> CONTINUE

“We’re tracking a rogue werebeast, and he’s the alpha of the local packs. All the local packs,” your boss says. You blink. “We need his cooperation if we’re going to hunt this thing down.”

“And he needs to talk to me because?”

“You’re head of the task force. If you remember, you requested more responsibility at work. I thought you’d be pleased.”

You probably would be, if it was any other task force. As it is, you’re just annoyed. Mostly with several iterations of your past self, including the one who hooked up with a werewolf, the one who said they wanted more responsibility at work, and the one who woke up this morning and decided to get out of bed.

You got this job because you have the Sight. In this day and age, the Sight is really rare, mainly because nobody’s having seven kids anymore, and on the rare occasions where they do, the seventh kid in line doesn’t usually have seven kids of their own. The thing about all redheads having the Sight was sort of an urban legend. Every so often, the Sight will crop up as a mutation, but more often, it’s the result of being touched by a creature from the magical world. You’d think that would mean it happens often, and it does. Except those people don’t usually survive what happens next.

As rare as the Sight is, someone like you is rarer – someone who lived through their first contact with magic and came out with their sanity pretty much intact. Because you can move through the human world without being noticed and the inhuman world without registering as a threat, you’re invaluable to the Department of Visibility, which is sort of a misnomer, given that the whole point of the Department is to make sure the inhuman world stays invisible. Staying invisible means corralling any inhuman whose actions threaten to expose the secret. A loose werebeast definitely qualifies.

Unfortunately, a loose werebeast is also a problem, because most of the time, it can pass as human. The people best at picking a werebeast out of a lineup are other werebeasts, which means calling in the head of the local packs is a good idea. It’s just not a good idea for you, specifically. Still, waiting isn’t going to make the problem go away. You make a cup of coffee, drink half of it, square your shoulders, and step into your office, resolving to be professional about this. “Good morning.”

Shigaraki Tomura tilts his head, studying you. “Is it?”

“It’ll be better once you get your ass out of my chair,” you say. He doesn’t move. “I’m waiting.”

“You dragged me out here at nine in the morning. I deserve a good seat.”

“I’m not the one who dragged out you here. That was my boss.” You’re not sitting in the guest seat in your own office. You lean against the doorway instead. “Alpha to all the local packs, huh? That’s new. I didn’t think you were that ambitious.”

“I’m not. It was necessary,” Tomura says. You decide you’re not going to call him Tomura any longer. You have too many memories of saying his name. “Look at you, though. Head of a Hunter task force. I’d say congratulations if you weren’t part of DV.”

“DV gets a bad rap,” you say. Shigaraki snorts. “Do you want the humans to find out about your kind?”

“No” Shigaraki says, “but I think this kind of thing should be handled in-house, not by some fae-led bureaucracy. You’re human. You should know their kind can’t be trusted.”

“I know damn well they can’t be trusted,” you snap. “If you hate the DV so much, why are you here?”

“You all have resources. I only know what’s happening in my territories, but given how much trouble they’ve already caused, I’m guessing this isn’t their first rampage,” Shigaraki says. He puts his feet up on the desk. His bare feet. Ugh. “I want to know what you know. In case it helps.”

“I’ll tell you what we know in exchange for your cooperation,” you say. Shigaraki tilts his head the other way this time. “Cooperation. Working together in order to accomplish a goal.”

“I know what it means,” Shigaraki says, impatience tinging his raspy voice. “What are we cooperating on, exactly?”

“Apprehending the rogue,” you say. Shigaraki mouths the word ‘apprehending’, making air quotes around it. “Not killing them. Apprehending. We have to figure out why they went rogue in the first place.”

“And then you’ll kill them.”

“Not if whatever caused it is treatable. DV cares about inhuman lives,” you say. “That’s the whole reason it exists.”

“Sure.” Shigaraki rolls his eyes, and he finally gets up from behind your desk. Unfortunately he crosses in front of you on his way to the guest chair, and you catch the scent of his skin, just enough to make you homesick. “I’ll cooperate –”

“Good –”

“On one condition,” Shigaraki says. “If whatever’s wrong with the rogue isn’t fixable – and if I agree – you hand them over to me. They’re one of us. They shouldn’t die at fae hands.”

“Sure. Because ripping them to shreds is so much nicer,” you say. Shigaraki glares at you. “Fine. If this is what it comes to – which it shouldn’t – the rogue is yours to deal with. Can I count on your cooperation?”

“Why not?” Shigaraki yawns, stretches. His blue-grey hair is longer than it was a few months ago, almost brushing his shoulders. “My packs had to spend half their last run trying to track this guy down. We need better intel. So – what do you have for me?”

You sit down in your chair and go to wake up your desktop. He must have been sitting here for a while. Your chair smells like him. Your eyes burn and your throat tightens, and before you can think better of it, you say something you know you’ll regret. “Are we going to talk about what happened at all?”

Shigaraki’s gaze is flat as he looks at you. His voice is flat, too. “What is there to talk about?”

Everything. Everything like the fact that he basically lived in your apartment for a week straight. Everything like the fact that you had sex on basically every flat surface in said apartment, plus a few vertical ones to spice things up. Everything, because you’d never felt like that about anyone, even people you’d dated for a lot longer. Everything, because you really thought he felt the same way.

But the way he’s looking at you now is nothing like how he used to. It’s like you’re a stranger to him. You can treat him like a stranger, too, no matter how much it hurts to see him and not ask the question: Why? “Nothing,” you say. “Let’s get to work.”

You gave yourself a crash course in werewolf biology when you were seeing Tomura – in the spare time where the two of you weren’t fucking, recovering from fucking so much, or winding up to fuck again – but as you work to capture the rogue, you learn a bunch of things that weren’t in the databases. Werewolves are usually born, but they can also be made, although most people don’t survive the process. Werewolves technically don’t need the moon to transform; most adults can force a transformation if they have to. They understand the language of true wolves, but they can’t communicate back to them. When werewolves are transformed, they can communicate telepathically within a pack, but not between packs. The communication is transmitted through the mind of the alpha. It’s a good thing most packs are small.

You say that to Shigaraki, and he gives you a look. “That’s why most packs are small,” he says. “Each extra mind increases the pressure on the alpha exponentially. Most alphas can’t handle more than five or six. And most can’t handle it for long.”

That explains why there’s so much turnover among alphas, and why alpha turnovers don’t usually happen as a result of a battle for dominance. “What happens if they try?”

“Their mind snaps,” Shigaraki says. A thoughtful look crosses his face. “If their mind snapped, their pack would choose a new alpha and cut them off. If they didn’t have a pack –”

“They’d be a rogue by default,” you say. Shigaraki nods. “And I’m guessing most rogues didn’t get there by going crazy.”

“No, they usually get there because someone wipes out their pack,” Shigaraki says. You don’t know why he’s glaring at you. You’ve never hurt a werewolf, and when it comes to subduing inhumans who threaten the concealment, you’ve never advocated for extermination. “If the rogue is a former alpha, it changes things. It won’t be as easy to absorb them back into an existing pack.”

“You just said that alphas step down all the time.”

“By choice,” Shigaraki says. “It’s not the same thing as being overthrown. Even a sane alpha has a hard time getting their shit together if they didn’t give it up by choice.”

Shigaraki would know. He was alpha of his pack when the two of you were together – but he’s not just alpha in his own pack any longer. Is he? “When you said you’re the alpha for all the packs, did you mean it?”

“Of course I meant it.”

“I mean –” You trail off, trying to work out the phrasing. “When it’s the full moon and everybody’s transformed, are you the one who’s transmitting for everybody?”

“That’s what being alpha means.” Shigaraki’s gaze shifts away from yours. “If the rogue tries to merge into an existing pack, I’ll know about it. But I’ll only know about it once I transform, so – do you know what form they’re in?”

“Survivor reports say it’s half-phased,” you say, and Shigaraki swears. You’re right with him. “They’ve got a wolf’s speed, a wolf’s senses, and opposable thumbs. It’s not a good combination.”

“No shit. How many survivors are there?” Shigaraki asks. There have been six documented attacks, all of which involved at least a dozen victims, and of the sixty or so humans who’ve been brutalized by the rogue beast, only eleven have survived. “If the rogue was half-only phased when during the attack, they might not transform on the next full moon. You’ve got people watching them?”

“Of course. But if you can spare the packmembers, it might help to have someone else watching them,” you hint. Shigaraki doesn’t react. “Do you have anybody?”

“If you’ve got them in a central location, one should be enough,” Shigaraki says. “Toga’s good at spotting new wolves.”

Toga turns out to be barely out of her teens, amber-eyed and sharp-toothed even in human form. She makes you call her Himiko, and she goes through the locked ward where the survivors are being kept in five minutes or less and comes back with the news. “Most of them will be okay. The three guys at the end and the cute girl with the missing eye are probably going to shift at the full moon.”

That’s not good. “We need to speed up their healing, then. Aren’t first transformations supposed to be physically traumatic?”

“I mean, they’re not fun,” Himiko says. She tilts her head, the same way Shigaraki always does when he’s thinking. Maybe it’s a wolf thing. “It hurts, but it hurts here worse.”

She’s touching her chest, just above her heart. “It helps to have packmates around. People who understand. Tomura-kun’s pack is so nice. We all smell like family.”

Her eyes shift sideways to you. “You smell familiar. Did I meet you before?”

You shake your head instead of lying, which is a mistake. Himiko thinks about it for a second, then breaks out in the kind of spooky grin you usually associate with vampires. “You’re Tomura-kun’s! He smelled like you for weeks. We all thought – hold on –”

She pulls out her phone and calls someone. Or multiple someones, based on the noise on the other end of the line and the multiple people demanding to know why she’s calling them while the sun is still out. “Guys, I found them! Tomura’s –” More noise. “I know what to ask! Hang on.”

She covers the phone, then looks at you. “How come you don’t see Tomura anymore?”

“Um –” You don’t like admitting this. It’s embarrassing, and you’re also worried you might cry. “He ghosted me. I only saw him now because he’s involved with the investigation.”

“Huh?” Himiko relays the information to the others on the phone, who shout back that they can hear just fine. “He stopped talking to you?”

“Yeah.” You can’t figure out why she looks so surprised. Tomura – Shigaraki – ghosted you. People ghost each other all the time. “Did he tell you guys it was me or something?”

“He made some alpha rule about dating non-wolves. We just thought it was because –” Himiko breaks off, listening to somebody on the other end of the line. “Spinner says he said it’s because non-wolves always turn on us eventually, so we all thought it was something you did. He ghosted you? That was so rude. I’m going to bite him.”

“Don’t do that,” you say hastily. “Look, it’s – it’s not a big deal. It wasn’t anything serious. Just a fling.”

Someone on the other end of the line scoffs. “Honey, if it was just a thing, he wouldn’t have disappeared on us for a week. Wolves don’t fuck unless it’s serious. We aren’t vampires.”

“Vampires aren’t even that slutty,” someone else says. “Faeries are worse.”

“Fucking hell, here we go again. Nobody made you fuck that faery –”

Himiko hangs up while they’re still arguing and turns to you expectantly. “You should talk to Tomura-kun.”

“I tried,” you say. “He said there’s nothing to talk about.”

Himiko’s mouth turns down in sympathy. “I’m going to bite him,” she says again, and this time you don’t argue.

You figured she probably meant the next time they all transform at the full moon, but apparently not – Shigaraki shows up for your next coordination meeting with a bandage on his arm and a bad mood that can be seen from space. “So Toga fucking bit me,” he says without saying hello. “Want to tell me what that’s about?”

“I didn’t tell her to bite you,” you say, although you’re not that sorry about it. “I got some more records in. It turns out we can track this rogue –”

“Nobody has to tell Toga to bite stuff. She bites stuff all the damn time,” Shigaraki interrupts. “Except she usually doesn’t bite me, and she usually doesn’t say that it’s from you when she does it. What did you tell her?”

“I didn’t tell her anything,” you say. “So anyway, the records –”

“While we’re talking about that,” Shigaraki interrupts, again, “what did you tell the rest of my pack? They’re all acting like I pissed their beds.”

“I thought we weren’t talking about this,” you say. Shigaraki glares at you, and you stare back. He’s still pretty. You wish he wasn’t so pretty. “They’re your pack. They’re your problem. I have a job to do.”

“You and your fucking job,” Shigaraki says, and you almost pick up your pencil-holder and throw it at him. “It’s all about the job with you, huh? Do you ever talk about anything but your job in the department of putting down wolves like mad dogs? Maybe you should –”

“I’m not sitting here and listening to this.” You stand up and step around your desk, banging your hip against the corner of it, and head for the door. “Send someone else next time.”

“Hey.” Shigaraki’s on his feet, too – and he’s blocking your way. “I’m not letting you pin this on me. You’re the one who lied.”

“What?” You need to get out of here before you cry, which means you need him to move. Or else you need to jump out the window and hope you can survive a twenty-foot drop without breaking anything. “How was I supposed to lie to you? You pinned this on yourself when you ghosted me –”

“You knew the whole time!” Shigaraki’s raspy voice cracks, and you reel back a step, banging your hip against the desk again. You’re going to have bruises. “The whole time you knew I was a wolf. You knew and you let me think – and it turns out you’re some fucking DV hunter trying to trick me –”

“Of course I knew what you are,” you explode. “I have the fucking Sight!”

“What?”

Shigaraki looks like you’ve slapped him. Part of you wishes you had. “I knew you were a wolf because I have the Sight,” you say. “I’ve had it since I was a kid. My job had nothing to do with it. I could have told you that if you’d asked me instead of doing this. Now get out of my way.”

“Wait,” Shigaraki says, instead of moving. You grab his shoulders so you can move him yourself, only for his hands to close around your waist in response, and before you know it, you’re crushed against his chest with his lips pressed against yours.

Fuck. You make one attempt to shove free, but it’s so halfassed that you might as well have skipped it. How can you expect yourself to pull away from what you’ve been missing? Shigaraki kisses you like he never left, like it’s the last morning you saw him and he just set down his coffee cup so he could pull you out of your chair and into his lap. Like he’s just as hungry for you as you were for him. Are for him. As much as you don’t want it to be that way, you can’t have enough.

Shigaraki’s hands move across your back, up to your shoulders and down the length of your spine, but they don’t stay that way for long. You wore pants with back pockets, and he slides his hands into them, pressing you closer at the hips. He’s hard already, and that snaps you out of the haze even as it makes you wet. You detach your mouth from his. “I’m at work.”

“Fuck that. I need you.” Shigaraki’s mouth moves down to your neck. You can’t fight the shiver that runs through you as you remember the times he kissed you there, the marks he left. “I screwed this up. Let me fix it.”

“Fucking me in my office isn’t going to fix anything.” You plant your hands on his chest and shove backwards, hard. This time, he lets you go. “I have a job to do. So do you. I don’t care if you want to talk now. If you really want to talk, then we can talk once this is over.”

“This meeting or this hunt?”

“What do you think?” you snap. “When the job is done. I don’t have time for whatever this is.”

“Do you think I wanted to leave?” Shigaraki asks. He sure acted like it. You cross your arms over your chest. “If it was just me, I’d have rolled the dice, but I have a responsibility to my pack. I promised them I’d keep them safe. And you were a threat.”

“I’m still a threat,” you say. “I still work here.”

“Do you want to hurt me?” Shigaraki doesn’t wait for an answer. “Do you want to hurt my pack? We can work the rest of it out later. But now –”

“Don’t –”

He steps in close to you again, his head dropping into the curve where your neck meets your shoulder. He presses his face against your skin, breathing deep. He did that all the time when you were together. You figured it was a wolf thing, until you tried it for yourself and realized how comforting it was. Shigaraki’s eyelashes brush your skin as his eyelids flutter shut. It’s hard to hold in a shiver. Hard to hold back from how much you want things to go back to the way they were.

They can’t. “Are you done?”

“Yeah. I’m done.” Shigaraki draws back reluctantly. “After this job is over. We’ll –”

“Talk.”

“Fine. Talk,” Shigaraki says, rolling his eyes. He does that, but his voice is soft when he speaks again. “I have some stuff to say.”

You think about telling him that you don’t want to hear it, but you can always tell him later. You’ll need to tell him later. His explanation for what happened makes sense – of course an alpha would put their pack first – but you don’t think you can forgive the fact that he didn’t even ask you about it before ghosting you. The two of you will finish this job, capture this rogue and figure out what went wrong, and in the meantime, you’ll figure out how to tell him that you’re not interested. It would be great if you could figure out how to not be interested along the way.

The full moon comes, and the wolves vanish into the woods – most of them. Shigaraki leaves one with you, to report on what he and the rest of his packs find, and when you point out that they won’t be any use because you can’t speak wolf, he ignores you. It turns out to be a nonissue anyway. The guy who meets you before you head out on your full-moon patrol has the hallmarks of a werewolf, but he’s not even close to being transformed.

“I’m half-shapeshifter,” he explains, when you ask. “Even before I was bitten. So I’ve got more control over my phases than most wolves do. I won’t actually be forced to transform until the moon’s at its zenith, but I can still hear what the others are up to.”

“Okay. Sounds good.” You introduce yourself, and he tells you that his name’s Spinner as the two of you set off. “How long have you been part of Shigaraki’s pack?”

“A while. I was like the third or fourth person to join once he became alpha,” Spinner says. “We thought it was a voluntary switch between him and the old alpha, but we found out later that it was pretty violent. The old alpha tried to kill him and Shigaraki dethroned him by fighting back.”

It doesn’t surprise you, when you think about it. Shigaraki has a lot of scars. You remember being shocked by them the first time the two of you had sex with the lights on.  “Did the other alpha die?”

“No, he just left the pack,” Spinner says. The two of you are on the edge of the woods, and your typical patrol route takes you into them. You turn down the path and he follows you. “And the area. He probably went and found another territory. Most territories don’t have as many packs as this one.”

“Do you know why that is?”

Spinner shakes his head. “No idea. A lot of wolves wind up here, though. They make their own packs, and those packs split up, and then they make new packs – I talked to some of the elders, and they said it’s never been as stable as it is now that Shigaraki’s in charge.”

You’d noticed something, when you were sorting through reports a few months back – a big drop in werewolf-on-werewolf incidents since the previous full moon. And what had happened right before the last full moon? You and Shigaraki had hooked up for the last time, and then he’d vanished off the face of the earth. You had figured it was just a werewolf thing. That’s why you’d mentioned it, so he’d know you understood, and he didn’t have to come up with some off-the-wall explanation for why he was going to be out of contact for a while. Instead he ghosted you. And a month later, werewolf-on-werewolf crime dropped by half.

You glance over at Spinner. “Do you know why Shigaraki decided to unite the packs?”

“Uh, yeah.” A howl splits the air, and Spinner pauses for a second. You raise your eyebrows. “Sorry. Somebody found a vampire scent marker and they’re fighting over who gets to piss on it.”

“That’s something you guys fight over?”

“It’s a dominance thing. It’s kind of dumb,” Spinner says. “Maybe it’s because I’m half-shapeshifter, but I’ve never started a pissing contest because someone rubbed up on a tree. Anyway – Shigaraki said he’d been thinking about why the fae and the vampires have so much power, and we don’t. He said it’s because they work together. And some dumbass from the nature reserve pack said that we all work together already –”

You’d have said something like that. You keep your mouth shut. “And Shigaraki said that the faeries do it better. They’re the most selfish inhumans ever to exist, but they formed courts and worked together, because they have more power as a unit than as a bunch of individuals. The only way we can be on equal footing with them is if we team up. So we started teaming up.”

“And people just went for that?” You hear another howl, but Spinner doesn’t translate that one. “Nobody fought?”

“Some people did. Shigaraki said he wasn’t going to force anybody to join up, but some people picked fights with him,” Spinner says. He snorts. “None of them can touch him. He’s the strongest alpha any of us have ever seen.”

You think of what Shigaraki said, of the mental strength it takes to hold even a small pack together. “Is it working so far? The unity thing?”

“Of course it’s working.” Spinner gives you a weird look. “That’s why this is happening.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it. Back when the packs were separated, how would DV handle a rogue?” Spinner doesn’t wait for an answer. “Call in all the alphas of the different packs, right? And some of them would lie. Some of them would try to pin it on their rival pack. Nobody would tell the truth – and the rogue would get away with it, because the packs wouldn’t work together to stop them. But this time –”

“There’s one alpha. DV knew who to talk to. One person who knows what all the packs are doing.” You can see Shigaraki’s logic easily. “Everyone’s already working together.”

“Yeah. It’s better this way,” Spinner says. Another howl. He tilts his head. “One of your survivors just transformed for the first time. Himiko’s got them. She says they’re in one piece.”

“Good.” You breathe a sigh of relief, but it doesn’t last long – your headset squawks, warning you that you’ve got a situation at the edge of your district. “Fuck. I have to head north.”

“What is it?”

“Faery festival. There’s kids.”

Spinner’s expression twists. You’ve been at this too long to be surprised at what some of the Fair Folk will stoop to, but you remember how you felt when you realized that what happened to you wasn’t a one-off. You set off, and Spinner follows you, not asking questions until you’re close enough to the faery ring to hear the music. “What do we do?”

“No fighting. We’re just there to get the kids and get out,” you say. “The kids don’t have the Sight. They don’t know what’s really happening, so we have to try not to scare them. Do you have any experience with faeries?”

“We all do. Shigaraki taught us.” Spinner’s expression is grim. His eyes were dark before. Now they’re amber-colored. “Let’s go get these kids.”

Even for a Sighted human, faery festivals are dangerous, but you came in well-protected. Each piece of metal you’re wearing is iron at its core, and your ears are sensitive to even the slightest shift in glamour. You aren’t hungry or thirsty, so they won’t be able to amplify either and use it against you. The only way you’ll be in trouble is if you let yourself get spooked. You got away from one of these as a kid, and no one came to help you. These kids won’t have to go through what you did.

As soon as you and Spinner cross into the faery ring, the party comes to a screeching halt. Good. You don’t want them to think they’ve got a prayer of getting out of this. You recognize the faery leading the revel, too – a repeat offender, somebody who keeps skating by with warnings because they’ve never actually hurt anyone. But DV management just instituted a seven-strikes warning, and this is number eight. You pitch your voice to carry. “All right. Time to break this up.”

The faery in charge hisses. “Right on schedule. DV’s here to ruin our fun. Didn’t I tell you all they’d show up?”

“Plenty of faeries have fun without kidnapping human kids,” you say. You loaded your crossbow before you stepped into the ring – ash stake, iron core, tipped with silver. Good against vampires, werewolves, and faeries, all at once. “Let them go. You know the drill.”

“And?” The faery scoffs. The bonfire they lit flickers, casting long shadows – not so long that you can’t see the other faeries slipping out of the ring, disappearing into the night. “If I submit to you, it’s over for me. Why on earth would I do that?”

“Because what they’re going to do to you if you don’t cooperate is a lot worse than what I’ll do if you do,” you say. Spinner growls. “What we’ll do to you. Let them go.”

You lift your crossbow to ready position, halfway cranked back. You can crank it the rest of the way back in seconds if needed. “You know,” the faery says after a moment, “if it was any other night, I might take you up on that. But unfortunately these aren’t for us. And I’m a lot more frightened of him than I am of you.”

Him. “Who?” you ask, and the darkness comes alive around you.

You’ve had the Sight since you were a child, and even you can’t see what’s burst through the faery ring – it moves too fast. But you’ve got Spinner with you, Spinner who’s got a werewolf’s sense of smell, and rather than transform into a wolf, he begins to shift into something else. You’ve heard that half-shapeshifters only have one form, and it’s a partial form. Spinner’s partial form is taller than you are, taller than any of the faeries in the ring. And that’s a good thing, because the shadow that rears up between you and the fire is enormous. You see tufted ears, yellow eyes, protruding fangs. You’ve found the rogue.

Or it’s found you. But it’s not here for you. It speaks in a low, guttural voice, a hairsbreadth away from a snarl. “Do you have what is mine?”

“There,” the faery says, nodding to one corner of the faery ring. You follow their gaze and see the children, all of them dazed and glassy-eyed. Faery food. You still remember the taste. “Is it done?”

“It will be,” the rogue werewolf says. “The whelp is following. When he arrives, we will stage the scene, and your problem will be at an end.”

They’re working together. This faery and the rogue? Have they been working together the whole time? It doesn’t matter; you have to stop them both. You crank your crossbow back with shaking hands, loading a silver-tipped bolt. “It’s all worked out as planned. Even the surprises favor us,” the faery continues. They smile at you. “When he kills the DV officer assisting him and one of his own packmates, his destruction will be assured.”

Shigaraki. This is about Shigaraki? The rogue lunges towards you and Spinner. Spinner leaps to meet him, and with your shot obstructed, you turn and fire on the faery.

Your bolt strikes them in the upper leg, sinking in with a hiss and the smell of burning flesh, and the faery howls. They’re only immobilized, and not for long, but in the meantime, you’ve got work to do. You run to the kids and park yourself between them and the inhumans, reaching back to shake their shoulders. Human touch can break faery glamours, sometimes, and the touch of a Sighted human works best. The children stir. Should you tell them to run? You remember the other faeries abandoning the circle. Any one of them could still be out there. But they can’t stay here, either. What are you supposed to do?

A shadow moves in the corner of your vision, letting you know you’re out of time to answer the question. You yank a crossbow bolt from your quiver and turn to face the faery. They’re limping, blood oozing from the hole in their thigh, but the grin on their face hasn’t changed. “It’s over,” they tell you. “You think you can save those children? You can’t even save yourself.”

“I got away from your kind once. I can do it again.” You hold your ground as the faery feints towards you. They said Shigaraki was on the way. How long can you stall? “Are you really this scared of the werewolves? How many people are dead because of you?”

“People? Humans.” The faery laughs at you. Their feint comes closer this time, close enough that you have to step back to avoid it – and then you’re amidst the kids, having to work around them. “If you want to blame someone, blame the wolves. They made it necessary.”

“By what? Trying to protect themselves?” The next feint comes so close that you can’t call it anything but a strike, and you lash out in response, drawing a jagged line across the faery’s forearm. They flinch, snarl. “Is stopping them worth dying for?”

“Is saving them worth dying for?” the faery counters. You hear a crunch, an agonized yelp – Spinner – and turn instinctively towards the sound. A moment later the faery’s hands close around your throat, stymied by the iron jewelry you’re wearing – but only for a second. “It seems the answer’s yes.”

A shadow falls over you, blotting out the stars. One of the children screams, high and panicked, a sound that chokes off when whatever it is bowls you and the faery you’re grappling with over. Somehow you come out on the high side of it, but the faery’s on the ground, pinned beneath the paw of a massive wolf. It lifts its head and howls, and a chorus of more howls answers it. You can hear dozens of cries within the chorus. Maybe hundreds.

Something grabs the back of your coat, and you glance up to see that a wolf has you by the collar. Other wolves are collecting the children, pulling them back out of the faery ring, and you breathe a sigh of relief. Shigaraki’s the alpha. These wolves are listening to him. You don’t have to worry about what happens to the children now. You know they’ll be safe.

The children are safe. Shigaraki isn’t. The faery ring is surrounded by wolves now, but there’s only three within it. Spinner, caught halfway between his dragon morph and his wolf form, lying unconscious and bloody in the grass. The rogue, his hands and muzzle smeared with Spinner’s blood. And a red-eyed, white-furred wolf between them, hackles raised and snarling.

Shigaraki’s a good fighter. He must be, to have dethroned multiple alphas – except the thing he’s fighting is just as strong as he is, and it has hands. They lured him here so they could kill him. Why would they do that if they weren’t certain they could win? All at once you’re sure that this is what the rogue wanted, that this monthslong killing spree was always meant to lead here. One of Shigaraki’s packmates is already hurt. The rogue at least must have known that the faery couldn’t defend themselves against so many wolves, so they must have planned to defeat Shigaraki without help. Everything has gone according to plan. Except for the fact that you’re here.

The wolf who has you by the collar has almost pulled you out of the ring. You wriggle out of your jacket instead and lunge for your fallen crossbow. In the time it takes you to find it, to crank it halfway back, the battle’s already begun – Shigaraki versus the rogue, and Shigaraki’s white muzzle is already stained red.

The battle’s hard for you to follow, which means it’s hard to see who you’re trying to shoot. They both move so fast, and if you get it wrong, you’ll kill Shigaraki. The partial transformation is enough to shield the rogue from anything but a shot to the brain or heart, but any well-placed silver-tipped bolt can kill a werewolf. You can’t risk shooting Tomura. You need him to separate from the rogue, but he won’t – or can’t. The rogue’s got him, by the scruff of his neck and one leg, and it doesn’t matter how much Tomura thrashes or snarls, or how many chunks of flesh he tears off the rogue’s legs and forearms. The rogue won’t let him go.

You said you’d try to take the rogue alive, but you change your mind. You aim for his head and fire.

But your hands are shaking. Your shot goes wide, and the rogue wheels around and throws Tomura at you. You couldn’t have caught him even if you’d seen it coming from a mile away. Tomura’s full weight thuds against you, crushing your crossbow between the two of you, knocking you to the ground. With his weight on top of you, you can feel Tomura’s breathing, feel the unsteady pace of his heart. “Get up,” you whisper, and one ear flicks towards you. “Please. You have to get up.”

Tomura tries. His weight lifts for a second, long enough for you to squirm partially free, but then the leg the rogue was holding gives out, and he crumples again, pinning you below the knees. All the while, the rogue approaches. He’s taking his time. And why shouldn’t he? You’ve got nowhere to go. Except –

You shake Tomura hard, one-handed. “You have to wake up,” you say, letting desperation creep into your voice. “You promised we’d talk when it was over. You said we’d figure it out. Please –”

“He is awake. Aren’t you, Tomura?” The rogue kicks Tomura away from you, then hoists you up to your knees. This close to him, you can see that Tomura’s done a lot of damage. None of it’s fatal, but all of it’s enough to slow him down. If he was facing somebody who could really fight, not someone like you. “Good. Keep your eyes open, Tomura. I want you to watch this.”

His jaws open, large enough to crush your head between them. A split second later they close on your shoulder, splintering your collarbone, cracking your scapula, even before his teeth sink deep into your skin. Your mind snaps along with your bones, erasing thought, self, memory. Everything vanishes but the sensation. Pain eradicating one side of your body. And something clenched tight in your other hand.

What happens next is more of a reflex than anything heroic or brave. When your left hand rises in a weak attempt to ward off your attacker, there’s still a crossbow bolt in your fist. It’s only chance that you stab it into the side of the rogue wolf’s neck. Chance, not luck, because the rogue’s grip on you tightens. Its teeth sink in deeper. Steaming blood spills onto your face, oozes into your mouth, and the anguished howl of a werewolf follows you down into the void.

You wake up, of course. Backup was on its way as soon as your headset mic picked up the sound of the faery’s voice, and the DV reinforcements got there in plenty of time to unlock the rogue alpha’s teeth from your shoulder. Plenty of time to patch the hole in his neck, too. Once it’s safe to move, he’ll be off to the locked ward. The faery came out in one piece, which is a small miracle, given how much most of the werewolves want to maul them. They’re cuffed in irons on the far side of the faery ring, waiting for the morning fog to rise so they can be dragged off for interrogation.

As insane as it sounds, only three people on your side got badly hurt. Spinner’s transformed back down from his dragon form, and he’s been able to hold onto his human form. Mostly. His eyes are still amber. His arm’s in a sling, and he’s gotten stitches from one of the faery medics already. Shigaraki’s a different story. He won’t transform back to human until the sun rises, and in the meantime, he’s snapped and growled at every medic who’s looked his way.

You didn’t have a choice about whether to get medical attention. You weren’t conscious when the other DV agents showed up, and by the time you woke up, the crushed bones in your shoulder had been pieced back together by faery magic. Your flesh is regrowing slowly, filling in the gouges left by the alpha’s teeth, but faery magic can’t replenish iron-rich human blood. You’re under orders to sit still and not make sudden moves until someone’s able to come talk to you. Talk to you, or lecture you. This op got away from you. Bad.

“Not that bad,” Spinner says, when you mumble something to that effect. “I mean, we caught the rogue. The kids are safe. Nobody got hurt except us and him. That’s a win, right?”

“If he survives,” you say. “If that faery talks. If – a lot of stuff.”

The faery is the wild card. Spinner confirmed that the rogue is a former alpha – the former alpha of Shigaraki’s pack, the one Shigaraki deposed. It makes sense that he’d have a bone to pick with Shigaraki. The faery’s involvement is more concerning. You deal with that faery every other full moon, and in all the time since you started working here, they’ve never tried something anywhere close to that ambitious. There’s no way they’re the only one involved.

More growling erupts. Another medic’s approached Shigaraki, who’s hackling like he’s facing the rogue all over again. “Can you tell him to calm down?” the medic asks Spinner, exasperated. “I need to take a look at the leg he’s dragging.”

“He can understand you,” Spinner says. Shigaraki growls again. “He says sorry, but no.”

“Why not?” you ask. “I know it hurts.”

Spinner thinks about it for a second. “He doesn’t trust faeries.”

After what happened tonight, after the proof that at least one faery was directly conspiring against him, you don’t blame Shigaraki for that at all. But he’s still hurt. “What if I take a look at it? I got advanced first aid training.”

“If you want to go near an angry werewolf, that’s your business.” The faery medic tosses the supply kit to you. It lands in your lap. “Good luck.”

You decide to get organized before trying to help Shigaraki, and while you’re sorting out the supplies you think you need, something crosses your mind. “They healed my arm. How come they didn’t heal yours all the way?”

“Faery magic works best when the underlying conditions stay the same. It really doesn’t like change, and werewolves change all the time.” Spinner adjusts his sling, grimacing. “Since I was half-shapeshifter before, it barely works on me. It works pretty well on Toga, though. She was half-vampire first.”

“Oh.” Maybe that’s why she likes biting so much. “I’d always thought you guys didn’t get along with vampires.”

“We don’t. Like, at all. Vampires and werewolves get along even worse than werewolves and faeries,” Spinner says. “But –”

He messes with his sling again, then pulls his hand away. “Toga’s kind hunted her after she was bitten. She stopped being a person to them. She’s always been a person to us. Like werewolves are people to you.”

You don’t know what to say to that. Of course they’re people. You’ve always been aware of that. Maybe it’s a human thing or just a you thing, but you’ve never looked up to faeries or looked down on werewolves. “It’s sad,” you say. “That treating you all like people is something to get complimented for.”

“I mean, that’s why Shigaraki thought you didn’t know he was a wolf. And then why he thought you were running a DV psyop.” Spinner shrugs. “A lot of us have cozied up to humans before and they’ve all gone running, so when you didn’t he got all hyped about it, and –”

He’s cut off by some ridiculously loud growling from Shigaraki, who’s dragged himself up alongside you without you noticing. Even with one leg injured, he can move quietly. “He says you can help him if you want,” Spinner says as Shigaraki flops down beside you. “And he wants to talk to you himself.”

“So, later.” You can’t talk to Shigaraki while he’s in wolf form, but you can help with his leg. Maybe. You shift position so you can reach it and run your fingers over it, searching for the break. You can’t find one, which doesn’t make any sense – not until your hands move up over his hip. “It’s dislocated. Doesn’t this hurt?”

Shigaraki huffs softly. He knocks the first-aid kit out of your lap with his snout and drops his head down in its place. “I don’t know what to do about the dislocation,” you say. “Um, maybe don’t move so much.”

Another huff. “He says he won’t if you don’t,” Spinner says. Shigaraki growls. “Okay. Fine. I’m leaving.”

You don’t know why Shigaraki wants him to leave, since you can’t understand what he’s saying without Spinner to translate. But Spinner gets up and leaves, going to talk to one of the other wolves instead, and Shigaraki nudges your hand with his snout. “What?” you ask. Another nudge. “Do you want me to scratch your ears or something?”

He liked it when you played with his hair, before. Maybe this is the equivalent. He doesn’t snap at you when you set your hand down on his head, so you take that as a good sign. His white fur is stiff with blood in a few places, and one of his ears is sort of ragged at the edges. You’re not sure how to bandage it, or what that injury is going to look like when he’s in human form. What any of his injuries are going to look like in human form. What the hell the two of you are supposed to do now.

It occurs to you that you’ve got an opportunity here. You can talk to Shigaraki without him being able to talk back. “I know we weren’t together that long – or together, really –” You break off, shoving his snout away as he nips you. “Shut up. We weren’t together, but I really liked you. I thought there was something there. Something real. And you leaving like you did hurt a lot more than I wanted it to.”

It still hurts, when you think about it. You remember waking up to find him gone – no text, no note, his number deleted out of your phone because you’d been stupid enough to let him see your passcode. There was at least a little while where you thought you might have hallucinated him. Like you’d wanted so badly to believe he wanted you that you’d spun an illusion out of nothing. The Fair Folk can do that. People who’ve been touched by them can sometimes do the same. People like you, with the tip of a faery dagger still embedded in their heart, can make yourselves believe anything you want.

“You hurt me,” you say again. Shigaraki makes a low sound that might be a whine. “I don’t know what you wanted to say back in my office, but I don’t know if it can make up for that. I don’t ever want to be hurt like that again.”

Part of you feels stupid for saying that. You know real pain. Sometimes your chest still hurts from the faery sacrifice you almost became, and you don’t know how you survived the obliteration of the rogue wolf’s jaws crushing your shoulder. But there’s a reason for that kind of pain. Something you can point to, something you can blame. There’s something to be said for it being easier to understand.

“This isn’t over,” you continue. “I don’t think that faery was working alone. Someone has it out for you, and they’ll probably try again. So this hunt might be over, but this job isn’t. I have to keep going if I want you and your pack to be safe. And I do. Want that, I mean. That matters more than the other stuff I want.”

Shigaraki makes a questioning sound. Somewhere behind you, the sun begins to rise. You can feel its warmth on your back. “I want to go back to how it was before,” you say. “I want to go back so you can ask me to explain, and listen when I tell you. I –”

You’ve always heard that shifting from human form to wolf form is painful for wolves, but it doesn’t look like it’s painful to go back. The wolf with its head in your lap barely shivers as it settles back into the form of a human man. Shigaraki’s pale hair is bloody, and the ear that was ragged in his wolf form is ragged as a human, too. His dislocated hip as a wolf is a dislocated shoulder as a man, one that hurts him when he breathes. You know it hurts him. You can see it in his eyes.

He’s looking up at you, his gaze intent, just like you saw it so many times. Across the bar when you first met. As he drew back from your first kiss. As his cock sunk into you for the first time, his hand at the back of your neck so you couldn’t look away. When you woke up in the night and found him watching you, his red eyes almost reflective in the dark. Shigaraki always looked at you like you meant something to him. Even in the beginning.

“I’m listening,” he says, his voice rough with pain, and you lean down to kiss him. He still smells like home.

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