Unclaimed: Taken by Iron Fang

Neve

There’s one rule I never break: don’t stay anywhere longer than three months.

I’ve been in Barlow for five.

I could blame the town. The rent is cheap, the woman who owns the diner pays in cash and never asks for a last name, and the winters here are so long and so gray that nobody looks too closely at anyone. I could say I stayed because it was easy.

The truth is less flattering. I got tired.

Tired of bus stations at two in the morning. Tired of learning which aisle the bread is in at a new grocery store, of memorizing a new route to work, of practicing a new name in a motel mirror until it stops sounding like a lie. Somewhere in the fifth month, I took a sweater out of my bag and put it in a drawer. Then another one. Last week I bought a plant from the hardware store, a small green thing in a plastic pot, and set it on my windowsill like I’m someone who gets to watch things grow.

That’s how they find you. Not when you’re careless. When you start to hope.

***

By four o’clock the sleet has emptied the Lone Pine Diner.

Two truckers sit at the counter, steam rising off their coffee. The woman from the post office is finishing her pie in the window booth, the way she does every Tuesday. In the back, Earl scrapes down the grill and hums something off-key. It’s the hour I like best. The lunch rush is long over, the supper crowd won’t come until six, and for a little while the whole place feels like it’s holding its breath.

I’m wiping down the corner booth when one of the truckers lifts his cup.

“Jo, honey, can I get a refill?”

It takes me a second to turn around. Five months, and the name still lands a beat too late.

Jo is a good name. Short and forgettable. It belongs to a woman who has never been anybody’s daughter and never been anybody’s wife, who was born the day she stepped off a Greyhound with one bag and four hundred dollars. Some days I envy her.

I fill his cup. “Here you go.”

“Thanks, sweetheart.” He winks. “You’d be real pretty if you smiled more.”

I smile. It costs me nothing anymore. That’s one of the first things you learn when you have to disappear: people stop looking at a face that gives them what they expect.

Back behind the counter, I fold my hands into my apron pocket so nobody sees them shake. They do that by afternoon, when I’ve been on my feet too long and the cold has settled into my bones. I’m always cold. I’ve stopped expecting that to change.

Marjorie glances at me over her glasses from the register.

“Jo? You okay, honey?”

“Fine. Just cold.”

She doesn’t push. Marjorie asks a question once, and if you don’t answer, she lets it go. It’s the kindest thing anyone has done for me in years, and she has no idea.

People think running is the hard part. It isn’t. Your body does that for you. The hard part is stopping, because stopping means you forget to be afraid.

Five months is long enough to forget what an engine on the highway can mean.

Which is why, when the window by the register starts to hum, I don’t notice it right away.

Engines. Low at first, buried under the drum of the sleet, then louder, until I feel them through the soles of my shoes.

“Motorcycles?” Marjorie says. “In this weather? Somebody’s lost their mind.”

I go to the window without meaning to.

Six bikes pull into the lot, one after another, headlights cutting through the gray. They line up by the gas pumps. The riders swing off, big men in heavy jackets and boots, helmets tucked under their arms. One of them turns toward the diner, shaking water off his shoulders, and I see the patch on his back.

A wolf’s skull. Iron fangs.

The rag slips out of my hand.

I grew up with that patch. It hung on a hook by our kitchen door. It was painted on the wall of a garage where I spent half my childhood. It was stitched across the back of the man who taught me to ride a bicycle, who ran behind me holding the seat long after I stopped needing him to.

When I was small, I thought that patch meant safe.

I was wrong about a lot of things back then.

Get out. Get out. Get out.

The words come the way they always do, flat and practiced. My bag is packed in my room three blocks away. It’s always packed. Out the back, across the alley, ten minutes to grab it. Twenty to reach the highway.

My feet don’t move.

The bell over the door rings. Cold air rolls in, and with it comes the smell.

My fingers find the spot behind my ear where I put the paste on this morning. Under it, humans can’t tell what I am. Most wolves can’t either.

But it doesn’t stop me from smelling them.

Wet leather. Motor oil. And underneath it all, something sharp and wild that no one else in this diner would ever notice.

Wolves.

Six of them, filling the doorway, stamping sleet off their boots, laughing about something one of them said on the road.

“Any chance of coffee, ma’am?” the tallest of them asks, flashing Marjorie a grin that’s pure charm. “We’re half frozen.”

“Sit anywhere, boys,” Marjorie says, and I’d swear she’s blushing. “Pot’s fresh.”

And beneath all those strangers is one scent I would know anywhere—pine, and rain, and something warm I’ve never been able to name.

I tell myself I’m wrong. Eight years is a long time. Scents fade. Memory lies. Half the wolves in the West probably smell like pine and rain.

Then the last man through the door pushes back his hood, and he isn’t laughing with the others.

He’s standing completely still, and he’s staring straight at me.

His face. Older, harder, a shadow of stubble along his jaw. But his face.

And everything I’ve packed away comes loose at once.

Summer nights on a garage roof with our feet hanging over the gutter. The back of a bike on a dirt road, my arms around his waist. A sleeping bag in a treehouse when I was eleven years old and too scared of the dark to admit it, and a voice beside me saying, I’m right here, go to sleep.

“Neve?”

His voice cuts through all of it. Barely above a breath, too quiet for anyone human to hear.

But I hear it. For three years, nobody has said my real name out loud. Not once.

The room tilts. The truckers, the hum of the coffee machine, Marjorie asking if I’m all right. It’s all too close and too loud, and he’s still looking at me as if he’s waiting for me to say yes. Yes, it’s me.

I don’t. I can’t.

My body remembers what to do before I do.

Run.