Jeff sr stacked the last logs of his hidden shelter as the sun dropped behind the pines. The walls stood at last, half a mile from any trail the hunters used. His son could sleep safe here, hidden deep in Shiveland's woods. But the moon was rising, full and white, and Jeff sr's cursed blood answered it. Tonight he would run as a wolf, and he could not stop it. He had one shift left before the change took him. His guard shift. The men who tracked him knew this land now. They knew a boy slept somewhere in it. Jeffery jr sat on a stump nearby, his black hair sharp against the dusk. His eyes glowed faint gold, half-wolf, half something colder. He was ten and did not yet know how to run. "You're leaving," the boy said. It was not a question. "I have to," Jeff sr said. "The moon takes me whether I want it or not." Karla stepped through the trees behind them. Auburn hair, dirt on her jeans, a knife on her belt. She was the boy's mother and Jeff sr's wife, and once she had pulled him from a hunter's trap with her bare hands. He had owed her his life ever since. Tonight the debt ran the other way. "Then I stay with him," she said. "They'll come for him tonight," Jeff sr said. "You can't hold them alone. Two guns, maybe three." Karla didn't flinch. "So find me another guard." Jeff sr looked toward the deep woods, where the old ones lived. He had heard the stories. A guardian moved through these trees, part woman, part living green, tied to the roots and the moss. Vines wound through her hair like veins. She protected the forest and asked nothing but respect. He cut his palm on his own claw and pressed his blood to the oldest tree. "I ask for my son," he said. "Guard him while the moon owns me." For a long moment nothing moved. Then the ferns parted. She came without sound, tall and calm, flowers open along her arms. She looked at the boy the way a river looks at a stone. Then she nodded once. Relief hit Jeff sr harder than the change already pulling at his bones. He knelt and gripped his son's shoulders. "She will keep you. Stay inside the walls. Do what your mother says." His spine bent wrong. Fur pushed through his skin. He ran before the pain could take his mind, and the woods swallowed him. At dawn he limped back on two legs. The shelter still stood. Karla stood in the doorway, pale. But the guardian was gone, and so was Jeffery jr. A single crimson rose lay on the boy's empty cot. Its petals dripped fresh red, like blood that would not dry. Jeff sr had seen that mark before. The vampires had taken his son.

The bloody rose still lay on the cot when Jeff sr found the vampires' trail. Broken ferns. A dropped shoe, small, his son's. The tracks led north, toward the old castle everyone in Shiveland feared. He knew where they had taken Jeffery jr. He also knew he could not go there alone. He was one man now, not a wolf, and stone walls waited for him. He found the castle at dusk. Weathered spires. Colored glass burning with lamplight inside. Two werewolves stood guard at the door, taller than any man, armored, watching the dark. Jeff sr crouched in the treeline and counted the ways he would die. His son was inside, past those guards, past walls he could not climb. He had claws for one night a month. This was not that night. He went back for help. Karla waited at the shelter. Her son had been gone three days now, and she had not slept. She met Jeff sr at the door with dirt still on her jeans and the knife on her belt. "You found it," she said. Not a question. "A castle. Two guards. More inside." He pressed his palms to his eyes. "I can't take it. Not like this. I need someone strong enough to stand with me, and I don't have one." Karla looked past him at the dark trees. "Then we don't take it," she said. "We don't fight them." "They have Jeffery jr." "I know whose son he is." She cut herself off. Her jaw tightened. She did not finish the thought. "Guns won't open that door. You said it yourself. So we stop trying to be strong." Jeff sr dropped his hands. "What does that mean?" Karla reached into her coat and set something on the table. The rose from the cot. Its petals still dripped red, wet as a fresh wound. "They left this," she said. "It's a message. A message means they want something. You don't send a note to someone you just want dead." Jeff sr stared at the dripping bloom. He had seen it as a threat. She had seen an open door. "They took him alive," Karla said. "They kept him alive. That's a trade, not a killing." She picked up the rose by its dark stem, careful of the thorns. "So we go to the castle. Not with guns. We go to bargain." Jeff sr felt the fight drain out of him and something colder take its place. He had spent all day looking for a sword and an ally to swing it. There were none. But there was a table to sit at, and a price to learn. "They'll name a cost," he said. "Yes." Karla put the rose in her coat. "And we'll find out what it is."