little while, Harp. Until the nightmares calm down.”
I told her they were getting better.
I lied.
The wolf had walked into my dreams the night they pulled me from the car, glass in my hair and someone yelling my name from far away. He hasn’t left since.
I press my fingertips to the cold glass, half-expecting to see those white eyes staring back from the parking lot. Of course there’s nothing there. Just the truck, hulking and dark, chrome catching the neon in mean little flashes.
Except—no. Someone is there.
A man leans against the side of the truck, hood up, head tipped back as he smokes. At first it’s just the ember of the cigarette that gives him away, a small, angry star in the mist. Then he straightens, flicks the butt away, and looks straight up at my window like he knew I was watching.
