Oryen stared, mouth slightly ajar, his breath stoppered like a cork in a bottle. The pressure built in his chest as the seconds ticked by. Had he heard that right?

"Me?" he heard himself say.

Beau looked incensed. "You don't remember?"

Oryen stood frozen with the knife at his throat, racking his brain for a memory of the man in front of him, but none came. "I think I'd remember a face like yours," he blurted incredulously.

Too late, he realized Beau thought he'd meant the scars.

"I didn't have these the first time we met," said Beau.

Though distinguishing, it was not the scars that made Beau memorable. It was the narrow, long lines of his face, his full lips, his dark fathomless eyes.

"I meant that you're a stunner," Oryen said blithely. "Though I'm not really into the pointy knife thing."

A stormy fury came over Beau's features. With his keen hearing, Oryen could hear the grind of his teeth clenching together.

"Sorry!" he said as Beau pressed closer with the knife, walking him back into the doorway he'd launched his initial ambush from. "I get it. Inappropriate. Not the time for compliments."

"No," Beau agreed. The hand that held the knife shook with barely contained rage. Oryen's skin itched where it touched, reacting to the silver as though allergic. "I don't believe you've forgotten. You can't have because no one has. You staked your career on it, so try to rack that teeny tiny—"

An icicle of real dread slid through Oryen's heart, past his walls of carefully constructed apathy. "Fuck," he whispered. "The Graveyard Pack?"

The quivering tension in Beau's frame froze as if prepared to snap. His chest moved with the breath of a mirthless laugh that made no sound. "That's what you call it?"

Oryen winced. The memory slithered through him like a serpent slowly winding its way around his heart and squeezing. The Graveyard Pack. His greatest accomplishment, come back to haunt him.

He remembered it. On the twentieth story of an apartment block, Taron had spied on an abandoned chapel and surrounding graveyard. Pocked with ruins and the jagged teeth of headstones protruding from the earth like buried treasure. He inhabited the town of Rideau like it was an ill-fitting second skin. He made small-talk while his glasses revealed the flash of eyes that weren't quite human in the otherwise unassuming townsfolk. He sat in the cafe marinating in the sheer number of infected residents around him. The barista. The teenager who cleaned on night shifts. The elderly man who walked here daily for a double espresso.

Oryen never went without a concealed sidearm. Never without the knowledge that one bite could ruin him.

For two months, he documented everything that transpired in that town. Who came and who went. How many. He frequented the corner store, the grocery, the gym. Every public space in this isolated little town was occupied, run and frequented by men and women who, on the night of the full moon, became monsters.

As it stood, nearly 70% of the adults were werewolves. The town was overrun. If he was correct in his estimations and observations, that number was steadily growing. They were turning more.

He remembered the night he sent an e-mail to his superiors, fingers shaking on the keys.

Six days later, there were at least three more werewolves in the town of Rideau, and over five-hundred Fens on its outskirts. That night had been the longest Oryen could remember—sitting in his temporary bedroom for the last time and listening to the feral song of the entire town gone wild.

At first light, the wolves shrank back into humans, and a massive squadron of Fens poured into the town like insecticide into a termite mound. They invaded the tiny suburb, the apartments, the grocery where Oryen had bought his fruit and veg for the past year. Oryen went with them, his intimate knowledge of the town's every nook and cranny finally brought to bear.

They started at the perimeter and choked the wolves inward, moving steadily towards the very center, towards the chapel.

Oryen remembered the chapel best of all because it had always struck him as a strange hub for creatures that defied all Biblical notions of purity and virtue. It stood on a grassy knoll surrounded by the squat humps of old gravestones, for which the pack had earned its name. The steeple rose out of the surrounding trees at a crooked angle. Its stained glass windows cast kaleidoscopic moonlight on the stone floor. Streamers and party balloons—ghostly baubles that didn't quite belong—bounced and fluttered from the parapets. On and around the pulpit were gifts wrapped in blue paper with gold ribbons. It looked as though they'd interrupted a birthday party to which no one had shown up.

Oryen found the would-be attendants in the cellar beneath the chapel. One after the other, werewolves lunged towards Oryen and into the steady fire of siinca. They had to step cautiously over the unconscious bodies to reach any others hidden within.

He recalled, his heart racing now, as he looked at Beau with the first semblances of recognition, that there had been a boy just a few years his junior hiding under the staircase. Wearing a navy hoodie with the hood drawn up, Oryen couldn't see his face. Approaching slowly, toeing past the bodies of the wolves who'd tried to escape, this one did not attempt to flee. He glanced up at Oryen only briefly, tears visible in his eyes. Tears, but not the glowing sheen to indicate he was the same creature as those who'd occupied the cellar with him. He hadn't said anything. His breath came in ragged gasps around the tears as he glared at Oryen, but he didn't speak.

His hair was jet black and no scars scored his face, but he was the same man that stood before Oryen now, wearing the same look of loathing he had ten years ago.

Only without tears.

Oryen said, "I remember, but—I don't understand. I didn't destroy your pack. That capture was clean. No casualties on either side."

Beau's lip curled. "That you know of."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

A raw noise of derision rose from Beau's throat. He paused, contemplating. His expression looked like a surgeon's right before deciding where best to cut. "The dear Alpha of Mardero—" he said, "—related by blood to a Fen."

Oryen's pulse tripped. The barb of the threat sunk and hit its mark. "He doesn't know. We haven't spoken in years."

Beau said, "Liar."

"I'm not." Oryen suppressed the panic tingeing his voice. The last thing he wanted, after so long estranged, was to damage his brother's hard won reputation and further alienate their already tenuous relationship. They'd been close once. Perhaps they could be again, but Oryen didn't know his brother now. Not anymore. He couldn't predict how Lazro would react to his past as a Fen.

If what Aryeta said was true, he couldn't risk it.

The look in Beau's eyes made him wonder if he had a choice.

Wetting his lips, Oryen said, "What do you want?"

Beau pressed the tip of the silver blade against the black tattoo, where the eye of the crow would be. It pricked and itched where it just broke skin and Oryen repressed a flinch.

Beau's voice was vicious, deep and rasping like a snake through the reeds. "I want my family back, rotgor."

Oryen's heart sank. He spoke as evenly as he could to prevent the knife scraping his throat. "I don't know how I can help you with that."

"You're the Alpha's brother," Beau said. "That opens doors."

Oryen held very still, not only to stop further injury from the knife but to avoid divulging how those words affected him. A boil of anger poisoned the fear, the dread. He'd just got here. He'd just found his brother after years apart, and already fate had conspired to extinguish the one light of hope he had in this black hole.

Beau's acerbic gaze lowered from Oryen's face to the tattoo, lip curling. "You'd best find a way to hide that, or I won't need to tell anyone what you are." He stepped backwards out of the alcove. "I'll come find you when I need you."

Then he turned and vanished down a side street as quickly as he had appeared, his pale hair and the scarlet paint making him a specter in the dark.

Oryen held the tatters of his shirt over the tattoo and let out a breath. A treacherous, shaky breath.

He made his way back to the barracks as quickly as he could. He'd been given spare clothes for training and could change once he got there. Beau was right. Oryen would need to find a means of covering or...removing the tattoo. As he went, heart drumming in his ears and skin itching from the scratches of the silver knife, he felt a sensation like sunburn on the back of his neck. Looking up, he saw the moon instead—a slim crescent of near nothing—shining in the cloudless night.

It waxed steadily closer to the day he'd no longer be human.