It worked like a charm, Bailey's plan. A scrimmage in the field for fun, that's what Matt had told his father. They were fighting, the way boys fight. A happy game of fisticuffs that snowballed out of hand.

His father took one look at Bailey's black eye and said, "That's the Richards blood in you, alright. But learn to block a hit, boy. You look like shit." Then he tossed them each a beer from the box in his truck and disappeared into the house—probably to drink the rest of it himself.

Bailey healed fast. A couple of days and the purpled flesh peeled away. His broken lip mended full and mauve again, but the cut on his brow did scar like Matt expected. Seeing it made him feel several kinds of terrible. He wondered who the hound had paid to beat him so badly. How he'd gotten that scar and if, in the end, it was worth anything at all.

For Matt, on the other hand, it took three days for the swelling in his left eye to go down enough that he could see properly. A week before his face was a normal shape again. Most nights, he laid in bed and watched the window of Bailey's barn change with the flickering lights of the television screen. Nearly every night, Matt would deliver food to the hound when he didn't come in for dinner—only to find him tucked in the corner of the sofa, a blanket thrown over his huddled shape and an xbox controller in his hand. It seemed every moment he wasn't slaving away on the field, Bailey was playing video games. A deficiency that he'd been starvedof for too long. Occasionally, he'd ask if Matt wanted to play, and occasionally, Matt wanted to—but not so occasionally, he thought back to what Bailey had said that night in the Wrangler.

Tonight's not one of those nights when we pretend we're friends.

So he refused.

Jess didn't come onto him after that first night she saw him broken and bruised to a pulp. After a week, Matt was starting to thinkthat maybe being beaten in a 4AM parking lot might've been more of a blessing than a curse. Eventually, he'd have to talk to her about the birth control. He'd save the discussion, he decided, for a day when he didn't ache so badly.

Sleep was difficult, knowing the rogues had him pinned—but Bailey would see 'em coming before anyone. He was putting too much trust in a hound he didn't trust at all, so Matt snuck his pop's retired shotgun from the shed of the house and kept it in its case, tucked in the closet beneath shoe boxes and old jackets.

Still at night, despite how wounded he felt, Matt watched the shadows move in that old beat-down barn and he let that empty feeling in him expand. Hollower and hollower until he felt the edges of him crumble in, weak and impressed at every touch and thought. His emotions changed with the tides—anxious, angry, then lonely. Anxious that a wolf would break down his door any night now and tear the flesh from his bones. Angry that he laid beside a woman who was playing his future like a pawn in the game of Life. And then lonely. The kinda lonely he had no idea he'd stopped feeling since Bailey came to the barn. The kinda lonely he couldn't stand to feel anymore.

When Quentin called about a new den location nearby, Matt packed his gear before he'd even ended the phone call. Maybe he just needed to get out of this place—needed to breathe air that hadn't been tainted by the city. Smell the wind when it didn't wreak of corporate America and Jess's too-sweet kiosk perfume.

This time, Matt didn't initiate any kinda conversation with the hound. They listened to the radio and stopped only once for bottled waters, then they drove in sweet silence toward the coast. Westport's stony beaches stunk of fish and the cold sea air was an icy out-of-season mist that made him gnash his teeth whenever he breathed. Though the lights that rode the water were beautiful at night, Matt found himself huddling in his windbreaker while Bailey braved the cold without a chill on his flesh. It was a biker bar they'd arrived at—paint peeling from the exterior and a closed sign hanging from the front window. Matt had started toward it when Bailey caught him by the arm.

"Don't," he said and he went still. For the longest, strangest moment, Bailey didn't move or speak—or even seem to breathe. Finally, he said, "It's not safe."

And that was all he said. It's not safe.

After ten minutes of pressing for a reason, Matt gave up and drove his wrangler to the boardwalk. Bailey hadn't specified that a rogue was still around, but he decided they'd come back and try again another day. He parked at the brightest bar on the pier and tore off his seatbelt without a word to the hound—who watched him like a child in an emotional display, sprawled out on the floor of the grocery store because he wasn't allowed a candy bar.

Matt didn't care if Bailey followed or not. He slung open the doors of a tacky tiki-decorated lounge room and took a seat on the worn leather of a swivel chair. Whiskey, he ordered, though he didn't know why. Matt hated whiskey. He was through his second shot by the time the hound took a seat beside him.

"Are you really that upset you can't commit arson?" Bailey asked. Matt didn't answer, so he went on, "I smell wolves. I don't know if they're rogues or not, but fuck me for trying to stick to Bronx's good side."

Matt ordered another shot. As he brought it to his mouth, Bailey caught him by the wrist. "Cowboy—"

"Don't fuckin' call me that," Matt said, jerking his hand away. The whiskey sloshed over the rim of his shotglass and wet his sleeve. He tossed back the remainder and suffered the burn with his teeth grit. "Don't even like fucking horses."

"Well, I'd hope not."

"That's not what I meant. Just go away."

"You know," Bailey said, stacking the tiny glasses into a tower. "People like you piss me off."

Matt was hardly drunk, but already he felt belligerent. "Oh do they?"

"All you do is bitch and complain about the kind of life people like me spend every day wishing they had. When you're done sulking over your cheap rent and your hot girlfriend, come find me. Because this," Bailey said with a strenuous pause. "This is fucking pathetic."

Matt didn't argue that. He was pathetic. He was pathetic and helpless and privileged in every way Bailey wasn't. But it wasn't something he hadn't known before and hearing it didn't change anything. Matt already hated himself to a degree that couldn't be roused.

For another hour, he drank—until he couldn't stand without his limbs floating delightfully severed from his body. He left the bar and found Bailey sitting on the edge of the dock, moon pouring down on his hunched shoulders. Matt sat beside him, nearly teetering down into the water. "You ever miss your mom?" he asked. It was the first word he'd said to Bailey since the silent wall built between them. It was a strange kindle for conversation, but that wall came tumbling easily. Brick for brick, mortar crumbling.

"Yeah." Bailey was looking at his hands—his claws exposed and slick with moonlight. Two still missing." You?"

"No," Matt said. His words stuck together at the S's. "She left because she didn't want me. Or, I dunno—cause she knew leavin' me with my dad would be the worst thing she could do to him. If Clara was still here, they—"

"Who's Clara?" asked Bailey.

Matt didn't have it in him to explain. He was too drunk—too sad. Too lonely.

"I'm not a cowboy," Matt said instead. "I hate horses. Horses are aliens...just so grafted into our civilization no one realize-ze..." he faltered, the word difficult to etch with his tongue. "..Realiz-it. And that's the hill I die on."

At first Matt thought he was just so drunk, the moon and Bailey had merged as one swollen, astrological being. Then he realized the hound was grinning.

"You're a beautiful tragedy, Cowboy."

"That sounds like something Raven would say."

"Raven?" Bailey asked.

This time, Matt did answer, "The voice in my head. The one who s—saved that lady on i5. Wasn't me. Ain't ever gonna be me."

Bailey's grin blinked away. "What do you mean he saved her?"

"Dunno," Matt said. "Wasn't there for it. Blanked out and—bam. Standing on i5 with a kid in my arms and her sedan cookin' like campfire."

Suddenly Bailey stood—it was too fast for Matt to track with his slow, glazed intoxication. He pulled his shirt off over his head, shed his shoes an jeans and cast them back on the deck.

"What're you—"

"I can't swim," was all Bailey said. Then he stepped off the dock.

Matt threw himself to the edge of the wood and watched the dark waters devour the last faint blur of Bailey's dark red boxers. "You can't what?" Matt shouted at the waves, as if they could speak back. "Bailey? Bailey?" But the bubbles faded and the salt-foam settled on the gentle surface. Matt stood, the earth tipping under him. He searched the waters, but they were still and dark—nothing to be seen within their depths but the glow of the boardwalk glinting back. "Bailey?" Matt called again. When there was no response, no sound of breaking water, panic slipped into his drunken core. "Bailey!"

Raven's voice slipped slow into his ear.

He's clever, that kid.

Blackness bespeckled Matt's vision until it was blooming like anti-fireworks—blinding him to the moon and the ocean and the sound of curling waves on the cold, dark horizon. When sight found Matt again, it was with a frigid gasp, cold stones under his shaking palms—hunched over Bailey's bare shape, the hound curled against the wet rocks, hacking out sea water. This close, Matt could see the scar on his shoulder: uneven flecks of rough skin, shaped in a crooked circle, covered by the ink of a tattoo. His chest shook and heaved, breath sounding wet with sea water. His fed, but slender stomach sunk hollow into his ribs, one dented in like a bumped fender. When Matt found his face again, there was that grin—dark eyes half open, water clinging to stuck-together lashes.

"I know what you are, Cowboy," he said like a song, "and it isn't a wolf."