The moon hung low that night—a smoldering pearl veiled in cobweb clouds, casting the world in silvered ambiguity. Elin slipped through her grandmother's cottage like a shadow, the floorboards singing creaky laments beneath her stockinged feet. Ash's bandage, now permanently stained burgundy, burned against her thigh where she'd sewn it into her petticoat as a talisman.
The Mistwood breathed differently after dark.
Pale moths traced Elin's path like spectral attendants as she retraced yesterday's footsteps. But where daylight had painted the woods in muted greens, midnight conjured a cathedral of shadows. Birch trunks gleamed like exposed bone, their branches knitting a vaulted ceiling where starlight pooled in liquid droplets. She paused, breath frosting the air. The forest's usual symphony—cricket chorales, owl lullabies—had been smothered beneath a silence thick enough to drown in.
"Ash?" Her whisper sliced through the stillness. A twig cracked to her left, then another to her right—an eerie synchronization that set her pulse racing. Moonbeams fractured through the canopy, illuminating paw prints larger than her spread hand, fresh blood blackening the soil.
The attack came not from ahead, but *above*.
A gray blur descended from the pine canopy, slamming Elin against an oak. Needle-sharp claws caged her throat as fanged breath seared her cheek. Recognition came slowly—the scar above his left brow where her handkerchief had knotted, the jagged white streak in his fur like lightning frozen mid-strike. But the eyes... Ash's eyes now blazed sulfur-yellow, pupils slit like a serpent's.
"*You*," he snarled in a voice that shouldn't exist—gravel and shattered glass and the echo of a chapel bell. "Little thief of curses."
Elin's fingers found the hidden bandage. "I came to warn you—"
His claws drew blood. "They're coming. Can't you *smell* their steel?"
A howl shredded the night—not canine, but human. Ash recoiled as if lashed, his snarl dissolving into a whimper. The momentary clarity faded, replaced by feral panic. He fled, dragging his injured leg like a broken pendulum.
Elin gave chase through a nightmare ballet. The forest contorted around them—vines snatching at her hair, roots rising like skeletal hands. When they burst onto the riverbank, the scene unfolded in grotesque tableaux: thirty armed men forming a crescent of torches and gun barrels, their shadows leaping like demons on the water's skin.
"Stand clear, girl!" roared a bearded hunter, crossbow aimed at Ash's heaving ribs. "That demon's claimed eight souls already!"
Ash crouched, every muscle coiled to spring. Elin saw the truth then—the fresh claw marks on his arms where he'd fought *something* before finding her, the way his gaze kept flicking northward where the river curved into blackness.
She stepped between steel and beast. "He's protecting us!"
Laughter rippled through the mob. "Protecting? It's *marked* you, witch-child!" The hunter spat. "Look at your throat!"
Elin's fingers brushed the scratches. Blood welled—black as midnight, shimmering faintly blue. Ash made a sound between a growl and a sob.
Chaos erupted as the true monster arrived.
It descended the cliffside in a cascade of shale—a hulking abomination matted with decaying flesh, its left side humanoid with rotting skin sloughing off bone, the right a malformed mass of tumorous fur. The stench of gangrene rolled off it in waves.
"*Brother*," it crooned in Ash's direction, voice bubbling through pus-filled lungs. "Still playing human?"
Ash's answering roar shook the river. They collided in a whirlwind of fangs and fury, the corrupted wolf's claws shredding Ash's flank. Elin watched in horror as her friend's blood hit the water—each droplet exploding into tiny silver flames that raced downstream.
"His blood's tainted!" screamed a hunter. "Burn them both!"
Elin moved on instinct. Snatching a fallen dagger, she plunged into the melee. The corrupted beast swiped at her—Ash intercepted the blow, taking the claws across his chest. As the monster reared for the kill, Elin drove the blade between its ribs.
The world slowed.
Her hand gripping Ash's fur. His muzzle brushing her temple in a fleeting caress. The corrupted wolf's death shriek harmonizing with the river's sudden roar. When the silver flames reached the waterfall's edge, the cascading water ignited into a curtain of blue fire, revealing glyphs carved into the cliff face—ancient warnings in a tongue that stirred Ash's bones.
As the hunters gaped, Ash collapsed. His transformation began at the wound—fur receding to reveal scarred human skin, claws shrinking into calloused fingers. Elin cradled his head, her blood-soaked hands leaving smears across his cheek.
"Elin..." His first human word emerged raw, a secret too long buried. His eyes—now stormcloud gray—met hers. "The curse... it's not what they—"
A fit of coughing wracked him. The hunters approached, weapons lowered but faces taut with suspicion.
"Speak, demon," growled their leader.
Ash's laugh was bitter as wormwood. "Demon? I was baptized here once." He gestured to the burning waterfall. "When this was a chapel."
Elin followed his gaze. Through the azure flames, the cliff's erosion patterns resolved into crumbling arches—a sanctuary drowned centuries past. Ash's trembling hand found hers.
"The wolf isn't the curse," he whispered. "It's the *cure*. They bound me to this form to atone..." His words dissolved as unconsciousness claimed him.
The walk back to Frostmere became a funeral procession. Hunters bore the corrupted wolf's carcass on a litter, its flesh hissing where moonlight touched it. Elin walked apart, Ash's human weight leaning into her—a man now, but no less a mystery.
Grandma's lantern blazed on the porch. The old woman's gasp upon seeing Ash's face carried generations of sorrow. "Lucas? But you died..."
That night, Elin pressed her ear to the guest room door. Grandma's murmured words seeped through the oak: "...the 1693 purge... your mother begged them to spare you... the lycanthropy serum..."
In the moonlit garden, the corrupted wolf's corpse began to molt. Rotting flesh sloughed away to reveal a military uniform from Queen Anne's reign, its brass buttons embossed with a phoenix rising from a wolfs head—the crest of Frostmere's long-dead lords.
As midnight chimed, Ash's fever broke. He found Elin curled in the armchair, her hand still clasping his. The truth perched on his tongue, venomous and vital—but he let her sleep. Dawn would bring the ledger of sins: how his ancestors had weaponized werewolves, how the town's founders had cursed their own saviors, how the true monsters wore human faces.
And how Elin's blood now carried the serum's spark—a living key to unraveling it all.
Outside, the first snow began to fall. Each flake ignited midair, tracing the constellation from her handkerchief across the frost-laced pane. The Wolf's Tear burned brighter tonight, its final star pulsing crimson over the chapel ruins.
Somewhere beneath those fallen stones, a dozen more corrupted wolves began to stir.