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“We don’t have time.”

“Put your clothes on.” I draped Johanna’s shirt over her like a pashmina, struck by a sudden aversion to her bare skin: it had a repellent shine to it in that near light. “And go to bed. I don’t know what fucking—”

“The Wolf is coming.”

I paused.

“When he’s here, I’m going to die,” said Johanna. “He’s going to eat me up. Unless you do it.”

I didn’t watch to touch her but I palmed her shoulder nonetheless, trying to steer Johanna toward her bed. “Goddamnit, Johanna. Go the fuck to sleep.”

“I have a theory,” said Johanna and she did not move under the pressure of my hand, green eyes brittle as glass. “I have a theory about the Wolf and the Hares and all of it. I think he needs us. They need us. The world, I mean. Our power.”

“You’re babbling. Seriously.”

As I watched, her throat became scalloped with bite marks, the indentations deepening, until the flesh sheared away and blood spouted from the ruin.

“Shit.” Instinctively, I wadded the shirt I’d thrown over her shoulders and pressed it to the wound but Johanna shrugged away from my touch, oblivious to her hemorrhaging. There wasn’t enough in her to restitch the mess, nothing to pull from, nothing left.

“I think we are batteries, generators, reservoirs,” said Johanna. “They build the future out of our bones.”

“Johanna,” I tried one last time.

“I don’t want to die for him,” said Johanna. “I’m not getting out, either way. At least give me some dignity.”

And it might have been the wind, the low keening that blew up to our window, a sound like howling but something else too: older, crueler, more eager. At the sound, whatever light remained in Johanna’s gaze extinguished.

“Please,” she said as the door blew in.

A thing like heat haze, that my brain could acknowledge as quadrupedal but would not otherwise describe in any way that memory would capture, could only flinch from like it was a flame, like it was teeth, crawled in through the hallway.

It growled. The Skinless Wolf.

All at once, I was struck by the sense that it existed not just in multiple dimensions but in multiple times, in multiple bodies, in fur and fang, as a long-boned man, grinning with more teeth than there ever should have been; as with a forest erupted from the corpse of a screaming girl, which is all to say, it looked like a migraine.

Blinking, I looked over to Johanna, who glowed now like a candle, our room clotted with shadow.

“Alessa,” said Johanna, my name a prayer.

“Yes.”

The Wolf leapt, crashing into us like grief.

You probably will not believe me but for whatever it is worth, I made sure it didn’t hurt. There wasn’t anything to do about what came after, no justice in what followed, but it didn’t hurt.

I owed her that.

I collared Johanna’s throat with both hands and she bent her head as if it were a blessing I was endowing. Maybe it was. When I touched my brow to hers, I could almost convince myself this was a mercy. Her skin was like silk under my fingers, like tissue, ephemeral as memory.

“I’m sorry,” I said, not fully knowing why.

Maybe it was because of how we got there.

Maybe it was how she had to simper through her life.

Maybe it was because we could have saved each other if I had less spite and she some certainty I wouldn’t bite her head off just because.

Regardless, I was sorry. I don’t care if you believe that either.

I broke her neck.

When she died, it was with the briefest exhalation, a small cut-off gasp.

There was relief in her expression as the light in her eyes drained like a slit throat, emptying until there was nothing, until she was just meat and soft blond curls.

Johanna slumped into my arms, and I might have wept then if not for her wolf crashing into us, bearing us down onto the cold floor.

I couldn’t quite see the thing pinning me down: my mind wouldn’t close over the sight of it, refused to do more than acknowledge that there was a monstrous weight astride my breastbone.

I could smell the rotten-meat stink of a carnivore’s breath, feel its boiling saliva hit my chest; I knew it had mouth and teeth and eyes.

If I focused hard enough, I could almost feel the slickness of bare muscle. Not that any of it mattered.

I held Johanna as the wolf panted above us.

She was mine, I heard it say in my mind.

“Fuck. You.”

She was given to me.

My absolute terror evaporated. It was old, yes. It was ineffable too, a thing like a god and like what lurked in the cinerous bones of the place where Portia made her bed; I knew I should be afraid of it but all I had in that moment was contempt.

“She’s dead.” My voice sounded like an ache. “You can’t touch her anymore.”

Something like a man’s laughter rumbled into my ear; almost a wolf’s chortling growl. I felt hands reach past me, and it was then I realized I was clutching Johanna’s body, skin warm enough still to be mistaken for living.

I don’t need her alive.

It began to peel her from my arms. Tried to, at any rate. Laughter clawed out of me, a rasp of noise that broke then into shrieking. I tightened my grip. Teeth sunk into my shoulder, a warning. Pain rippled across me like a grease fire.

Mine. My body to use. My body to bury in the orchard. Mine.

I saw again the wolf’s forests and the bodies beneath its branches; the wolf as a long-legged man, sitting on the soil, teeth digging into the white flesh of a girl’s leg as she kicked, screamed. We were meat to them, I remember thinking. Just meat. To the wolf, to you, to everyone else.

“Hope you have a bucket then.”

While I had no idea if I could stop the Wolf from doing what he wanted, I certainly could keep it from being easy.