It was so sudden—so easy, Matt hadn't felt it at first. Just the cold burning of metal entering his body, the strange sliver between his ribs. Then the pain, sharp and fiery. The hot, wet feeling in his chest.

He looked down to the knife, the red ring around its plunged blade. He didn't recall touching it, but blood stained his hands. A panicked sob came from somewhere in the room, and like he'd fallen back into earth's cruel orbit, his father's cries grew clear and palpable.

"Matt! Matthew! Matt!" The shadows rolled over Jack Richard's face in cloaks of bleary black veils, but the fear quaked his voice in ways the planted the image of his agonizing scream behind Matt's eyes. "Son of a bitch—Matt! Hold on boy, hold on."

And the world fell away and Matt slumped his knees, the blood on his hand a blurry red smear, smudged and quivering in his teary eye-sight. The world was comprised of ever-moving shapes and shadows, and somewhere in the distance was Rico—a hulking shadow, skulking in the lantern light.

The room stunk of blood and gasoline and the thin, unforgiving air sent Matt coughing. Blood bespattered the basement floor and he realized he had been staring at it for some time now. The pockmarks of air in the cracked cement—a stain that was likely older than himself. A tiny ant. A stray hair. Then his father's pale face in the swirl of shapes and shadows as Matt lifted his head.

"Hold on, boy—hold on. You, help me get out of this. Help me—"

"He's pouring gasoline," said Gabe, somewhere beyond the thunder of Matt's heart. "We have to get out."

"Matt!"

And though he could hear every word they spoke and see the faintest shapes of them in the dark, Matt was too tired to grip the outlines. Too tired to make out the faces. Lungs shuddering and blood sullying his mouth, he laid his face against the cold, filthy cement and felt the heat of his own life slide through his fingers.

We're fixing broken parts with broken tools.

Maybe this was how it was always meant to be. He had found happiness in Bailey, Bailey found happiness in Idaho. Maybe it was fate that chose these things—a meticulous plan that always led to this moment. Twice now, he'd died this way and no matter how many dances with death, he'd find himself here again and again until there were no more agains and he was too dead to care about things like happiness and fate.

Jack had moved toward him somehow and at some point, his bound, bony hands had pulled Matt onto his legs and squeezed the shirt on his chest until veins bulged from his skin. He said things Matt couldn't understand, hard, heavy head pressed to his temple. Rocking, rocking, rocking—like it would make pain less and air more. Like rocking would bring breath into his breathless body.

"What'd you do, boy?" he asked, a tremble in his voice. "What'd you get yourself into?"

Fire bloomed somewhere in the basement and traveled along a snaking line of gasoline, but Matt cared only about air. The thin, weak oxygen that left him before he could swallow it down.

"Please," Jack was saying, wet tears against Matt's cheek. "Please. I'll do better. I'll be better. Goddammit, please!"

Matt's chest fell, heavy and hollow. He was drowning in the smoke of fire and the stink of gasoline. Hear that? He thought to himself, bitter blood swelling up in his throat. If you'da lived this time, he would've done better. If you'd lived, he woulda fixed himself.

"Is this it?" asked a voice, rich and warm as coffee. And when Matt looked up, it was to the sight of Olivia Black, seated on the top shelf beside outdated textbooks and old milk crates. "All this way for nothing?"

"Bullshit." Raven's voice brought a sudden warmth to Matt. He stepped out from behind a toppled tool board and said, "Get up, kid. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and get up."

"He can see us now, Raven," whispered a third voice. This one, Matt had never heard before. But it felt like he had. It felt like he'd listened to her silken voice sing him awake a million times. She stood beside an old water heater, golden hair pouring down her small back in pearling waves. Anastasia Sigvard looked a lot like her mother. "It's never good when they can see us."

"Is he really dying?" asked Olivia.

"He's not dying," said a fourth voice. He'd never have recognized her if it hadn't been for the photos on the walls, the pictures of her tiny, pumpkin-shaped face, nailed to every corner of Jack's home. Her curly brown hair and freckled cheeks, the birthmark above her brow that looked like a drop of rain. She stepped out from behind Anna, fussing nervously with the end of her summer dress. "He can't die. He's the hero, right? Anna? Right?"

The more he looked at her, the more he was certain. Clara stood in front of him, exactly the way she looked in photographs, years before he was born. That was what he was meant to replace. Those rosy cheeks and wet eyes. Those tiny hands and long lashes.

Anna said nothing, but took her hand. Smoke rolled past the rotting, wooden pillars of the basement.

"Look at me, kid," Raven ordered, and though dim and bleary as his sights were, Matt found him in the growing flames. "She's in you. Wake her up."

Her?

Raven didn't reply, and as the fire ate away at them, one by one they began to vanish. Olivia Black, Anastasia Sigvard, Clara. Then Raven.

But his whisper carried on, Wake her up.

Matt wasn't sure what he'd meant by her, or why visions of dead folk were appearing from walls to talk about him as though he wasn't in the room, but he was very certain and alarmingly aware of the presence in his front right pocket. For a reason he couldn't understand, it was the only thing he knew. Matt reached inside for the wolf's bane Gabe had given him and popped the cap with a trembling hand. It was a game of chance again. If he were really human, wolf's bane would kill him. But if he were really wolf...

Matt tossed back the vial, the substance bitter and burning, but dry, like swallowing hot sand. The moment it hit his stomach, a pain erupted, so searing hot, he was almost certain he'd chosen wrong.

"Matt, what was that?" Jack asked in a panic, snatching the empty vial away. "What did you just do?"

And there, in his father's arms, Matt began to tremble. It was sudden how the pain tore through him, but not quickly enough. He watched as black, bloody claws budded from the tips of his fingers—as the bones in his wrist bulged and the shapes of his hands changed, turning beastly and then back again.

It pained him, and Matt couldn't hide it as well as he hid most things. He cried out, gripping his own shirt in his fist to keep from tearin' up his father. And of all things—all the problems whirling around in his life like a cyclone, Matt had one question for Raven while tears wet his eyes and pain wracked his body.

My wolf's...a girl?

And somewhere in his loud, angry thoughts, he heard Raven cackle.

Then the pain eased.

Then it stopped altogether.

He felt limber, light on his feet. And when he rose, it was not to his grief-stricken father, but a man so drenched in blood, he dripped at the chin. He gaped with unmoving eyes and a slacked jaw. Gaped and shimmered, red and wet in what tiny moonlight poured through the small basement window—

The window.

At the doorway of the basement, fire bloomed. It licked at the rafters, smoke sailing across the ceiling and toward the half-cracked window.

Gabe! He called, finding he couldn't really speak at all. But somewhere in the dark, smoke thick corner of the basement, Gabe's skinny pale legs appeared. He stumbled toward the bloody Jack, hacking into the crook of his elbow.

"I'm sorry." He brought his shirt up over his mouth to filter the smoke, speaking muffled against the fabric. "I didn't know this would happen, I—"

Matt tried to speak again, only praying he could somehow hear. Get him out. That window right there. Something brushed against his back legs—his own tail, he thought. He hadn't paused for a moment to wonder what he looked like. To wonder if he was really wolf, or some fucked up thing between. He was low to the ground. The fire was loud. The world stunk so terribly he thought he might pass out. He screamed once more without really screaming at all, Get him out!

And Gabe must've understood, because he took Jack beneath the arm and heaved the shell-shocked man to his feet. Matt didn't wait to see their escape. He turned to the flames.

The pain in his rib ached still, his lungs thin, his air smaller. But there was a warmth that wrapped Matt, a kind of mother's touch that told him it would be okay. That if he went out the way he came, it would be okay.

It was a strange feeling, moving as a wolf. Almost like skateboarding, back when he had the balance for it. His smooth, limber footsteps glided quickly across the hardwood. He moved toward the staircase, where flames billowed at the doorway. Rico was somewhere in them and he knew it. He could smell it—him. The stench of Jack's old vomit and the food rotting in the living room. He could smell it all. His heart pulsed against his throat, but in his head, he felt her urge him. It wasn't words, but a feeling. That mother's warmth that said keep going.

And so he ran, heart drumming in his ears. He climbed the staircase and tore through the flames, blind by the smoke and heat. Something hard took the air from him on the other side—a wall he'd forgotten was there. He shook, though he didn't know how, sparks and cinders falling from his coat. Matt didn't mind the feeling—being wolf—but he could've done without the tongue; the lazy, heavy thing spilling from his teeth. He curled it back into his mouth and calculated the fiery patches, eating away old furniture and piles of squatter trash.

Rico had not left a method to the madness—just one thin line of gasoline that failed to cover the house quickly enough. It ate away at paper and climbed the walls with a haste, but the floor was still untouched in most places. Matt followed the fireless curve, through the laundry room, the dining room, the kitchen. As he reached the smoke-tinted glass of the sliding doors, he spotted Gabe and his blood-drenched father, staggering across the overgrown weeds.

He could nudge the door open if he wanted to—escape with them toward the safety of the truck. But beyond the smoke, he smelled Rico. The woodsy stink of his sweat.

One of them was dying tonight and if there was one thing Matthew Richards was really bad at, it was dying.

As he crept past frames and slithered beneath smoke, Matt felt Bailey's hair beneath his fingers—soft as feathers and cold like silk. He felt his sun-hot skin, heard the sound of his laugh. The rare and real one that made his gums show and his voice pitchy. No one owned Bailey. No one ever had and no one ever would. But in every way, for every reason, Matt belonged to him. In every way, for every reason, he lived for Bailey Walters. And Matt decided then, without any reluctance at all, that he'd kill for him too.

The flames scorched him, though never catching his fur. And the smoke beat at his lungs and turned his heavy tongue to cotton. But still, he circled the piles of cinder, and the flame-thick walls, in search of Rico's hulking mass.

A famished feeling pooled in him.

He'd kill him. He'd kill him. He'd kill him.

If it meant tearing every bone from his body with his bare fucking fingers, he'd kill Rico for what he'd done and what he'd do again. He'd kill Rico and he'd leave him here to rot with the flames and the rats and the vomit.

Then came a growl.

Deeper, fiercer than the flames, it groaned from behind him. And the black thing that appeared from the bend of fiery hallways hardly looked wolf at all. It was mangy—bare of fur in strips and stripes that Matt couldn't discern as scars or scabs. But it was the one eye that gripped him, nail-deep. The one milky, blue eye that stuck him to the boards beneath his feet.

The overwhelming size of the beast crept from his shadowed space, and Matt crept back—into the brush of hot flames. Before he could react to the pain on the back of his legs, that black, mangy shadow broke into a sprint, barreling into the side of his neck. Matt let out a sound sharp to his own ears, and the both of them tumbled into the fiery trash heaps, sparks biting at his feet and his back. He cracked open his jaw and snapped—snapped at whatever he could, feeling coarse hair in his mouth. The pop of cartilage beneath the hungry weight of his jaw.

And when the weight of Rico left, he bounded out of the flames, fire falling from his coat. His feet slipped and scraped against the hardwood, finding purchase on a rotting door frame, and as if the beast in him knew he couldn't manage a doorknob as a wolf, that same, hot pain racked through his body. It tore him apart, and in a single moment of disorientation, Matt found himself staring into his own blood-sopped palms, man again.

But breath came suddenly easier. The pain where Bailey's knife had been was gone now, the skin edged with a newly fleshed scar. He had only a moment to take in the sight of his own pale, mended body before he heard the scrabbling of claws on hardwood.

Matt staggered over hot cinders, wrenching open the first door he found, the metal of the knob burning the flesh of his palm. It was a sunroom he staggered into, old windows stained with weather and cracked from storms and squatters. And as he sought a door—or at least something to shatter the windows with, that hulking build cut through the smoke and flames again, like he was impervious to the heat, to the asphyxiating clouds. Impervious to Matt and anything he could possibly find to defend himself with.

Rico was a different sight without a scrap of clothing on, his chest tatted with women and wolves and words Matt thought might be Latin. Flowers curled along his shoulders, dying as they went. At the base of his neck were the wings of demons, stretching from the skull at the center of his clavicles. Everything was tinted red, every bit of him dripping with blood.

"I don't know what it is about kids like you," he said with that furious scraping in his voice. He hacked out a throatful of smoke and thundered closer, lead footsteps cracking against old, dying wood. "You're just like him. Just like my boy. Different breed, but the same fire in your blood."

Something angry twinged in Matt when he realized he meant Bailey. My boy.

My boy.

"Not looking to replace him," Matt said, feeling the sill of the window behind him. His heart barreled in his throat as he sought the empty hole where Rico's eye used to be. His own stung from the flames. "Rather throw myself off a fuckin' bridge."

"I don't want you," Rico spat in a marriage of humor and disgust. Still, he moved closer. Matt pressed himself to the hot glass of the window. "Want him," Rico said, leering in. "Want my boy."

"He's not your fuckin'—"

A quick hand caught Matt by the throat. He clutched at the wrist, dug at the flesh with his nails.

Rico's rancid breath spilled against his face as he said, "Tell me where he is."

The tendons of his neck snapped and shifted under Rico's grip, but still Matt shook his head. Then he met something hard—the window behind him cracking against the back of his skull. Rico swung him forward and sent him back again—and this time, the glass shattered, splintering against the bare flesh of his back. He tumbled out into cold air and crushed glass, and as Rico followed him out and ripped him up from the ground by the hair on his head, Matt curled his fingers around a piece of glass.

"You burned up my world," Rico gnarled in his ear. "Now I'm gonna—"

Matt swung, plunging the sharp edge into the muscles of his arm.

Rico cried out and staggered back, gnashing his teeth as he ripped the chunk from his flesh and a slew of blood poured out with it. It ran down his arm and dripped from his fingers, but already he was moving again. He stalked toward Matt, but paused after a step to take in his surroundings. Matt felt the lump in his throat grow as Rico's gaze set on an old ax, still stuck in a chunk of half-chopped wood. He wrenched it off cleanly and let it hang by his side as he closed in, glass cracking under his bare feet.

Every bit of Matt ached, burned by fire or cut by glass. He shoved himself back, but the shards stuck into him and whatever adrenaline had disarmed the pain in his feet was ebbing now. He felt the burns that hadn't been there moments ago, tight and tender on the pads of his toes and the back of his ankles.

"Naive little bitch," Rico said, that heavy blade swinging at his side. "Think you can hide him from me? He's not the only hound out there." The wound in his arm still bled, and it was reaching the ax, rolling down the handle as he closed in. "I'll get another one. I'll find him," Rico said. "And everything you did here tonight won't be worth shit. I want you to die knowing that. That you wasted your time—that you died 'cause of it. All you had to do was tell me where he is. Know what I'm gonna do?" Rico brought the ax up, meaty arms raising it high over his head. "Gonna tell him you led me right to him."

Moonlight glinted from the edge of the rusted ax. Matt watched the metal shift and glint, lit orange by the flames, licking their way through the sunroom. Maybe it was the wolf in him, but there was a strange new comfort that killed the fear in Matt. Something that told him he'd lived his life the way it was meant to be lived. That he'd fought with every fist and bone and claw and tooth—and it was okay. It was okay to go like this, because he'd done everything he could in the time he had to make things right.

Something in Matt was saying, Stop running from it. It's okay to die. So he closed his eyes—

Then came the groan of an engine.

Matt opened his eyes to a stripe of red, stripped paint, flashing by. Jack's old pickup barreled into Rico, pinning him to the crumbling, burning wall. The metal crunched, undulating like aluminum, smoke barreling out through the gaps in the chassis. Rico cried out, thrashing to free himself from where he was wedged between the bent grill of the truck and a brick wall. He was a beast trapped in the jaws of metal and brick, and when the flames began to leap onto his skin, he let out a scream that made Matt turn his gaze anywhere else but the flames.

Jack leapt out of the driver's side, stumbling to Matt and heaving him to his raw, stabbing feet. "Come on, boy," he said, with that same, quivering voice. "Come on. Quick, now."

As he ushered his son away from the flames, Jack tore the jacket from his own shoulders and wrapped Matt in the cold, wet denim. The pain in his legs sent a sick chill to his stomach, but he staggered along, every step like hot coals. He had to explain. He had to explain about the wolves, about Rico.

"Dad—"

"No time," Jack said. And as he dragged Matt toward the edge of the road where Gabe trembled, white and small in the night, Matt took one unforgiving look behind him. Within a matter of seconds, the fire had overtaken Rico and the entire engine compartment of the old pickup.

They were both but corpses in the flames.