Tisper hated these hallways.

The floors were too slick and every sharp turn sent her grappling for balance, slinging into walls until the rubber of her shoes found a grip on the waxed linoleum. The red lights had faded—the purple walls had turned white. She didn't know where she was, just that the wolf was a lunge away.

But the floors seemed a worthy adversary for the beast as well. His long claws struggled for purchase, and she'd heard a sharp yip when he'd slammed into a corner on her last spur-of-the-moment left turn. He was back on her heels now, but she could outrun him. Until she found an exit or a safe room to lock herself away in, she could stay ahead of the wolf.

But Tisper didn't know her way around this place. Every hallway she'd stumbled into led to another like the veins of a complicated labyrinth. Her shoes scuffed the ground, the rubber screaming, echoing through the hall. She threw herself around a hard right corner, slamming into a door handle. The forearm went numb from the pain, but her heart was beating through all the bones in her body and it made every other sensation so small. She took a hard right next, the wolf scrabbling against the floor somewhere just behind her—but then Tisper stopped. A dead-end. The hallway she'd staggered into couldn't have been more than ten feet long, office doors at each side and a window at the end, washing the floor in blue moonlight. She moved quickly from one door to the next, wiggling desperately at the locked handles.

A reading chair sat beside the window, an end table to its left with a small vase of roses on top. There was nothing else to hide under. No emergency exit, not even a vent in the ceiling—as if she had time to unscrew it anyway.

Then Tisper heard the spatter. Hard rain on an umbrella.

When the wolf rounded the corner, he was not as a wolf, but as man. Blonde hair with buzzed sides, bathed in blood, a tungsten metal shimmering from his pierced ears. Strange snake tattoos ribboned around his wet shoulders. His feigned look of surprise was exchanged for a grin and he moved closer on bare, bloody feet. Tisper slung her bag from her shoulder in search of her beloved arrows—but only to find the zipper wide open. Empty, down to the bare threads of the fabric. The arrows had fallen out in her escape.

"Uh oh," Zachary said with a grin. "Lose your toys?"

Tisper grit her jaw. She had nothing else to defend herself with. She should have listened to Matt when they were boarding a plane to Maine—they should have brought guns and mace and pocket knives. She would've taken anything right now.

"Hey, it's alright," said Zachary, slinking closer. "An arrow ain't gonna do much. You know we're werewolves, right?"

Tisper rose slowly, her knees bowing and buckling. She reached to her side, fingers curling around the neck of the rose vase. God, she hated roses.

"Was a good shot though," the man said. "Right through that guy's throat. You must practice, huh?"

Tisper swallowed. The man moved forward, wiping the fresh blood from his face like he was pushing away cool rain.

"Wonder how that'll go when you're missing a few fingers. How's three sound?" he said. "Enough to get ya' by, right?"

He took another step and Tisper's fingers tightened around the neck of the vase. The roses pricked into her fingers.

Zachary threw his head back with a groan. "Don't look at me like that. I hate when they look at me like that. Breaks my heart."

Tisper whipped her arm forward, slinging vase with all her might. The wolf stepped easily out of the way and the glass went crashing through the office window just beside him. Pieces crumpled to the floor like slow melting ice.

That grin of his bloomed again, twice as large as before. "I get it, ya' don't wanna talk." He reached for the shattered window and snapped off a chunk of clinging glass, flipping the sharp piece between his fingers. "Least let me show ya' how to aim."

He moved so quickly, Tisper hardly saw the glass leave his hand. Just a bright shimmer as it traveled beneath the recessed lights above. Then she felt a sharp pain in her eye and she slumped back against the end-table, trembling fingers reaching up. When she touched the glass, a searing pain crushed back into her skull. She cried out, slipping down to the linoleum floor. She saw nothing through her right eye, but through the left, her palms were paved in blood.

"That's gotta suck," Zachary mused. "Sorry."

When she looked up, it was with that same, terrible pain. A nauseating agony that begged her eyes to shut. She wanted to scream, to vomit. She wanted to kick her heels together and wish she was anywhere else but here. She had to get the glass out, but just touching it put a pain in her that she couldn't fathom. It ached in a grueling, disgusting way. All wrong, like a broken bone. But a part of her could only consider that maybe this wasn't real life—that she was dreaming it. That she'd wake up soon, and there would be no werewolf prowling in on her with his snake tattoos and his wicked smile.

And then a flash of red.

Felix slammed him into the wall where glass still stuck up from the broken window—shoving Zachary's head back against the jagged bits until they gouged at his neck. He slung his head forward and Tisper heard their skulls connect. Felix staggered back, glass crunching beneath his feet. The metal cuff still locked around his bloody wrist as he threw a punch that sent Zachary down into the scattered glass. Felix dropped to his knees and every hit that came after felt so hard on the ears, so palpable. The loud clout of hungry fists, the slight crack of cartilage, until Zachary went still and Felix was slouched over him, breathing in a way that made him seem like he was more wolf than man.

When he looked up—saw the blood that ran down her wrist and the way she cupped her ruined eye—that animalistic way about Felix died out like a flame. He stood, glass falling his knees, blood pasting his knuckles. She wanted to look up to him, but she couldn't—so Tisper kept her sights straight. Watched the stained knees of his jeans as he moved closer.

His breath ran hard through his teeth—it was all she could hear as he knelt beside her. Felix slid his arms around her back and beneath her knees, and heaved her up. The shift pulsed through her like fire and she hid her eyes in her palms until Felix kicked open the lock on the nearest door.

A set motion-sensor lights flashed on and Tisper sobbed out from the searing pain. Some kind of relief found her when Felix flipped the switch off with his elbow and a darkness shrouded the room. With nothing to serve as a proper bed, Felix laid her down on the ground. The tiles felt like ice on the back of her arms. A tear fell hot down the corner of her eye and she lifted her hand slowly from the glass shard. "Is it bad?" she whispered.

Felix's eyes moved over her face, with a soft, considerate regard, and he shook his head just slightly. "Nah," he said, brushing back the hair from her face. "It's not bad."

"I can't see," she said, a second tear spilling down the bridge of her nose. "Take it out."

"I can't," Felix told her. There was no hair left to brush away, but still his fingers feathered over her forehead. "I can't do that."

"It's bad, isn't it?" she sobbed. "I know it is."

"Oi, listen." Felix wiped the tears from her good eye onto the back of his hand, then the knuckles of each finger until there were no more tears to brush away. "Yer Tisperella. You make grass grow and flowers bloom," he said. "This... this is just a scratch."

His eyes held light, like they always did, but it was too dark for Tisper to see much else. So she felt along the warm skin of his arm instead, for those unsightly scars. Her fingers grazed the rough flesh and she shuttered in a breath. "Like yours?"

"Aye, princess," he told her. "Like mine."

He stayed there like that, letting her trace his own scars—his history, stamped into every mangled, knotted old wound on the muscles of his arms. They were like braille. A single twisted story, written in hundreds of excruciating ways.

"Okay." She took a breath and sat up on her elbows. "Find me something to bite down on."

Felix let out an incredulous breath, pushing himself up to his feet. "Ye' aren't pulling that out."

"I have to," Tisper said, breath shaken. "I have to get it out."

"Pull it out and ye' could lose the entire thing," Felix said, digging through each drawer on the counter nearby until he produced a medical kit from the contents. "There're sedatives here."

"No." Tisper shook her head and deeply regretted it when the gravity of the glass pressed in. "Not while the others are—no."

But already, Felix was breaking the needle from its hygienic wrapper. "This should be just enough to put ye' out for a couple hours."

Tisper laid her head back against the floor, heaving in an upset breath. She knew he was right—that she'd only get in the way out there with the others. She was in too much pain to focus on anything else, and even if she could, she'd lost her arrows escaping the wolf. She was no good to anyone like this.

But still, she cried. Because the glass hurt and because everyone she loved might die tonight.

"I don't want to leave them," she whispered, those tears searing a red-hot pain into her eye.

Felix held her arm out against the cold floor, pressing with his thumbs to rile up the blue of her veins.

"Ye've done enough, Princess," he told her, the cold needle sliding into her skin. She reached up one last time to feel the scars on his arm before the drugs settled into her veins.