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Twice.

It’sbeating.

The wolf’s legs twitch, causing fur to shed.

I stare in horror. Lead in my veins. I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t think.

The wolf opens its mouth, a long exhale that makes its chest expand, its ribscracking. A black tongue slips out between its teeth, growing longer and longer and?—

It raises its head and looks at me with one milky eye and one empty socket.

Release me, the wolf hisses.

Then it lunges at me.

I scream.

I scream so loud that my whole body shakes and my vision blurs and I stumble backward, the wolf’s rotting jaw snapping at me, a tooth catching the edge of my raised arm as I try in vain to protect myself.

I fall backward onto the moss, still screaming, my head banging against a rock.

But the wolf stops.

I struggle to sit up, expecting to see it face-to-face, to stare into that one milky eye, for its teeth to gnaw my nose off.

Instead, it’s slinking off into the bushes in retreat, and then it’s gone.

“What the fuck, what the fuck,” I cry out. I look down at my arm. There’s a long red mark, but it didn’t break skin.

“Sydney!” I hear Kincaid’s voice from behind me, echoing through the trees. “Sydney!”

“I’m here,” I say, trying to shout, but my voice cracks.

What the fuck just happened?

I hear rustling in the brush, and I twist around, expecting to see the wolf coming at me from behind, but instead, it’s Kincaid, bursting through the underbrush.

“Are you alright? What happened?” he asks, his voice strained with panic. He runs right over to me and crouches down. Then he reaches out and cups my face in his hands, sostrong, so warm, brushing the hair off my forehead in a gesture that is so intimate and tender that it disarms me even further.

“I don’t know,” I whisper, conscious of how close our faces are, of how his winter eyes are vivid with concern. “There was a wolf.”

His pupils dilate. “A wolf?”

He looks behind him, and I raise my arm to show him the red mark, which has already faded to pink. “It tried to bite me, but it didn’t break the skin.”

He runs his finger over the mark, a soft touch. “A wolf,” he repeats. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“I hit my head on the rock.”

He gently runs his hand over the back of my head, and I wince. “There’s a bump, but you should be alright,” he says. “Still, we need to get you back, have Everly look you over. Then we need to find this wolf. The sea wolves here have never attacked anyone. They’re shy creatures. It could be rabid.”

“It wasn’t rabid. It was dead,” I say.

He stares at me as if he didn’t hear what I said.

“What happened?!” Rav yells.

I turn to see him and Patrick at the edge of the clearing.