Chapter Text
SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 – NIGHT
The details of her apartment’s interior hallway come to Trinity through a dense fog.
There’s the mildewed, muddied carpet that hasn’t been replaced since the 90’s. A distant buzz of out-of-code wiring. If she were to look closely enough at the walls, she could see each individual drip of nicotine oil trailing down from the ceiling, each one stopping a few feet to a few inches before hitting the rubber baseboard.
Ordinarily, it would all have a smell. Or at least some kind of identifiable vibe. Tonight, it all feels so far away, and she’s too tired to give a shit.
She’s standing in front of her locked apartment door, having given up on the search for her keys a minute or maybe ten minutes ago. It’s probably time to knock again. Her arm raises up as if pulled by a marionette string.
“Huck,” she groans, her forehead resting against the cool metal of the door, “let me in.”
There’s no immediate answer or unlocking, so she goes back to waiting.
Her only thought is that she’d rather be doing anything but. It’s been a long day. She had woken up around four or five o’clock and found it impossible to fall back asleep before her alarm, despite being tired from the many similarly restless nights before that. It’s rainy and abnormally cold for the season, so her shift in the ED had been an endless cascade of slips and falls and car crashes, resulting in a pile-up of charts that she’d had to stay and finish well after work ended. At some point in the night she had driven home—alone—which she doesn’t remember all that well. And her shoes are soaked. When did that happen, again?
She really hates this time of year.
She pulls out her phone to call Dennis. He had left work earlier than she had; she can remember them discussing something about that. It’s normal for him to not hear her knocking at the door. Sometimes he’s in the shower, or playing his strange music, or sleeping. He acts like a seventy-five-year-old woman with her first iPhone and never has it on silent mode, so no matter what he’s up to in there, a call will work.
First, she notices the texts:
huckleberry (7:57 P.M.)
I give you my blessing to eat the rest of my bolo
I forgot it :(
Forgot it?
That’s right. He left work early to go play house all the way out in Beaver or Butler or whatever irrelevant county. And she’s been standing outside of her empty apartment with sopping wet shoes and heavy shoulders, waiting on someone who isn’t even here to let her in. Which might have been the cherry on top of her already shitty day, if not for what she notices next: the date.
It’s September 26th. The date that has been marked on her wall calendar with a solid black circle; the date that she would have remembered and prepared for today if her brain wasn’t suddenly made of Swiss fucking cheese.
Tonight is the night of the full moon.
The realization hits her dulled mind like a bucket of ice water. Being a werewolf is not something that Trinity has to deal with on a day-to-day basis. It hasn’t been like that for a long time. So she should be able to remember the one day of the month that she is forced to deal with it.
It’s because Anaya isn’t around to remind you anymore, she thinks.
She swallows the lump in her throat and pushes the thought somewhere deep down. What can she do now? On full moon nights, she usually hops in her car and drives out to a secluded area—typically a forest, once an abandoned mall when she was in a rush. She had only realized once she came to the next morning just how terrible of an idea that had been. There is no controlling the wolf or guiding it away from danger. She has no memory of what the wolf even gets up to anymore. What if it had run into security guards or looters? There’s just no telling what the wolf would have done to them.
Now that she’s a little more seated in her body, she can feel the ache in her bones and the itch under her skin that signal she’s running out of time. Trinity has no trust in her driving abilities tonight, not after apparently spacing out for the entirety of her drive home. It’s too late to call an Uber somewhere—she can’t risk turning in front of some poor, innocent driver. Locking herself away has never worked. For one, she hates the feeling, and for another, the wolf always manages to slip out.
She lightly bangs her head into the door. “Fuck,” she sighs in utter, humiliating defeat.
If she’s going to turn into a werewolf, she might as well do it in the comfort of her own home. That used to be the norm. Not in Pittsburgh, never, but in California, before she’d gotten more of a handle on things. What’s the worst that could happen? She ends up dead in a gutter because the wolf got hit by a Pittsburgh driver?
Not great, admittedly, but she doesn’t have a choice.
The door is still locked. She’s stupid enough to forget about the full moon, but not so much that she keeps a spare key under their doormat. Anyone could slip into their building, take a peek under the mat, and let themselves in. She’s not too sure that they have anything of value to steal, but it’s a real concern. People who leave spare keys lying around are just asking to be robbed.
Well, anyway. Her spare key is under the carpet.
She groans as she pulls up on the loose spot of carpet near her neighbor’s door, nasty bits of dirt and God knows what else sticking to her hand as she retrieves the key. It would have let her into her apartment sooner, but this was really not worth it before—it hardly feels worth it now.
The mental note she makes to replace the key later immediately slips into her mind’s recycling bin.
The apartment door shuts behind her with a sigh. The living room is dark, dim streetlight from alley-facing windows serving as the only illumination. Blankets lay disorganized across the couch, their bulky silhouettes looking almost like people, unmoving and in contorted positions. Dennis’s mug from this morning sits abandoned on the coffee table. In here, the ambient sounds of electricity and neighbors shuffling around fade away, with not even a knocking from the ice maker to revive the dead air.
She flips on the lights despite there being little point in doing so; she’s not going to be here long. At least the light livens things up with some color. She toes off her (gross) shoes and sets off down the hall, passing Dennis’s closed door on the way to her room. He’s not here most nights now—something about it being hay harvesting season on the farm—so by that and many other miracles, he has yet to be around for a full moon.
Her footfalls are soft against the carpet, but they echo through the empty space regardless. Her room is the larger of the two, but that doesn’t mean much when she can hardly fit more than a bed and a desk inside. Space is limited in a South Side shithole. She opens the window wide enough for a wolf to fit through. If it damages something in an escape attempt she’ll lose her security deposit, so she might as well give it a clean exit.
Cold, humid night air flows in and sinks to the floor where her feet are planted. Drunken shouts carry from the sports bar on the corner. The city skyline peeks out from behind her neighbor’s roofs. The air rises up to her ankles, and eventually her knees.
Nothing to do but wait.
Her body aches in the same way that growth pains probably felt as a kid, and the itch has grown to be nearly unbearable. This has always been one of the worst parts—the discomfort, the anticipation, all of it.
Anaya had been better at turning than Trinity; if there were such a thing as being “good” at being a werewolf, Anaya was it. Her switches were smooth, controlled, practically effortless. It was always easier for Trinity to turn when Anaya was around. Maybe the same was true for Anaya, because they always did it together.
Behind her, the rest of the apartment is silent. She focuses on the cold air stinging her fingers.
Or tries to. Trinity misses how warm Anaya’s hand felt in hers. How soft the fur of Anaya’s wolf was. The harsh sound of her laugh ricocheting across brick and concrete, her howl weaving through trees and crashing waves. Anaya’s grin as she tore down midnight streets on her bike. Her wolf’s glee at riling up the neighborhood dogs.
Fuck. This isn’t going fast enough.
Usually, relaxing into it helps the transformation along. She takes a deep breath. That doesn’t work, which marks the end of her long and sophisticated list of relaxation techniques.
Standing here on the verge of shivering isn’t helping. She looks at her bed, then down at her scrubs. She’s not going to touch her bed when she’s still disgusting from work. But a blanket is easier to clean than her sheets, so she grabs the threadbare one she’d bought for her freshman year dorm, dumping herself on the floor and throwing it over her body.
It’s closer now; her limbs feel vaguely disconnected from the rest of her, like they don’t totally belong to her anymore. That’s fine—it’s not relaxing to think otherwise, so it’s fine. She fails spectacularly at trying to find something uninteresting to look at when her eyes land on the wall calendar. Today’s date is definitively marked with a circle for the full moon.
Her gaze locks onto the 30th. There’s nothing noted for that date. Ideally, she won’t remember it. She’ll go to work in the morning and drink the remainder of the night away when she gets home. Like she has for the past fifteen years.
She can’t look away. She wants to, but she can’t. Can’t look away, can’t get far enough away—even 2,500 miles isn’t far enough—can’t even get control of her own fucking body. It’s her cross to bear. Her curse to bear the brunt of. She should just be grateful that she’s still alive to bear it in the first place. Anaya wasn’t that lucky.
Luck. Ridiculous. It had nothing to do with luck.
She squeezes her eyes shut, but the image of the calendar stays burned into her mind. She digs her fingernails into her palm, even though she can’t really feel it.
She can’t feel anything, actually.
The turn comes, and she lets it quiet everything.
??? - ???
The wolf’s heart pounds and chest heaves, though she does not know why.
She does not recognize where she is. Each time she wakes up, it is in a new place. Unlike the usual young woods of the past uncountable years, there is something familiar here: it smells like her. It must be her human’s apartment.
It seems safe, but she should probably scope things out. There are other scents—is that where the danger is coming from; the reason that her heart is beating so fast? She wriggles out from under the thin blanket covering her and follows a scent out of the room she is in, muscles that have been dormant since the last full moon satisfyingly stretching with each long step. It is strongest at the base of a closed door; it is of sunscreen and soil and sweat. She recognizes this, too, from her human’s car, but she has no idea whose scent it is. It is strong but stale. Whoever it belongs to is not here right now.
Good, because it is not a pleasant smell. Also good, because it means that there is nobody else here. Maybe there is no danger after all. Her breathing starts to slow.
She has much to do tonight, so she treads back into the first room with the open window. Another smell, almost entirely faded, meets her nose before she leaves: something earthy, soapy, with an undercurrent of antiseptic. This person hasn’t been here in a long time.
None of it is even remotely close to what she is looking for tonight: chalk and coconut perfume, overwhelming to the point of stinging. She has not smelled it in years but remembers that aspect of it very well. She cannot catch any of Anaya’s scent outside, either. It rained recently, so if she was here, that could have washed it away. The wolf growls in frustration. Her one night a month that she gets to search is ruined by rain.
She can still hear things. The baying of a group of men, the drumming of car tires across pavement, a rat digging through trash. Nothing there.
The wolf squeezes her shoulders through the window, then her haunches, landing on the solid ground of a back alley.
Just as she did not recognize the apartment, she does not recognize this city. It is nothing like the briny town that she and Anaya spent their nights in. The buildings here so close that they all touch, forming a claustrophobic knit of brick, while the wires and pipes suspended above block her view of the night sky. She cannot imagine Anaya liking a place like this; she prefers the open water and forests with high canopies.
The wolf sets off down the alley. Maybe, if she can find water somewhere, she will find Anaya, too. She had vanished a long time ago—suddenly, Anaya was not there when the wolf turned, nor in their usual stomping grounds. Her human had seemed to disappear, too. The wolf stopped getting any more flashes of her day, stopped turning on nights not of the full moon. She misses those flashes. Mostly they were of places and people she did not know. The ones she liked were those of Anaya, smiling or twisting through the air or focused on schoolwork. Her human was always happy in those ones.
Anaya had said that they would see each other again. She must be out here somewhere. So it is on the wolf to find her.
She might have to stop at some point for food. Her stomach is miserably empty. If she could, she would stop for rest, too; her entire body seems to ache with tiredness. But she has no time to waste.
She lurks, waiting for a car to pass by on the rain-shined road before quickly moving across it. It is hard to smell, hear, or see a body of water when everything is some level of damp. Her ears mostly pick up the steady rush of rainwater into storm drains. She continues weaving her way though side streets and alleys, careful to avoid detection, and without really knowing where she is going until she hears it off in the distance: a deeper, more forceful flow of water.
A river. A big one.
Yes! This could be the best lead she has had in many moons.
Her drooping tail perks up as she follows the sound and eventually the scent. If she finds Anaya, she will finally have someone to play with again. She will get those flashes of memory back. She will get to feel her human’s happiness again.
There is a thin strip of grass and trees before the river, which the wolf promptly barrels through. She lands at the bank of a swollen river, the dark, churning water reflecting a blurry version of the city skyline in front of her and the bridge looming above her. Hopefully Anaya is not on the city side—the wolf would rather not go where there are so many people. People yell when they see her. They run away or throw things or chase after her. She does not want to deal with that tonight.
Right there, on the small dock to her left, is a shape that looks an awful lot like a crouching wolf peering into the water. She cannot help but let out an excited yelp as she sprints down the length of the dock, claws clacking against the metal.
She skids to a stop next to the shape and almost slips on the wet surface. It is… decidedly not a wolf. It is a large storage box of some kind.
The wolf paws at her head and groans. Stupid. She did not even think to properly use her ears or nose. Stupid.
No. The rain did not make her give up. The night is still young, and this river is massive. There is plenty of searching to be done. She raises her nose into the air and—
She smells him a split second before she sees him. The rank stench of alcohol carries down the dock from a man stumbling his way across the river bank. He trips, giggling as he catches himself without falling flat on his face.
Immediately, she drops down, belly hitting the dock. It is dark. If she stays still enough, quiet enough, he could walk by without noticing. Drunk humans are idiots. Drunk men even more so.
The man freezes at the base of the gangway. “Hey!”
The wolf does not move. She makes no sound. There is no way his lousy ears can hear the frantic beating of her heart from all the way over there.
“Hey, puppy!” he calls, and starts making his clumsy way down the dock.
Okay. No more hiding. It is time to go. She shoots up to her full height and, not turning her back to the man, starts to slowly creep back and away.
He does not get the message. “Ooh, big puppy.”
The dock is narrow, so while the man is not large, he takes up enough of it that she cannot get past him. He continues lurching forward, his face obscured by the darkness. The sourness of his breath is so pungent that she can taste it—it permeates from her tongue all the way down her throat, nearly enough to make her gag. As he takes another step forward she sees it: light glints off of a glass bottle gripped tightly in his hand.
“You’re a”—he hiccups—”a good girl, right? Good doggy.”
She could bite his head off just for calling her that. That would show him. It is also a bad idea.
Step back careful. Step back slow, get enough time to think. Step back—
Her hind foot slips off the edge of the dock and her stomach sinks and her heart skips—she bares her teeth and snarls at the sheer surprise of it, but she manages to get all four paws on solid ground.
At her growl the man recoils with a startled yell, his own heart now pounding hard enough for the wolf to hear. “Get away!”
By the time she sees his arm wind up and the flash of the bridge lights on the bottle, it is already whipping through the air and slamming into her flank. She stumbles against it, the whimper unable to leave her throat before she slides off the dock and into the river below.
Everything vanishes in the instant that her body hits the water. Just a moment ago the man, his stench, and the bottle had seemed so immediate, yet those things are suddenly numb, like her skin upon contact with the freezing currents.
Her throat snaps shut as her instincts shift directive from get away to breathe breathe breathe. There is no air down here, no light. Her limbs strike out furiously in all directions, not in an attempt to swim and get to the surface, because she has no idea where that is, but in the hopes that one of them is met with the breaking of surface tension and the kiss of air. She fights even as her lungs burn, as the pressure building in her chest and head reaches the threshold of explosion, as the cold makes her body heavier and heavier…
A front paw hits air and she forces herself up towards it with a massive burst of energy from some primitive reserve. Her jaw unclenches and she inhales, which is met not with a reward of oxygen but with cold water. She could not reach the surface, or maybe it had been a mirage in the first place; there is no light or sound other than the roar of blood and current.
The water paradoxically sets her insides on fire. She writhes and coughs but the water cannot be expelled, only replaced with more. With each wild movement fear grows distant and exhaustion takes its place.
Even in the dark water she sees her vision somehow begin to darken further; the water must contain some light, because this new shadow is like there is no light at all.
She wants to be scared of it. Some part of her, whichever part is not yet numb, knows that she should be scared of it.
Wait. Is there something within it?
There are two warm hands beckoning, a toothy grin, the scent of coconut.
The shadow envelops her. Her eyes close and her tail gives a final, joyful twitch.
I found you.