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Maki bounces in place on the front doorstep, snowy mountains looking down on him in the open doorway. “Let’s gooooooo!”
“You’re like an excitable five-year-old,” Yuma tells him as he emerges from the doorway, pulling on fur sleeves under his thick cape coat.
“And you guys are the slowest pack of wolves ever,” Maki says as Fuma emerges next. “Come on, let’s go!”
“The runs are still a novelty to you, huh?” Taki says, stomping his boots onto his feet all the way out the doorway.
“Obviously,” Yuma says. “Why else would anyone be excited to run around in all this snow?”
“I’d much rather stay inside,” Nicholas grumbles, hoisting a bag onto his shoulders. “Can’t we skip while it’s so cold?”
“Harua!” Kei calls from the hallway. “Hurry up, we’re going!”
“Coming!” Harua calls back from farther inside the house as Jo piles out along with Eujioo, who has the one-man tent bundled up and slung over his shoulder.
“Have you put all your furs on?” Fuma asks Harua as he’s bustled out the door by Kei.
“Yes, I have them all.”
“And the thermal clothes?” Kei asks.
“Yes, yes, I’m ready,” Harua huffs, stepping forwards and reaching up to put his arms around Maki’s shoulders. Maki picks him up without a moment’s hesitation, and begins walking in the direction of the run route with Harua in his arms.
“You can’t carry him all the way there. Harua needs exercise too,” Euijoo scolds, and Maki stops to let Harua slide from his arms onto his own two feet.
“Shame,” Harua says, moving to slip his arm into the crook of Maki’s elbow instead as they lead the pack towards their camping ground spot.
It’s not far from home, an hour’s walk at most, but it’s an hour more than a typical pack would do before a run. Even though Harua has never been able to shift like other wolves, he doesn’t like being left out of the runs they do every full moon as a pack. Their compromise is this—a walk to a safe camping spot, Harua holing up for a day or so in a tent while they all run—so he can join them, in a way, while the moon is full in the sky.
This walk up to the campsite is the closest thing they have to a bonding run as a full pack, so even though Maki is excited to really run, the walk is his second favourite part. Purely because Harua gets to be with them.
The mountain slopes up to their favourite camping spot, where the long-since-abandoned body of a small plane sits on the edge of a clearing, overrun by nature and hollowed out to just the shell by years of exposure. The area has a good view down the mountainside, over the top of closely packed trees, and in the summer they play games in the clearing together before they shift for the full run. When the weather is good, sometimes they’ll all camp out for two or three days, just enjoying the weather and the bountiful hunting options and fruitful pleasures of the earth. He loves nothing more than waking up in the tent with Harua, the summer heat settling heavy over them, their pack sleeping in wolf form in the clearing around them.
In winter, the run is much more straight to the point. But it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.
The sun is high in the blue sky when they reach the camping point. Nicholas has cheered up by the time they arrive—everyone enjoys bonding runs, even if they can be grumpy leaving the warm house at first—and starts to unpack his bag, which consists solely of dry wood for a fire and food reserves for Harua.
“I’m gonna clear out the plane,” Maki announces. They’ve done enough of these runs in cold weather to know the routine by now.
“Yes, puppy,” Yuma calls back.
Maki jumps up to a low-hanging branch of an evergreen tree to snap off a makeshift brush.
“You don’t need to,” Harua says, watching him set about sweeping the snow from the inside of the plane. It’s the best place to start a fire, because it has pretty good coverage from any snow that may fall throughout the day, but enough space for the smoke to escape. Sometimes they’ll sit here after a run in companionable but exhausted silence and toast fruit or meat over a fire, watching the squirrels in the trees and the snowflakes float through the sky. “I’ll probably just get cosy in the sleeping bag and rest.”
“You can’t do that all day,” Maki says, jovially kicking a rock out of his way. “Didn’t you bring your camera?”
“There’s only so many times I can photograph the same part of this forest,” Harua says, wrapping his arms around himself. “I brought my book.”
“Good. You can read it next to the fire,” Maki says, as Taki appears behind Harua to engulf him in a hug.
“Don’t be cold,” he says, muffled into the material of Harua’s coat.
“I’ll be fine. I’m still a wolf,” he says petulantly.
While Harua may run hotter than the average human, it’s far from what any werewolf can withstand in their wolf form. But with no humans for miles around to compare him against, Harua has to begrudgingly accept that being stuck in his human form will eternally make him their pack baby.
Euijoo, Jo, and Fuma make quick work of the tent, and everyone piles in to watch Nicholas attempt to light a fire in this cold weather. It ends with everyone huddling around to try and trap the heat, Taki, Yuma, and Kei all making loud sounds of anticipation as the smoke rises, the fire catches, and eventually spreads to the pile of wood Nicholas has set up.
“Okay. Let’s get this done,” Kei says, unbuckling his jacket as soon as they’re satisfied Harua is comfortable and warm.
“You don’t have to sound so matter-of-fact about it,” Maki grumbles, but he’s shedding his own clothes quickly too.
“The baby still finds bonding runs exciting,” Yuma supplies in a drawl.
“They are fun,” Fuma says. “You love them once we get running.”
“I love them once we get back,” Yuma quips back.
“Harua, we’ll be back when it’s dark, so sleep if you want to,” Kei says, only his underwear left on him now. “You know what to do if you’re in trouble. Nicholas, you packed the–the thing, right?”
“The flare gun,” Maki supplies. It had been his idea, an impulse purchase from a camping store on one of his trips back to the city. Most of the others didn’t even know what one was, but Kei loved the idea, even if Harua was a little put out by the prospect that he may one day need saving.
“Yeah, it’s in there,” Nicholas says, before he fully shifts down to his dark-furred wolf form, howling for the others to hurry up.
“I know,” Harua says. “You guys have fun. I’ll see you later.”
One by one, the others shift to their wolf forms and join in the howl.
“Hey,” Maki says, crouching beside where Harua is sitting next to the fire. “I’m gonna miss you. Don’t have too much fun without us.”
That pulls a smile onto Harua’s face, even if it’s a longing one. “See you later.”
They share a kiss, and Maki grins before shifting into his wolf form too. He’s the last to join the howl, and that’s the signal for them to set off running.
⛦
The run is as euphoric as it is every time, the eight of them trampling through snow and trees and wide expanses of wood as one unit, one pack.
Though they’re called bonding runs, there’s not much need to bond further with the pack he lives with, hunts with, and loves like family. But he loves the runs so much because they remind him of summers spent at camps with other wolves, learning about a side of himself he didn’t get to fully embrace before finding this pack. It reminds him of the rewards of choosing to be with this pack, rather than living a typical human life in the city. The freedom it affords, the thrill of living wild. His love for his pack, for Harua.
Leaving Harua at the campsite is the worst part. But everything else is the freaking best.
The bonding run is different from a typical hunt because they don’t take any precautions to be quiet or track down prey. The occasional unlucky prey that finds itself in their path is often taken home for them to eat after the run, but generally, nothing stops them in their path on a bonding run. Depending on how long it’s been since the last one, they can run for hours, all their pent-up roaming animal energy released in one go in the wilds of the forest.
Back when Maki lived in the city, he eagerly kept an eye out for organised runs on every full moon, not just on the important moons as most city wolves prefer to celebrate, because the release of pressure he felt after a run was better than any workout or therapy could provide. But it wasn’t quite the same as this, running with a bunch of strangers. Joining the pack was the first time he realised the true meaning of a bonding run—of the sensation of feeling not just your own, but everyone else’s energy running with you, all your hearts beating in time.
Werewolves can communicate with each other with just a turn of a head, the change of a scent, the tiny movement of a body, so they hardly need words in this form. But when they run together, Maki feels as though they become one. Not for the first time, as they come down from their run today, he wishes Harua could join them.
As Kei predicted, it’s long past nightfall by the time they circle back to the familiar camping ground, so Maki isn’t surprised to see the fire extinguished by now.
What he is surprised to see is the sight of no tent at all.
He shifts back onto two legs as soon as they reach the clearing. “Harua?”
His heart drops when he catches sight of the remains where the tent once was; only ash, and the burned tatters of the tent exterior. Scattered around the tent are the half-burned ends of the drywood Nicholas had brought all the way from home, extinguished in the snow.
“Harua?” Kei calls out, but Maki already knows he’s not here. Everyone must know—his scent isn’t strong enough for him to be close by.
Yuma is checking inside the plane anyway. “He’s not here!”
Maki takes another look around the campsite. There’s what looks like half a snowman standing on the edge of the site, his head knocked to the floor beside two lumps of body.
More importantly…
“Blood,” Jo says, pointing at where the snow is stained red, visible only thanks to the bright light of the full moon.
It’s hard to tell if there are foreign scents in the clearing with the smoke sitting heavy in his nostrils. It’s even harder to tell where Harua’s scent is headed among it all.
Taki, who never even shifted back, has his nose high in the air. Suddenly, he takes off running.
Maki, Kei, and the rest of the pack shift back and follow after him without question. Though Kei is their pack alpha, Taki has the keenest nose among them, and there’s no question about what their next steps are here.
Harua is hurt. Something happened back at the clearing, and the only option is to find him as soon as possible.
They run between the trees with the moonlight guiding them. Harua can’t have gone far—nowhere they can’t catch up to, and as they run, the path of his scent becomes stronger. Kei, their fastest, overtakes Taki when it becomes obvious to them all that Harua is nearby.
Maki is close on his heels, heart pounding, propelling himself as fast as his legs will take him.
They come down a slope to a hidden dip in the mountains, where there’s hardly a hundred feet of flat land before the mountain curves up again. The trees clear out here, and the snow almost glows under the moonlight. In the open space, several tall, jagged rock structures stand independently in a perfect circle.
In the centre of that circle is a body. The snow around it is untouched but for a single set of footprints leading to the body.
In front of him, Kei skids to a halt outside of the circle formation. Maki hardly notices—he speeds up, if anything, snow sloshing as he almost falls over beside Harua.
He’s lying on his side on the ground, still wearing his furs. There are scratch marks on his neck—not deep, but red with dried blood—and his eyes are closed. He’s unmoving.
“Harua,” Maki says, placing a hand on his shoulder. He didn’t even register himself shift. “Harua?”
Fuma arrives on the other side of him. He lowers his nose and licks Harua’s neck wound. One by one, the rest of the pack arrive, coming to a stop around them.
“Harua,” he calls again, patting his cheek. “Come on, baby, wake up.”
Harua stirs, eyelashes fluttering against Maki’s palm.
“Hey,” he says softly, and Fuma, done with cleaning the wound, backs up and shifts.
“Harua, are you hurt anywhere?” he asks, and Harua blinks a few more times, eyes glassy.
“What?”
“Are you hurt?”
Harua rolls over onto his back to face Fuma better, but his expression is still clouded and confused. “Where am I?”
“You’re with us, you’re safe. Do you remember what happened?”
“What happened?” Harua echoes, blinking slowly. “No.”
“Okay. Let’s sit up, come on.”
Maki takes Harua’s hand and places the other on his shoulder blade, supporting Harua as he sits up and shivers, looking at the clearing around him.
“You’re alright,” Fuma says softly, watching his face. When Harua turns back to him, looking hazy, Fuma leans in for a comforting hug.
Maki joins without a second thought, putting his arms around him from the other side. Nicholas drops to his knees behind Harua to get his fill too. Maki can feel Euijoo’s hands on his back, and can see Jo and Yuma coming in behind Fuma too.
His relief is immeasurable. He’s not sure what would’ve become of the pack without Harua. He’s not sure what he would do if they lost Harua.
“If you’re not hurt, we should get home and get you warm,” Fuma says, pulling them out of the hug again. “Do you think you could hold on if we put you on my back?”
Harua is staring around at the rock formation circling them. “Harua,” Maki says gently, trying to bring his attention back. “Let’s take you home.”
“Yeah,” he says, and Maki wraps an arm around his waist to help him stand. He keeps an eye out for any sign of pain, but Harua agreeably moves to climb onto Fuma’s back, clutching onto the thick fur around his neck.
It’s only then that Maki realises the rest of the pack isn’t standing around them the way he’d thought. Kei and Taki are waiting outside the circle formation, watching.
A rush of anger that fades as quickly as it comes. He can see, from where he’s standing, that Kei is shaking, and watching keenly as they scoop Harua up and begin to leave the clearing.
Maki looks around once more at the open space, the way the rocks are perfectly spaced apart from each other, the way they almost deflect the light of the moon. The stone is perfectly dark despite the brightly lit clearing.
Kei snaps back into action once they’re out of the clearing. He steadfastly leads them back to the house, turning his head back to check on Fuma and Harua often, while Maki runs right behind them, ready to catch him if he falls.
⛦
When Maki was seventeen and stupid, he decided to go camping in the mountains on his own in order to better connect with his wolf side. Having been to lots of lycan summer camps, he yearned to spend the summer before university with a real wild pack—get extended time in his wolf form as he’d never been able to before. So he decided the best way to go about it was to go camping in the mountains on his own.
When Harua was eighteen and living comfortably in the wild with his pack, he had a vision of a stupid seventeen-year-old boy falling and breaking his leg in the mountains.
Harua is what the wild wolf packs call gifted. Wider society might call him a clairvoyant. To Maki, he is magic itself.
He saw the accident in his mind’s eye a few hours before it actually happened—the perfect amount of time for the pack to set out and find him. In the end, Maki was only lying there in pain for about ten minutes before Harua emerged between the trees, hazy in his vision, and told him they were going to help him.
City wolves know the stories, of course, of wolves who have supernatural gifts. But it’s so rare, practically unknown to city wolves, that they’re almost a thing of legend. Maki had been enchanted by Harua from the first time they spoke, when Harua explained that the vision of Maki falling from the rocks came to him while he was drinking his tea and watching the sunset.
After that, he kind of just… never left. He moved into Harua’s room from day one, because Harua knew that he would end up spending plenty of time there anyway. He got his dream of living life as a rural wolf, even if they’re an unusual kind that lives in a house rather than roaming or making a den.
He loves it. It’s perfect. These people are his second family now, and he truly believes this is where he yearned to be, for all those years when summer camp was the highlight of his life.
But as much as he’s learned from his pack the past two years, he still feels like an outsider sometimes. There’s still a lot for him to learn, especially when it comes to the magic stuff. Harua’s visions have been known to paralyse him, or he can randomly begin speaking to no one. Sometimes he passes out.
This is new, though. He’s never had such a peculiar, dangerous episode like this one before.
When they arrive back at the house, Harua is trembling with cold, so Maki takes him to wash the cold away as soon as Kei is satisfied that he doesn’t have any injuries. They don’t have proper running water at the house, but they do have a water tank that does the job pretty well. He’s sure the others won’t mind them taking up all the hot water today for a bath.
Harua sits on the toilet lid and watches the water run with a blank expression. When Maki deems the water high and warm enough, he takes Harua’s hand to help him stand, and starts to unbuckle his coat.
Harua sits, pliant and unspeaking, as Maki takes his clothes off one by one. Lifts his arms to let his shirt come off, steps out of his trousers when guided. Underneath his clothes, his old scars are pale and stark across his body, contrasting against the new red scratches on his neck and wrists. When he eases into the bath, Harua looks down at the scratches as if noticing them for the first time, eyes wide.
Maki sits beside the bath and takes a cloth to gently wash the dried blood away, cradling Harua’s tense fist in his palm. “It’s okay,” he says softly. “They’re not deep.”
“How did I get them?” Harua asks.
“I don’t know,” Maki says, and lifts Harua’s wrist to his lips to place a soft kiss there. “Are you hurting anywhere?”
Harua shakes his head mutely. “My head feels fuzzy. And my tummy hurts.”
“How bad?”
He shrugs. “Not bad. Just feels funny.”
Maki strokes his thumb over Harua’s fingers to unclench them. There’s red under his fingernails that causes Maki to pause for only a second, before he’s gently swiping under each nail to clear it away. He has blood under his fingernails on the other hand too.
Maki fills his cupped hands with water to wet Harua’s hair before he runs shampoo through it. Harua is relaxed against the tub as Maki gently rubs his fingertips into his scalp, shivering long gone, but he still hardly speaks.
Harua is usually twitchy about his scars. He doesn’t mind nudity—he’s lycan, after all—but if Maki ever tries to kiss his scars when they make love or touch him there when they’re cuddling, he’ll get wriggly and redirect his touch elsewhere. As Maki washes the criss-crossing patterns on his back now, he doesn’t move at all, doesn’t say a word.
“Do you remember anything?” Maki asks gently as he washes down his arms, the long line of the single white scar running from shoulder to wrist.
“I had a vision,” Harua murmurs. “Someone bad is coming to the house.”
“Someone bad?”
Harua only hums.
“You know when?”
A shrug. “Don’t remember well.”
That’s weird. Harua’s visions are usually full of detail, and he usually knows precisely where and when things are going to happen. His uncertainty is unsettling.
“Okay. As long as you’re okay,” Maki says quietly, leaning down to plant a kiss on Harua’s mouth.
Harua doesn’t reply, but he raises his arms to Maki’s shoulders when Maki reaches down to lift him out of the bath. Maki wraps him in a towel and holds him close for a long moment, and Harua burrows his face into Maki’s neck.
When he’s towelled dry and into a pair of pyjamas, Maki ushers him into bed. It’s so late it’s early, and there’s probably only a few hours until sunrise. But it doesn’t take long for Harua to fall asleep, despite his twitching fingers and the tension in his body.
Maki holds him in his arms for a while, watching his chest rise and fall with steady breaths; the crease in his forehead softens with sleep. But he can’t sleep himself, his mind replaying the events of the night.
Once he’s sure Harua is deep in sleep, Maki slowly eases out of his hold, tucking the covers in around him.
There’s a soft light coming from the living room. When he enters, Fuma is sitting on the sofa, kneading his temple. Kei is lying by the fire in his wolf form, while Taki sits beside him, stroking behind his ears. Everyone else must’ve gone to bed already.
Maki can smell the fear on Kei, can tell by his stance that he’s still on edge despite being in the safety of their own home. That’s another surprise—he’s never seen him like that before. Kei is usually so assured and wise about how the nine of them should keep safe.
Before Maki joined the pack, the other eight had already been a pack together for years. Maki is hazy on the details, but he knows that they had left a larger pack when Harua was twelve or thirteen, and Kei was twenty.
Years before that, Kei, Harua, and Taki had originally come from a pack that was very traditional and very wild and very superstitious. They had to leave when Harua was too young to remember it, because they feared Harua’s abilities. Maki has always understood, by reading between the lines, that this is where Harua got his scars, and why Kei is so doting and protective of him in particular. It’s also why he’s considered to be one of the wisest among them—because he survived on his own as a teenager with two small children, at least for a little while.
It’s why the powerful scent of his fear is so deeply unsettling.
Taki raises his head as soon as Maki appears at the doorway. “How is he?”
“He’s asleep,” Maki says, sitting slowly on the other end of the couch. “He’s alright. Just confused.”
Taki nods, slumping a little bit, hand stilling in Kei’s fur. Kei’s head is raised, trained on Maki.
“Are you okay?” he says, directly to Kei. “What was that back there, with the two of you?”
Taki and Kei look at each other.
“That circle of rocks you saw,” Fuma says. “That somehow Harua found himself in. It’s a ritual ground.”
“A ritual ground? Do you think whatever happened to him was some kind of magic?”
Fuma takes a long look at him. “I don’t know. I don’t think somebody else did this to him. There were no signs of other footsteps, no other scents at the campsite…”
“He did the scratches to himself,” Maki supplies. “There was blood under his fingernails.”
“I think it might just be Harua,” Fuma says softly. “Things like this happen to him sometimes. The price of his gifts.”
“I don’t know,” Maki says, rubbing his hands together. “This seems kind of different. He doesn’t usually hurt himself or get violent. He completely lost himself out there, the tent had been burned down, I mean…”
“There was a weird smell at the campsite,” Taki interjects, and everyone turns to look at him. “Just faintly. I don’t know what it was, but… something bad.”
“He said someone was coming to the house,” Maki says, surveying Fuma’s expression closely. His brows are furrowed, eyeing Maki closely. “That’s all he can remember about his vision that led him out there. That someone bad is coming.”
“Someone bad,” Taki repeats, glancing out the window.
“He doesn’t know when?” Fuma asks.
“No.”
The scent of fear is even stronger from Kei now. He doesn’t shift to join the conversation, but stays rooted in his spot, and they all fall into tense, helpless silence.
Now that Harua is safe at home, and there’s nothing to do but wait for answers, Maki can’t help but feel powerless.
“We’ll keep a patrol of our territory for a while,” Fuma says eventually. “We can keep an eye out for this mystery visitor and keep Harua safe in the house. He’ll be alright. He probably just got scared by the foreign smell, whatever it was.”
Taki agrees softly, but Maki’s uneasy feeling doesn’t dispel when they all turn in for the night. He’s sure nobody else’s does, either.
⛦
Over the next few nights, Harua begins speaking in his sleep.
Most of the time it’s gibberish. Occasionally he’ll protest something, or whine. He tosses and turns when he has these vivid dreams that make him so talkative. Sometimes he’ll speak so loudly and clearly, it will wake Maki up out of dead sleep. It must wake up those in the rooms around them too, sometimes. He also twitches and jerks in his sleep, like he’s trying to get away from something, breath quickening.
Maki will sometimes speak back, hoping to soothe him, or naturally wake him up. He’s not sure it’s doing anything, but he doesn’t want Harua to feel alone.
He also never remembers what he was dreaming about come morning, which is unusual for Harua, who often gets visions through dreams. Every day, the bags under his eyes get a little darker.
On the third night following his episode, Maki only gets an hour or two of sleep before he’s awoken by Harua’s voice, clear as day in his ear. It’s gibberish again, but Maki stretches out, reaching over to softly rub his shoulder.
“Yeah, I know,” he says.
Harua jerks, eyes still shut, body tense. He whines in his throat, and his hand flails out, awkwardly hitting Maki in the stomach.
“Ow,” he says, though it didn’t really hurt. It’s more surprising.
He speaks again. It sounds panicked even if it doesn’t mean anything.
“It’s okay,” Maki says soothingly. “I’m here. Wake up, Rua.”
Then, so suddenly that Maki thinks he has woken up, Harua pushes the covers back and stands from the bed, walking over to the bedroom door.
“Hey, wait–!”
Maki hastily pulls himself from the bed, grabbing a discarded hoodie from the floor as he follows after Harua out the door.
Harua is moving alarmingly fast for someone still asleep, picking up his feet as he heads towards the front door. It’s deadbolt locked, which he easily unlocks and steps out into the snow, barefoot.
“Harua, Jesus—”
Maki wrangles the hoodie over his head and grabs the first two coats hung beside the door, shoving his feet in a pair of shoes and grabbing another pair before he follows out after him. The cold doesn’t seem to be doing anything to wake Harua up, and only marginally slows him down. He’s walking with a purpose up towards the forest to the left of their house, the mountains looming in the opposite direction.
“Harua!” he calls. You’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but if this goes on for much longer, he won’t have a choice. He can’t let Harua wander out here at night, even if Maki is with him.
Harua does seem to be slowing down once they enter the forest. Maki catches up with him, wrangling one of the coats onto himself. “Harua, we have to go back, it’s way too cold to be out here…”
Harua suddenly stops walking and tilts his head back up to the sky. Maki rounds him to see his eyes are open, but blank, unblinking.
“What did you come out here to do that for?” he mutters, carefully placing the coat over his shoulders. “You can’t even see the sky between the trees now. Silly.”
Then, Harua blinks. He starts to lean backwards, and his head tilts to the side like he can’t quite orient himself.
“Hey—” Maki reaches out to catch him by the wrist. Harua takes a few stumbling steps, but looks down at Maki with clarity. Maki reaches out to put an arm around his waist, but Harua is all off-kilter from waking up standing in the middle of the woods, and his legs give way. Maki pulls him into his body so he won’t end up on the snowy forest floor.
“You with me?”
Harua looks around, dazed, and nods. “Did it happen again?”
“You were just sleepwalking,” Maki says, but he feels a bit breathless. Is this what happened back at the ritual ground? A bad bit of sleepwalking? “I got you. You okay?”
Harua nods and shivers. “Cold.”
“Yeah, I bet. Can you hold yourself up? I brought shoes for you.”
Harua backs up so Maki can place the shoes down. He squats to wipe Harua’s wet feet on the front of his hoodie before helping him step into each shoe.
“Thank you,” Harua says softly, wriggling into the coat too. “Sorry I brought you on a wild goose chase. I don’t know why I’m out here.”
“It’s okay. You keep me on my toes. Wanna go back?”
Harua nods, and Maki puts an arm around his shoulders as they walk back to the house. They haven’t come far, and it doesn’t take long to exit the trees.
Harua stops walking when they come to the edge of the tree line, the house only a stone’s throw away. Maki stops with him, looking at where he gazes up at the stars.
He’ll never get sick of this view—the way the stars shine so brightly out here.
“I think I do know why I came out here,” Harua says after a moment. “Usually, my visions come to me randomly. But if I need something specific, I look to the stars for answers. Sometimes they show me things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Sometimes I can see shapes. When Fuma got sick last year, I saw a meadow of flowers. That’s how I knew he would get better when the seasons changed. Other times the stars sing to me in my mind. That usually happens when you guys are all out on a run, and I look to the stars to see when you’ll be back. They sing to me, and I can tell by the pace of the song whether you guys are back soon, or if it will be a while.”
“I didn’t know that,” Maki says. “You never stop surprising me.”
Harua looks at him side-on with a little smile, the stars glinting in his eyes. “It sounds magical, but most of the time it’s overwhelming. Sometimes I do things without knowing I’m doing them. Sometimes my mind plays a piece of knowledge or a vision on a loop until I can do something about it. I feel afraid, a lot of the time, of the next vision that will come to me. It’s been even more intense the last few days. I can’t tell you how many times in my life I’ve wished I was born normal.”
Maki runs a hand down his back, watching his gentle features search the skies now for an answer. “If you’d been born normal, our whole pack wouldn’t be together. We would never have met. I probably would’ve died out in the mountains.”
Harua purses his lips. “I know. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. I just wish it were easier.”
“Me too. That’s why you’ve got us, though. We’re looking out for you.”
Harua sways in place slightly. Then he looks down to the house. “Even that—” he takes a shuddering breath. “They think I have bad spirits. I know all wolves think that.”
“I don’t think that,” Maki says instantly.
“Not you city folk, you’re practically human.”
“You try telling a human that. City wolves are wolves too.”
“Fine. All wild wolves think that. I know they love me, but they love me despite my gifts. They work around it. They are afraid for me, a lot of the time, and afraid of me, now and then. Taki has been looking at me weird ever since my episode.” He leans into Maki’s side, rubbing his cheek against his shoulder. “That’s why I like it best when you take care of me. It’s why it’s easiest to tell you about my visions. You’re never afraid, you’re just amazed. It feels like you love me and my gifts, not despite them.”
“I love it,” Maki murmurs. “I love you. I think you’re incredible.”
Harua is mum for a long moment, hanging onto Maki’s arm. “I never thought the spirits in me were malicious. Sometimes just a bit too much for me to handle. But when I woke up in the ritual ground, it felt like I had done something bad. Or something bad had happened to me, I don’t know. I’m so scared it will happen again.”
Maki nuzzles his forehead to the top of Harua’s head. “There’s nothing bad in you. You just had a weird moment. It can happen to anyone. Maybe it was just sleepwalking, like you did tonight. Sometimes things like this can just switch in your brain, and you might need more help than before. Doesn’t mean it’s evil spirits.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not though.”
Maki hums. The magic, superstitious stuff is out of his depth. He does his best to understand, but he’s the last person who could offer an informed opinion on it.
Maybe it is something to do with Harua’s gifts that’s been fucking him up. Maybe it’s something Maki can never fully understand, how Harua’s mind constantly coexists with the past and future, how sometimes that takes a toll on his body.
But he knows Harua.
“There’s not a bad thing about you,” he says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “That I know for sure.”
Harua tips his head back to look into Maki’s eyes. Maki cocks his head with a challenge, and Harua’s mouth quirks.
“You think?”
“I know.”
Harua leans forward a little, and Maki meets him in a kiss. The trees stand still and calm around them, a distant owl hooting. The stars their only witness.
“We should really go back now,” Maki says. “Did you get anything from the stars?”
Harua looks back up at the sky. “They’re showing me the ritual ground. I don’t know what it means.”
Maki looks up at the sky too. To him, it looks the same as ever.
“Maybe we should go back there,” he says. “See if you remember anything.”
Harua stares into the sky a little while longer. “No,” he says eventually.
Then he steps out of Maki’s arms and starts walking back towards the house.
⛦
Their pack is unique in a few ways.
The first is Harua. Maki has never met another lycan that couldn’t turn into their wolf form at all, never even heard of it before. Even the city wolves that know nothing about wild wolf life turn once or twice a year on special moons. But Harua can’t—has tried everything, and just can’t shift.
The main one, though, is that they are neither a proper wild pack nor a group of city wolves. The wild packs spend the majority of their time in their wolf forms, have set territory that they endlessly hunt in order to feed, set dens in spring and summer to have babies, but live more or less nomadic the rest of the time. Their human forms are the rare and unusual indulgence.
City wolves are the opposite. ‘Packs’ are often just your close family and friends, not a rigid group of people who live and hunt and protect their territory together. They work a nine-to-five, they go out for matcha and parties and cook meals in ovens, and only ever shift when they need to.
Maki’s pack is somewhere in between these things. This is intrinsically linked with the fact that Harua cannot shift and so can’t live truly wild, and they need to accommodate for that.
They don’t have jobs, but they do have a house, and hustle together whatever they can to get by. They go out hunting most days at dawn or dusk, and bring home the catch to cook and eat together. They spend a lot of time as humans, reading books and playing games and talking, and a lot of time as wolves, hunting and protecting their territory from other passing packs. Plus, their pack is all male and hardly biologically related—Kei and Taki are brothers, as are Fuma and Yuma, but no one else is blood-related—which is unusual for both city and wild packs.
They are both wild and urban, human and wolf. They are just the way they are, and Maki likes it like that.
Hunts are where they align much more closely with wild packs. Hunting is the majority of the life of a wild wolf pack, and it takes up a lot of their time, too. Unlike the bonding runs, they don’t usually go out all together to hunt. One or two members of the pack will always stay with Harua while the rest go out, because they can be out for hours or full days at a time hunting for prey. They don’t all need to be there, six or seven of them is enough.
There is, of course, no hurry to change that routine after Harua’s incident. By the time it’s been a week (or five hunts) since the incident, Maki is aware Kei or himself will always be one of the people waiting back with Harua. He can tell Harua is aware of this too, so when Jo offers to stay back the night before hunt six, Maki claps him on the back and suggests Taki be the other companion before Kei can get in there.
They need to start giving Harua some breathing room. The sleepwalking, or whatever it is that has been affecting him lately, is only going to get worse if he feels like they are breathing down his neck.
“Oh, sure,” Taki says, and Harua only glances up from his bracelet weaving in acknowledgement.
When they gather up at dawn the following day, Maki kissing Harua’s forehead before they leave, it’s not Harua that’s feeling stressed out by this new development. Rather, when Maki exits the house, it’s to find Fuma and Kei standing out the front of the house, arguing in hushed voices.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea today,” Kei is saying. “Today marks a week since.”
“Isn’t that a good sign?” Fuma says. “He hasn’t had another episode.”
“He went wandering out the house the other day, didn’t he?” Kei suddenly turns to Maki. “I heard you guys coming inside in the middle of the night.”
Maki nods reluctantly. “He was just sleepwalking. We didn’t go far.”
“He’s not going to go sleepwalking at this time of day,” Yuma says. “Let’s go. The sooner we go, the sooner we come back.”
“I think I should stay,” Kei says.
“Don’t you think Jo and Taki can look after him?” Maki says. “They’re just as capable as you or me.”
“It’s because Taki is there that I don’t want to leave them. They’re both…” Kei trails off. Maki knows he doesn’t really have a good explanation for this, that it ultimately comes down to his history with the two of them. Having known them since they were literal babies, sometimes it seems like that’s all Kei will see them as.
“I don’t want him to feel like we don’t trust him,” Maki says calmly. “When it’s you or me staying back every day, that’s what it seems like. If we want him to get back to normal, we have to behave like it too.”
Kei’s mouth twists, but Maki’s words settle in. They both know he’s right.
“Let’s just go,” Euijoo says softly. “He’ll be fine. There’s no reason to think anything will happen today.”
Fuma shifts into his wolf form without a word, and begins to lead them on today’s hunting trail. Though Kei is their alpha, their pack hierarchy isn’t strict, and leadership decisions are often made collaboratively between Kei, Fuma, and Euijoo. If two of them have made a decision one way, the third will, however begrudgingly, follow.
Taki doesn’t often stay behind on hunts because his nose is that sharp, he can catch wind of prey from miles and miles away. Perhaps that’s what Kei meant, why he didn’t want Taki to stay behind—because it will probably take longer without him, and leave Harua without them for longer.
But the six of them are, nonetheless, still perfectly capable wolves.
They travel up into the woods together, where sika deer often wander through the dense, older trees. They travel steadily and quietly until Fuma catches a whiff of something, and leads them off in a quicker trot until they all catch onto the scent too.
Finally, their prey comes into view—three sika deer grazing together, idling in the morning light. They’ve come across the deer relatively quickly, only an hour or two into the hunt, but Maki can still smell the anxiety on Kei stronger than he can smell the deer.
They approach slowly, quietly, naturally spreading out to surround the deer, staying low to the bushes to stay hidden.
It’s an easy hunt. As straightforward as anything. They follow Fuma’s lead, who leaps first, Yuma then Eujioo and Nicholas quickly following, pouncing onto the deer.
The other two deer scatter and run in panic. The unfortunate chosen deer doesn’t stand a chance, thrashing and kicking, but ultimately going down quickly.
Maki is about to join the efforts to down the deer when something catches his eye.
Kei, who has the sharpest instincts of all of them, usually the quickest of the entire pack… is frozen in place.
Then, he turns and runs.
Maki is stunned for a moment. Fuma lifts his head from the deer, looking too. Maki looks back at Fuma, then takes off after Kei.
It’s obvious enough he’s running back to the house. What’s absolutely baffling is why. They all bring back the kill together, skin and cook and eat what they want and freeze the rest of the meat. This is how their pack does things. He’s never witnessed someone running off immediately after a kill before—none of them get squeamish. It’s just not in their nature.
Maki is a good few seconds behind Kei, and Kei seems to be running at full pelt, judging by the way Maki loses sight of him so quickly. So by the time he catches up, Kei has shifted and come to a stop, sitting in the snow outside the house. It’s the same place he and Harua had been watching the stars together a few nights prior.
He’s gazing over at the house, where they can see Harua sitting in the window seat of the front room, concentrating on writing in his journal.
“Kei?” Maki asks, shifting back too. “What happened? Are you okay?”
Kei closes his eyes. His lashes are a little bit wet, and his frame shakes slightly. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I just… I saw Harua. When the deer went down, all I could see…”
There’s silence for a moment. When it seems clear Kei isn’t going to finish that sentence, Maki sits beside him.
“I think it was just sleepwalking, you know,” he says. “Whatever happened that led Harua to that ritual ground… I think it was sleepwalking mixed with his, you know. Vision thing.”
When Kei looks at him, there’s a haunted look in his eyes. “Something bad is coming. I can feel it. He was warning us, we need to do more to protect him...”
“We’d know if someone was nearby,” Maki says softly. “We’d smell them, or see their tracks on hunts. Everywhere is still covered in snow.”
“We wouldn’t know our own from a stranger’s,” Kei dismisses. “We couldn’t be sure.”
Maki lets the silence sit for another minute or two. “It’s okay to be worried about him, you know. I’m scared too. But we have each other, we’re gonna be okay. If you really thought we were in imminent danger, you wouldn’t let us stay here.”
Kei shakes his head. “No. We’re strongest in our own territory. When they come, we’ll be ready for them. But when the pack leaves… that’s when Harua is at his weakest. That’s why I’m worried about him.”
“I get that. Nothing gets past Harua, though. He’ll have another vision when the visitor is closer, and we can be ready.”
“He didn’t foresee his episode. Or he didn’t tell us if he did.”
Maki doesn’t have an answer for that. “Why don’t you go inside to him? Taki will come out asking us what we’re doing soon. I’ll go back and let the others know everything is fine.”
Kei nods, shoulders slumped. “Okay.”
Maki shifts back into his wolf form and takes off in a run back the way he came. The others have made quick work of dragging the dead deer through the forest, in various forms, including Fuma in his human one.
“All okay?” he says, not stopping dragging the deer.
Maki shifts back so he can convey a ‘meh’ shrug adequately. Fuma eyes him, sighs, then gestures for the other four to take the deer on.
“Don’t take too long,” Nicholas grumbles, as Fuma stands back with Maki.
“I think Kei needs help,” Maki says. “Like, the sort of professional help I know you guys don’t really believe in, but he’s really paranoid, and really protective of Harua. I know everyone is nervous about this mysterious visitor, but you know it’s more than that if Kei is starting to act like that...”
Fuma eyes him, dark eyes on the path of disturbed snow following the deer carcass.
“I don’t know if he would trust any human therapist enough. We do need to do something, though.”
“What else can we do? Does he talk to you?”
“He does. But I can only do so much. I want to send a raven to my old pack. We have a shaman who may be able to help him, and look over Harua at the same time.”
“A shaman?”
Fuma nods. “I’ll talk to Harua about it soon. I don’t know how he’ll feel about it, I’m not sure he’s ever met someone like him before.”
“This person is like Harua?”
“Yes. But older, wiser. She might be able to tell us something. I think Kei will trust her word.”
That’s… that’s good. Maki might not be able to wrangle these wild wolves into therapy, but some divine intervention would be good right about now.
Still, his unease doesn’t go away.
⛦
Fuma sends the raven that night, and receives one in return the following morning. It must be an affirmative, because he gathers Harua and Kei privately into a room, and when Harua comes out, he’s pale and wide-eyed.
That night, he cries in his sleep, breathing quick and afraid. Maki holds him close and murmurs comforts into his ear for a long time.
The shaman arrives just one day later. Though Fuma reassures Maki he trusts this shaman, they agree to meet her away from their home to avoid any possibility that she could be their dreaded visitor. Taki smells her first, and so Fuma heads out to greet her at the border of their territory. The rest of them get their furs on and walk up to the mountains, a route that’s not too far from (but not too close to) the ritual ground, where they’ve agreed to meet Fuma with the shaman.
Harua has been almost entirely mute since he heard about the visiting shaman. When Maki had attempted to ask him if he was okay with it, Harua had stared out of the window long enough that Maki didn’t think he was going to answer.
Then he said, “I’ve never met anyone like me before,” and went back to his drawing.
Maki’s not sure what to expect. He’d half been imagining a witch-looking lady, crazy white hair and cape and hobbled walk. But the wolf that meets them has deep red fur, and when she shifts, her hair is grey flecked with the deep red shade of her fur. She does look older than Maki’s parents, but she carries herself like a young woman. Though she doesn’t look concerned for her nudity in the slightest, she does accept Kei’s offering of his coat, smiling amusedly.
Harua grips his hand, and Maki grips back, squeezing reassuringly.
“It’s good to see you again,” she greets Kei, cupping his face. “Though I wish we could meet under better circumstances.”
“It’s good to see you too, Mio,” Kei says, and he sounds genuinely glad. Maki is surprised—he didn’t know Kei had any connections outside their pack, unlike most of the others, who keep in touch with members of their old packs. “Please look over him first. He needs it more than me.”
Mio tuts at him. “This kind of thinking is what led you here in the first place. You need to think about yourself, too.”
“I know,” Kei says softly. Nonetheless, he gestures to Harua, and Mio walks over to him, face curious, eyes kind. Harua’s grip on Maki’s hand is almost painful.
“Hello, Harua,” she says. “Do you remember me?”
Maki looks over to Harua, who is as pale as the snow around them, eyes wide on the shaman. His breathing is fast and panicked.
“Harua,” Maki says softly, before Harua’s eyes roll back in his head, and he collapses to the floor.
His grip on Maki’s hand never lessens, so Maki is dragged to his knees with him, almost falling on top of him. Harua’s whole body is tensed up like he’s having some kind of fit, and Taki shouts in surprise, their pack closing in around them in concern.
“Stay back, everyone,” Mio speaks, and her voice holds such authority that everyone complies. Maki can’t, for how hard Harua is holding onto him now, cutting off blood flow to his fingers.
Mio comes to her knees on the other side of Harua, watching his face, but she doesn’t do anything to help him.
“Can we do anything?” Maki says urgently. He feels dizzy as he watches Harua’s body twitch and seize.
“Let him work through it,” Mio says quietly, still watching him.
Harua’s nose is bleeding. Red runs down onto his lips, and when he spasms, his whole body turns onto his side, smudging the red into the snow. Then, his body loosens and relaxes.
He blinks his eyes open, face a mess of blood running with melting snow.
“You are here, Harua, with us,” Maki says as Harua looks around blankly. “You are safe.”
Harua releases Maki’s hand, reaching up for his embrace instead. Maki carefully bundles him up into his arms, Harua’s breathing shaky, and pulls him close.
“I got you,” he says softly, wiping his face with his sleeve.
“Is there nothing you can do?” Taki says, somewhere off to the right.
Maki glances across to Mio, who is getting to her feet. “I need to speak with Kei.”
She takes Kei over to a further line of trees, away from the rest of them, and after a moment, Kei beckons Fuma and Euijoo over too. The rest of their pack hang back awkwardly, knowing Harua doesn’t like to be crowded after an episode, but Maki can feel their eyes on them.
“You with me?” Maki asks, once Harua’s face is clean. He’s got his other arm under Harua’s shoulders, supporting him, and Harua’s hand is on the back of his neck, keeping him close.
He nods, shaken, eyes a little teary. “I had a vision of Kei.”
“Of Kei?”
“He was walking through these woods with a child in his arms.” Harua chokes up retelling it. “The child was—covered in blood, nearly dead. It was dark, and Kei was afraid they would both die in the woods. The child was so scared. There were two—two children. No, three. They were all terrified.”
Maki shivers. This vision is more vivid than the last, but Harua still seems muddled. Maki really doesn’t like the sound of whatever is about to come their way, whatever is going on with Harua to get him like this.
Someone is approaching them—Euijoo. “Let’s go back.”
“Go back?” Maki echoes, looking over at Kei, who looks tense, is saying something to Mio, who is shaking her head. “She didn’t even get a chance to speak to Harua, never mind…!”
“Maki,” Euijoo says, voice firm, and Euijoo’s voice is never firm. “We’re going back.”
Maki’s mouth snaps shut. Harua doesn’t seem to have any objections, because he casts one last look at Mio before shakily getting to his feet.
“You guys come too,” Euijoo calls, beckoning the rest of their pack over, besides Kei and Fuma.
Harua holds his hand all the way back to the house, and Maki doesn’t complain, despite it hurting a little after Harua’s Vision Death Grip just now. An aggressive vision like that usually tires Harua out, so Maki isn’t surprised when he flops into their bed and falls asleep as soon as they get back. Maybe that’s why Euijoo wanted to bring them back early.
Maki lies with him for a while, but just like that night when all of this started, his unanswered questions keep him awake.
When he hears Kei and Fuma get back, he slips out of bed and pads down the hall to the main room. To his surprise, neither of them are in there. They often sleep out here for sheer shortage of bedroom space, but Nicholas and Taki are the two talking quietly by the fire tonight. Maybe they traded Taki or Nicholas for the privacy of a room to discuss whatever Mio told them together.
“You okay?” Nicholas asks him as he slips down onto their singular armchair.
“Me?” Maki asks distractedly. “Just great, yeah.”
“It’s okay not to be okay,” Taki says, legs crossed, sitting on the rug instead of on the sofa beside Nicholas. Taki never sits on chairs if he can help it. “It’s weird, all this stuff.”
Maki snorts. “Yeah, no kidding. What the hell was that back there? She didn’t even do anything. What was the point of it all?”
“She was talking with Fuma and Kei for a long while. She knows something,” Nicholas points out.
“What even is a shaman? I thought she’d have like, a magic spell or something.”
Taki smiles weakly. “Not really. A shaman is a wolf who has been taught how to heal. How to make medicines, treat wounds, stuff like that. There are usually a couple in a pack. We should really have one, but no one learned from any shaman in our old packs.”
“What? If she’s just some herbal medicine lady, then why the hell did Fuma call one for Harua? I think we need a bit more help than that.”
“Because they don’t just do physical wounds,” Nicholas says. “Shamans aren’t always gifted wolves, but gifted wolves are always shamans. Didn’t you see the way she watched Harua? She already knew what was happening before we even did.”
Maki throws his arms in the air. “Well, if she’s gifted, why the hell didn’t she speak to Harua? Give him some tips for handling this shit? That’s what we needed, someone who knows what he’s going through better than any of us do!”
“Just seeing her set off a strong vision,” Taki says quietly. “Can you blame her for wanting to keep her distance? She clearly told Kei something important, or they wouldn’t all still be discussing it in Euijoo and Nico’s room.”
“You think she set off the vision?” Maki asks quietly. Now he says it, he doesn’t know why he didn’t realise it already. Harua’s visions often come on randomly, but aggressive ones like that are usually triggered by something.
“Definitely. We’ve met her before. I recognise her scent.”
“You recognised her?”
Taki shrugs. “She’s from Fuma’s pack. We stayed with them for like, two days after we left our original pack, before we found a home with Jo’s pack. I probably met her then.”
“You remember that? Weren’t you really young?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember her, exactly. But I remember the day we left our original pack. Well, not really the day. I remember the smell of the blood. I remember Harua was bleeding so much Kei had to carry him, and we walked for hours and hours. The blood smell was so strong I couldn’t tell if anyone was following us, or if we were close to any other wolf packs, or anything. That’s what I remember from that time. The smell of the blood. She—Mio, I associate her scent with that memory.”
There’s a prickle crawling up Maki’s back, sitting at his neck. “Kei carried him?”
Taki nods, eyes distant as he looks into the fire. “We seemed to walk forever. Kei carried him all the way. He would’ve only been a kid himself.”
“Why was he so hurt? Do you remember?”
Taki shakes his head slightly, tearing his eyes away from the fire to look at Maki. “I don’t remember.”
Maki shakes his head, but he can’t find his voice to reassure Taki. His throat feels stuck closed. That vision Harua had at the sight of the shaman—it wasn’t of the future.
It was of the past. His own past.
⛦
Maki is jolted awake the next morning by the feeling of Harua clambering out of bed.
“Rua,” he calls groggily, but Harua doesn’t slow down or look back, and Maki wrenches himself out of the bed after him, in case it’s another sleepwalking episode.
But when he reaches the doorway, it’s to find Harua standing at the entrance to their living room, wide awake.
“Takeru is trying to find you,” he says, and Maki comes up to his shoulder to see he’s talking to Kei. Taki is also curled up on the rug in front of the fire in wolf form. “He blames you for the downfall of the pack. And he blames me too.”
Kei’s face is ashen. “Will he find us?”
Harua nods. “Soon.”
“We need to go somewhere safe. You, me, and Taki. Lay low for a while.”
“He won’t hesitate to kill the others to get to us,” Harua says. “We all need to go.”
“Who is Takeru?” Maki says, rubbing his eyes. “What is going on?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Harua says, eyes trained on Kei. “I’m not going anywhere. There’s something you need to tell me, isn’t there?”
Kei puts his face in his hands, exhaling shakily. “Damn, Mio. She said it was time for you to know, but…”
“It’s time,” Harua says, coming to sit on the chair opposite Kei. “There are things I’m missing, right? I can’t protect the pack without the full truth.”
Maki looks over at Harua. All his uncertainties from the past few days are gone.
He’s ready for the truth.
Kei looks at Harua for a long moment, eyes sad. “Maki, would you give us a moment?”
“I want him to stay,” Harua says instantly, reaching out for Maki’s wrist.
Kei may be their alpha, but Harua is his boyfriend. Maki sits on the floor beside Harua’s chair, watching Kei’s shoulders slump, resigned.
“Okay,” he says softly. “Don’t think too badly of me, Harua. You know most of the story, but I didn’t want to tell you everything in detail. I thought it would be too painful. It hurts me to even say it. But Mio said your brain is trying to piece it together without the full context, and it’s hurting you, so…”
“I know you’ve always protected me,” Harua says softly. “I just want to know why I am like this.”
Kei quickly wipes his eyes, and sighs. “You already know that we are from a wild, traditional pack, up in the mountains. That I left with you and Taki when you were both six years old. Taki remembers it a little bit.”
“He told me he remembers a lot of blood,” Maki interjects.
Kei glances at Taki, still curled up on the rug, eyes attentive on him. “Yes. You see… Harua’s gifts were obvious from early on. Our pack had one shaman, a young man named Takeru. He had visions too, but they weren’t specific like Harua’s. He liked the mysticism, I think, and he just wasn’t as strong as Harua was. So the older Harua got, the more threatened Takeru felt by his power.
“One day, he said they needed to do a ritual to determine whether Harua’s gifts had come from good spirits or bad spirits. It wasn’t unknown to do a ritual like that—the elders agreed. I don’t know what they exactly did. But when they were done, they declared that his gifts were from bad spirits, and that they needed to perform a bigger ritual to cut the spirits out of him, and get rid of his gifts entirely.”
“Cut them out?” Maki asks quietly.
Kei nods gravely. “Your scars, Harua… they’re not from your parents. They weren’t done over time. They are all from one night.”
Maki’s stomach turns over.
“I came to the ritual ground with them. Many of us did. It’s something I see in my dreams all the time…” Kei’s voice fades away, and he curls in on himself, shaking slightly. “When it was done, Takeru told me to pick you up and watch you for a while, see if you still had your gifts. I bundled you up as best I could, and stayed with you while the rest of the pack went out to hunt. Taki was the only other pup in our pack at that time, so he stayed with us too. I was fourteen, old enough to join the hunt, but young enough to stay behind. Maybe that’s why he chose me. Hoped to blame it on me when you didn’t survive the ritual.”
“The ritual ground…” Harua says, voice hardly a whisper.
“The same one you found a week ago,” Kei confirms. “I had no idea we lived so close to it, but I think our original pack used to live on the other side of these mountains. I haven’t been sleeping well since I realised how close we are to our old territory. When I saw you lying in that circle…” he chokes up, eyes wet. “I was brought right back there. I thought you were dead. I saw your blood…”
“I could smell it, too,” Taki says. Maki didn’t notice him shift. “When we were there, I felt like I couldn’t go in, but I could smell all the blood. And the bad smell…” he trails off, nose twitching.
Kei exhales shakily. “I sat with you at that ritual ground for an hour, maybe. You were getting weaker. But you still had a vision. You told me where we needed to go. I knew that you wouldn’t survive the night if we didn’t go. So I told Taki to shift and follow us, and I carried you all day and into the next night until we found Fuma’s pack.
“That’s where we first met Mio. She saved your life—was somehow able to put you back together. But she wasn’t the head shaman at the time—there was an older man who believed in the ritual Takeru had performed. He forbade us from joining his pack. You asked Fuma and Yuma by name if they would leave with us. I don’t know what you saw in their future, but Mio agreed they had a path with us. And so they came, not knowing anything about us, just because you asked them to.
“We tried to live on our own for a while, but we were all kids, we didn’t know anything. It was only a few months before Jo’s pack found us. You remember them much better, I’m sure.”
Harua nods, swallowing. “Of course.”
Kei tries for a smile. “They were unusually kind when it came to taking in outsiders. Though we were five scrawny kids with not much to offer, they cared for us. We got by. Became close with Euijoo and Nicholas, who were outsiders like us. It was hard, because you couldn’t shift any more, couldn’t move as fast as the rest of us, especially when you got too old to carry easily. The elders in that pack also refused to acknowledge your gifts at all. Even when you warned us of danger, and were proven right every time, they wanted nothing to do with it.
“So when you were twelve and you had the vision of this house, I knew we were going to start again. We announced our intentions to leave, and the elders wished us well. Jo came, because you asked him to. We moved here, found Maki. The rest is history.”
Harua is staring at Kei, face tight. There’s a long moment of silence. “I couldn’t shift any more.”
“What?”
“You said I couldn’t shift any more.”
Kei’s mouth snaps shut, and he looks to the floor, closing his eyes. “Yes.”
“I—I could shift? I have a wolf?”
“Before the ritual ground, you were a happy, healthy wolf. You had no problem shifting.”
Harua stands, hands shaking. “How could you never tell me this? You know how badly I wanted it—you know, I have told you how much it hurts, not being able to—not having—” He chokes on his words, angrily wiping away tears.
“Because I don’t know if we can get it back for you, Harua, I don’t know how. I thought it would hurt more, knowing you had it once.”
Harua makes a sound like he’s been stabbed right through the heart. “I don’t care—about the rest of it, I don’t care what they did to me. Because I always had you, I always knew you would protect me. But you—you kept this from me—”
“To protect you, that’s all I ever wanted!”
“I’m not a child anymore! You should’ve told me the truth!”
Kei swallows back his response. He knows Harua is right—maybe this is what Mio said to him, too.
Harua furiously wipes his eyes again and storms from the room.
“Harua…” Kei calls weakly.
The front door slams. “I got him,” Maki says, stepping quickly to follow after Harua.
He’s walking into the woods again, and Maki jogs through the snow to catch up with him.
“Harua,” he calls, and he can hear Harua’s hiccuping breaths as he stomps through the snow.
“Go away,” he says miserably. “I want to be alone.”
“Not out here,” he calls calmly. “It’s not safe. Come back to the house.”
Harua whirls around. His cheeks are blotchy and red. “I can’t believe all this time, he let me think there was something wrong with me—I thought it was my punishment, that the bad spirits that gave me these visions—I thought they were stopping me from being a real wolf.”
“You are lycan. You have always been lycan. Nothing changes that.”
“I thought I had no wolf,” Harua says, bitingly. “But I do.”
Maki nods. He’s not sure what the right thing to say is. He’s always seen Harua as a wolf, as much as the rest of them. But he knows Harua has mourned this side of himself he couldn’t connect with, and has always felt divided from the rest of them by it.
It’s not Kei’s fault he can’t shift. Kei knew how devastated he would be to learn he had a wolf form all along, just out of reach—Maki can’t blame him for never saying it.
But it’s been said now.
“Maybe this will change things,” he says. “Now you know everything. We can speak to Mio, she might be able to help you unlock it.”
“Why didn’t they ask for her before? All those nights I cried? It was worse before you came—I wanted it so badly, the full moon would upset me so much every month. Kei always held me, consoled me. But he knew… he knew it was possible.”
“Why don’t we go back and ask him? If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that he only wanted the best for you. Maybe he didn’t do it perfectly. He went through a lot too. But he loves you so much, you know?”
“He… I…” Harua’s eyebrows furrow. “Do you smell that?”
As soon as he says it, Maki does smell it. A foreign wolf is nearby, and the smell is quickly growing stronger.
In the distance, there’s movement between the trees.
“Harua, run!”
He can barely get the words out—Harua has gone stiff and pale, and in trying to take a step through the snow, he stumbles to the side.
Maki catches him as his eyes roll back in his head.
Oh, fuck. Not now.
Maki lowers him to the ground as quickly as he can. There’s nothing for it—he can’t carry Harua back to the house quicker than the foreign wolf can run.
“Maki!” Taki’s voice shouts from the direction of the house through the woods—he must’ve warned the others. Help is coming.
“Get Harua!” Maki shouts before shifting into his wolf form and taking off running in the direction of the unknown wolf.
This must be Takeru. The wolf is big, bigger than Maki is, battered by scars and fuelled by fury.
Maki doesn’t hesitate. The wolf comes in charging, snapping his teeth, and Maki strikes with his claws.
The wolf takes the hit, powerful enough to barrel by Maki, heading for Harua. Maki won’t have that—he leaps onto the wolf’s back, digging his claws in and biting down on his neck.
The wolf howls in pain, which turns into a snarl as they both fall to the side, Takeru rolling over on top of Maki and swiping for his neck.
His claws tear through flesh, but Maki can’t let up. He’s pinned under Takeru’s weight, but when Takeru goes to bite his neck and finish the job, Maki catches his jaw in his teeth, writhing his body in an attempt to get free.
Takeru shakes him off, but it gives Maki some leeway to shove back, sending Takeru into the snow.
Takeru is fast and powerful. Maki can’t win this fight, but he only needs to buy the others some time.
The sound of Kei’s snarls is approaching—help is coming. When Takeru lunges at him again, Maki goes for the throat.
He’s not quick enough. Takeru’s teeth sink into the juncture of his neck, and blood splatters onto the snow, Maki’s body alight with pain.
He falls to the side right as Kei arrives, furious and frenzied, teeth gnashing at Takeru.
When Kei lunges and the two wolves topple over together, Maki tries to get back up. He can’t die here alone. At least he should die making sure Kei finishes him off.
Another wolf dashes past Maki. Fuma. Maki slumps into the snow—the fight is out of his sight now, but he can rest easier knowing Kei and Fuma are both there. Together, they’re strong enough to finish him.
“Maki,” someone says, and then Euijoo is kneeling above him, hand pressing into the wound on his neck. Maki whines and scrabbles at the snow—it hurts, it hurts so bad, can’t Euijoo just let him go easily…
“I know, I know—over here! Yuma! Maki, just don’t let go—”
It’s getting hard not to choke on the blood with the way Euijoo is holding the wound at his throat. His body spasms as the blood pools in his mouth.
“Maki!” He’s not sure whose voice that is. It’s getting hard to focus.
Someone else is by his side. There are multiple voices now. Harua’s cuts through the noise.
“Maki. This is not how you die. You wake up for me.”
Maybe Harua isn’t right about everything, he thinks, as he succumbs to the endless nothingness.
⛦
“Hey. Wake up.”
Maki doesn’t want to wake up. The more he wakes up, the more he can feel the pain thrumming through his body.
“I know you can hear me.”
He tries to swallow some moisture into his dry mouth, but the movement is painful. There’s a hand on his arm. “Take it easy. You got badly hurt.”
Finally, he cracks open his eyes. Blinks a few times to adjust to the low light.
He’s lying in bed, Harua sitting next to him. For the first time, he registers Harua’s hand stroking his hair.
He reaches a hand up to touch where the pain is coming from—a burning pain at his throat. There’s a bandage stuck over the wound, and as he swallows a second time, it’s slightly more bearable than the first.
“Hey,” Harua says, and his face swims into focus.
“Hey,” he croaks. “How bad is it?”
“Kinda bad,” Harua says, tracing his fingertips over the bandage. “Your throat is going to scar.”
He blinks a few times. “We’re gonna match.”
The tension falls away from Harua’s shoulders all at once, eyes welling up wet and sparkly. “You nearly died,” he says, voice low and dangerous. “You don’t get to appeal to me now.”
“The others?”
“All okay. They took Takeru down with no major injuries.”
Maki sighs, content. “I did what I had to. Bought enough time.”
Harua shakes his head, but they both know he’s right. “If you’d died, I would’ve killed you.”
Maki smiles, and Harua leans down to kiss him. “And if you’d died, I never would’ve forgiven myself.”
Harua nods, sniffing. “Let’s both be more careful next time.”
“Deal.”
There’s a knock on the door, and Euijoo pokes his head in. “Hey. You’re awake.”
Maki hums. “Do you have something for the pain?”
“Yeah, I’ll get you something. How are you feeling?”
“Surprisingly alive.”
Euijoo shakes his head. “It’s a miracle you survived, Maki. You were very brave to charge in alone like that.”
Not really. He did it out of love, not bravery. “I did what any of us would do.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s not brave,” Euijoo says softly. “Do you need anything else? We should try and get you to drink a little bit.”
“Okay. Could you ask Kei to come help?”
“I can do it,” Harua grumbles, and Maki looks up at him.
“I know. You haven’t spoken to him, have you?”
Harua’s silence tells him all he needs to know.
“I’ll ask Kei to come,” Euijoo agrees, before disappearing.
“You know me too well,” Harua mutters, and Maki smiles tiredly, reaching out to take one of his hands.
Shortly after, Kei enters the room with ginger water for the pain and sits beside the bed. He only glances at Harua before looking over Maki.
“Hey, kid. You’re looking better than yesterday.”
“How long was I out of it?”
“It’s been more than a full day,” Kei says, setting down the drink. “Do you think you can sit up?”
Maki slowly pushes himself up, Harua guiding him with a hand on his back, Kei propping up the pillows for him. He hands over the ginger water, and Maki takes a small sip, grimacing as the wound on his neck flexes.
“Take it slow,” Kei says. “Mio should be arriving soon to look at your wound.”
“Mio is coming?”
“Fuma called for her as soon as he could.”
Maki settles the glass on his lap. “Good. I think I understand everything that’s been happening with you two, now.”
“Us two?” Kei echoes.
“Yeah. The sleepwalking, the flashbacks. How anxious and paranoid you’ve been. I’m no expert, but I think you have PTSD. Some kind of trauma, anyway.”
“PT what?” Harua asks.
“It’s when you experience something really bad, and your body never switches off your fear afterwards. When Taki said he smelled something bad at the campsite—I think you smelled Takeru tracking us that day, Harua, and it triggered a memory you had repressed. That’s what caused all these weird things to happen to you lately.”
“Taki has been kicking himself the last twenty-four hours,” Kei says. “He could smell Takeru when we were talking about our past, but he thought it was just in his head, from the story.”
“And it was Takeru he smelled at the campsite, right? That’s why you’ve been so paranoid too, Kei—you revisited that site again. You weren’t prepared for it, you didn’t know we lived so close.”
Kei nods, mouth twisting. “I think you’re right.”
“But we killed him,” Harua says. “Kei killed Takeru. That—the fear hasn’t gone away.”
“It’s not just about him,” Maki says softly. “He triggered it. But you have a lot of stuff to unpack from your past.”
Harua reaches out to take his hand again. “It’s not my gift doing this to me, after all?”
“Nothing to do with it. I mean, the flashbacks triggered your visions, yeah. But it’s not because of your gift. It’s because of how the world hurt you both, when Takeru couldn’t accept how special you are. When he was cruel to children because he could be.”
Harua squeezes his hand, then looks at Kei. “Can Mio help with that? Is that what she told you?”
“She said she can help,” Kei nods. “But that I needed to tell Harua the full truth first.”
Maki knew it. Maybe Mio does know what she’s talking about. “And when she arrives, will you tell her that you’ll take her help? Both of you?”
Harua and Kei look at each other. Harua is the first to nod.
“I want to work with her. I don’t want him to keep hurting us.”
Maki turns to look at Kei, who looks reluctant, head tilted to one side.
“I’ve always been like this. I don’t know if there’s any changing me now.”
Harua reaches out across Maki’s legs to offer a hand to Kei. Kei looks at it for a moment, then reaches out to accept.
“Maybe not,” Harua says. “But we can try together. You’ve always looked out for me. Let us look out for you, now.”
Kei smiles, pained and relieved. “I’ll do it with you, Harua. I’d do anything for you.”
Harua nods. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Harua climbs over Maki carefully to hug Kei, and Kei pulls him into his lap, holding him tight.
“Thank you,” Harua says again, holding him back just as tightly.
⛦
Harua and Kei meet with Mio regularly following the attack.
It’s been nice. Maki has got to meet other members of Fuma’s pack that come to visit with her, and is surprised by how effective the treatment of his neck injury is, from a wild werewolf shaman. His throat has scarred, but he has no physical problems after several months of recovery. He thinks he looks cool as fuck with the scar, actually, though he’s not looking forward to explaining it to his parents when he next visits home.
Mio doesn’t really believe in houses, so she often takes Harua and Kei out into the forest or up into the mountains when she sees them. Still, Maki hears plenty about how these sessions are going, because Harua often talks with him about his discussions with Mio and the efforts they’re making to get in touch with his wolf.
It’s not like it all goes away immediately. Sleepwalking seems to be a new fixture for Harua, but usually it’s harmless. He’s been uncovering memories through visions that can be hard, at times, but he’s always brave about it, and doesn’t miss a session.
He doesn’t hear so much about Kei’s sessions, but it’s clear that Kei is taking steps to keep his panic at bay, too. Maki can tell when he makes a visceral effort not to hover around Harua or Taki, or linger at the door when they head out on their own for foraging or collecting firewood.
Overall, things are good, and getting better with every passing week. It might be an after-effect of nearly dying, but he thinks that having the whole truth out there makes everyone in the pack more relaxed and connected. In particular, he can tell Harua is happier, even if things are hard. Being able to do something about all the worries he’s ever held inside him is working wonders.
Maki sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, haunted by dreams of Takeru charging towards them. He’s had a few sessions with Mio about it too. But it’s getting easier with time.
Tonight he is woken up not by this dream, but by the movement of Harua getting out of bed.
“Harua,” he mumbles.
To his surprise, Harua actually responds with clarity. “You’re awake?”
Maki props himself up, blinking at Harua’s outline in the dark, standing in front of the window. “Always. You good?”
“I had a dream.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
Harua lets the silence sit. “I want to go out.”
“Now?”
“I want to try something.”
Maki learned long ago not to question Harua. He shuffles over to the edge of the bed, and Harua takes his hand, leading him down the hall and out of the house.
“Shoes?” Maki asks as Harua leads them straight out the front door, wearing only their pyjamas. It’s well into spring by now, so it’s not particularly cold, but it’s not exactly warm either.
“No,” Harua says, barefoot on the grass.
The moon is large and bright in the sky—tomorrow is the full moon. Harua has been sticking to the house rather than coming with them in the tent on the full moon for the last few months, but they’ve been doing something nice as a pack the day before to make up for it. Today’s activity was sports games in the field, and a barbecue afterwards, to celebrate the good weather.
Harua takes Maki out to stand in the middle of the grassy clearing in front of their house, turning to look up at the moon.
“Mio has been getting me to do all kinds of things to get in touch with my wolf again. Talking and meditating and running and hunting. But it’s not the instinctual stuff I miss the most. I got over that years ago. What I want so badly is to run with you guys. I want to be with my pack on a full moon. That’s what I care about.”
“Okay. Is that why we’re out here?”
Harua’s face glows in the moonlight, face full of reverence. Then he looks back at Maki, and the reverence doesn’t leave. “Will you run with me?”
“Of course. Anytime.”
“Now?”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“Oh. Yeah. Of course.”
Harua steps back, giving Maki space to shift. He calls forth his wolf, and stands in front of Harua on all fours, looking up at him.
“Don’t leave me behind,” Harua says.
I would never.
He turns and runs, and for the first time, Harua runs with him.
He can’t run flat out like he would on a full moon—Harua’s full-out run on two legs is his lazy run on four. But it doesn’t make it any less special, running with Harua.
When city wolves get married, they traditionally go on a run like this in the wild for their honeymoon. Wild wolves think it’s a funny tradition, because running is day-to-day life for them, nothing celebratory.
But Maki always loved the idea of running with your lover as a form of ultimate connection and freedom. Of choosing someone, and experiencing this primal instinct together. He’s never given much thought to not having that chance with Harua, though—Harua was more important to him than any tradition.
Now, he’s not sure why he never asked this of Harua before. Of course Harua can still run, perfectly fine. It may not be exactly the same, but as his paws hit rocks and Harua’s feet hit the earth and their breathing pounds in time under the light of the moon—it feels so incredibly right.
It feels like the last piece of everything he was looking for, years ago, when he came out here alone and accidentally found his pack.
They come out under the trees towards the slope of the mountain, looking down on hundreds of trees below. Maki, slightly ahead of Harua, runs along the outer edge and howls up to the moon.
Look at us, doing this together!
Harua laughs just behind him, a sound that bursts out of him, pure adrenaline and joy.
Maki comes to the edge of the cliff and howls again. Looks back at Harua, who has come to a stop behind him, breathing heavily. I love you.
Harua’s gaze flicks from the moon to Maki. His breathing is heavy, and his smile is so, so wide and bright.
“Ready?”
Harua’s body transforms into a small, powerful, grey-white wolf.
He howls, and Maki howls with him. His heart could explode from his chest with pride.
Together, they run.