Page 4

Everyone in my community knew my first name. Not my last name, though. Technology made it too easy to track me to my origin story. Not that it was hard with my first name alone. It wasn’t exactly common. My fucking father had thought the name was unique.

Granted, he hadn’t planned on getting ripped apart by a werewolf then having my name splashed across local papers before I became a hunter who tracked down and killed supernatural beings for a living.

Although my name had been somewhat obscure growing up in a sea of Sarahs, Elizabeths, and Carolines, I had caught a break now that millennials were having kids and were naming them weird shit. But if someone was determined enough, tech savvy enough or hated me enough, they could find the info. They could dig out old newspaper articles, of which there were many. The headlines in Dreadwood Falls gravitated toward the school janitor retiring after forty years and the rec center getting a new swimming pool.

So grizzly deaths stood out.

Luckily, most hunters didn’t spend their time trying to research other hunters. They were either tracking monsters, killing monsters, or trying to stay alive.

“Earth to Hadley.”

I jerked.

I was sitting in my car, in the woods, the cold creeping into my bones. I was not in my hometown, warm and horrified with my parents’ blood drying on me.

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat before taking a long swig of my whiskey. “I’m on my way there now. Send me the details you have.”

“Will do,” she replied. “Try to stay alive.”

My car roared to life. “No promises,” I said, hanging up and kicking up dirt as I screeched down the road.

Toward the one place I vowed I’d never return.

Home.

two

The goal was to get in and out of town without anyone recognizing me. I figured it wasn’t going to be hard since everyone in Dreadwood Falls remembered a perky, blonde-haired cheerleader, full of naïveté and bullshit hopes and dreams.

That could not be reconciled with a thirty-something-year-old woman with blood-red hair, tattoos up and down both arms, black-rimmed eyes, combat boots, and a heavy dose of cynicism radiating from her very pores. I was what I had planned on being— absolutely unrecognizable. And hostile enough to ensure that no one looked too closely at me.

But I forgot the power of small towns, how tightly they held on to the past, frozen in time, ready to pluck out memories from over a decade ago like they were yesterday.

I didn’t even make it a fucking hour.

“Hadley?”

Fuck.

Fuck.

My hand clenched around the neck of a bottle in the six-pack I was reaching in to get from the cooler at the gas station.

It was after sunset. New moon. Which meant there was nothing for me to do that night. My chances of catching anything were slim before the full moon.

Why in the fuck did I drive thirty hours straight to get to this hellhole, Stepford town in Connecticut, if I had to wait a few weeks? Right, because I had to do recon, had to be smart instead of bursting into town on the night of the full moon, thinking I could take on a werewolf. I’d done that before. And I had a long, ugly, gruesome scar from my rib to my hip to communicate just how fucking stupid it was to do such things.

Beyond that, werewolves could still wreak havoc on any day of the month. It was only on the full moon that they needed to consume a human heart in order to change at will. I’d heard rumors of werewolves who abstained from this, fed only on animals and didn’t harm humans, but I’d yet to see evidence of that. Every wolf I’d come into contact with had been devoid of empathy, of humanity, caring only about the hunt. The kill.

That made two of us.

“Hadley Harris?”

The voice was closer now. Warm, familiar, and it latched onto me like a fucking leech.

I took a deep breath.

I’d prepared for this. I’d known that this was a possibility. Fuck, I’d been lying to myself since Donny had called me, thinking that there was some way for me to work this case without a single person from my past recognizing me.