Chapter Text
THE SMELL HIT HER BEFORE THE TASTE DID
It ignited her senses, awakening them for the first time in what felt like forever. As the liquid trickled down her throat, the crust that encased her skin began to crack and fall away, the stiffness in her bones easing with each swallow
With a trembling hand, she clutched the source of her salvation like a lifeline. A hum of pleasure escaped her lips as she felt warmth flood back into her skin, color blooming beneath the gray.
What had felt like stone beneath her body now felt like rich, yielding earth. Easier to move through. Easier to breathe. Her senses returned in crashing waves
smell, taste, touch, hearing, sight
each one sharper than she remembered.
She forced her heavy eyes open, focusing on the face above her. Foreign eyes. Dark eyes. "Easy... save some for the rest of us."
She groaned in protest as the man gently pried the bag from her lips and turned away. Through her haze, she scanned the darkness. There were others—just like her, but less alive. Dust and grime caked their beautiful gowns and suits as they lay perfectly still.
As the man moved toward the back of the darkness, toward another body, she took in her surroundings. The tomb.
It came back to her then, the screaming, the fighting, the snarling.
The crying.
They'd left them here to rot, to suffer for all eternity, simply because of what they were.
"We can leave now. The seal has broken." She jumped at his sudden reappearance beside her, that dazed smile still on his face. "We're free again."
With heavy limbs, she stood. The weight of her gown didn't help her weakened state. "How long has it been?" Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper as she brushed the dust from her attire.
"A century, give or take." He murmured, then added with an audible smirk. "Leave before someone notices. Have fun."
"Thank you," she said, her voice steadier now.
She stumbled toward the entrance, hesitantly reaching past the stone threshold. No resistance. No barrier. Her smile bloomed as she stepped through.
The night air was bitter and unforgiving, but she'd never been more grateful for anything. She drew a deep breath of clean, fresh air and ventured into the woodlands.
The preserve in the rain was exactly the kind of place she liked. It loud enough to cover her movement, dark enough to cover everything else.
Madeline had learned a long time ago that forests at night were not the threat, forests at night were cover.
She was the threat.
She'd made her peace with that.
She was just to make her way back into town when she heard them. Two boys, moving loudly and not at all as sneaky as they thought, one of them heaving like he was battling his own body for breath.
She tracked them from a distance for a moment — more curious than concerned, the instinct for curiosity being the one she'd never managed to hide. She quickly dropped back into the shadows when the flashlights and the Sheriff arrived. She listened to the sheriff huff at his own son and dragged him away. She waited until the voices faded.
Then she found the clearing.
The deer hit it first, She heard them coming well before they arrived. a wave of panicked hooves, a good few of them, moving blindly in fright. She stepped back into the treeline and let them pass, standing in the sudden silence, listening.
One of the boys was still in the preserve. The one with the bad lungs.
She tracked him by sound — the startled yells, the snapping of twigs from where he obviously took a tumble down the hill and the grunts from below
She blurred past the trees, coming to a stop behind an old tree trunk on the edge of the hill. Suddenly, a growl came from her left, low and enormous,
She instantly recognised it.
Alpha
She was already moving down the hill
she had always been fast. Even before the tomb, she had spent centuries perfecting the art of speed and stealth but an Alpha on a full moon in its own territory was not something you could outrun or hide from once seen.
She had to be smart about this.
She heard the pounce, she heard the boy go down and she had also heard the moment the teeth bit down on him, his scream ripping through the preserve and scattering whatever birds were still roosting in the canopy overhead.
Then the Alpha was gone, as quickly as it had come.
She stood a few feet behind him, listening to his panicked gasps, his hands pressed to his hip, the blood seeping between his fingers in a way that meant deep but not fatal.
He was Young, no older than her — talking physically, of course.
She came out from her hiding place and pressed her hand over his mouth before he could make the sound, her grip firm enough to silence without hurting "Shut up. He's gonna hear us."
His whole body went rigid under her hand but She kept her eyes on the trees, listening to any hint of return, the Alpha's weight moving away somewhere to the north.
"Can I take my hand off without you screaming?" He nodded and She took it away and stepped back, and he spun around.
She looked at him. He looked at her. He was soaked through, covered in mud, with a bite at his hip he hadn't fully registered the weight of yet
"W— who are you? What are you doing here—"
Her mouth curved. He was adorably, catastrophically naive "Saving asthmatic boys apparently"
She looked at the wound properly now — the shape of it, the depth. She knew that bite. She knew exactly what that bite was.
Very inconvenient.
Not so much for her, but more so For him.
"We need to get you out of here," she sighed "Can you walk?"
He nodded, though the shock was doing most of his answering for him. She guided him with a hand on his arm, moving fast and quiet through the trees, pausing every few strides to listen past the rain.
As the preserve began to thin, the road appeared ahead of them, wet asphalt catching what little moonlight there was.
She pulled him back a half-second before the SUV came screaming around the curve, the tyres shrieking, the headlights sweeping over the exact spot he would have been standing.
He turned to say something and she could see it forming on his face, the thank you, the question, the very reasonable things he had every right to ask.
She was already gone.
She moved back into the treeline and listened to him stand alone on the roadside for a moment, Then the sound of him pulling up his shirt, Looking at the wound and his sharp intake of breath.
From somewhere north of them, deep in the preserve, a howl rose up into the rain.
She leaned against a tree in the dark and listened to it carry.