Chapter 1 The feeling
IVY’s POV
Something felt wrong. I'd been telling myself that for a month. That crawling feeling at the back of my neck. The whisper that someone was watching me, following me, tracking every step I took from a distance.
I'd spin around on a busy street and find nothing. Just strangers. Just the city. Just New York being its loud, indifferent self.
Paranoid. That was the word I kept using.
I was good at talking myself out of things. I'd had a lot of practice. But a month in, the feeling wasn't getting quieter. It was getting louder. More specific.
Less like anxiety and more like a warning I didn't have the language to read yet. It sat in my chest every morning when I woke up and it followed me to campus.
It was still there now, at ten at night, as the library doors swung shut behind me and the October cold hit hard. I stood on the steps for a moment and looked out at the street. Empty. Lamp-lit. Normal.
I pulled my jacket tight and told myself one more time that I was imagining things.
My apartment was twelve minutes from the NYU gates on foot. A studio on Bleecker Street. Small, quiet, entirely mine. Chosen the way I chose everything in my life.
Deliberately. Carefully. Far enough from the dorms to breathe, but close enough to campus that I had no excuse to be late.
I didn't do dorms. Too many people. Too much noise. Too many bodies pressed into too small a space with nowhere to disappear when you needed to.
Growing up, I learned that proximity wasn't the same as safety. Sometimes the most dangerous place you could be was surrounded by people. Old lesson. Never forgot it.
I passed a group from my psychology seminar outside a bar on the corner. One of them raised a hand. I nodded back and kept walking.
That was the full extent of my social life and I was at peace with that. People started with small things: your time, your attention and worked slowly toward the things that actually cost you.Your trust. Your softness.
The parts of yourself you couldn't get back once you gave them away. I wasn't interested in paying that price. I put my earphones in with nothing playing and kept moving.
Two blocks from my building, the feeling spiked. Not the usual background hum. Something sharper. Something immediate.
A sudden cold that had nothing to do with the weather, a tightening across my shoulders, every hair on my arms standing straight up beneath my jacket.
I stopped walking. I turned around slowly.
The street behind me was empty. A lamppost. Wet pavement catching orange light.
A cab moving slowly at the far end of the block. A woman on the opposite side walking a dog that strained at its leash toward the shadows between two parked cars. Nothing.
My heart was slamming anyway. There is nothing there. There is never anything there. Stop this and walk. I told myself. I turned back around. Took the cut-through.
The narrow passage between the two old brick buildings, a block from my front door. Six weeks of walking it every single night without a single problem. It saved three minutes off my route home. There was no reason to avoid it.
I was halfway through when the growl stopped me dead in my tracks. Low. Rough. It cut past my thoughts and hit something deep in me. An old instinct that reacted before I could understand what was happening.
I turned toward it. Something stood at the far end of the passage. My mind tried to make sense of it, tried to find a word that fit. “Wolf” was the closest word I had, but it didn't fit at all.
This was to a wolf what a storm is to a breeze. The same basic shape, but on a completely different scale. Too large. Too wide. Too still in a way that felt intentional. It wasn't hiding. It wasn't startled. It had been waiting.
Its eyes found mine across the dark and my stomach dropped completely through the floor. Yellow. Burning. Fixed on me with a cold, sharp intelligence my mind refused to accept.
I didn't scream. The sound never came out. Something in my chest just locked tight. I stood there gripping my bag strap with both hands like it meant anything, my feet nailed to the ground, heart going pounding insanely behind my ribs.
It lowered its head and lunged. I threw myself sideways. My back hit against the wall hard, and its jaws snapped shut in the air beside my face — so close I felt the heat of its breath on my skin.
I pressed flat against the brick wall and looked for somewhere to run. There was nowhere. It circled back toward me with a patience that was somehow worse than speed.
Unhurried. Certain. The way something moves when it already knows the end.
It turned to face me again. This is it, some quiet part of me said. This is actually it. Something crashed into it from the side.
The impact was huge. A sound like the world breaking open. The force shook both walls of the passage and sent the yellow-eyed thing into the brick hard enough to leave a mark.
Something stood over it.
Black fur. Enormous. A shape that filled the whole passage, like it had always belonged there and everything else was simply in the way.
It moved with a terrifying precision — no wasted motion, no hesitation, only controlled violence. The yellow-eyed wolf fought back. But it didn't matter.
The black wolf pinned it in seconds. Its jaws locked at its throat. A low sound rolled from its chest, vibrating through the ground and into my bones.
Then it let go.
The yellow-eyed wolf ran. It disappeared into the dark like it had just faced something far worse than itself.
The black wolf turned around. And looked at me. My breath stopped.
Its eyes were black, threaded with deep red that pulsed slowly like a fire that wouldn't go out. Behind them was something I couldn't place. Something that didn't look at me like prey.
It looked at me like it knew me.
It stepped forward.
The wall pressed into my back. The ground seemed to tilt. The dark closed in at every edge of my vision and my legs gave out.
Two hands caught me before I fell.
Warm. Firm. Certain.
The moment hands touched my skin, something tore through my entire body like lightning.
Then everything went black.