Hide in the Shadows
The travel from Shadowmoon Pack’s corporate office, high-rise penthouse to The Rustic Moon Motel, outskirts of town consumed the next hour. Headlights cut cold through the gathering dusk.
The Rustic Moon Motel sat like a forgotten bruise on the edge of town, its neon sign sputtering a weak pink halo into the fog. Iris had counted seventeen cracks in the plaster ceiling before she stopped. The number stuck in her skull anyway.
Seventeen.
She shifted Milo to her other hip, his deadweight warm and trusting against her collarbone. He’d fallen asleep in the car, his small fingers curled into the collar of her jacket like a kitten gripping its mother’s fur. The blue balloon from his nightmare had evaporated into the dark of her memory, but she could still feel the phantom string of it brushing against her wrist.
*Twenty-four hours.*
The clock on the nightstand read 2:47 AM. She had twenty-two hours left.
Selene moved through the room with the quiet efficiency of someone who had never thrown a punch in her life but had spent years learning how to disappear. She pulled the heavy curtains closed, checked the lock twice, then slid a wooden chair under the doorknob.
“That won’t stop anyone with a shoulder,” Iris said.
“No.” Selene turned, her eyes scanning the room’s corners as if she could will threats into visibility. “But it gives me time to scream. And you time to run.”
Iris lowered Milo onto the bed, his small body sinking into the stained floral comforter. She pulled the blanket up to his chin, and he stirred, his eyelids fluttering. For a moment, the gold flickered beneath them—a thin ring of molten light that vanished as quickly as it appeared.
Selene’s breath caught. She looked away, pretending she hadn’t seen.
“The room is swept,” she said, her voice carefully neutral. “No bugs. No trackers. I checked the vents, the baseboards, the light fixtures. The owner is an old friend of my mother’s. He won’t talk.”
“He won’t have to.” Iris pulled her phone from her pocket, the screen black and cold. “They don’t need informants. Beckett showed me the footage from my own kitchen. They have drones.”
“Military grade?”
“Probably.” Iris set the phone face-down on the nightstand, as if she could bury the truth of it under the plastic casing. “Marcus said the Sterling family doesn’t buy off the shelf. They commission.”
Selene’s jaw worked silently. She moved to the window and parted the curtain a fraction of an inch. The parking lot was empty. The fog had thickened, swallowing the single streetlamp at the motel’s entrance until it was barely a smear of yellow.
“Heat signatures,” Selene said softly. “They’ll be looking for two adults and a child. Body heat. Movement patterns.”
Iris looked at Milo. His breathing had evened out, his face slack with the particular vulnerability of deep sleep. She could see the faint pulse at his temple, the rise and fall of his chest. Every breath was a beacon.
“We need to break the pattern,” Iris said.
Selene turned from the window. “What do you mean?”
“I mean we need to give them more targets than they can track.”
For the next hour, they worked in the kind of silence that exists between women who don’t need words to understand that the clock is eating them alive.
Selene drove to the all-night gas station three miles down the road and returned with four portable space heaters, two cases of bottled water, a roll of heavy-duty aluminum foil, and a bag of cheap LED candles. She arranged the heaters in the far corners of the room, pointing them away from the bed where Milo slept. The air grew thick and artificial, the hum of the heating elements filling the space with a false warmth.
Iris worked on the decoys.
She wrapped the foil around the water bottles, twisting the ends into crude approximations of limbs. She set them on the second bed, arranged the foil bodies under the blanket, and positioned the LED candles near their centers. The flickering orange light caught the metallic surface and threw it into false relief. From above, through thermal imaging, it would look like three bodies huddled close together—human shapes radiating heat.
It was a parlor trick. A party game.
It was all she had.
Selene came to stand beside her, surveying the decoys with her head tilted. “It might buy us ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is an army.”
“You don’t have an army, Iris.”
“No.” Iris picked up the last water bottle and wrapped it in foil, her fingers moving on autopilot. “I have a boy who makes drones fall out of the sky. And a wolf who’s been running through these woods since he was fourteen. That has to be enough.”
Selene placed a hand on her shoulder. Her palm was warm and slightly damp. She was afraid too. But she didn’t pull away.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Selene said. “Try to sleep.”
Iris didn’t argue. She lay down on the bed beside Milo, curling her body around his, and stared at the ceiling’s seventeen cracks until the numbers blurred and the clock read 4:32 AM.
She must have slept. There was no transition—just a sudden jolt of awareness as the door rattled in its frame.
Selene was already on her feet, her phone clutched in her hand. She held up her other hand, palm flat. *Wait.*
The rattle came again. Three short knocks. A pause. Then two more.
The code.
Selene crossed the room in three quick strides, slid the chair away, and twisted the deadbolt. The door opened six inches, and Marcus slipped through like smoke through a cracked window.
He was human. Barely.
The shift was receding from his face, leaving behind the sharp planes of his jaw and the hollows under his eyes. His clothes were torn at the shoulders, and there was a long scratch running from his temple to his collarbone, still weeping blood. He moved past them without a word, crossed to the window, and looked out through the gap in the curtain.
“They’re coming,” he said.
Iris sat up, her heart slamming against her ribs. “How many?”
“Six. Seven. Hard to count when they’re moving in formation.” He turned, and his eyes caught the dim light—still half-wolf, the amber bleeding into the iris. “They dropped boots two miles out. Ground approach. Smart. Drones are vulnerable in the trees.”
“The drones,” Iris said. “Selene and I set up decoys. Heat—”
“Won’t work for long. They’ll sweep the perimeter, find the false signatures, and converge on the real one.” He crossed the room in three strides and knelt beside the bed, his hand finding Milo’s cheek. The boy stirred, his eyelids flickering.
“Papa?”
“I’m here, little wolf.”
Milo’s eyes opened fully then, and the gold was there—not a flicker but a steady burn, like embers catching breath. He looked at his father with an understanding that was older than his six years, and said, “They’re outside. I can hear them breathing.”
Marcus’s hand tightened on his son’s face. He turned to Iris. “Get him to the bathroom. Fill the tub with cold water. It won’t mask his signature completely, but it might buy us time.”
Iris scooped Milo into her arms. He was shaking, his small body vibrating with a tension she could feel in her teeth. She carried him into the bathroom, set him on the closed toilet lid, and twisted the faucet. The water ran brown for a moment before clearing.
“Cold,” she said, pressing her hand to the stream. “It’s so cold.”
“I don’t mind, Mama.”
She looked at him. His eyes were still gold, and there was a calm in them that she had never seen before—a stillness that belonged to the predator, not the prey.
*He’s too young for this. He’s six years old.*
But there was no room for that thought. She pushed it down and helped him into the tub, the cold water swallowing his small body up to his chest. He didn’t flinch.
Outside, the first drone hit the window.
It was a small thing—no bigger than a dinner plate—but its rotors cut through the glass with surgical precision, carving a circle in the pane. The glass fell inward, shattering on the floor. The drone hovered for a moment, its single red eye scanning the room.
Then Marcus tore it out of the air.
He moved so fast Iris couldn’t track him. One moment he was beside the bed. The next, he was at the window, his hand closed around the drone’s chassis. He crushed it. The metal buckled, sparks showering his arm, and the drone fell to the floor in two pieces.
“That was the scout,” he said. “The rest will be here in thirty seconds. Stay in the bathroom. Don’t come out until I call you.”
He shifted.
The change took less than three seconds. Bones realigned, skin split and reformed, fur pushed through in a dark tide. The wolf that stood where Marcus had been was massive—his shoulders nearly level with the bed frame, his teeth the length of Iris’s fingers. He looked at her once, his amber eyes holding everything that words could not carry, and then he turned and leaped through the shattered window.
The sounds that followed were not human.
Iris pressed herself against the bathroom wall, Milo clutched to her chest. The water from the tub was soaking through her clothes, but she couldn’t feel the cold. The drone’s red eye was still glowing on the floor, its body twitching with dying electricity.
Selene appeared in the doorway, her face bloodless. “Three down. Four left. He’s holding the line.”
“Get down,” Iris said.
Selene dropped to her knees just as another drone punched through the window—larger, military-grade, its underside bristling with dark equipment. It hovered in the center of the room, scanning. Its sensor swept over the decoys on the bed, paused, then pivoted toward the bathroom.
Toward Milo.
The boy’s eyes flared gold.
It was like watching a star ignite. The light poured from him, not hot but bright—so bright Iris had to look away. The drone’s rotors stuttered. Its red eye flickered, went dark, flickered again. The light pulsed once, twice, and the drone fell out of the air like a dead bird.
Silence.
Iris blinked, her vision swimming with afterimages. Milo was trembling in her arms, his gold eyes fading back to brown. He looked up at her, exhausted.
“I made it stop, Mama.”
“You did.” Her voice cracked. “You made it stop.”
Selene crawled across the floor to the fallen drone. She flipped it over, her fingers finding a small port in its casing. “It’s still transmitting. The damage stopped the flight, but the signal is still live. They know we’re here. They know *exactly* where we are.”
Iris heard him before she saw him. Paws hitting the floorboards. A low growl that vibrated through the walls. And then Marcus was there, his fur matted with blood, a gash running along his flank.
He didn’t shift fully. Not yet.
He limped to the bathroom, lowered his massive head, and pressed his snout against Milo’s cheek. The boy reached up and buried his hands in the wolf’s fur.
The door banged open.
A man stood in the frame—not one of the mercenaries, but a man in a charcoal suit, his face smooth and unremarkable except for his eyes. They were the color of winter concrete, and they were fixed on Milo.
“Alpha Blackwood,” he said. “Flynn Sterling sends his regards. He was hoping you’d run. It makes the hunt more entertaining.”
Marcus’s growl shook the floorboards.
The man in the suit smiled. His hand came up from his pocket, a small device in his palm—a remote detonator.
“The motel is wired,” he said. “Sterling doesn’t leave loose ends.”
Iris saw Marcus tense, saw the muscles gather under his fur as he prepared to launch. She saw Selene’s hand reaching for a lamp, the only weapon within her grasp. She saw Milo’s eyes beginning to glow again.
And then the man’s smile faltered.
His hand spasmed. The detonator slipped from his fingers, clattering to the floor. He looked down at his chest, where a single bullet hole had appeared, clean and precise. Behind him, the door swung wider, and Silas stepped into the frame, his service pistol still raised.
“Found him skulking in the bushes,” Silas said flatly. “Filled him with holes. Made him drop the clicker.”
The man in the suit crumpled. The light left his concrete eyes.
Silas stepped over the body, his gaze scanning the room with tactical precision. He took in the broken window, the dead drones, the blood on Marcus’s fur, the boy with the cold-water skin and the golden eyes.
“The safe house tracking alert triggered an hour ago,” he said. “I had to walk the last mile through the woods to avoid their surveillance sweep. We have maybe five minutes before they send the cleanup crew.”
Marcus shifted back, bloodied and swaying.
“He did that—Milo pulsed. The Sterlings will know exactly what he is now. We have to run.”