Wild Blood

Eira

My lungs burned with the frigid air I was forcing into them. Even with the weak rays of dawn peeling over the treeline, I could still see the fog escaping past my lips. Every huff matched the wet slap of my sneakers against the track. I kept the beat in my earbuds at a low hum — loud enough to count laps, quiet enough to hear if something hunted me.

Not that anyone else was insane enough to be here. Not at 5:30AM in early October. And definitely not ten days after they found a body behind the bleachers with his throat shredded open like a wet paper bag.

Lap three. My eyes cut to that spot before I could stop them. The memory of that night’s frost, blood, and the wrong shape of a man hit and my ankle almost rolled. I caught it, forcing my breath back into rhythm, the frost, the burn in my thighs.

Focus on that.

By lap five I’d found it again. The groove. My wolf settled in my bones, pleased. She’d been pacing for days, clawing at the inside of my skull. We’d been caged too long. Hiding from Sheriff Dan at the Apothecary, under Rowan’s too-careful eyes. Rowan, who poured wolfsbane like it was coffee and told Dan I was home that night instead of finding the body.

It had been her idea to lie. New wolf in Nighthollow equaled the first one questioned. It didn’t matter that I’d been Rowan’s shadow for four winters. It didn’t matter that I had an alibi for the official time of death. Dan still lingered around the shop like he paid rent.

Lap seven. The campus was waking. Janitors, their carts squeaking. Gulls screaming over the bay. Then, somehow over the bane, my wolf sat up, all hackles and teeth.

Look, she murmured.

The hairs on my neck and arms prickled and my breath hitched with the feeling of being watched.

I didn’t stop. Prey stopped. I scanned instead. Trees to my right. Empty bleachers. Chain-link. Then the gate by the quad.

Bingo.

One figure. Hoodie up, hands in pockets. Still. Not winded. Not new.

Been there a while, my wolf muttered. Watching.

I kept running, forcing my legs to hold pace. But watching him broke it. My foot caught on nothing and I stumbled on the turn.

Idiot, she snarled. Focus.

I shoved her down, hating that my anxiety brought her forward. Hating that he’d brought her forward. Lap nine. I pushed past the gate to prove a point. That he didn’t rattle me. And that’s when the frost betrayed me.

My ankle turned and I went down hard on one knee.

Not really hurt. Just pride, split open and bleeding.

He was over the rail before I got my palms under me. No shout. No “hey.” Just the sound of boots hitting track and closing distance. But he stopped six feet out. Like there was a line.

“Você está bem?” The question was low, rough. Some kind of Spanish, maybe, but the vowels were rounder. Softer. Then, as if he remembered where he was, he tried again, “You good?”

The wind finally gave him to me. Laundry soap and shea butter but not the market crap. It was Rowan’s brand, the kind she made in the back, with the lavender she grew herself. Not wolf which should’ve eased me.

It didn’t. Only creepers watched women running at dawn.

“Fine. Cramps.” The lie was automatic. I pushed up, ignoring the wet heat seeping through my sweats at the knee.

He glanced down, saw the blood and looked away fast. His jaw ticked. Once. The sunlight cut across his face for half a second and caught on stubble, not a beard. The kind that said he didn’t sleep, or didn’t care to shave.

“You run every morning?” The question sounded practiced. Like he’d rehearsed it.

I took a step back when his hands went into his pockets. He didn’t follow. Didn’t try to show me his face. The hood stayed up.

“Yeah,” I lied. Defensive. “You?”

“Me too.” Also a lie. I felt it in my teeth. His chest deflated a bit, like admitting it cost him. He turned toward me again, just his chin, just shadow. “Starting today.”

I lifted a hand to block the sun and tried to see him but it was pointless. He was a wall of black hoodie and broad shoulders eclipsing the dawn.

“Well, watch the frost,” I joked. It was a dumb dismissal as I took another step back but he didn’t laugh. He just stared from under that hood. Then nodded once and walked away. Not toward campus. Toward the lot that bled into town.

Why lie about running? Watch your surroundings. Check your car. Don’t drown me out. Did I lock my door? Her thoughts tangled with mine, frantic, and I knew our run was over.

I waited, stretching until he vanished, then bolted for my car. I never kept my bag on me. Too risky. The wolfbane in my thermos was poison to humans, evidence to Dan.

Inside my beater Corolla, I chugged half the tea and soon the world went cotton-quiet. No gulls. No waves against the docks. No wolf. Just me.

The quiet felt like safety and I hated that I needed it.

After making sure I wasn’t followed, I showered at the gym, pulled on jeans and a thermal, and made it to Bio 101 about thirty minutes early. Normal. Safe.

I cracked my book and let the words blur while I waited for students to trickle in.

Slowly the room filled. Then came Kelsey, bitch of the century. Her heels were a weapon on tile, and her disgust was louder when she saw me in the back at my usual table. She smirked down at my desk, whispered to her flock, and snickered. I didn’t look again.

Until the door opened again and my wolf, who should’ve been comatose, slammed against my ribs.

“Ho–ly smokes,” Kelsey hissed, slapping her friend’s arm.

The room went still, the kind of still that only happened with new bodies in town. And I looked up.

Sure enough, it was the guy from earlier.

On the field, at a distance, he was just big. Broad shoulders eclipsing the sun. Now he was in the doorway and I couldn’t breathe right.

He didn’t just fill the frame, he took it. The hoodie from earlier was draped over one arm and his duffel was on the other. His hair was braided back, deceptively brown-black, tied into a low, messy bun like he’d given up halfway. Stubble crawled along his jaw, close-shaved but present.

He didn’t scan the room like prey. It was one sweep, efficient, and then —

Forest green eyes. Too bright for 8AM. Too bright for Nighthollow in October. They landed on me.

That green dragged from my auburn curls up to my face, slow, like he was taking inventory of a problem.

My chest did something stupid. It recognized him. My wolf, drugged to hell, sat up.

Look.

He broke contact first to look at Kelsey, who was smiling so hard her face might crack. Then he walked.

Not to her. Past her. His henley stretched over his chest, the kind of chest you got from work, not gyms. Thighs thick under black cargos, shoulders straining seams. He moved like a linebacker who’d been in fights and won.

He came straight to my desk. The back one. The one no one sat at.

Because carved into the laminate, deep and mean, was a word:

FREAK

Someone took a key to it recently.Maybe Kelsey. Okay, definitely Kelsey.

“Seat’s taken,” Kelsey called, sweet as poison. She took two steps before his look stopped her cold.

He glanced at her. At the desk. At me.

“Não.” The word was low in tone and volume. He didn’t need to be loud, not with his build. “It’s not.”

He rucked the sleeves of that henley to the crook of his forearms before pulling out a notebook and letting his duffle hit the floor.

He slid onto the metal stool, resting his arms on the desk and Goddess, his arms. Muscled and veined and there. A thin white scar cut through the hair on his left forearm, old, clean. Like he fought a blade and won. His hands were worse. Scarred across the knuckles. The right hand had a fresh split, skin pink at the edges. He’d punched something. Or someone.

But more than that, his arm moved to cover the word. All of it. Just gone.

He didn’t look at me. He just opened the notebook, like he hadn’t just started a war with his arm, and wrote his name at the top. Penmanship precise. Hand steady.

Tiago.

With him closer now, I smelled him. Under the wolfsbane burned into my nose from years of poison tea. Plumeria. Rain. And lightning, that sharp ozone bite before a storm split the sky. And something under it, warm, like skin in the sun.

My wolf didn’t sit down.

I was supposed to look away. Rule one: Don’t engage with the humans. Don’t notice. Don’t feel. Two bags of tea should’ve made sure of that. The wolfsbane kept the wolf asleep and me human. Manageable. Safe.

But she was awake, fully for the first time in a long while, looking at him through my eyes.

And a heat, low, uninvited, traitorous, settled between my legs. My breath went shallow.

So I forced my gaze to my book. At the words. At the chewed edge of my pen.

Don’t breathe in. My stupid thought, not my wolf’s. I had to breathe. I wasn’t a vampire. But I did it through my mouth, like if I didn’t use my nose, he wouldn’t exist.

It didn’t work.

Plumeria.

Not cologne. Not soap. Him.

Like summer rain in Hilo. Like my mom’s lei on my fifth year graduation day. Like home before it burned.

And under that rain. Lightning. Skin.

My wolf rolled over in my chest. Look.

I put the book down. Wrote the date in my notebook, hating that the letters wobbled, and he shifted but his elbow didn’t move off the word. That henley was soft. I knew it without touching. And that scar —

Touch him, she stirred again.

Stop. It. I pressed the pen until the tip snapped. Blue ink bled onto paper and my fingers like a bruise.

I swore under my breath.

“Pens break on you, too?”

I flinched. His voice up close was quieter. Lower. Rasped, like he didn’t use it much. Or like he’d been yelling yesterday.

His bushy brow arched, but his mouth didn’t smile beneath the stubble.

“No,” I lied, tearing the page out. “It’s fine.”

He nudged his pen across the desk, a plain black Bic. It stopped next to my hand. He didn’t touch me.

Touch him, she pleaded.

“Take it.” He wasn’t asking.

I had another in my bag but it didn’t matter. She didn’t care about wolfsbane. Didn’t care about FREAK two inches under his arm.

She cared that he smelled like home.

I took it. Our fingers didn’t brush but the air between us went hot anyway and she swooned under my skin.

“Thanks.” My voice was thready like I’d ran here.

He nodded once then the forest green was gone, back to his notebook.

Kelsey was still watching, mouth open because I got a pen and she didn’t get her way but I didn’t look at her. I looked at his arm. Still covering the word. Still too close.

And for the first time in two years, I wanted to skip my next dose. Just to see if he still smelled like that when I was awake.