Prologue

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Tanner Lindsay never knew what woke him. Later he thought it might have been a scream, or a gunshot. But he never knew for sure.

He’d fallen asleep on top of the blankets, still wearing his jeans and a black hoodie with a grinning jack-o-lantern face on the front—two days to Halloween, not that he’d dressed up or gone trick-or-treating for years, not since he was thirteen.

He’d left the stereo on, too. Bootleg Nirvana crackled over the speakers; Kurt Cobain thought he was dumb, or maybe just happy.

The clock on his nightstand read four fifteen in the morning, but tomorrow was Sunday, thank God. His parents had ten thousand rules, but at least no rules about getting up early on the weekend, no crazy ideas about going to church. He could sleep until noon, and then worry about finishing his history essay, due Monday. Caesar: Hero or Tyrant. Like he cared. Yawning, he began to gather the textbooks and now-crumpled notepaper he’d fallen asleep on.

When the bedroom door crashed open, he jumped slightly. “Jesus, Lita, what the—”

It wasn’t his sister. The man standing in the doorway was no one Tanner had ever seen before. Sandy disheveled hair and a few days of beard growth on his narrow face, a tall, thin man with a gunfight stance, with a gunfighter gun raised and trained on Tanner.

Tanner’s mouth went dry; he had the peculiar sensation that his heart had stopped beating. “What do you want?” he asked, meaning it as a demand, but his voice cracked halfway through. A man with a gun at four in the morning. There was only one thing he could want.

“Take it easy, kid.” The man had a low voice, smooth and deceptively soft. “Let’s just take this real slow.”

The gun never wavered. Tanner didn’t know if it was loaded with silver bullets, but if the bullet found the right place—between his eyes, in his heart—it wouldn’t matter.

Tanner swallowed. “Are you going to kill me?”

“You’re the last one, son. You don’t want to outlive the rest of your family now, do you?”

Sorrow would come later, the awful crush of it; now there was only the trip of his heart and the frantic circling of his thoughts.

“That’s right.” The gunman eased into the room, flipped off the stereo. In the sudden chasm of silence, Tanner heard the murmur of voices from outside the room. “You just stay right there.”

A hot chill tumbled down the back of Tanner’s neck. In the back of his mind, he heard his father’s stern voice, saw Lita rolling her eyes as they listened to the same rules over and over. Really what did they really need all these rules for? They weren’t living in the Middle Ages, in some dangerous country where peasants still hunted witches and wolves and ghouls. They were safe.

“We’ll make this real easy,” the gunman said, his eyes small and pale, as steady as the black handgun.

But Tanner caught his scent, the sour whiff of fear and uncertainty. Suddenly he didn’t think it was easy at all for the gunman. Maybe he’d never pulled the trigger before, never just squeezed and bang, ended someone’s life. Maybe that was why he was still talking.

Ten thousand rules the Lindsays had drilled into their son and daughter, and when it came down to it, maybe this was the only one that mattered: When they come for you, don’t think, don’t fight. Just run.

The voices outside the room neared, someone calling, “Sullivan?” as the clocked ticked over to four seventeen. Tanner smelled the others coming, the scent of gunpowder and hard wills. The gunman glanced over his shoulder—

And Tanner didn’t think, didn’t fight. He twisted around and sprinted barefoot across the carpet.

“Fuck—”

A bullet cut through the air inches from his shoulder and lodged in the wall. Bunching his muscles, throwing his arm up to cover his eyes, Tanner leapt for the tall window that looked out onto the fire escape. It was shut against the October chill, reflecting the light of his bedroom, the Sin City poster on the wall, Nancy in cowboy boots, gyrating, swinging her lasso.

A second bullet shattered the window an instant before his body struck it. He crashed through in an explosion of glass shards, rolled across the fire escape and flipped over the edge before he could catch hold of the metal grating and stop himself from plunging to the ground three stories below.

For a moment he hung in dark space, glass glittering as it fell past him to smash against the alley floor. Any minute, he knew, the gunman would appear in the window, and this time he wouldn’t hesitate before squeezing the trigger.

Jaw clenched, Tanner released his grip on the fire escape. Air rushed past his body as he plummeted, and for one heartbeat, he felt like he was flying, like this was all a dream and he could never really fall.

He struck the ground on his feet, but hard. Pain lanced through his ankles and shinbones, and his teeth clipped down on his tongue, filling his mouth with the taste of blood. No matter, as another bullet ricocheted off the brick wall over his head, releasing the biting scent of silver into the damp night. Bones and tongues healed; wounds made by silver bullets did not.

Tanner fled, bare feet pounding the cold concrete. Glass shards sliced into him, and he left behind a trail of blood as he bolted out of the alley and shot up the sleeping avenue like a boy with the devil behind him.

He couldn’t tell at first if there were sounds of pursuit, his ears still ringing with the gunshots, with shock and with the terrible question of whether he had just abandoned his family, or if the gunman was telling the truth, and they were all dead.

He realized at last, after eight or nine blocks through the wide streets, that he was alone. No pursuers, nor even any late night pedestrians. The city of New Berlin held its silence as if in mourning. Tanner felt his throat choking up, his eyes burning, and strangled the emotion as best he could. His feet, too, ached with each step, but he refused to slow, only the spinning stars above and the frost-clouded pant of his breath marking the passage of time.

At the edge of the city where the houses crumbled away into the towering white pines of the Mord Woods, he stopped long enough to shed his clothing and leave it concealed in the low crook of a hickory branch. The moon overhead was only half-full, but that was all he needed. He stood under its rays and shut his eyes, willed himself into the ecstatic agony of the change. When the pain came, he embraced it, let it wrack him, beat upon him from the inside out as bones shifted and muscles pulled, tendons stretching, tugging free of their moorings.

When it was done, he stood under the light of the moon, no boy of seventeen but a creature rangy and lean with a coat blacker than the night itself. Lifting his muzzle to the sky, he released a long, clear cry that swelled with more pain than any human voice ever could hold.

At last, on the four sure legs of a wolf, he turned and fled into the forest, into the mountains.

A/N: The first several chapters of this were up eons ago as Behind Wolf Eyes, but it's undergone major plot revisions since then. I will try *desperately* to get one or two chapters posted each week. Thank you for reading, and enjoy!