by Alexis Davie
He growled at her, his dark eyes glowing yellow again.
Sophia raised her hands in front of herself, the light from her phone lighting up the trees surrounding them. “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, taking small steps towards the man. “I just want to help you.”
“You can’t help me,” the man snarled through gritted teeth. He started to push himself up to his feet, using the tree trunk behind him as support. “Now get out of here before I—” He winced in pain, pressing his hands to the gash on his side.
“You can’t even stand on your own!” Sophia said, carefully stepping closer to him. A part of her kept screaming at her, urging her to go back home and try to sleep. What are you doing? it cried. Just go back! He’s a beast! He could kill you before you even realize what’s happening!
But she couldn’t just leave him. Even if she did go back home, she wouldn’t be able to sleep—not until she made sure she had done everything in her power to help him. If this shifter, this man, was going to die, it would not be under her watch, and it wasn’t just because she didn’t want to have that in her conscience; something in the man’s glowing eyes was calling out to her, beckoning her forward. Despite his efforts to make her leave, his eyes seemed to be crying out for help, desperately hoping she wouldn’t abandon him.
Sophia wasn’t going to walk away from him when she could see he needed her to stay. She felt… almost compelled to do so.
“I can call 911,” she offered.
“I can’t go to the hospital,” the man said, and his voice was softer, like all the fight had gone out of him, like he had accepted the fact that Sophia wasn’t going anywhere.
“Then…” Sophia struggled for something to say. “Let me take you back with me. I can… I can try to patch up your wound, at least.”
The man stared at her, his eyes narrowing as the weight of her words sank within her. Had she just told a complete stranger—who was a shifter, a creature she hadn’t believed existed until three hours ago—to let her take him back to her place so that she could try to heal him? What was she, insane?
“There’s…” The man took a deep, pained breath. “There’s n-nothing you can do to help me,” he stammered. “I’ll heal on my own.”
Sophia glanced down at his hands pressed to his side. “Looks like it hasn’t worked for you so far.” She didn’t know the extent of a shifter’s self-healing capabilities, but he didn’t look any better than the last time she had seen him. If anything, he looked even worse. She tried again. “Please, I swear I mean you no harm. As soon as you’ve healed, you can go back to your life, and I assure you, you’ll never see me again.”
The man took another breath, possibly to respond, but then he was stumbling forward, and Sophia rushed to catch him before he fell down to the ground. She wrapped one of his arms around her shoulders (which was a little more difficult than she had anticipated, as he was at least a foot taller than her) and secured one of her arms around his waist, helping him to hold himself up. He covered his hand with hers, both of their palms applying pressure on his wound.
“Fine,” he murmured in the end, the word coming out of his lips in an exhale. His eyes stopped glowing, and Sophia noticed they were almost as dark as they had been when he had turned into a wolf. She waited for him to say more, though the man didn’t seem inclined to do so.
Fair enough, she thought, taking one careful step forward. She was glad to see him following her lead. He probably had to concentrate on breathing and not dying after all the blood he had most likely lost by now. Sophia just hoped she hadn’t been too late.
3
When Owen woke up, he was no longer bleeding to death.
He was, however, shirtless.
His memory was hazy, and he only remembered bits from the previous night. He remembered the hunter finding him, even though Owen had spent months evading him and trying to stay out of his radar. He remembered that the hunter had been able to get a few good hits on him, and that he’d managed to stab him with a silver dagger. Other hunters Owen had come across hadn’t carried silver daggers, and so he hadn’t been prepared to deal with such a weapon in the slightest.
That was when his mind went foggy. He’d tried getting to the woods, where he could hide until he healed, and he had almost made it, but then he’d felt like his entire body was burning, like the silver from the dagger was flooding his bloodstream, setting him on fire from the inside.
Owen had barely gotten to an alleyway before collapsing, having to practically crawl to the alley’s dead end so that no one would see him. He didn’t want to risk anyone calling 911 or crying out for help on his behalf—if the wound started healing on its own, it would either raise a lot of questions or get him killed, and Owen had never been too keen on finding out which one it would be. Besides, if he shifted in such a dangerous situation and in such an unconscious state of mind, his instincts would take over, and he didn’t want more blood on his hands than he already had.
The alleyway…
He remembered someone calling out to him. He remembered shifting, and he remembered somehow making his way into the woods.
But he wasn’t in the woods anymore, he was in a bed, and there had been a girl last night, saying something about his wound, telling him that—
The girl.
Owen slowly sat up and glanced down at his stab wound. There was a bandage around his waist and a patch on the gash, covering it. He softly pressed a hand to it and winced, only slightly. It would take a few days—maybe even a few weeks—to heal, but it would…eventually. He wasn’t the reckless young werewolf he had been a few decades ago, so a wound of such magnitude would force him to rest in order to close and scar.
Owen groaned to himself.
While he was thankful that this girl had seemingly helped him, he still couldn’t believe she had convinced him to let her take him back to her home. What if she had told someone about him?
“Oh! Um…”
He turned toward the door of the room. The girl from last night was standing at the doorway, carrying a mug of what Owen assumed was coffee. She kept glancing between the mug in her hands and Owen, shifting from one foot to the other, as if she didn’t quite know what to do. That made two of them.
Owen used her hesitance as a moment to observe her. Her short height made him think she was a teenager, but she looked like she was, at least, in her early twenties. Her brown hair was tied up in a messy bun, and her hazel eyes looked everywhere except at him. Although she didn’t seem to be any kind of threat, Owen couldn’t let his guard down. He had lived long enough to know that people were rarely what they seemed to be at first glance, and he had lived alone long enough to know that he couldn’t trust every single person who appeared to be nice.
Still, she had covered up his wound, which ought to count for something. Besides, if Owen needed to, he could easily take her in a fight.
The girl finally turned her eyes to him. “Um… are… are you okay?” Her voice was soft, almost soothing even. She didn’t move any closer to the bed. Owen didn’t answer her. “I, uh…” She gestured to the mugs she was still carrying. “I didn’t know if you’d be awake. I… I can get you some coffee, if you’d like some? Or I have orange juice, or milk, or I can make some tea, if you want? It’s nothing fancy though. Or—” She stopped her sentence short. “You must be hungry, right? I have toast, or cereal—”
“Who are you?” Owen asked her. The girl blinked at him, and her demeanor seemed to change: she suddenly looked taller, and her eyes focused on him like she could stare him down. Owen didn’t think she could, but he had to admire that she thought otherwise.
“I’m Sophia,” she said. “Do you want anything, or are you going to sleep for another two days?”
Owen’s eyes widened. “Another two…”
The girl’s… Sophia’s expression softened. Her shoulders relaxed, and she went to a rocking chair a few feet away from the bed and sat down on it. For a moment, she didn’t say anything else;
she just stared at Owen, and the look in her eyes was something between curiosity and… Owen didn’t know if it was amazement or fear, or a strange combination of both. He glared in response. He didn’t like being looked at like he was some sort of circus animal put on display.
Contrary to Owen’s expectations, Sophia kept her gaze locked on his.
“You’ve been sleeping for the last two days,” Sophia told him, looking at him over the rim of her coffee mug. “I was worried at first, because I didn’t know if it was normal, but whenever I checked up on you, you were still breathing. I figured you just needed some rest.”
Owen glanced down at his hands. He definitely wasn’t the young, reckless werewolf he had been a few decades ago anymore. A younger shifter than him wouldn’t have been unconscious for such a long time, and the wound would’ve probably healed already. Then again, he hadn’t been around other werewolves for at least thirty years, even more than that, and he had no idea if a younger shifter would’ve been equally affected by being stabbed with a silver dagger.
He turned to Sophia. “Why did you help me?”
Sophia took a sip of her coffee. “Because you needed help,” she answered. “And you said you couldn’t go to the hospital.”
“So you just bring any wounded shifter you encounter to your place, is it?” Owen asked.
Now she was the one who frowned at him, and a soft blush covered her cheeks. “Of course not!” she said, as though the idea was scandalous. “You’re free to go, if you want to! I’m not holding you hostage or anything, you know!”
Owen took a deep breath. He was perfectly aware that he wouldn’t get anywhere in his current state. His plan for the past two months had been to finally get the hell out of Evergreen Grove, even though his entire life had once been here. Too many experiences he wanted to forget and too much pain he didn’t want to think about.
He looked back at Sophia, remembering the words she had said to him last night after he had snarled at her to forget she had ever seen him.
Please, I swear I mean you no harm. As soon as you’ve healed, you can go back to your life, and I assure you, you’ll never see me again.
Sophia had tried to help him in the alleyway, and then she had gone looking for him in the woods, despite the fact that Owen had refused her help and shifted in front of her, revealing his true nature to her. For all she knew, he could’ve ripped her apart, and yet she had still offered him help again. Even now, knowing what he was, Sophia was sitting in the same room as him, armed with only a mug of coffee that had probably already gone cold.
Why is she not scared of me? Owen wondered. She saw me shifting. She knows what I am and what I could do, doesn’t she? She’s surely heard the stories, too.
Everyone who had ever lived in Evergreen Grove, Montana had heard the stories of people who could transform into wolves, who could suddenly turn into vicious beasts able to tear you apart in seconds. Sophia had surely grown up hearing those stories, because even if half of the town’s population didn’t believe them—even if they had become urban legends and myths over the last century—they were still passed down from generation to generation.
Then why had Sophia saved him?
And, more importantly, why had Owen let her help him in the first place?
Owen cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said, nodding his head. After all, the only reason she had brought him to her place was because he had agreed to let her do so.
Sophia sighed, and her posture in the rocking chair relaxed again. “I meant what I said. You can leave as soon as you’re healed.”
“That’s my plan,” Owen told her. He hadn’t expected to be stabbed on his way out of town, but he had already been postponing his departure from Evergreen Grove for at least the last ten years. He supposed that a few more weeks wouldn’t make a difference. “I’m sorry for intruding in your life like this though.”
“Oh.” Sophia blinked, as if that hadn’t even occurred to her. Then she dismissively waved her hand. “No, don’t worry about it. I did offer to let you stay here. I’m just worried that your family will wonder where you are,” she said, and Owen’s hands clenched into fists before he could help it. “Do you want to call someone—?”
“There’s no one to call,” he snapped, and he didn’t miss the way Sophia seemed to lean back against her rocking chair.
“Oh,” she mumbled. “I… I’m sorry.” When Owen turned back to her, she was looking down at the mug in her hands. It seemed that she wanted to ask more questions or make some other comment, but she thankfully added nothing else, which Owen appreciated. It wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, much less with a girl he had just met.
Would it be so bad though? If he talked to her about it? He’d probably never see her again, anyway.
All the more reason not to tell her, Owen thought to himself. There’s no need to burden her when you won’t be here to deal with the mess.
“What’s your name?” Sophia asked, bringing him out of his thoughts. The curiosity in her eyes was different than the one Owen had seen in them before. Instead of feeling like a circus animal on display, it was more like she was holding out her hand to a street dog, letting him know she wouldn’t hurt him, and she was waiting to see what he would do.
Owen’s first instinct was to bite the offered hand… but there was something about Sophia that made him hold himself back. Something about her made him want to slowly approach her hand.
It’s those eyes of hers, he thought, biting back a smirk. Sophia’s hazel eyes didn’t stand out all that much, though once you looked into them, it was fairly easy to realize that you shouldn’t underestimate her. Perhaps she really could stare Owen down—if anything, it would be amusing to find out.
“Owen,” he said. “My name’s Owen.”
4
A week passed by, and the gaping wound on Owen’s side looked better every time Sophia checked on him and changed his bandages. When she had first seen it, she had wondered if maybe she should try sewing it closed, but she had quickly decided against it. The last thing she had wanted was to accidentally make things worse. Luckily, she hadn’t needed to sew it closed in order for it to stop bleeding: his body had started to heal on its own, and as soon as Sophia had placed a bandage and a patch on top of the gash, the blood had stopped flowing out of it.
“I’ll be out of your hair soon enough,” Owen kept telling her. “It’ll probably scab over in a few days anyway.”
“Shouldn’t it have healed already?” she asked him one day. “I thought werewolves were kind of… I don’t know…indestructible.”
“Do you really want me to leave that badly?” he replied with a raised eyebrow.
He hadn’t seemed offended by the thought, but Sophia had still felt like he was accusing her of wanting to get rid of him, after she had been the one to bring him here in the first place.
“I didn’t say that,” she said. “And you didn’t answer my question.”
Owen sighed, wincing slightly when Sophia placed a new patch on top of the bandage around his waist. She tried not to pay attention to his naked torso, but sometimes she found herself staring for a little longer than was probably appropriate. Even though Owen didn’t have a rippling six-pack like the insanely fit guys on TV and in magazines, he did have defined muscles, and there were times when Sophia wanted to reach out with her hand and touch them, running the tips of her fingers over his skin.
Then she would shake her head and scold herself. She hadn’t brought Owen here to gawk at him; she’d brought him here so that he wouldn’t die. He would be out of her apartment as soon as he was back to his full health, and Sophia would keep his existence a secret to the rest of the world until the end of her days.
“What do you know about shifters?” Owen asked.
Sophia shrugged her shoulders. “Not much,” she confessed. “Nothing, actually. The stories don’t really go into all that many details.”
Owen nodded his head. “Well. We’re not indestruc
tible. We can only be killed by certain weapons, and while we do age, we live much longer than humans. Still, the older you get, the more difficult it is for wounds to heal on their own, especially a stab wound like this.”
“You were stabbed?” Sophia cried. Thinking about it, it was the only obvious answer, given the wound itself and the hole in his blood-soaked shirt (which she had washed and dried so that Owen could wear it again once the gash had healed), but hearing him say it was still… shocking. Had he been on the end of an attempted robbery gone wrong? Had someone found out he was a shifter and attacked him?
“I would’ve healed by now,” Owen mumbled, tightening his eyes shut as Sophia finished treating his wound for the day, “but I’m sadly not as young as I used to be.”
His words, and the fact that shifters apparently lived a lot longer than humans, made Sophia wonder how old Owen actually was. He looked like maybe he was in his early forties. Then again, did age mean the same thing to a werewolf as it did to any other person?
“I’m not telling you how old I am,” Owen suddenly said, and Sophia blinked confusedly at him. “Your eyes give away everything you’re thinking, you know,” he told her as his explanation.
Sophia huffed out an annoyed groan, a blush covering her cheeks. She supposed it was only fair: he hadn’t asked anything about her, and she had no right to ask him any personal questions.
A sudden thought occurred to her. If he could see what she was thinking just by looking at her eyes, that probably meant he had spent some time watching her, right? So maybe her staring at him wasn’t as bad as she believed it was, right?
Just because he’s going to leave doesn’t mean you can’t make the best out of his time here, Sophia told herself, and she bit back a smile.
* * *
“Owen, what are you doing!”
Owen turned to Sophia, who had just walked into her room holding two mugs of coffee in her hands. He was currently sitting on the edge of her bed, trying to push himself up to his feet. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
