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Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

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Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

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Original Fiction Dark Fantasy

Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

In one small town, the delicate balance between predator and prey is threatened when five girls are murdered on prom night.

Illustrated by Terra Keck

Edited by

By

Published on January 13, 2025

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An illustration of a moon rising over a forest.

Prom Night, Wolf Moon

She can’t stop seeing them—the doe-girl skins hanging from the wall, turned inside out, cut and changed so the girls could never find their way inside them again.

She can’t stop hearing the things left behind. Not girls or deer anymore. Peeled, glistening raw and red under the spinning lights. Gleaming muscle and white fat. Terrible, thin legs poised to shatter as they blundered across the dance floor, filling the room with the panicked clatter of hooves and piteous, bleating screams.

The last song the DJ cued up before he fled thumped bass under the chaos and panic. Then came the first flat crack, the muzzle flash as someone—more than one someone—finally took it upon themselves to do what was needful. Shots—one, two, three, four, five—putting the prom court out of their misery because there was no coming back from what had been done.

Coach Stevens held one of the rifles, Principal Gibbons another. Maybe there were others; Merrow never saw in the chaos. The guns must have come from the Lodge’s security office, protection against wolves reclaiming the land after the resort shut down. But who had been first to fetch them? How much time elapsed before the first trigger pull?

Not enough time to ask, Is this right? A split-second choice born out of grief and fear. But who made the call? She can’t imagine Coach Stevens picking up a gun, only having one shoved into his arms. What about Principal Gibbons? Did he tremble as he raised the stock to his shoulder? Was there a tear in his eye as he sighted along the barrel?

Neither of them were hunters before the night began. And now? What have they become?

Not murderers, because the girls were already worse than dead when they stumbled—were released—back into the hall. The thud of bullets hitting meat, the thud of bodies hitting the floor, that was just batting cleanup.

Merrow runs, sucking in cold mountain air. There’s never enough to satisfy her lungs. She runs, leaving behind the Lodge that isn’t a Lodge anymore, an in-between thing waiting to be torn down for a new multi-million-dollar resort to be built instead. She runs under the wolf moon painting the trees silver, the perfect round of an animal with its tail tucked over its nose, not yet woken from its winter nap.

A stitch burns along her side. Her breath stutters, and she chokes on almost-tears. Not because the doe-girls were her friends, but because they’re dead, all of them dead, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Everyone scattered when they burst from the Lodge. She runs alone. She lost track of Shep, his father. She lost track of the prom court as well, way back when the night began.

Now it’s only her, and her foot catches a hidden root. She sprawls, breath knocked from behind her ribs with a painful huff. The sound echoes back, too close, the breath not hers. A huff, then a whine—an animal in pain.

No, please, no more. Not tonight.

It’s all Merrow can think as she rolls onto her side, trying to get air into her lungs. Eyes burn in the dark, an improbable gold. Wolf. Man. Both. Neither.

Merrow bites her lip hard enough to taste blood, holding back laughter, a sob, a scream.

What are the fucking odds? That there are wolves on the mountain after all and she stumbled on one in her panicked flight.

He whines again, a high sound too much like the ones the doe-girls made. Metal jaws pin one of his legs. This isn’t trapping land, not anymore, not for a long time, so it must be old. Bad luck for the wolf, good luck for her. She could run. She should.

But Merrow reaches instead.

The scent of gunpowder lingers in her nose. Her blood, all the weight and history of it, thuds in her veins. The scent of oversweet drinks and too much cologne laid atop the slaughterhouse smell. The crack of rifle-fire and the skinned girls making their terrible, broken sounds.

She needs to not be prey.

It’s that simple.

And there’s nothing simple about it at all.

Once upon a time, there was a girl who tamed a fox. After that, she was responsible for him. She belonged to the fox, and he belonged to her, forevermore.

The memory of her grandmother’s voice in the memory of her kitchen, and Merrow’s voice answering her at five or six years old.

Why was it a fox? Why not—

Hush. Which one of us is telling the story?

Her grandmother’s hands on her shoulders, cigarette burning between her first two fingers, a thread of smoke rising into the air.

It’s a fox because I say it’s a fox.

The cigarette slipped back into the corner of her grandmother’s mouth, a hard, glinting look, a cloud exhaled with a sigh.

It doesn’t have to be a fox. It could be a hedgehog, a crow, a boa constrictor. It doesn’t matter. The point is what happens next. To tame something, you don’t need to love it, but you must care for it once it is tamed. Do you understand? You tame something, and it is yours. Whatever happens after that, it is yours to care for, because it can no longer survive on its own. Whatever harm comes to it, whatever harm it does, both are yours to carry.

Merrow pushes to one knee, crouched in the cold leaf litter. The first thing her grandmother ever taught her about the shape of the world, their world, is that there are wolves and there are deer. There’s a sharp line drawn between them—predator and prey. Everything else her grandmother taught her came later, and it isn’t what is in her head now. Only that sharp line, and which side she chooses to stand on—she does not want to be prey.

The doe-girls are dead; the night is already broken—a bone cracked wide so the hunter can suck marrow and magic from inside. Merrow’s fingers close on the tear in the wolf’s skin where the trap bit closed. She pulls.

Mine.

She doesn’t take her eyes from the wolf, but he doesn’t look away from her either. He snarls—a pain sound, teeth bared. His skin unravels and pools into her hands. She stands, wolfskin a bloody mass clutched against her already gore-soaked gown—collateral damage from the slaughter inside—shaking, breathing hard.

When his skin comes undone, so does the man, trap falling away from him. He unfolds, raw, but not in the way of the doe-girls. Shivering, his shoulders hunched inward, instinctively pulling his limbs to his core to protect the softest parts of himself.

Merrow smelled like prey moments before. Now she smells like him, all musk and snapping jaws. One quick bite and it would be done, his corpse at her feet on the forest floor.

The trees wait; the night waits with them. Wolf and girl, the balance of power shifted between them. There is another balance waiting to shift too.

Wolves and deer were the first things her grandmother taught her—an old dichotomy, written into the skin of the world. Later, her grandmother taught her of the hunters who made the sharp line a triangle; two sides becoming three points, hunters neither predator nor prey, but a bit of each. Born without claws, without teeth to rend, claiming self-defense, but sometimes killing for fun. Sometimes killing because they hoped to become something more, to take the old powers and make them their own.

The wolf watches Merrow to see what she will do, and the forest, the hills, wait and watch with him.

Is she a hunter? Predator? Prey?

These hills are a place of change, and the night is already thin with everything that’s happened. Old rules close around her as sure as the trap closing on the wolf’s leg. She only has a split second to choose. No, she already chose. She took his skin. She tamed him. He is hers; she is responsible for him. She—

No.

Merrow shouts it without words. This isn’t what she wants, it isn’t what she meant. She isn’t ready. Except, deep down, this is what she was always meant to be, following in her grandmother’s footsteps, because if she doesn’t . . .

No!

It’s too fresh, too close, and Merrow screams her denial at him—the wolf-man watching her with his golden eyes. A guttural sound, a refusal, vomiting up her rage as she shoves his skin back into his arms. She tries to step away, but he catches her forearm, tacky with his blood.

“You can’t,” he says.

It’s too late, he means.

His voice is neither wolf nor man, velvet and smoke, whiskey and cigarettes and glass scattered on the highway where a deer has just been smacked by a car.

His grip tightens; his fingers—even though he doesn’t have claws at the moment—dig in. His breath is hot against the night air. There’s a wildness to his wolf-gold eyes, and they’re also glazed with tears.

“Once upon a time, there was a girl who tamed a fox. After that, she was responsible for him. She belonged to the fox, and he belonged to her, forevermore.”

No. No, no, no.

How dare he quote her grandmother’s words back at her? How could he possibly know?

“I don’t—” Merrow says.

He lets go. Her words are cut off by the too-heavy sound of wolfskin hitting the forest floor.

It’s not the kind of thing that can be undone.

“No!” Merrow places both hands on the center of the man’s chest, shoving as hard as she can.

She expects him to fall, but he barely moves. His gaze burns, and so does hers—anger, not the threat of tears. She wants this thing. She wanted it when she reached for his skin, but she doesn’t want to want it. She doesn’t want to hurt people, and she’s afraid that she will, just because she can. The line between predator and hunter is so thin. That thinness has already been crossed once tonight, in the Lodge, in the smoke, with the bass thump not quite covering the way the doe-girls screamed.

The wolf’s long arms go around her. He crushes her against his chest. It’s the last thing Merrow expects, and it shocks her still. His lips at her ear release breath hot with the scent of devoured things.

“I’m sorry,” the wolf says.

The words are as heavy as his dropped skin, and there’s an edge of relief beneath them as well. He doesn’t have to carry this burden anymore. It’s at her feet. It belongs to her.

The wolf holds her, like a grandparent holding a child, wrapped tight—not to hurt her, but to keep her from hurting herself. He’s a wolf, but he’s her wolf now.

She melts into him, this man she doesn’t know, in the woods in the middle of the night, after escaping an abattoir. His mouth is close to her ear, and so also her throat, but there are no teeth, just words, a growl—not at her, but for her.

“Let it go.”

And she does. A throat-shredding scream, a howl, hollowing her out. He holds her through all of it, holds her until the storm passes. They both know—when this moment ends, she will have to figure out how to live; this is when the rest of her life begins.

Six Months Before Prom, Fox Moon

The final bell echoes. Merrow spins her combination lock closed just as the prom court goes clattering down the hall. Everything stops, a parting without conscious intention, letting the doe-girls pass.

Prom is months away. No one has voted the doe-girls as the court yet, but no one needs to. They’re the planning committee, the heart of the school. They are the heart of the town. They are everything.

Merrow has known the doe-girls since they were all five years old, starting kindergarten. Her first memory of them, which seems impossible, but isn’t for this town, is of the five of them standing together on the field just outside the kindergarten classroom. Other students, even teachers, surrounding them, but not too close. Merrow herself standing on the asphalt, closer to the school.

Even then, she understood that she was different—the concentric circle of the doe-girls and the people surrounding them wasn’t for her. Not just because she didn’t have a mother and father—or at least one of the two—raising her, like most of her classmates, but because of her grandmother—who and what she was to the town. Even the grown-ups were a little afraid of Merrow’s grandmother, despite recognizing her as necessary. As a result, they were a little afraid of Merrow too.

In her mind’s eye, Merrow sees the doe-girls in their circle-within-a-circle wearing white shifts. She’s sure they were wearing something else, but reality bent around them until the fabric was white and glowed. Arms raised, long hair hanging halfway down their backs—shiny black, brown, red, strawberry-blonde. She can’t see their faces, but she knows they’re smiling. Beatific, peaceful, pledging themselves to the town and one another.

It’s how Merrow always sees them—too-bright things that are impossible to look at, calling down the sun, or bidding it to rise. Like right now, she wants to squint as they pass. Even though they’re wearing jeans and sweaters, they glitter, already draped in prom finery, shedding sequins and rose petals in their wake.

The doe-girls move as a herd: Callie, Bailey, Saya, Devon, and Estelle. Born on the same day, side by side in separate rooms in the same hospital. Their names are a spell, and magic follows everywhere they go.

Before your doe-girls, there were deer-wives in the field below the hills.

Her grandmother’s voice in her memory, Merrow back home from her first day of school, telling her grandmother about the girls in her class who went everywhere together, who shone like the sun.

There were no roads then, only scattered houses connected with beaten paths. The men in those houses became hunters because they were afraid. They stole the deer-wives’ skin, changed them, and made marriages through blood and bone and stone. They did it to keep themselves safe, at first, and then they did it for other reasons altogether.

How were they already deer-wives before the men married them?

Because there are things older than men who make marriages as well, her grandmother had said. Now hush and help me cook.

By cook, her grandmother also meant kill, because people should understand their food—where it came from, what it was before being consumed. Merrow held the chicken steady; her grandmother wielded the blade. Crimson splashed the apron Merrow wore and scattered across her skin. They’d plucked the bird together, and her grandmother showed Merrow how to pull out the organs and guts from inside.

Her grandmother had never shied away from bloody things—not in the stories she told Merrow, not in the chores she had her do. Not in what she did to protect the town.

It all happened a long time ago. Her grandmother looked through the kitchen window, rinsing the rime of gore from beneath her nails. But that doesn’t mean it’s done.

The doors at the end of the hall open to a burst of late-fall sun, letting the doe-girls out into the world. The scent of rose petals lingers in their wake; a single bright sequin winks on the floor—a promise of greater things to come.

The world restarts, and Merrow carries her books to the bleachers by the football field. Tuesdays and Thursdays she has a forty-five-minute gap between when classes end and driver’s ed begins. Not enough time to bother going home. Her aunt doesn’t worry; if Merrow is going to be late for dinner, she’ll call.

The sharp blasts of Coach Stevens’ whistle and the sound of padded bodies colliding with one another make a nice backdrop, and it’s preferable to studying inside. Twenty minutes into practice, an apologetic text arrives from her driving instructor—can they reschedule? Merrow replies that it’s no problem and since no one is expecting her anywhere, she decides to stay.

When she next looks up, the players are filtering off the field, and the sun is angling low. Coach Stevens gives her a questioning look—Is everything okay, are you safe, why are you still here? He strikes Merrow as a kind man who spends a great deal of time worrying about others while pretending to be gruff and not care. She feels bad for worrying him, and at the same time, a prickling at the back of her neck makes her wonder—why is he uneasy? Is she okay?

Merrow half turns, but there’s nothing behind her. Only a feeling, like a premonition. Or maybe it’s nothing at all.

The moment passes; the fine hairs at the back of her neck settle. She holds up her textbook to indicate she’s almost done and gives Coach Stevens a reassuring wave. The field empties. Merrow finishes her work, tucks everything back into her bag, descends from the bleachers, and nearly collides with Shep Hollingsworth on his way to the parking lot.

His book bag and gear bag are both slung over his shoulder, but he stands tall and carries them effortlessly. He tosses his head, a startled motion at the near collision, shaking caramel-colored curls out of his eyes. The sun disappears fast at this time of year, but enough lingers to warm his skin and highlight his dimples as Shep recovers and smiles. If the prom court needed a king, if the doe-girls were not whole and complete in and of themselves, Shep would wear that crown. Captain of the football team. Straight A student, and not just because of his sports prowess, but because he’s genuinely smart and cares about his grades. On top of that, his father is founder and CEO of Hollingsworth, Haber, and Belmont, the largest real-estate development firm in town.

Merrow has known Shep since kindergarten as well, but they aren’t friends. They don’t run with the same crowd, in that Merrow doesn’t run with any crowd at all. The image fixed in her mind and associated with Shep is from third grade, picture day. Shep arrived with a cast on his arm. He’d broken it during a fishing trip with his father, except later it was hunting, and later still camping. The story changed in the telling, but no one seemed to care. Everyone swarmed around him, eager to listen regardless and sign their names on his cast.

Shep’s mother was a model or an actress or a beauty queen, one of those, but she isn’t in the picture anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. That’s the way Merrow’s aunt put it—not in the picture anymore—like someone took a pair of scissors and snipped her out.

“You stayed for the whole practice this time,” Shep says.

It takes Merrow a moment to make sense of the words. She wasn’t there for practice, she’s never there for practice, just for a place to sit and do her homework.

“My driving instructor cancelled, so . . .”

Her words trail as Shep’s smile falters. She may as well have said, I don’t care about football, which is technically true, but Shep doesn’t need to know that.

“I’m glad you did stay.” He regains his composure quickly, like someone used to pretending everything is okay. “I actually wanted to ask you whether you wanted to go to prom.”

“With you?” Surprise catches Merrow off guard, lets the words pass without a filter.

A chill breeze slips past her. The moon will be up soon, the fox moon. Full and bright, and tinged faintly gold. An apple stolen and carried away in clever jaws. The fox itself never seen, only its prize.

“Sorry.” She hurries past her blunder, cheeks warming. “I just wasn’t expecting . . . we’ve never really talked before.”

Shouldn’t you be asking Callie-Bailey-Saya-Devon-Estelle?

“Oh.” Shep looks flustered now too, like there’s a script in his head, and she’s just thrown all the pages into the wind. “It’s just that you’ve been hanging around to watch practice since the season started. I thought . . .”

Oh.

Ohhh.

Shit.

Merrow is so used to people looking past her, trying not to see her, that she’s surprised Shep noticed her at all. Other than Coach Stevens, in his role as a responsible adult on school grounds, she didn’t think anyone was paying her any mind. Vague panic catches her. She doesn’t want to hurt him, but she doesn’t want to be his prom date either. She doesn’t want to be anyone’s prom date, if she even goes.

Shep’s expression is far more fragile than she expected. She always assumed that in the divided camps of predator and prey, Shep would be a wolf. He’s captain of the football team, and the kind of adoration he receives regularly and without effort makes so many people hungry. Even when they have everything, they only want more. Shep’s father is like that, why wouldn’t Shep be too?

Which Merrow knows is unfair. She isn’t her grandmother; she isn’t her aunt. No matter who raised them, they get to choose who they want to be.

“Maybe? I mean, thank you. It’s really nice of you to ask, but let me think about it?” She flails, trying to be gentle, swallowing the urge to apologize. Prey apologizes. And besides, Shep doesn’t belong to her; she isn’t responsible for his feelings.

“Oh. Uh. Yeah. No problem. Just let me know.” Shep’s smile unravels at its edges, uncertainty in the crinkling at the corners of his eyes.

Lights snap on over the parking lot on the far side of the field. Even from here, Merrow hears their faint hum. Soon moths will gather, bumping against the thick plastic as the sun falls even lower.

She gives Shep her number and takes his in exchange. An air of confusion lingers as he walks away. His shadow trails behind him. Merrow tries to discern the shape of it. A deer after all, maybe, brow marked with the faintest budding of horns. In a world abound with predators and hunters, it is a shape in need of protection.

The thought shudders through her, as if arrow-struck. She’s never been responsible for anyone but herself. A sense of thrill comes with the idea, a feeling of power. But she isn’t . . .

She isn’t her grandmother. She isn’t a predator.

Having a friend might not be so bad though. As long as she makes it clear they’re only going as friends, prom with Shep could even be fun.

There’s safety in numbers after all.

A scent on the wind makes her turn. Like something dead, a deer struck on the road, its carcass left to bloat and rot in the sun. She scans the field and the school buildings, but there’s nothing obvious to be seen.

The fox moon rises, rolling across the darkening sky from low on the horizon.

Something is coming.

Once the thought is in her mind, she can’t let it go.

An Hour Before Prom, Wolf Moon

It’s spring, but up on the mountain, winter’s chill continues to hold. There’s a bite in the air and patches of snow linger, tucked between the trees. The weather hasn’t stopped girls from shedding their wraps to bare spaghetti-strapped shoulders, or boys doffing their jackets and rolling up their sleeves to take photos. Arms slung around waists and shoulders, beaming faces against the backdrop of the Lodge’s weathered wood. Students wedged into the branches of gnarled apple trees to get the perfect shot.

Merrow’s aunt insisted on taking pictures of her and Shep before they left. Merrow stuck her tongue out, crossed her eyes, made her fingers into a crown of antlers and held them up behind Shep’s head. She relented and let her aunt take at least few serious ones too, Shep’s arm around her shoulders, her arm around his waist.

You’ll want to remember this, her aunt had said, and Merrow thinks it might actually be true.

Having Shep as a friend is better than she expected. Once football season wound down, they started meeting up at a local coffee shop to study. The first time was awkward, Merrow afraid that the meeting would be construed as a date. But they’d fallen into companionable silence, interrupted occasionally by Shep helping her memorize the sequence of key events in history, and Merrow pop-quizzing him in preparation for taking the SATs.

Merrow invited Shep over for dinner with her aunt. Afterward the two of them settled onto the couch with blankets and a bowl of popcorn.  It became a habit. Shep had a soft spot for classic horror, the cheesier and more cheaply made the better. In turn, she introduced him to the Thin Man movies, and their next study session had been carried out entirely in snappy Nick-and-Nora-style dialogue.

Shep had never tried to push their relationship into anything more romantic. When they watched movies, they sat side by side with their knees up under separate blankets. It wasn’t until the third or fourth such evening that Merrow realized he’d never invited her to his house—and not because he was embarrassed of her, or afraid of her. Because he wanted to be anywhere other than home.

An excited stage whisper catches her attention and Merrow turns to see the doe-girls, their heads together, their needle-thin heels surprisingly steady on the gravel as they climb the winding drive toward the Old Barn, intent on some secret prom-court mission. Their dresses are all shades of silver, bronze, gold, and champagne, a subtle shine that makes it even harder to tell them apart, a single, multi-legged creature, gliding into the falling dark.

Back in the 1970s, when Sugar Hill Farm was first built, it was the hottest winter destination around. Skiing, both downhill and cross-country, skating, ice fishing, tobogganing, a snow fort that the staff meticulously built every year and maintained all season long, snowshoes and Ski-Doos, nightly sleigh rides, and even an outdoor sauna, hot tub, and ice plunge. Over time, newer resorts sprang up around it, and now, over the summer, the old Sugar Hill will be torn down and a new and improved resort will take its place.

Shep’s father’s firm is the one redeveloping the land, and as a result, just for tonight, the entire resort is theirs, courtesy of Hollingsworth, Haber, and Belmont. The Great Lodge will hold dinner and dancing, later there will be firepits outside, and for one hour the old ski lift will carry anyone who wants to go up to the top of the hill to enjoy the view. The guest rooms and cabins are off-limits for obvious reasons, but the grounds are theirs to roam as long as they stay out of the woods. There’s a wolf out there, maybe more than one; Principal Gibbons made an announcement on the bus.

He also made an announcement that the Old Barn, administrative offices, and storage spaces were off-limits, but that doesn’t stop Saya-Callie-Bailey-Devon- Estelle.

Before Sugar Hill Farm, there was an actual hunting lodge tucked into these hills. Merrow has seen pictures of hewn logs stripped of their bark and varnished against the rain, a sloping roof covered in snow. Shep’s great-grandfather was a founding member, and everyone who was anyone in town belonged. According to her grandmother, back then, any real matter of import was debated and decided in the lodge. The mayor and town council, if they weren’t monied enough, or from the right family to be members themselves, simply went along.

Merrow’s grandmother was invited to a meeting at the tail end of the original lodge’s heyday. She attended once, and only once.

There were older buildings in the hills before Shep’s great-grandfather’s lodge, and Merrow’s grandmother knew those as well.

A house built of stone high on the hill overlooking the place where the town would one day be, her grandmother said.

Merrow sat on the edge of the bathtub while her grandmother told her the tale, holding towel-wrapped ice against her mouth for the swelling. Three weeks into second grade a boy named Trevor Carter told everyone Merrow had fleas. Merrow’s pencil snapped during spelling practice, and when Shep Hollingsworth tried to lend Merrow his sharpener, Trevor shrieked, saying Shep would get fleas too. The teacher sent Trevor to sit in the corner to “cool down,” but at recess, he rallied a group to chase Merrow away from the playground, throwing sticks and pebbles, yelling and laughing.

Merrow didn’t remember hitting Trevor Carter. She remembered anger that made her vision go redredred, then picking herself up off the asphalt between the school and the playground, her face aching, and blood on her shirt, after Trevor, or someone else, fought back. She’d cut her lip and skinned both of her knees; Trevor had a broken nose. Trevor was sent to the nurse’s office, and Merrow was sent to the principal’s office to wait for her grandmother.

The man who built the house invited other men to visit him there. Her grandmother scrubbed Merrow’s knees as she spoke and then swabbed her skin with iodine. When the men arrived, they found a rabbit-wife trussed on the table, and the man who owned the house handed them his two sharpest knives.

The iodine left brown-red smears behind, but the scrapes underneath were barely visible.

When the men tried to leave, the man who owned the house barred their way. He said the hills weren’t safe, they were teeming with wolves, and their only choices were to eat or starve or be eaten. Then he went outside, locked the door, and left his guests alone with the rabbit-wife and their knives and made them choose.

A breeze slides past Merrow, following the doe-girls up the hill, raising goose bumps on her arms.

“Dinner’s starting soon.” Shep’s footsteps crunch on the path behind her. “Ready to go inside?”

“Are you?” she asks.

“No.” A muscle twitches in Shep’s jaw, a brief shadow tracing it in the falling dark.

Merrow can’t place the wrongness, but she feels it in the air, a tension, a bowstring pulled taut, an arrow ready to fly. Shep pulls a flask from his pocket, sips, and holds it out to her. Because it’s Shep, she knows it’s the good stuff, filched from his father’s liquor cabinet, not the cheap stuff that their classmates are also hiding.

“Aren’t you worried he’ll notice?” Merrow asks as she hands the flask back to him.

Shep takes a longer pull, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and puts the flask away.

“I don’t care,” Shep says.

His fingers flex at his side, like he wants to hit something, only Merrow knows he never would. Just like she knows his words are a lie—he does care, very much.

“We can . . .” But she doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

Buses brought them up the mountain; none of them have their cars. They are essentially trapped. Their choices are to go inside and pretend to enjoy dinner, stay outside shivering in the cold, or take their chances in the woods with the supposed wolves.

Eat, starve, or be eaten.

“My dad talks about this place all the time,” Shep says, surprising her. “The way it used to be back when it was a private lodge. He was never even here back then, but you’d think he personally built it with his own hands, like the new resort he’s building is some kind of resurrection.”

Not all of the stones in the man’s house were stone. Some of them were bones.

“Are you okay?” It’s a useless question; Merrow can see that he’s not.

“I’m great,” Shep says, “I’m having a great time, aren’t you?”

His smile looks like it hurts, his eyes picking up weird light from the wolf moon and the luminaria candles lining the pathway up to the Lodge. Around the warm brown of his irises, his eyes are faintly stitched with red.

We shouldn’t go in, Merrow thinks. We should run. We should find the doe-girls, and—

“Coach Stevens will come looking for us.” Shep tilts his head toward the Lodge, grim, resigned. “Did you see how jumpy he was on the bus? We’d better go.”

He doesn’t give Merrow time to agree or disagree. Fight-or-flight instinct tightens the skin along her spine. She wants to fight. She wants to run. She can’t leave Shep alone. She follows him inside.

People are taking their seats. Merrow scans the room; she doesn’t see the doe-girls anywhere. Principal Gibbons takes the stage to make welcoming remarks, and Vice Principal Tanner follows with a toast. Then Shep’s father takes the stage.

Merrow startles, looks to Shep. The tightness in his jaw and shoulders suddenly makes so much more sense. Technically, Addison Hollingsworth is their host, it’s not that strange, and yet his presence here feels wrong. Intruder, Merrow thinks, forcing himself in where he doesn’t belong.

And yet she pictures Mr. Hollingsworth arriving in his sleek silver car, striding through the doors like a lord into his hall. This is his place, rightfully claimed. She sees him with a fresh-killed deer slung across his shoulders, a brace of rabbits in either hand. A shrug and a careless opening of fingers, and the animals drop heavily, rattling plates and silverware—ready to be gutted, ready to be skinned. She doesn’t have hackles, but they rise anyway, vision doubling, every smell in the room overwhelming, stinging her eyes. She blinks and everything snaps back to the way it should be with a polite smattering of applause as Mr. Hollingsworth cedes the microphone.

Shep’s shoulders curl inside his jacket. Principal Gibbons invites them into the other room and onto the dance floor. Chairs scrape and the volume of voices rise.

“I hate him,” Shep says.

Just that, his tone clipped. A strange trick of the light makes it look like nasty bruises ring his throat, just above his collar, the opposite of the doe-girls’ glamour. Merrow hurries to catch up. Disco lights spin. She spots Shep huddled by the wall.

“I’ll get us drinks,” she says.

He nods, looking miserable. She still doesn’t see the doe-girls. The windows are open to alleviate the heat of bodies dancing, and Merrow hears an unnerving yip-bark-scream from outside.

Principal Gibbons and Coach Stevens stand by the doors. Sentinels keeping them safe, or guards keeping them in. Merrow tries to shake the image as she fills two cups with punch. There’s a slant to Coach Stevens’ shoulders, like he expects something bad to happen.

And then it does.

There’s a crash from the other room. A sound like a table being turned over. Breaking glass. A heavy thud against the doors. Coach Stevens jumps away, and the doors bang open. Five red and terrible figures stumble, terrified, into the room; five grisly banners unfurl along the walls around the dance floor, bundles previously hidden below the rafters by a dimness only occasionally cut through with the glare of the swirling, multicolored disco lights.

A scream, followed by another, and another, spreading like wildfire. Everyone pushes in opposite directions. Merrow loses sight of Shep, loses sight of everything but the five shapes—the doe-girls, bleeding and panicked and in horrible pain. One of them—Devon or Saya or Callie or Bailey or Estelle, it’s even harder to tell apart now without their skin, which hangs in ragged, crimson tatters on the wall—lets out a wild, keening yell.

Smoke fills the room, the fog machine kicked over by accident, or turned on deliberately to add to the confusion.

A silhouette by the door. A hunter with an armful of guns.

No, she thinks, oh no.

They weren’t hunters when they entered the house of stone and bone, but by the time they left, they were.

The flat crack of a shot rings out. A doe-girl—Estelle or Devon or Saya or Bailey or Callie—drops to the floor.

Another shot. And another shot.

Merrow runs.

One Week After Prom, Rabbit Moon

Candlelight flickers, a river of stars overflowing the plaza in front of City Hall. It’s the same spot where every December a massive Christmas tree is lit, and vendors sell hot chocolate, cider, and mulled wine. Now, it holds a vigil instead of celebration. The doe-girls are gone, and the entire town has gathered to mourn.

Five portraits, blown up larger than life, are arrayed across the steps. Mayor Evalyn Woodson stands behind a podium, delivering words of condolence, while acknowledging that there are no words for this time.

Merrow stands at the edge of the crowd, a wall of backs subtly barring her from the collective mourning, saying without words this is not for you.

Wolves have always ranged on the outside of the town, snapping jaws at its ragged edges. Sometimes they kill to cull. Sometimes they kill to eat. Sometimes they protect the town from worse things, older things, and newer ones as well. But the town would rather look away from the wolves, because the doe-girls’ radiant magic is so much prettier.

Was.

Now the doe-girls are gone.

There is only Merrow. Wax drips over her fingers from the vigil candle held tight in her hands. The mayor’s speech drifts back to her.

“. . . violation,” the mayor says. “The natural order destroyed.”

Is it the doe-girls the town mourns, or itself? There’s a knot of families—parents, grandparents, and siblings of the doe-girls—huddled in front of the podium, holding one another up. An epicenter, muffled sobs rippling outward from them. Merrow sees classmates, shell-shocked, reliving the slaughterhouse scene as the doe-girls found their way onto the dance floor. She does not see Principal Gibbons or Coach Stevens; they wouldn’t dare.

Shep’s father stands near the stage, hand possessively on Shep’s shoulder, pinning his son by his side. Merrow imagines tearing her way through the crowd to Shep and stealing him out from under his father’s hand. Before she can even try, she catches a gore scent on the breeze. Too much like the smells of prom night, and yet reeking of a different kind of magic altogether.

She lifts her head, tracking. It smells more like birth gone wrong than death, a thing she can’t quite parse. The crowd shifts, an animal wariness. The mayor half steps from the podium. Everything goes still, a collective shuddering. Merrow turns to look behind her.

She’s one of the first to spot the figure limping toward the vigil, but not the first to react. A shriek pierces the night, echoed by a terrified wail from the thing that stops its horrid progress to stand swaying and lost in the middle of the road.

“Nononono.” The blurred sound of dismay comes from behind Merrow as someone collides with her shoulder, half tripping and pushing past her.

Instinct makes her reach for his upper arm, but he’s too fast. She recognizes Kyle Merchant. His sister, Gemma, is in her class. Kyle is a sophomore. Their younger sister, Lyssy, is—

Oh.

Oh no.

Merrow catches up with the ragged ends of Kyle’s words as he races toward the terrible thing his little sister has become.

“I told you to stay inside, it’s too dangerous, what did you—”

Merrow tries to catch his shoulder, and again, he twists away from her, but then arrests his progress on his own. Lyssy drops to her knees, repeating her wail. Her tears are pale pink, saltwater mingled with blood, running from furrowed skin. Tattered strips of flesh hang from her in ribbons, bone showing through in the gaps left behind. Lyssy’s hands cover her face, its remains. The sound she makes is mingled terror and pain.

Words stutter, fragmented, but the only ones Merrow can make out are, “I tried, I tried,” through chattering teeth. Lyssy’s scapulae flex with her heaving shoulders, further splitting her skin. Becoming something like wings trying to break free as her body twists itself into an impossible shape. Snapping, the hollowness of bones breaking. Merrow is close enough to see that not all the skin hanging from Lyssy is human. Some of it is velvet-napped, fawn spotted fur.

I tried.

Kyle lurches forward. Merrow throws an arm around his chest to haul him back. The rest of the crowd surges toward them, stopping just short so Merrow and Kyle are stranded alone between the mourners and Lyssy, now writhing on the ground.

I tried.

Kyle bellows, a wordless sound of rage, throwing an elbow into Merrow’s stomach to get her to let go. She clings harder, speaks through clenched teeth into his ear.

“Don’t.”

It’s too late. He can’t touch Lyssy now. She’s too sharp, too awful, a would-be-protector made of gore. She tried to become a doe-girl, whether by tapping into magic she didn’t understand, or whether because that magic reached out and caught her. Nature abhors a vacuum. The balance of their town has been broken. A gap remains in their defenses, like a tooth pulled, and sweet, young Lyssy tried to fill it.

Merrow tightens her grip. Kyle goes limp. His rag-doll weight doubles over with a sob, bearing Merrow with him, and they end up awkwardly kneeling in the street, Merrow half holding him up in her arms. Lyssy’s bones finally stop snapping into new and terrible forms, her pleading, her screams dying in a gurgle as the twitching mass of her falls still.

She is not a doe. Not a girl anymore either. Nothing recognizably human. Something awful and in-between. Like roadkill, only nothing struck her. She did this to herself. The town did this to her. The death of the doe-girls made her into this thing.

Lyssy and Kyle and Gemma’s parents reach their fallen child. Gemma is there too, pale and shaking, and Merrow gently relinquishes Gemma’s brother into her arms. She slides away from their grief, their anger, their horror.

Someone grabs her shoulder, wheels her around.

“What did you do?” Joseph Conrow—Merrow recognizes him; he’s on the city council and runs a repair shop in town.

His daughter, Sarah, is in Lyssy’s class. They are, or were, best friends.

She tries to shake free of his grip, but his fingers tighten, digging in. The yeasty, fermented scent of beer hangs on him. He sways, but it’s everything that’s happened making him unsteady, not the drink, which is his courage to confront her, to sling blame.

“I didn’t do anything.” This time, Merrow succeeds in shaking free of him.

“You.” He catches her elbow, refusing to let go. “You’re like your grandmother. You’re—”

“Joe.” A warning, calming voice—Tim Parker, another one of their neighbors.

Some members of the mourning crowd are getting their first sight of Lyssy, turning away, covering their mouths. Merrow spots Shep, but not his father. Joseph Conrow reaches for her again, and Tim Parker tries to hold him back.

Anger, needing somewhere to go. Joseph takes a swing, and it’s Tim he hits, a clumsy strike to his jaw that sends them both reeling. Joseph looks almost as surprised as Tim, as if he didn’t mean to, wasn’t aware that he had. They scuffle toward each other, no one thinking clearly anymore.

The fear-scent of a herd on the point of stampede. It’s her fault. She’s the predator they caught wind of—except no, she was trying to help. Or not even that. She didn’t do anything at all. Lyssy wasn’t her fault, but Merrow didn’t protect her either.

It’s all so big and so stupid and something in Merrow snaps, redredred.

Her hands fist in Joseph Conrow’s denim jacket, hauling him off-balance. The accusation in his eyes becomes alarm. Merrow knows there must be something terrible in her own eyes, because she wants to hurt him. Drive the heel of her palm into his nose. Wrench his arm from its socket.

Bite him.

Because the wolf’s skin pooled into her arms and the doe-girls are dead and now Lyssy is dead too and none of it is fair and the people who started this should pay but they won’t and—

“Merrow.” Shep pulls her away, voice stitched with concern—fear for and of her.

If she doesn’t stop—

She sees Shep bathed in the gentle glow of black-and-white movies, sitting on her couch. She wants to take it back—all of it, back before prom, before giving him her number, all of it. But she can’t.

She lets go of Joseph Conrow.

“I’m sorry,” Merrow says, not to Joseph, but to Shep.

She walks on stiff, numb legs away from the center of town. Shep calls after her. Merrow breaks into a run.

The scent of death, failed birth, follows her. She doesn’t slow until she reaches her street, and when she stops running, the trembling starts. Merrow shakes and shakes, as if with cold, even though the spring night is relatively warm.

She doesn’t want this, she doesn’t want any of this, but she does. More than that, she needs this—needs something to make the thing started on the mountain on prom night stop. Everything is out of balance, and someone needs to set it right. Her grandmother is gone, and if Merrow doesn’t . . . well, there’s no one else.

She finds her wolf waiting for her in the small park sitting catty-corner from her home. Away from City Hall and the center of town, Merrow smells the wall of pines enclosing the back side of the loop that is her street. She smells the woodchips under the play structure, meant to soften falls—damp, but not quite rotting. The air, the wind, is cleaner here, but she also smells her wolf.

He sits on the sturdy plastic climbing structure, legs dangling over the side. There’s a slide at one end, ropes at the other, and steps in the middle. Merrow uses these last to climb up beside him. Insects circle the sodium lights edging the park and casting everything in an odd-colored glow.

She can’t do this. She can’t do this, but she has to. It won’t stop otherwise. The town will try to stitch itself together again and again, compensating for the loss of the doe-girls. Callie-Bailey-Saya-Devon-Estelle.

Deer that the wolves would never dare touch, because they respect balance in a way that hunters do not.

If the town is going to survive, it needs its wolves to return.

And here is Merrow and the wolf. Her wolf. Merrow looks at him sidelong. He’s not a wolf or a man just now; he’s both at once, one tucked neatly inside the other. Hair—wolf-colored. Eyes—wolf-colored. Skin hidden under shapeless clothes, muscles coiled with strength. Wolf jaws inside a human skull, with all the pounds of pressure they could apply.

“How did you know to be here?” Merrow asks.

There’s a gap between them, but his scent winds into her nose. It’s not unpleasant. Presumably he smells her as well.

“You called me,” he says, and as he does, she can almost see the invisible red thread binding them.

“Now and on the mountain?”

He shrugs, as if to say both, as if to say it doesn’t matter, what’s done is done.

“Were you following someone that night?” Merrow asks.

“They’ve been trying to drive us away for years,” her wolf says. “Trying to take what doesn’t belong to them, but not all of us are willing to go.”

“Hunters?” Merrow asks; she doesn’t ask whether the wolf included her when he said us.

“Yes.”

He leaves unsaid: don’t ask stupid questions, don’t waste my time.

What should she ask, then? What does she need to know to survive, to do what needs to be done? Her grandmother armed her with so many stories, but Merrow feels woefully unprepared.

She wants to burrow against her grandmother’s side as she did when she was very young and breathe in the tobacco scent of her. Feel her angularity. Deceptively fragile. If she had to put a name to it now, Merrow would say rangy, hard.

Her grandmother grew tired of such closeness before Merrow ever did. Instead of Merrow as a child becoming restless and squirmy with affection, her grandmother was the one to push her gently, but firmly, away, telling her she needed to learn to stand on her own.

She needed to be ready, because one day, her grandmother would no longer be around.

As a child, Merrow never thought about her grandmother’s age. All grandmothers are old, by definition, but she knows now some grandmothers are older than others. But even the kind of age her grandmother possessed has limits. Or maybe not.

Her grandmother is gone, but Merrow can’t imagine death applying to something, someone, so complicated. It isn’t a child’s denial, or a refusal to believe, either. She was fourteen when she came home to find her aunt at the kitchen table, dry-eyed but harrowed, lips pressed into a thin line. She’d met Merrow’s gaze after it had finished searching the room, as if she’d expected to find her grandmother hidden in a corner somewhere. Her aunt had shaken her head slightly—no, she’s not here, and she won’t be coming back, not anymore.

Death is a possibility—a likelihood in fact, in a world that makes sense—but the truth is, Merrow doesn’t know. Her grandmother may have been like an animal, sensing its time and crawling off to be alone at the end. Or she may be roaming, far away, changed, like so many other things in this town.

He closed them up in his house of stone and bone, left them with his knives and the rabbit-wife, and a choice of what to become.

It isn’t cold, but Merrow wraps her arms around herself. She likes less and less the picture forming in her mind, the shape gathering in the dark. The way the town is subtly shifting, being tilted by an invisible hand. Except she can picture the hand too, the weight of it, resting on his son’s shoulder, pinning him down.

A drawing back of the wolf’s lips that isn’t quite a smile, that’s too long for his mostly human face, revealing teeth that are too sharp. Merrow finds herself wanting to mirror it, wanting to snarl and snap at the night.

“If I asked you to, would you eat my heart?” Merrow’s feet dangle over the side of the play structure beside those of her wolf.

Overhead the rabbit moon is the soft half-curve of a cottony tail left behind. In her grandmother’s stories, once a month the rabbits—wives and husbands and both-and-neither—would slip out of their fur to dance skinless under their moon. Before they had to worry about hunters trussing them up for their tables and terrible ritual feasts.

They would eat the hearts, her grandmother said, but never worry about the heartless things left behind. That’s the problem with hunters, always skipping steps, always mistaking the ritual itself for sacred, rather than the thing it represents. But without a heart, without fear, Merrow might have the strength to do what needs to be done to protect the town.

Her wolf’s shoulders hunch, ears flattened along his skull, tailed tucked even though he’s sitting down. He knows the old stories too.

“Are you certain that’s what you want?”

“No,” Merrow says. “Not yet. I’m still deciding.”

The words are a half-truth. The full truth is, she’s afraid that it’s already been decided for her. She thinks about her aunt’s thinness in relation to her grandmother’s. A different quality—a nervous thinness, always afraid of something chasing at her heels. She sidestepped the path that might have claimed her, chose not to follow in her mother’s footsteps, but even now, it’s as though she expects it, always looking over her shoulder to see if it’s followed behind her. If Merrow doesn’t accept that road in turn, who will?

Merrow has long suspected the nameless girl in her grandmother’s stories, the one who tamed the fox, was her grandmother. She never asked directly though.

It doesn’t have to be a fox, her grandmother said, that isn’t the point.

It wasn’t a fox, Merrow thinks, and it wasn’t alone. Her grandmother tamed would-be hunters, turned their violence to her own use.

There are men in that house that’s all made of stone and bone, the fox said to his girl. Bad men who want to turn the deer-wives into something they are not.

Like I changed you? the girl asked her fox.

Like that, but so much harder and so much worse.

Can we stop them? If I hold them down, will you bite them all up?

I am yours, her fox replied. If that is what you want, that is what I will do.

The fox sat primly with his tail wrapped around his paws and watched the girl. In one eye, she saw sorrow, in the other, she saw hunger. If she let the fox bite up the men, how much worse would that sorrow and hunger become?

Give me a knife, instead, the girl said. You hold them down, and I will eat them up.

“When they went hunting,” her grandmother had asked her after telling her the story, “what do you think the girl and her fox were doing? Were they stopping the hunters, or saving the world from what the heartless deer-wives might become?”

Both.

Merrow thinks of the five women in their five separate hospital rooms, giving birth to five doe-girls who would eventually become one. Did those women have skins secreted away somewhere that they never showed to anyone but one another?

She looks at her wolf sidelong again. He reminds her of the hard-eyed men who used to sit around her grandmother’s kitchen table, drinking, smoking cigarettes, playing cards. Her grandfather, like Shep’s mother, wasn’t in the picture anymore. The men were though, at all hours of the day and the night, a constant, murmuring background.

Her grandmother would sit with them, smoking and drinking, occasionally joining their games of cards. Merrow can’t remember the men’s names; she wonders if they even had them. They never paid Merrow any mind. Except one man, once, his voice slurring, beckoning her to stand by him, saying it would bring him luck with his cards. His nails were thick and yellow, stained from the cigarettes he smoked, which were long, and skinny, and brown. They smelled like spice when he lit them, but the man himself only ever smelled of tobacco.

He never touched her; it never got that far. The man swayed in his seat a little, swayed toward Merrow, and her grandmother snapped at him, her shadow flaring behind her, huge and twisted and terrible, so much bigger than what could ever be contained by her skin. A whine, low in the man’s throat, protesting he hadn’t meant anything. Her grandmother’s eyes like coals burning low in a fire. The sharp line of her arm, pointing toward the door. The man slunk off into the night, and Merrow never saw him again.

Her wolf could be one of those hard-eyed men’s sons. Except he has no pack around him, alone and untamed until Merrow stole his skin. There’s something weary about him. The way he peeled under her hands, he might as well have pushed his skin into her arms. And now she cannot let go.

“I need to protect people,” Merrow says. “I’m not sure I can do that with a heart.”

She thinks of her grandmother rinsing blood from her hands, the hard protection she offered the town and how the town turned away from her. But Merrow’s grandmother never stopped. She didn’t have a heart to hurt—or did she? She didn’t have a heart to weigh her down with indecision. If Merrow had acted quickly, coiled her muscles and sprang into action, maybe she could have saved Lyssy.

“Your boy?” the wolf asks.

Merrow startles, realizing the wolf means Shep.

“He isn’t mine,” she says quickly.

“Isn’t he?” The wolf’s lips creeping toward that not-smile again, the one with too many teeth in it.

Did she tame him with black-and-white movies and bowls of popcorn? Simply by giving him a place to feel safe, that felt like it could be home? How old was Shep when his mother was suddenly no longer in the picture? Merrow thinks back, settling on six years old, picturing his tiny body pressed back into a corner, small and powerless to help. How many similar nights had he witnessed, before his father finally—Merrow presumes—went too far? Clutching a stuffed animal—maybe a rabbit, maybe a deer. And when he could no longer bear to watch, burying his face in its softness, soaking tears into its fur.

Once you tame something, it’s your responsibility.

“Not just him,” Merrow says, “the whole town.”

The wolf shrugs, as if it’s no business of his, though it is, even if they weren’t bound. Merrow stands, brushing dirt from her jeans. She climbs onto the railing, drops neatly from the play structure with hardly any sound.

“Don’t go far,” she calls over her shoulder. “When I do decide, I don’t want to have to search all over to find you.”

“You know better than anyone, I don’t have a choice where I go,” the wolf says.

As Merrow walks away, he calls after her. His voice is soft, but carries perfectly to her ears.

“Was your grandmother truly heartless, do you think?”

She whirls to face him, to ask what he knows of her, her family. Did he know those other wolves, the ones bound to her grandmother? Were they his kin? But he’s gone. The breeze picks up, blowing across the play structure, standing empty under the rabbit moon.

A Week and a Half After Prom, Serpent Moon

There’s no vigil for Lyssy, not like for the doe-girls. She is mourned in private, her family huddled in their living room, curtains twitch-drawn tight over the windows, candles lit around a framed portrait of their little girl, whispering and afraid of what their sorrow might call.

A curfew is instated, Merrow and her classmates watched closely for signs of change.

But it doesn’t matter; it turns out the town should have been watching the dead, not the living. The doe-girls’ bodies go missing from the morgue before their grieving families can reclaim them.

Merrow imagines them coming back, a single hollow-eyed and multi-limbed thing. Callie-Devon-Saya-Bailey-Estelle, howling their hunger, transformed.

Unintended consequences. When the hunter put a knife to the girls’ beautiful skins, he was after a transformation of his own, building back what was lost, never thinking of what else might change.

Merrow finds her aunt sitting at the kitchen table. The same kitchen her grandmother sat in with her hard-eyed men, but a different table. The whole kitchen, in fact, redone—smoke scrubbed from the walls, harvest gold and avocado appliances banished in favor of clean white and stainless steel. Her aunt jumps when Merrow touches her shoulder, hastily stubbing out a cigarette with a guilty flinch.

“I wish she was here too,” Merrow says.

She recognizes the cigarettes for what they are—a kind of conjuring, a desire for the safety they’ve lost.

“It shouldn’t have to be you,” her aunt says.

Her shoulders hunch under Merrow’s hand, and Merrow lets her touch slide away.

“It has to be someone.” Merrow looks toward the kitchen window, imagining a pack of wolves slinking through the dark of their yard.

She keeps her gaze carefully away so her words won’t fall like an accusation. She knows, they both do, that it was never going to be her aunt. She doesn’t have the hot, red twist of anger inside that made Merrow snap at Joseph Conrow the night of the vigil, that made her punch Trevor Carter back in second grade.

If she doesn’t have a heart, maybe she wouldn’t care about the people she has to hurt in order to keep a larger number of people safe.

“Did she ever tell you stories?” Merrow asks.

“Not the stories she told you, but yes.” Her aunt smiles, a brief, sorrowful thing, picking a fleck of ash from her lip. “If you can imagine it, sometimes she even sang lullabies.”

Merrow can’t, but she almost, sort of, can. Her grandmother, kneeling between two twin beds, her hands out to rest atop the blankets covering both of her girls. Before her voice was roughened with smoke, it might have held a deep sweetness. The language she sang in, Merrow thinks, may have been older than any human tongue. Something like a prayer for protection, to keep her girls safe.

Despite everything that she was, she couldn’t stop Merrow’s mother and father from being struck by an oncoming car. But the drunk driver who hit them swerved to avoid an animal in the road while stone-cold sober a month after he got out on parole. He crashed through a bridge guardrail, his car went into the water, and he drowned. Not balance, not justice, but a small act carried out by a hurting mother, because she could.

Merrow thinks of her grandmother’s heart gnawed to a sliver, like the thin crescent of the serpent moon shining outside. Depending on who you ask, the curve of it is either the flick of a tail in warning, or the slash of a fang, because it’s already too late.

Was your grandmother truly heartless, do you think?

Her grandmother kneeling between her daughters’ beds, singing them lullabies—not one heart, but two, beating outside of her chest. A sound she could follow out of the dark, to guide her home, if she ever drifted too far.

“I have to go out for a while,” Merrow says.

Her aunt nods, distracted, reaching for the pack of cigarettes again. Merrow hears the lighter spark and smells the particular scent of her grandmother’s brand as she slips outside.

It’s past curfew, but that doesn’t matter. It didn’t stop whoever took the doe-girls’ bodies, whether it was the hunters, or the doe-girls themselves. Merrow imagines wolves running beside her, sleek bodies with sharp teeth, smelling improbably of tobacco. Whatever happened to those hard-eyed men once her grandmother was gone? Did they go when she did, her responsibility, forevermore?

Merrow keeps the hood of her gray sweatshirt down, hands jammed in her pockets, until she reaches the fence surrounding the gated community where Shep and his father live. It’s easier to scale than it should be, the illusion of safety rather than the thing itself. She slips past hedges and lawns neatly maintained by gardeners, avoids the sprinkler systems embedded in yards. She recognizes Shep’s house by his light blue car. A pine-shaped air freshener dangles from the rearview mirror, a faint spattering of rust around the wheels. Merrow knows for a fact Shep’s father offered to buy him a car, and Shep insisted on paying for this secondhand embarrassment on his own with a part-time job—a small measure of freedom, a tiny slipping of control.

Merrow doesn’t want to think about how else Shep might have paid for the car, but she’s fairly certain she already knows. It gives her a weird feeling of pride that Shep still drives it. At the same time, it prickles rage along her spine, because it shouldn’t be a fight, Shep shouldn’t have to choose—his father’s heart, his approval, or his own.

The low-slung silver car Mr. Hollingsworth drives is nowhere to be seen. Merrow circles around the back of the house. Soft-glowing lights shine in the pool and chlorine scent slips into her nose. It’s decidedly stupid, but she does it because she can—baring her teeth, wild and reckless as she climbs the rose trellis and makes her way by guesswork to Shep’s window.

She taps on the glass, briefly gratified to see him startle. For a horrible moment, she is predator, he is prey. She sees the soft point under his jaw where his pulse beats and thinks how easily she could tear out those veins. And in the next moment, she loathes herself. He crosses the room to open the window, his expression haunted, almost as hollow-eyed as she imagined the doe-girls, but this terribleness is of another kind. Sorrow and fear, no hunger to be seen. The light falls across his curls and casts the shadow of horns on Shep’s brow. Not antlers, velvet nubs, like those of a fawn.

“If my father—”

“His car isn’t in the driveway.” Merrow climbs inside, surveying Shep’s room.

It doesn’t smell like a high school student’s room. It’s impeccably neat, bed made, books stacked beside the laptop open on his desk, shoes lined up beside the dresser. No clothes strewn around or empty plates left to attract bugs. No posters on the wall either, no sign of Shep at all, like he’s afraid of treading anything but lightly, leaving any impression of himself behind.

“I don’t know when he’ll be back.” Shep frowns, arms crossed. “If he finds you here . . .”

“He won’t,” Merrow says.

She isn’t sure she believes it, but she hopes Shep does.

A part of her wants Addison Hollingsworth to find her here, give her an excuse. Could she do what needs to be done then? Make Shep watch while she breaks his father? How much, she wonders, does Shep know?

She wants him to understand. She wants, when all is said and done, to still be Shep’s friend.

She sits on the edge of his bed

“Your father . . .” Merrow looks at her hands.

Shep’s father is his to hate, not hers, and hate is so often bound up in complicated love when it comes to family.

“I—” Merrow starts, and Shep cuts her off.

“I know.”

She brings her head up, startled. Misery etches his features, knowledge pulling his shoulders down. Wordlessly, Shep claims the space beside her on the bed, and hands her his phone.

“I went back after prom to look around, and I took this picture,” Shep says. “I knew, I suspected at least, that my father was up to something. But I had no idea it was—” He falters, runs his hands through his hair like he’s trying to scrub something away, then starts again. “I thought if I went back afterward, at least I might find something to incriminate him, so he’d have to pay, but there’s only this.”

At first Merrow isn’t certain what she’s looking at. Five chairs in the center of a darkened room, facing outward in a circle. Bales of what might be hay out of focus in the background—bales that would have been set up around the firepits outside the Lodge on prom night. The Old Barn. Merrow expands the image to make it larger. Marks in concentric rings on the floor around the chairs. Chalk, partially erased, as if whoever made the marks didn’t care about getting caught.

Merrow pictures the doe-girls in their glittering dresses, hands bound, bloodied fingers reaching toward one another, but not quite touching. She pictures them in the sun—five years old—pledging themselves to one another, pledging themselves to something far older than they would ever grow to be. At least in their current forms. The ritual conducted on Sugar Hill the night of prom—whose was it, truly? The doe-girls, or the hunters? A hot sourness rises at the back of her throat—like hunger, like bile.

Shep takes his phone back, grips it hard enough that Merrow hears the protective case creak.

“The point was to make them pull the trigger,” Shep says. “Coach Stevens and Principal Gibbons.”

“To make them into hunters,” Merrow says.

“Will you go after them?” Shep lifts his head; Merrow suspects he already knows the answer.

There’s the faintest glint of hardness in his eyes, not anger, something more resigned. He won’t put his hand on her arm or stop her this time.

“Would you . . . If it seems like I’ve gone too far, if I get lost, will you stop me, like you did the night of the vigil?” It isn’t fair to ask him, but Merrow does anyway.

A heart outside her chest to guide her home if she drifts too far.

She doesn’t have the words to say that she would be his friend regardless, that she will protect him no matter what. It isn’t transactional. But she hopes he understands.

“I don’t know if I can,” Shep says.

There’s a flatness to his tone, a grimness. He doesn’t look afraid of her now, only sad.

“But will you try?” She takes his hands, for just a moment, squeezing them. “Please.”

She wants him to see that in this moment, at least, she isn’t like his father. She isn’t a hunter, even if she is a predator. She isn’t sure how much longer that will be true—if it’s true even now, or if she only wants it to be. Shep gives her the very faintest of smiles.

“Of course,” he says. “No matter what happens, I’ll always try.”

Two Weeks After Prom, Hunter Moon

There were stories her grandmother never told her, but whose edges Merrow can guess at. Not because the details were too frightening, too complex, for a young girl to hold, but because they were personal. The stories she told were always about the girl and her fox—never me, I, this is what I did, what you might have to do one day too. There was never a story about why Merrow’s grandfather wasn’t in the picture anymore, or where the hard-eyed men haunting her kitchen table came from before they were hers. She withheld these things for Merrow’s protection, for plausible deniability, and because they weren’t truths owed to anyone else—her granddaughter included.

The wind whispers scents to her, and Merrow’s footsteps are wolf-pad soft. Her eyes see far, and far better, in the dark than strictly human eyes should. This is what she’s always been, but Merrow is making a choice too. She will own it, call it, not destiny, not fate. A truth, owed to no one but herself.

She climbs the plastic play structure. The air smells like promise, like musk, like ozone and a storm about to break even though the night is exceptionally clear.

The line the moon makes is the hunter’s bow, pulled taut, ready to strike.

“Yes,” she says, releasing the word, then she sits cross-legged to wait.

Her wolf comes to her, never far, like he promised he would.

She is alone in the dark and then she is not. She smells him, feels the shift in the night tilting him toward her. He makes little sound as he climbs up beside her, and she allows him that, not turning until he’s crouched at the other end of the structure, looking at her with his wolf-colored eyes.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

I am yours. I will do this thing for you.

“Yes.”

Her voice does not waver, but his expression does—a flicker of sadness like a drooping tail. She will own this thing; the choice is hers. Merrow stretches out on the play structure, looking up at the moon. Her wolf shifts closer. He doesn’t ask if she’s certain a second time.

“It’s okay,” she says, meeting his gaze. “Let it go.”

The wolf throws his head back, howls, and the sound ripples out over the neighborhood. A shivering that stirs sleepers in their beds, causing blankets to pull tighter and those still awake to double-check the locks on their windows and doors.

Tomorrow, the moon will be at its thinnest point—the antler moon—a last bite, all but consumed, until it begins to wax again.

Her wolf lowers his muzzle. She’s braced, but even so, it hurts more than she could imagine. He doesn’t bother with niceties like moving her shirt aside. He bites straight through fabric, flesh, muscle, and cracking bone. Merrow suppresses a cry, but tears still leak from the corners of her eyes and into her hair as the wolf chews and chews.

She holds as still as she can, lest the wolf’s teeth graze anything else, but once he’s done, she lets the shivering take her—freezing cold, even though they are well into spring. Merrow sits up. The fabric of her shirt isn’t torn. There is no gaping hole, not to the naked eye, but she feels it—an absence, which in time, will become a bruise. In this moment, it burns with loss.  

Her wolf crouches at the far end of the play structure again, watching her. He’s a predator, but his posture is wary, as if he expects her to pin him, tear out his throat. Merrow draws her legs up against her chest, hugging them, not trusting herself to stand. Slowly, never taking his eyes off her, the wolf removes his coat.

He drops it, halfway between them, and then turns, coiled muscles launching him from the play structure and loping him off into the night. Merrow watches him go. She pulls his coat to her—a beige raincoat, worn, several sizes too big for her. The sleeves overlap her wrists, and the rest of it large enough to wrap around her body, which she does.

She feels him, a trail stitched through the breeze, across the earth, between the stars. She could call him back any time, he is leashed to her, but she doesn’t intend to hold him as tightly as the girl in her grandmother’s fairy tale. He is hers, but she doesn’t want him to be. He doesn’t deserve this, but there are others who do.

Two Weeks and a Day After Prom, Antler Moon

Merrow runs, stride long, eating the ground. She tastes the air—spring with the promise of summer, rot tucked beneath it all. Shadows pace her as she flashes between the trees, feeling her muscles, feeling the weightlessness of no longer having a heart holding her down.

She gives herself permission to be monstrous, to transform and to trust that she will find her way home at the end. Merrow picks a spot where leafless trees bend strangely away from one another. There are terrible things buried on this hill, old sacrifices calling up older magic. This is where the doe-girls will return, whether the hunters bring their bodies or their own terrible legs carry them here.

She flattens herself against the rich earth and breathes hard, mouth open, not bothering to be quiet just now. Bird wings make the faintest wittering sound against the blue-gray sky—their own language as they pass from tree to tree—but otherwise, they hold their tongues.

Her breath calms, slows. She has no heartbeat, and stillness comes more easily now. In a trancelike state, holding readiness, she waits as night falls and the moon rises, a scant sliver above the trees. She pictures the stag whole, a silhouette against the dark, the moon only part of his crown. Power masses in that negative space suggested by the crescent light. The antler and the unseen beast beneath it.

 A footstep crackles the leaves. Merrow stands.

Hunters move between the trees, twitchy and uncertain, answering her question about the doe-girls. They are more like trackers now, not fully understanding their quarry. They carry no guns; guns would be useless against the thing they are hunting. Unintended consequences, but they still think they can stop what they put in motion, bring it down.

Maybe they can, but not alone, not in the shapes they’re in now.

Merrow extends herself, her awareness, feels the delicate balance. It is a night of becoming, of what isn’t yet, but might be. She is a wolf without a heart, but she might be something else still. The are five hunters in the woods around her—one for each doe-girl—but only one of them whose steps are sure. Four of them are only halfway things; pulling the trigger didn’t finish the job. She can push against the darkness inside them, their sorrow, their grief, and make them change—hard-eyed men bound to her, tumbling and snapping in her wake.

Shep’s father is the fifth. She doesn’t have to see him to know. It might be harder, bloodier, but she can force him to change too.

And the doe-girls, whatever they might become, they are still waiting to happen as well.

Like her grandmother, Merrow will tame these hunters, but it will be so much harder than what she wants to do, which is rip their throats out, one by one. Because dead is dead. If she kills them, her responsibility ends. But if she tames them, they will always and forever belong to her.

A careless footstep brings a hunter too close and she leaps. Wolf-body and wolf-muscles bear the man to the ground. A whuff of shocked breath. Addison Hollingsworth. He recovers quickly, the most prepared of any of the six of them on the mountain to deal with what she’s become.

He shoves back against her, gym-hardened muscles against the new barrel thickness of her chest. Merrow leans against him, shows her teeth, but doesn’t snap yet. He can’t shift her, but that doesn’t stop Hollingsworth’s sneer.

“Do you think you’re going to kill me?”

Do you think my son will forgive you if you do?

He doesn’t say it, but his eyes glitter triumph. He thinks she will cave. His father knew her grandmother; he should know better.

“No,” Merrow says—wolf and girl both.

She puts her teeth against the softness of his throat where she imagined the ring of bruises on Shep’s neck, where she imagines Shep’s mother carried bruises as well. She learned from her wolf as he devoured her heart. She learned from her grandmother, long before that.

When Merrow bites down, it isn’t on skin. She doesn’t tear, but snips something far more fundamental than flesh and bone. It’s like a ribbon going down, oily-dark, slicking her throat. And it hurts. All the rage and hot wanting in Addison Hollingsworth—the parts of him that feel the world is unfair, that he should have been born with teeth and claws and the means to match his will and make everything he sees his own—burn in her. Flames lick the cage of her ribs, the hollow where her heart used to be. Merrow wants to howl, wants to scream.

But she doesn’t stop. She keeps biting, swallows it all down. Takes it into her, knotting the dark ribbon of it into the core of her. She leans her paws against Mr. Hollingsworth’s collarbones, hard and harder. Hears them creak, wants them to snap. His eyes go wide; he didn’t think she had it in her, didn’t think she could do what she’s about to do, what she’s already done.

Mine.

One last bite.

The light goes out of his eyes.

Nothing physical breaks, but he breaks all the same. Hers now. She is responsible for all his anger, his darkness, his pain. Everything he did to the doe-girls, and everything else he wants to do. She will turn it into something useful, keeping the town safe from the hunters outside their walls. Keeping the town safe from the worse and older thing than hunters that may be coming for them still.

The second man she brings down is Principal Gibbons. No blood soaks her muzzle, or turns the front of her shirt crimson, but there is still red in her throat. Mr. Hollingsworth slinks between the trees, man-shaped, but nonetheless with his tail down and his ears low. He whines once, tests his limits with a growl showing teeth and gums. Merrow snaps a correction, brings him to heel. It will be a process, continual, but he will learn.

He sinks back, watching her, and in a moment, Principal Gibbons joins him.

The third man is even easier. She doesn’t give him the chance to apologize. She takes the hot burning thing inside him, devouring it like a star. She runs the fourth man down, lost and blundering between the trees. She thinks of the doe-girls without their skin, staggering onto the dance floor. Dazed with pain, caught halfway between one thing and the next. Slipping on their own blood in their high heels and their hooves.

Maybe it’s seeing the others that brings the third and fourth man to heel, not the warmth of her breath in their faces. It doesn’t matter; it is done. Merrow feels all four of them like splinters under her skin. Is this how her grandmother felt all the time? She tries to remember how many there were around that kitchen table. She loses count. In her mind, they all look the same. Should she take up smoking? Learn how to play cards? The thought is wild laughter, held behind her teeth as she runs Coach Stevens down.

There’s fear in his scent and sorrow in his eyes. He stops, sways, dead tired on his feet; he sees her loping toward him and he doesn’t run. He’s making an apology, not a last stand.

“Merrow,” he says her name, softly.

Are you safe? Is everything okay?

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t let you go.”

“I know.”

He pulled the trigger. He made the choice. He went into the house of bone and stone on the hill and held the knife in his hand. If he didn’t want to, it doesn’t matter now. He chose, but he’s choosing again. A better choice now, or at least a different one.

This burden is yours now, you carry it; I don’t want it anymore.

Coach Stevens is giving her his skin, like the wolf on the hill. She should hate him for it, but the space where her heart was is empty.

He kneels, bringing his face level with hers. She huffs breath scented with not-blood. Coach Stevens’ chin trembles, but he tilts his head, giving her easy access to his throat. There are tears on his cheeks; they shine improbably in the light of the antler moon. A snip, a cut, and she takes his guilt and sorrow. She takes in the shattered part of him that was willing to go along with Addison Hollingsworth because he thought it would keep him safe, make him strong.

Five shadows follow Merrow through the trees as she runs back down the hills that pre-date the town.

She will bring them home, to her aunt’s door. To her grandmother’s door. They will sit around the new kitchen table and she will teach them how to be a wall of teeth and claws against whatever comes next.

There’s a weight behind the stars, pressing down on all six of them. The stag, sketched in darkness around the antler moon. She thinks of the doe-girls standing in the sun, arms raised, pledging themselves to one another and the town. They are something else now. There is a door between the stars and it will open soon, and they will step through.

One body, too many limbs; no longer uncertain, panicked, bleating, and slipping on bloodied hooves.

The worst is yet to come.

She hopes Shep will forgive her and help her find her way out of the dark.

Merrow throws her head back and howls to the antler moon. The sound shivers out over the hill, through the trees. The five newborn wolves take up her song—howling all their pain and hunger in chorus with hers.

It is a call, whether or not any of them are ready. They wait for the door to open and the darkness to step through.

“Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” copyright © 2025 by A.C. Wise
Art copyright © 2025 by Terra Keck

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Wolf Moon, Antler Moon
Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

A.C. Wise

About the Author

A.C. Wise

Author

A.C. Wise is the author of the novels Wendy, Darling and Hooked and the novellas Grackle and Out of the Drowning Deep, among other works. A new novel, Ballad of the Bone Road, is forthcoming in early 2026. Her work has won the Sunburst Award, and has been a finalist for the Nebula, Stoker, World Fantasy, Locus, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Aurora, Shirley Jackson, and Lambda Literary Awards. In addition to her fiction, she contributes a regular review column to Locus and Apex Magazine.
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