୧ ~ ᴥ ~ ୨

Kyle woke from a dreamless sleep at a little before twilight o'clock. Yes. He'd taken a nap. Yes, somehow that'd ended him with hay in his mouth. Yes, the kid had not known the difference between straw and hay, but who was keeping score, huh?

Wait. The kid. The child. Who was now in his flaky care. Who he was meant to keep an eye on, which you couldn't exactly do while drooling into a bed of scratchy fiber.

Where—

Kyle's eyes snapped to the first indication of movement and found said kid sitting hunched under the barn's slanted roof. There was a gap in the wood behind him, just big enough to pass for a window. It had cobwebs for curtains and let in a pink evening sky.

Phew. Child still accounted for. Excellent. Reassured he hadn't napped his way into a catastrophic quest failure, Kyle yawned and began to grope around for his shoes.

The movement got Aiden's attention. "You have a knife," he stated out of the blue.

"Uh huh, I do," Kyle's mouth replied. Ah. Lovely autopilot.

"Can I have it?"

"Not gonna lie, you probably can," Kyle said just as he'd fetched his first shoe. He had to shake more hay out of it before he stuck his foot in. "The more appropriate question would be—" Shoe number two fought him, its lip riding down and jamming his foot about halfway. He grunted and applied a pinch of violence. "—may you have it."

Aiden sighed. "May I have your knife?" he asked, voice all grave, and climbed over from his spot by the window.

Kyle eyeballed him with a sideways glance. "Whatchu want a knife for?"

"Whatchu putting your shoes on for?"

. . .

"For going out."

A spell of silence flopped down between them. "For the toilet?"

"Nnnoo." Kyle scrunched his nose up. His bladder complained. "Well. Yeah, okay. That, too. But then I'm gonna go sniff around for a beaver."

"Wha— it's— late. It'll be dark in a few minutes," Aiden complained.

"Mhm."

"That's stupid."

Kyle rolled his head onto his shoulder and regarded Aiden with a long look.

"What? It is," said the kid. "You'll get—like—killed. By the Infected."

"Aw. You worried about me? Me, your terrible detective sidekick?"

A huff was all he got for that. Then Aiden stuck his hand out and very gravely said, "If you're going, you have to give me your knife. Mine's all blunt and won't work." Aiden reached behind him and produced two things: a sad knife with an ancient handle made of deer antlers and about as much edge to it as a plastic butter knife, plus a block of driftwood, its sides chipped at by the sad knife.

Whereas chipped was being generous. There was no chipping happening with that blade.

Kyle smiled at the block of wood. "Ain't that sweet. You making something for the old dude?"

"Maybe," Aiden muttered. "So, can I have it?"

"Sigh," Kyle said out loud. "And come back to you missing a bunch of fingers?"

"I am not a baby, I know how to do knife things." Aiden's eyes fixed on Kyle's and got ridiculously large and innocent. Puppy dog eyes, you see. "And if you don't give me yours, I guess I need to go out too and find one. Maybe one that belongs to someone already, and then they'll be mad at me and beat me up."

"Jesus, kid."

The puppy dog eyes did not relent. How the fuck did people say no to this sorta shit?

"Fine. But that means you stay put. Do we understand each other?" He dragged his pack over and fished for a folding knife he kept reasonably sharp. It had a worn-out wooden handle and a loop of rainbow-coloured cord dangling from one end. He flipped it open with a flick of his thumb.

Aiden reached for it.

Kyle pulled it back. "Do we?" he repeated.

"Yes." Aiden rolled his eyes.

"Great." Another flick and he'd closed it back up. "I won't be out long, I think," he said and tossed the knife into the kid's lap. "Please stay out of trouble and off your ankle, okay?"

"Sure."

Sighing the weariest of sighs he could drag out of himself, Kyle folded his pack shut and shoved it towards Aiden.

"And keep an eye on that for me?"

The kid squinted at the gear but nodded. And, so, yeah, maybe he'd root through it but there wasn't much he'd find that was child inappropriate. And maybe, just maybe, a bit of snooping would tempt him enough to stick around while Kyle went on a little hunt.

Maybe.

Departing the camp at night made Kyle wonder (yet again) just how on Earth this place had survived up until now. They had way too few UV lamps to ring an area quite as large and not enough walls to make up for it. Sure, they'd clustered what lamps they had were people hunkered down for the night, but then what?

Did they do morning sweeps and push whatever Infected had crawled in back out? That was risky. And deadly if the thing that'd stuck itself under some shade was a Volatile because it'd missed curfew.

So.

How?

And how was he going to convince his conscience to let this go, rather than throw himself at the camp's shitty security like an idiot in a bid to compensate? A mystery, that. Grimacing, Kyle ducked back into Aiden's secret fisherman's shed and began kicking off his shoes even before the door managed to fall shut behind him.

"Something, something, oh lord I never met," he said and shucked his shirt, "grant me the serenity to accept the things I can't change—" Belt, bye. Pants, bye. "—the courage to change the shit that'll budge, and the—" Socks and accessories, begone. "—wisdom to tell which one's which."

Buck naked, Kyle rolled his head back into his neck, gave the ceiling a tired smile, and whistled for his wolf.

So, uh, funny thing about putting on his fur… the chances of him no longer fitting through a door he'd previously had no problems with exponentially increased.

Which was to say the shed's door was small and Kyle!wolf was not.

He huffed once, rolled his eyes, and stuffed himself through with the help of a few awkward wiggles, along with two or three irritated whimpers. What he left behind were his clothes and a freshly gauged up floor from the change tearing through him and his claws doing some tearing of their own.

The night outside was young. He turned his nose into it, let his tongue flop out, and tasted everything it had on offer for him. Water. Wet earth. Spicy plants. Layers upon layers of different rot. Animal musk. People smell.

And tantalizing coral carried on a whiff of salty sea.

He angled himself at it.

The hunt was on.

The siren had travelled downstream and hadn't popped back out of the water until she'd reached the nearest village. The village itself was dipped in equal parts darkness and a typical post-apocalyptic hush. Infected groaned and wheezed between the dead buildings. Bats squeaked. The river whispered by. A breeze tugged on open windows, their hinges squeaking.

And then there was Kyle's excessive panting.

Hey, he'd raced here, alright? There'd been lots of ground to cover. Enough ground for his legs to grow all green from all the grass he'd plowed through. Honestly, having white fur kinda sucked. Sometimes.

Anyway.

With his ears on the literal swivel and sufficiently perked, Kyle crossed the village threshold. The place had grown outwards from a spot at the river in a tight cluster, with one larger road leading straight through and a bunch of tighter streets striking outwards. None of the buildings were taller than four stories, and they all looked old.

He scaled the first one he could find with two leaps and took a sniff from up above. It didn't take much and he'd picked up the scent of sun-kissed sand — and not a heartbeat later, he heard it: a hum.

Distant.

Faint.

Serene.

The hum slipped into his ears, inconspicuous. It brought a stranger's warmth and then grasped for his hurriedly beating heart. Tranquil tendrils slipped around it, squeezed, and teased him with a promise of peace and bliss while they tugged at him, luring him forward.

Oh, I see how it is, Kyle thought, his lips peeling back to flash the night his teeth before he leapt onto the next roof.

Pff.

Silly siren, convinced he hadn't figured out how to love the soul of another.

There was one knitted into him, one he'd accepted fully, unconditionally, no questions ever asked.

Yep. His wolf. That was the one. Because woe be the werewolf (woe be, like, the majority, he sometimes thought) who viewed their inner beastie as not a partner, but some invading force to fight against. Or, worse, a spirit to squash and subjugate and only ever think of as a means to an end.

Nah. He couldn't fathom life without her anymore. A life without her excited wiggles in his chest when she saw something she'd like to chase or her dramatic lamenting when she didn't get a chance to.

So, yeah. That love for the soul of another that kept the siren from gaining a foothold in his mind, that was his love for the cinnamon-furred beastie he carried around.

… had to be.

Right?

Right. Had to be.

The trail led him across three more roofs in two and a half more leaps and then down into a tight, cobbled alley. She'd retreated into a café, judging by how her scent had started to taste a smidge like the ghost of coffees past.

A few more sniffs and he'd found it: a store front caught halfway down the alley, where the leftovers of outdoor seating and decoration remained scattered over the cobbles. Chairs. Tables. Pots. Volatiles. Etc.

The Volatile addition turned their dirty orange-to-red eyes at him as he prowled through the dark and greeted him with a challenge of clicks and pitched hisses falling out from between their flapping mandibles. They were freshly hatched. Junior Vollies, if you will.

And when Kyle hunched low and sent a growl down the alley, they—

—fucked off?

Huh.

He tilted his head.

They just about scampered, their flat naked butts bobbing through the night until they vanished around a corner.

Now, he'd sent a few Volatiles running in his days, especially the flavor of Vollies that'd cropped up after the Fall. The original Harran ones, though? Specifically, those from the city? Those fuckers had thrown themselves off ledges to fall to their screeching deaths if it meant chasing after a bite. All of which'd changed once he'd ventured into the golden wheat fields of the Harran countryside and encountered his first Fae-o-tile.

Those'd been too clever.

And what'd remained after the Fall was some weird-ass middle ground; brains still steeped in a virus programmed for violence first and foremost but with the once-in-a-while odd affinity for self-preservation.

Typically, this meant the Vollie'd first have to see Kyle stomp a buddy or two before it turned tail, not— like— Kyle huffed. Not like this: see big bad wolf with teeth bigger than your runty claws, flee.

Eh.

He'd think about this later.

The café had been barricaded with furniture shoved against its door and solid shutters blocking the windows. The barricade was intact, meaning there was probably another way in. Somewhere. Could he have sniffed around for whatever hole the siren had squeezed through? Probably. But her humming had begun to grate on his nerves, specifically in the kinda way when someone you did not like one fucking bit tracked their fingers through your hair.

He hated it and he wanted it to stop. Thus: Kyle gathered himself up and threw himself against the barricade. The first shove made the entire thing shift backwards. The second one sent it crashing inside, baring a narrow but long room that stretched into murky darkness.

Or it would've been murky darkness.

He had fantastic night sight.

Plus, the siren kinda glowed. She stood at the far back, a beacon of dirty light not unlike what you'd catch staring up from underwater while dull sunlight pressed against tall, dark waves. She'd seen him. Naturally. But she didn't move to run. Instead, she wove gently on the spot and parted her lips to sing him a melody that promised his every wound would heal upon her light kiss and every heartbreak he'd ever suffered to scatter with the wind, never to fall onto him again.

On all fours, Kyle stumbled on his first step forward.

(Wink.)

His ears drooped. His tongue stuck out between a lightly parted jaw.

(Wink. Wink.)

And the glowing siren sang on.

She was—yeah, she was alright. She was tall. Fit. Had ridiculously long raven black hair and wore a very shapely dress in ocean-blue studded with trails of golden sand. There was no way the clothes were real, of course. Or so Kyle thought off-handedly and with a pinch of jealousy. Those threads had to be a glamour.

But what was very real was her voice; sweet and swelling and plucked straight out of every possible variation of heaven this literal Infinite had on offer.

More importantly, though, she was 100% clueless. As far as she was concerned, the wolf waddling up to her (with a suitably dopey expression hanging off his face) was about to roll on over the second he reached her feet and stick his belly up for her.

Pscht. Nah.

He was gonna roll her.

By the time she realized her mistake, Kyle would have gotten away with a half-hearted lunge if he'd wanted to. Her eyes went wide. They were turquoise, he noted, and up until now they'd held a look of bottomless serenity. But as he shot forward, his teeth ready to clamp down on her throat, they filled with fear and grew bigger and bigger as the siren shifted from human to not-so-human.

(Let it be heard that Kyle Crane thought it was, frankly, fucking unfair how sirens—along with a whole host of other critters—could do that shit on the fly without the screaming and flesh tearing and bone popping.)

Her mouth split wide. It filled with teeth sharp enough to rival a shark.

Her limbs stretched. Her skin shimmered and turned to scales. Scales which flashed a kaleidoscope of color at him and which'd be hard enough they'd give his teeth trouble.

And none of that was going to help her. Not her teeth. Not her scales. None.

Sirens weren't big fighters. They were decent hunters while in the water, but put them on land, and all they had going for them was their ability to implant peace into the people around them.

People.

And maybe Infected, too?

The thought was a distant thing in Kyle's mind. Shit, he was surprised he heard himself think it at all over the clamour of bite and fight that liked to bubble over when he threw himself into a Situation while wearing his fur.

What wasn't so distant at all was what the siren snapped at him after he'd thrown her across the coffee shop and bounced her off a wall. She crashed into a table and some chairs. The table folded. The chairs scattered. He leapt at her, ready to end this maybe two seconds after it'd started.

But before he got around to ripping her throat out—where the scales weren't near as solid—her eyes fixed on him, and she spat: "Coward! They were children! Children!"

— Wha?

Kyle's teeth snapped shut before they could close around her throat. He slammed one paw down on the ground by her shoulder and set the other against her chest, his claws positioned in a way they'd threaten to dig into the hollow of her throat.

She stared up at him.

There was a resignation in her eyes; the kind which sometimes liked to settle in before death. Though, much to her credit, she backed this one with a flush of defiance.

"You wolves are meant to be better than this," she said, her voice distorted by her changed mouth and wide lips and laboring with how it struggled to come out from under his weight. "You're supposed to be Vigilants!"

His wolf whined in his chest. Kyle did, too. Sort of. He cocked his head to the side and let out a whimper-adjacent noise.

What are you talking about, Kyle would've liked to say. Alas, there was another downside the siren didn't share with him. He growled at her instead, his teeth bared.

"Go on then! Kill me," she taunted. "Or are your jaws only fit to murder the young, hm?"

Right.

He'd— ah— miscalculated?

Had he?

Maybe?

I mean, it kinda makes sense. Sirens aren't kid-snatchers. You figured that yourself. So. Uh.

Frustrated, Kyle pushed himself off her. He paced. Once, then twice, her eyes on him the entire time.

"You wish to talk?" she asked, still on the floor. Her hand slid against her throat where he'd left a nasty scratch.

He huffed. Nodded.

The siren's eyes narrowed, but soon enough she gave him a slow, deliberate nod.

"Very well. I give my word not to exploit your change."

And here we have a benefit of werewolf versus many other shifters: most shifters had spawned from the fae, while he was, at the end of the day, still Man. The capital letter M. The homo sapiens man. Fae had an aversion to boldly telling a lie. Trickery was fine. Pretending to be a human in a camp of innocent refugees was fine, as long as none of them looked her straight in the eye and asked Are you actually fish-adjacent?

Meaning when she said said she'd give her word, Kyle reluctantly believed it. After one more threatening glare (yeah, he had to get that out of the way), Kyle squeezed himself through a door leading to the back of the café, where he popped back out where they'd once stashed all their coffee-ssentials.

Turning back left him a shivering mess for longer than he wanted it to. And it also left him in dire need of modesty. Muttering, Kyle swiped an apron from a hook. It had a name tag on it and all. Patrick, it read. With a little heart for the dot on the i.

Thankfully, Patrick had been a tall enough dude, though aprons being, well, aprons Kyle ended up sauntering his way back out with his ass bared to the elements.

The siren's hum greeted him, hard at work to cast a soothing, cool net over his irritated mind. Said mind burnt that shit up in a flash.

Her eyes snapped to him. She hadn't been humming for him, Kyle acknowledged. She'd been humming for the night out there; for the infected who'd been given the café a pass, even though two supernatural beasties had just made a real good racket in here.

And she'd been busy. Not just with humming, but with tilting one of the tables that'd remained intact after the fight against the front door.

"I was wrong about you?" she asked.

"Yep."

"And you were wrong about me."

"Yep," he admitted.

"When I saw you with the boy earlier—" She kept her distance as she walked over to a nearby chair, set it straight, and sat. Somewhere between all of that, her long limbs shortened, the scales flaked off, and her raven black hair got back to framing a much more delicate face. "—I thought the worst."

"Same. I figured you were the one eating the kids."

"We don't eat young." She narrowed her eyes at him. "We don't eat people. You'd know."

Kyle lifted his arm in quiet surrender. "My bad. But c'mon, a siren in a refugee camp? Shouldn't you be out in the ocean or, I dunno, home?"

"This has been my home since I hatched," she said. Unchallenged by her true form, her voice was every bit as sweet as her hum had been.

Not to say her voice wouldn't have been sweet and delicate and tempting while she'd flashed her scales. But human ears liked human sounds best, and, at the end of the day, Kyle'd grown up to Enya. Not, uh, you know. Siren-ya.

"And I am not about to abandon it," she continued while Kyle's distracted brain conjured an earworm from its depths. "As for the refugees? They needed help. They've never not needed help."

"So you stick around their camp—" Kyle didn't pull himself a chair. He found the café's counter instead and shoved his bare butt against it. "—and you pacify the Infected so they don't pick the place apart."

She nodded. (And her eyes did a thing where they looked him over and made him curl his toes in response.)

"Just the Infected, though. From what I've seen the people are still tense as shit."

"It'd be wrong of me to Sing for them." Her eyes finished their little tour and cut back to his. "Consent is important."

He put on a sheepish smile and scratched at his neck for good measure. "I got you all wrong, didn't I? But— here's something I don't get. Why'd you run? Why not stay with the group?"

She shrugged. "I thought since you'd seen me, you'd look to hunt me instead. Which'd give me a chance to finally take care of the wolf problem that's been following these children for so long. What I didn't expect was one immune to my Song."

"Hella risky still, even if I hadn't been," he said, only for something to go Click over the earworm buzzing in his mind. "Wai— wait. Wolf problem? You expected a werewolf?"

"That's all I knew for certain, that it was a wolf."

"A werewolf? Here? Picking up human kids? One by one?"

"Yes."

Dumbfounded, Kyle stared through her. The gears in his head clunked along uselessly. "This makes no sense."

"Little does these days."

"No, no, you don't get it. What I mean is… if there's a second werewolf here, I'd know. Especially since they've snatched up at least one kid from that same camp. I'd have sensed 'em."

She nodded slowly. "That is a curiosity I haven't been able to puzzle out myself. The last time I've sensed the wolf was at the first camp. Ever since, all I see is the end result, a missing child."

"Fucking hell…" Kyle swiped his hand through his hair. Another werewolf complicated this way more than Kyle wanted it to. Another werewolf he couldn't pick up on? That was just all kinds of weird. It didn't matter how many brain cells he tried to rub together, nothing meaningful sparked.

"Okay. Alright. Let's start over." At least he had a friend, huh? Kyle offered the siren his best, well-mannered smile. "Hi. I'm Crane. You're— Florance, right?"

She arched a perfectly sculpted brow.

"Aiden told me about you," Kyle said. "He had you on a list of suspects for who was doing the snatching." He cleared his throat. "Which I shouldn't have bought into without thinking it through properly first. My bad."

"I'm impressed." Florence put on something of a smile of her own. It was, objectively speaking, lovely. "If what you say is true, then you've been at the camp for no more than a day, and you've already managed to make friends with one of our more wily kids?"

"Eh, I'm easy to like. But— ah— what I'm trying to get to is I'm here because someone wants this particular kid safe."

"Aiden?"

"Yeah. I've been sent to look after him."

"Why?"

Kyle scoffed up a laugh. "Honestly? I don't know. Yet."

"And I've lured you from his side."

He winced. "You kinda have."

"Then, Crane, I suggest we both hurry back."

Florence got a head start. While Kyle had to relax into the agony of turning, Florence went right ahead and set off for the river. He caught up though, even catching sight of her scales winking in the dull moonlight while he raced along the riverbank, and overtook her the rest of the way.

Then came the exhausting shedding of his fur (twice in a row, he'd be fucking knackered) and a sloppy game of find the socks (where the fuck'd he tossed them), eventually followed by a mortified trek back to the camp.

How had he messed this up so bad?

He'd almost killed an innocent siren. And not just any innocent siren, but a nice lady type who liked helping people. To the point where she put her life on the line if it meant she'd get a shot at whatever big bad (wolf) had been terrorising them.

Okay, buddy— ease up. It's not like you can go back in time and leave yourself spoilers over this shit.

. . .

"You know what? If I could do that, I'd be going way back," he muttered at himself while he snuck back into the camp. "Pre-Harran back. Pre-GRE back. I'd send myself after them, Terminator style."

Which was all totally beside the point. The point was that he'd screwed up, he admitted, and grabbed the first rung on the ladder leading to the little nook Aiden had so generously decided to share with him.

And what'd you do after you messed up?

You regrouped.

You learned from it.

"You do better," he whispered —

— and found the barn's attic empty.

Aiden was gone.

୧ ~ ᴥ ~ ୨