They Both Wanted Me

The night air smelled like rain and regret.

I pulled my worn cardigan tighter around my shoulders, cursing myself for staying so late at the library again. Six hours of reshelving, three argument with the microfilm machine, and exactly zero human interactions that meant anything. Just another Tuesday.

My apartment was a twenty-minute walk through the older part of the city, where streetlights flickered like dying stars and the sidewalks cracked into puzzle pieces no one bothered to solve. Most of my coworkers had cars. Most of my coworkers also had lives, boyfriends, dinner plans that didn't involve instant noodles and a cat I couldn't afford.

I was halfway down Birch Street when I felt it.

A prickle at the back of my neck. That ancient, animal instinct that screams someone's watching even when there's no one there.

I walked faster.

The sound came first. A low growl, so deep I felt it in my chest rather than heard it with my ears. Then the shadows at the end of the alley to my left moved-not like wind, not like anything natural. They gathered, thickened, and stepped into the dim pool of a dying streetlight.

Three of them.

Men? Not quite. They wore human shapes the way a wolf wears sheep's clothing-badly, with violence peeking through the seams. Their eyes caught the light and threw it back yellow. Their smiles showed too many teeth, all of them sharp.

"Well, well," the tallest one said. His voice scraped against my ears. "Smell that, brothers?"

The one on his right inhaled loudly. His nostrils flared. "Sweet. Clean. Human."

"Alone human," the third corrected, circling to my left like he was herding me. "Tender human."

I should have run. Every survival instinct I possessed screamed at my legs to move, to flee, to do anything except stand there frozen like prey. But my body had betrayed me. My feet were concrete. My heart was a trapped bird throwing itself against the bars of my ribs.

"Please," I whispered. The word tasted pathetic. "I don't have any money. I don't-"

"Money?" The leader laughed, and the sound was wrong. Too rough. Too much like something that had forgotten how to be human. "We don't want your money, little lamb."

He stepped closer. The smell hit me then-wild, earthy, like wet dog and blood and forest after rain. Wrong. All wrong.

"We want," he said, and his face shifted-jaw extending, teeth lengthening, eyes going fully gold, "to play."

The transformation happened in heartbeats. One second they were men, or something like men. The next, fur exploded from their skin, spines curved, and three wolves stood where the men had been. Not ordinary wolves. These were the size of ponies, with shoulders that brushed my waist and jaws that could snap my arm like a twig.

I screamed.

The sound had barely left my throat when the first wolf lunged.

I threw my arms up-stupid, useless, as if my forearms could stop teeth designed to crush