werewolf

Ms. Cross, I regret to inform you of the passing of Margaret "Mae" Lovell. Per her last will and testament, you are the sole beneficiary of her estate, which consists of the property and business known as the Rusty Spoon Diner, 114 Main Street, Hollow Creek, Tennessee…

Mae Lovell wasn't really my aunt. She was the foster mom who took me in when I was twelve, after two years of group homes and three families who sent me back like a defective blender. Mae was sixty, five feet tall, and smoked menthols on the back porch while doing crossword puzzles in pen. She never asked me where I came from. She never asked why I wouldn't take off the locket, not even in the shower. She just made me grilled cheese and told me I had a mouth on me like a sailor's parrot, and she said it like it was a compliment.

She was the closest thing I'd had to a mother since my real one died.

And I hadn't seen her in four years, because I'm an idiot, and I kept moving, and I kept thinking there'd be time.

There wasn't.

I didn't even know she'd moved back to her hometown. I didn't know she'd bought a diner. I didn't know she'd left it to me until Gerald Huffman, Esquire, tracked me down at the cell phone store in Dayton where I'd been working for six months — a personal record — and handed me a key and a sealed letter.

The letter was in the envelope on the passenger seat. I'd read it so many times the folds were going soft.

Laney-girl. If you're reading this, I'm dead, so don't be sad, I had a good run and I never once quit smoking, so I win. The diner's yours. It needs work. So do you. Go to Hollow Creek and stay put for once. You'll be safer there than anywhere. If you get in trouble — and you will, because you're you — go find Hazel Thorne. She lives up the old mill road. She'll know what to do. Love you, mouth and all. — Mae

You'll be safer there than anywhere.

I'd stared at that line for a long time. Mae didn't know about me. She couldn't have. Nobody knew.

And Hazel.

I knew that name. I'd heard it exactly once, fifteen years ago, on the worst night of my life. Hazel made this for you a long time ago, just in case.

My hand drifted up to the locket under my T-shirt. The silver was warm from my skin, the way it always was. Fifteen years, and it had never come off. Not once.

"It's a coincidence," I told Dolly. "Lots of people are named Hazel. It's a very common old-lady name. It's practically a requirement."

Dolly went ka-chunk.

"Nobody asked you."

The road got narrower. The trees got taller, closing in on both sides until my headlights felt like a flashlight in a closet. Pine and oak and something else I couldn't name, all black and silver in the moonlight. Every so often, the trees opened up and I could see the valley falling away below — and way down there, a little cluster of lights that I was pretty sure was Hollow Creek.

The town I was supposed to be driving into. Not looming several thousand feet above.

"Recalculating," my phone announced, for the ninth time.

"You've been recalculating for forty minutes, Brenda. Just admit you're lost."

I'd named the GPS voice Brenda because she sounded like a woman who'd ask to speak to your manager. Brenda did not admit she was lost. Brenda never admitted anything. Brenda and I had a toxic relationship.

The first sign appeared on a tree on my right.

PRIVATE PROPERTY.

Then another, a quarter mile later. NO TRESPASSING.

Then a third, bigger, hand-painted on a slab of wood: BLACK RIDGE LAND. TURN BACK NOW.

"Wow," I said. "Welcoming."

And then a fourth, and this one made me slow down, because somebody had spray-painted it in red right under the official warning:

SERIOUSLY. TURN BACK. WE MEAN IT. — MANAGEMENT

Underneath that, in a different handwriting, someone had added a smiley face.

I should have turned back.

I want that on the record. Any normal woman would have turned back. Any woman with a sense of self-preservation, or a functioning survival instinct, or literally any sense at all.

But there was nowhere to turn. The road was barely wider than Dolly, with a ditch on one side and a drop-off on the other. And my gas light had just come on. And the little voice in my head that's been getting me in trouble since I could talk said, There's probably a house up there. With people. Who have a phone. And maybe a bathroom.

I really, really had to pee.

So I kept going.

The thing about suppressing your wolf for fifteen years is that it doesn't make you human. It just makes you a wolf with a pillow over her face.

I don't hear things the way I used to. I don't smell things the way I used to. I can't shift, can't run, can't feel the moon pulling at my skin like it's trying to unzip me. The locket keeps all of that locked down tight. Most days, I barely remember there's anything under there at all.

But sometimes — on the darkest nights, in the deepest woods — something stirs.

That night, about a mile past the smiley face, it stirred.

It started as a prickle at the back of my neck. Then a weird pressure in my chest, like a hand pressing flat against my sternum. Then my heartbeat kicked up for no reason at all, fast and hard, and my mouth went dry, and every hair on my arms stood straight up.

I gripped the wheel. "Nope. Nope, nope, nope. We are not doing this. We are not having a feeling in the creepy murder woods, Delaney."

The locket went hot against my skin. Not warm. Hot. Like it had been sitting in the sun.

I yanked my shirt away from my chest with one hand. "Ow — what the—"

That's when the wolf stepped into the road.

It came out of the trees like the darkness had just decided to get up and walk. One second, nothing. The next second, there it was, standing dead center in my headlights, maybe fifty feet ahead.

It was black. Not dark brown, not gray — black, like a hole cut out of the night. And it was huge. Not big-dog huge. Not even regular-wolf huge. It was the size of a small horse, with shoulders like a linebacker and a head the size of my microwave, and when the light hit its eyes, they flashed gold.

It didn't run. It didn't flinch. It just stood there, staring straight at me through the windshield, like I was the one who didn't belong.

Which, okay. Fair.

I knew what it was. Of course I knew. No natural wolf on earth gets that big. And every cell in my body — every buried, locked-down, pillow-smothered cell — lit up like a pinball machine and screamed one word at me.

It wasn't danger.

It was something a lot worse.

I did what any reasonable person would do.

I screamed, jerked the wheel, and stomped the gas instead of the brake.

Dolly fishtailed. Gravel sprayed. The wolf vanished from my headlights in a blur of black, and the trees swung past my windows like a carousel, and suddenly there was a gate in front of me — a massive iron gate between two stone pillars, with a giant wrought-iron wolf's head welded in the middle of it — and I had exactly one second to think, Oh, that's nice craftsmanship, before Dolly plowed straight through it.

The sound was incredible. Like God dropping a filing cabinet down a flight of stairs.

The gate tore off its hinges. Dolly bucked and crunched and screamed, then slammed nose-first into a stone pillar with a crack that rattled my teeth. My head bounced off the steering wheel. The airbag, which had not worked since 2009, did not deploy.

And then everything was very, very quiet.

Steam hissed out from under the hood. Somewhere behind me, a piece of iron fell over with a delicate little clang. My flamingo lamp had flown out of the truck bed and was lying in the headlights, perfectly intact, its pink plastic neck pointed at me like it was judging my life choices.

I sat there with my forehead pressed to the steering wheel and took stock.

Arms: working.

Legs: working.

Head: pounding, possibly bleeding, definitely embarrassed.

Bladder: miraculously holding.

Truck: dead. Very dead. Dolly had gone to the big junkyard in the sky, and she had taken the front gate of a giant scary werewolf compound with her.

"Recalculating," Brenda said brightly.

I reached over, unplugged her, and threw her out the window.

Then I looked up.

In the trees on either side of the broken gate, eyes were opening. Pair after pair of them. Gold and amber and green, glowing in the dark, flicking on like porch lights down a long dark street. Five. Ten. More.

All of them looking at me.

I swallowed hard and pressed my hand flat over the locket. It was burning now, almost too hot to touch, and underneath it, for the first time in fifteen years, I felt something push back. Something that wanted out.

Something that, for some insane reason, wanted to go find that big black wolf.

"Well, Mae," I whispered. "You said I'd get in trouble."

I'd been in Hollow Creek for less than an hour, and technically, I wasn't even in Hollow Creek.

New record.

End of chapter one. 29 more chapters and about 109,942 words in the full book.