The girl shook in fever as her blood fought what it couldn’t hope to beat in the end. The bite on her arm was a livid brand, swollen at the edges and crimson-black where the cursed teeth had pierced deepest. It would remain a wound only while her doomed body fought – once she surrendered, it would heal quickly to a moon-white scar.

The healer, who had herded all the village’s bloodthirsty worry out of her cabin, sat cooling the sweat on the girl’s forehead with a cloth, soothing the throes and whimpers of her fever, but doing nothing to fight the bite that caused it. Leave her to me, she had told the men of the village, who would rather kill a bitten girl than let a wolf live. I can save her yet.

It wasn’t a lie. She had saved the girl from them, from their suspicion and cruelty. Nothing, no healer or god, could save her from what she would become once her blood gave up fighting. Mercy could only wash her brow of fever and then, once all the throes were done, let her out the back door into the forest, where human cruelty would have no chance of catching a canny wolf.