Chapter 2

The fourth day in the concrete box brought the truth, and it shattered every reality I had ever known.

The morning began like the others—miserable, damp, and punctuated by the heavy thud of a guard tossing two wooden trays of stale, mold-bitten bread onto the floor before walking away without a word. My voice was still an absolute void, the phantom weight of the witchcraft sitting like a lead coin on my tongue.

Across the gap, Harlow—as I had come to call her in my mind after she meticulously traced the letters H-A-R-L-O-W in the grime of her floor the previous evening—wasn't eating. She sat huddled in the far corner of her cell, her knees pulled tightly to her chest, her matted hair concealing her face.

I tapped my iron bars once. Danger?

She didn't look up. Her shoulders were shaking, but it wasn't from weeping. It was a rhythmic, violent trembling that seemed to vibrate through the very concrete beneath her.

I pressed my face against the rusted bars, my brow furrowing. I signed rapidly, my hands cutting through the dim torchlight. Look. Me. What wrong?

When her head finally snapped up, a cold spike of dread drove straight into my stomach. The amber eyes I had grown familiar with over the last few days were gone. In their place were two pools of molten gold, burning with a terrifying, feral light that didn't belong to a human. Her lips pulled back in a silent snarl, revealing teeth that looked sharper, longer, and entirely predatory.

Harlow gripped her stomach, her spine arching backward at an impossible, sickening angle.

A collective shudder ran through the corridor. The heavy silence of the dungeon was violently broken. Though the witchcraft held her vocal cords hostage, preventing her from screaming, the raw, brutal sound of her transformation echoed through the stone. Her bones began to snap, fracturing and re-shaping themselves with a horrific, wet sound that made my own ribs ache in sympathy.

Thick, coarse silver-gray fur erupted from her skin, swallowing the bruises and dirt. Her hands elongated, her fingers twisting as wicked, black claws burst from the tips, scraping violently against the concrete floor.

I stumbled backward, my boots skidding in the filth of my cell until my spine violently collided with the back concrete wall. My breath caught in my throat. My heart hammered against my ribs like a cornered animal.

Shook. It was the only word that fit the sheer, paralyzing terror expanding in my chest.

Monsters. The old, bloody folklore the elders used to whisper around the tavern hearths in the forest city to keep children from wandering too deep into the trees—they weren't warnings. They were real.

Where a pale, frightened girl had been sitting just moments ago, a massive, muscular wolf now stood. The beast was easily the size of a prize bull, its silver fur bristling in the damp air, its chest heaving as it drew in deep, frantic breaths. The sheer aura of power radiating from the creature pressed against my chest, suffocating and heavy.

The wolf took two slow, silent steps forward, its massive paws sinking into the shadows, until its large black snout pressed directly against the iron bars of its cell. Those golden eyes, ancient and terrifyingly intelligent, locked onto me.

I froze, pinning myself against the back wall, my hands instinctively reaching for the empty space on my thighs where my knives should have been. My mind scrambled, trying to find a pattern, a logical explanation. If the world was full of shape-shifting beasts, and this dungeon was built to cage them, what the hell was I doing here? I was a human. I was just a hunter from a starving forest city. I didn't have claws. I didn't have fur. I was entirely fragile compared to the creature staring at me.

Minutes bled into hours as the wolf simply watched me, its ears twitching at the distant sound of dripping water. It didn't pace. It didn't snap. The terror in my veins slowly began to cool, replaced by a strange, sharp curiosity. The beast wasn't mindless. There was a sorrow in its golden eyes that mirrored the expression Harlow had worn as a human.

By the time the torch down the hall began to sputter and die, the horrific process reversed. The bones snapped again, the fur receded like a low tide, and Harlow collapsed onto the concrete, gasping and shivering, entirely human once more.

She lay there for a long time, her chest rising and falling. Finally, she dragged herself up, using the bars for support, and looked across the corridor at me. Her face was deathly pale, filled with a raw vulnerability as if she expected me to look at her with disgust.

I took a slow breath, stepped out of the shadows of my back wall, and walked right up to my bars.

I didn't draw away. I lifted my right hand, opening my palm, and made a slow, deliberate circle over my heart. Safe.

Harlow's shoulders visibly dropped. She raised a trembling hand, her fingers tracing a rapid sequence of the signs we had built.

Wolf, she signed, pointing to herself. Then, she pointed a finger across the gap at me, her brow furrowing as she made a horizontal slicing motion. Not wolf. Human. Why here?

I shook my head, my hands dropping to my sides. I don't know.

We sat there in the deepening dark, two prisoners of an impossible world. The situation we were in had just become infinitely more dangerous, but as I looked at the girl across from me, I realized the rules of the hunt hadn't changed. You analyze the prey, you adapt to the terrain, and you never let them see you blink. Werewolf or human, we were both caged. And we were both looking for a way out.