Pregnant for The Hollow Alpha

I woke up on the floor again.

Third time this week.

I lay there for a moment, cheek against the cold wood, staring at the leg of my bed like it had personally betrayed me. My heart was slamming. My hands were shaking. And on my right palm four thin lines of dried blood, curved like something had tried to claw its way out from the inside.

From the inside.

I pressed my fist against my mouth and breathed through my nose until the shaking stopped.

The dream was already dissolving the way they always did edges going first, then the middle, leaving me with nothing but the feeling of it. Dark. Fast. The sound of something enormous moving through trees. And eyes. Amber eyes burning in the dark, watching me like they'd been watching for a long time and had no intention of stopping.

I sat up.

I looked at my hand.

Closed my fingers over the marks and stood up.

I was fine. I was always fine. I just needed to stop sleeping, apparently, and everything would work out.

Merek was already awake when I got downstairs.

Of course he was. My grandfather had the sleep schedule of a man being personally haunted, up before dawn, asleep after midnight, always in his chair by the dying fire like he was waiting for something to come through the door.

Tonight he looked like he actually was.

"Bad dream?" he said, without looking up from the fire.

"I'm fine."

"You always say that."

"Because I'm always fine."

He looked at me then. One eye clear, one clouded by an old scar, both of them carrying the specific expression he got when he knew something I didn't and was deciding whether to tell me. He'd been making that face my whole life. I used to think it was just how his face looked.

I was starting to think it wasn't.

"Go back to bed, Aria," he said.

"I wasn't tired before. I'm less tired now."

He turned back to the fire. "Then sit down."

I didn't sit down. I went to the window.

The Hollow Woods pressed up against the back of the cottage close enough that on windless nights you could hear the trees breathing. I'd grown up with that sound. I'd learned to sleep through it, learned to ignore the way the forest moved when nothing was moving, and learned to write off the feeling of being watched as the particular anxiety of living somewhere that had a reputation.

The Hollow Woods were old. Everyone in the village knew that. Old and strange and full of things that weren't entirely explainable.

I'd always assumed that meant animals. Odd weather. The way sound traveled strangely between the trees.

I was beginning to reconsider.

Because tonight the forest wasn't breathing.

It was still. The specific, unnatural stillness of something that had been moving and stopped all at once. Like every creature in the woods had simultaneously decided to hold their breath.

My hand found the window latch.

"Aria," Merek said sharply.

"There's something out there."

"There's always something out there. That's why we stay inside."

"It's different tonight."

A pause. "How."

I didn't know how to explain it. It wasn't a sound or a sight. It was a feeling, low in my chest, behind my sternum, like a hook pulling toward the tree line.

Come outside, it said. Or maybe it didn't say anything and I was losing my mind. Both felt equally possible at 2am.

"Aria. Step away from the window."

Something moved at the tree line.

Not an animal. The shape was wrong, too tall, too still, the stillness of something that had chosen to stop moving rather than something that had never started. A figure at the edge of the trees, right where the forest gave way to the clearing behind our cottage.

A person.

Standing there like they'd been there for a while and didn't plan to leave.

My blood went cold.

Then the figure looked up.

Even across the distance, even in the dark, I saw it, the glint of eyes catching the moonlight. Not the dull reflection of ordinary eyes. Something brighter. Something that caught the light the way an animal's eyes did, from the inside.

Amber.

The same amber as the eyes in my dream.

I had my boots on and my hand on the door before I made the conscious decision to move.

"Aria." Merek was on his feet. "Do not open that..."

I opened it.

The cold hit me like a wall.

The clearing behind the cottage was small, twenty feet of frost stiff grass between our back door and the tree line. Twenty feet that suddenly felt like nothing at all.

Because the figure was still there.

Closer now, actually. Closer than they'd been a moment ago, which meant they'd moved while I was coming through the door and I hadn't seen it happen, which meant they were fast.

I reached back inside and grabbed the first thing my hand found. A kitchen knife from the hook beside the door.

I'm not saying it was my best plan. I'm saying it was the plan I had.

"That's not going to do much," the figure said.

A voice. Low, steady, male. Coming from someone who had absolutely no business being this calm about a girl pointing a knife at him in the dark.

"Step back," I said.

He didn't step back. He tilted his head, just slightly, just enough in the way you tilted your head when you were listening for something specific.

"I need you to go back inside," he said.

"I need you to explain who you are and why you're standing in my clearing at..."

"Inside," he said again. And his voice had changed not louder, not harder, but with a sudden urgent edge underneath the calm that stopped me mid-sentence. "Right now. Please."

I opened my mouth to tell him exactly where he could put his please.

Then the forest howled.

Not one wolf. Three. Then six. Then more, a rising chorus from deep in the trees, spreading outward, surrounding the clearing in a sound that hit me somewhere below the reasoning parts of my brain and went straight to the part that was just alive and wanted to stay that way.

The figure turned toward the tree line.

In the moonlight I got my first real look at him, tall, dark haired, with a jaw that had a scar along the left side. Young, maybe mid twenties. Dressed in dark clothing that looked like it had spent a lot of time in forests. His hands were at his sides, perfectly still, but there was a readiness in his entire body that made the kitchen knife feel a lot more inadequate than it already did.

On the inside of his right wrist, a mark. Dark lines, detailed, visible even from here.

Something pulsed on my right wrist.

I looked down.

My palm was still closed around the knife. But I could feel it underneath the blood from the claw marks, underneath the skin, a warmth I'd never felt before. Like something pressing outward. Like waking up.

The howling was getting closer.

The man turned back to me. His eyes found mine and even in the dark I could see them clearly amber, burning, exactly like the eyes in my dream and the expression in them was urgent and certain and completely, terrifyingly calm.

"They're here for you," he said. "We can't be standing in the open when they arrive." He took one step toward me. I raised the knife. He stopped. "I am not the threat right now. I promise you that."

"You're a stranger in my garden at two in the morning."

"I'm the person who's been keeping those wolves out of your garden for six years," he said. "And tonight my cover is blown, which means you have about sixty seconds before they reach the clearing." He held my gaze. "So please. Come with me."

The howling swelled.

I made a decision.

I went with him.

We moved fast through the tree line, north, a direction I wouldn't have chosen and didn't get a vote on. He was ahead of me by three steps, moving through the dark like he'd done it a thousand times, which he probably had. I kept up better than I expected. Better than I should have, actually, for someone who'd been asleep twenty minutes ago.

Something about the forest felt different with the howling at my back.

Not scary. Not safe. Alive. Like it was paying attention to me specifically, like the trees were leaning slightly in as I passed.

I told myself that it was adrenaline. It was a convincing argument.

The man stopped at a rocky outcrop about a quarter mile from the cottage. He pressed himself against the stone, listening. I pressed myself against the other side and tried to slow my breathing.

The howling had stopped.

Which was worse.

Silence meant they were close enough to not need the sound anymore.

I looked at the man across the rock. At his profile the focused, unhurried way he was processing the dark around us. At the mark on his wrist that I could see more clearly now: a wolf's head, mid howl, lines curling outward into something that looked like a moon.

My wrist burned.

"They've stopped at the cottage," he said, low. "They'll search for it first. We have maybe five minutes."

"Great," I whispered. "That's great. While we wait, you can tell me who you are and why there's a pack of wolves looking for me and what the hell that mark on your wrist is, because I have one too and nobody has ever explained it and I'm extremely tired of not having context for my own life."

He looked at me.

For the first time since I'd stepped outside, something moved through his expression that wasn't pure focus. Something almost startled. Like he'd expected fear or compliance and gotten this instead.

Good.

"My name is Kael," he said.

"Kael what."

A pause. "Kael Drev."

The name meant nothing to me.

"And those wolves?" I said.

He was quiet for exactly one second too long.

"My father sent them," he said.

I stared at him. "Your father."

"Yes."

"Sent a wolf pack."

"Yes."

"To my house."

"Yes."

"And you're..."

"Trying to stop them," he said. "Which is significantly harder when you're asking me questions."

I shut up.

For approximately forty five seconds, which was my absolute limit under the circumstances.

"Start talking the second we're clear," I said.

His eyes cut to me sideways. And in the dark, with the moonlight catching those amber irises and a pack of wolves somewhere behind us and my wrist burning like it was trying to tell me something...

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Related to one.

"Deal," he said.

We made it back to the cottage twenty minutes later, a long loop through the forest that avoided the eastern path entirely. He checked the clearing before he let me step into it. Then the back door. Then inside.

Merek was standing in the kitchen with an iron poker in his hand and an expression that cycled through relief, fury, and something complicated when he saw Kael.

Not surprising.

He was not surprised to see this man in his kitchen.

I looked at my grandfather. At the lack of shock on his face. At the iron poker that he was now lowering very carefully.

"You know him," I said.

Merek said nothing.

"You know him."

"Aria..."

"How long?" I said. "How long have you known him, how long has he been out there, and what exactly are you not telling me about my own life?"

Merek set the poker down.

He looked at me with the face of a man who had been putting off a conversation for eighteen years and had just run out of road.

He reached up and took the iron key from around his neck.

The one I'd seen my whole life. The one that opened the cellar he'd told me held wine.

"Sit down," he said.

"I don't want to sit down."

"Aria." His voice cracked slightly on my name. "Please."

I sat down.

He crossed to the cellar door.

He put the key in the lock.

"There are things," he said, "that I should have told you the night you were born." He turned the key. The lock clicked. "I was trying to protect you."

"From what?"

The cellar door swung open. Cold air rose from the dark below.

He looked at me over his shoulder with one eye clear and one eye clouded and both of them carrying eighteen years of something I hadn't had a name for until right now.

Guilt, I thought. That's what that looks like.

"From the truth," he said. "Come and see."