Maxwell ran with the silver hammer banging against his thigh and a dropout's worth of medical school rattling in his head. Two days ago he had swung that hammer at two men who tried to drag him out of a roadside diner, and now the law wanted him almost as much as the thing in the trees did. He knew silver resisted infection and corruption. He had learned that in a lecture hall before he learned he was no good at lecture halls. The hammer was the only thing he owned that still meant anything, and he needed to turn it into something that could kill. The creature behind him was not a wolf, though it ran on four legs. He had glimpsed it twice through the birches: too much color for an animal, mouth open too wide, eyes set wrong. It moved like it had already read the map of his footsteps. When he cut left, it was waiting on the left. When he doubled back, it had doubled back first. The proof of it caught up to him at a stream bend, where he found a paw print pressed into the mud beside his own boot mark. The print still glowed faintly, pink and blue, like spilled paint that hadn't dried. He scraped a fingertip through it. The color clung to his skin and would not wipe off. He ran until his lungs gave out, and that was when he saw the shed. It sat low under the pines, walls covered in bark so it looked like part of the trunks around it. The door was real, though, and the hinges were iron. Inside he found a packed dirt floor, a workbench, and an anvil bolted to a stump. Someone had built this place to work metal where no one could see. Maxwell shut the door, dropped the bar across it, and set the hammer on the anvil. From his coat pocket he took out the stone he had picked from a creek bed that morning: a smooth moonstone the size of his fist, milky white with soft orange veins. He had taken it because it felt cold even in sunlight, and because a stone that cold seemed like it might hold something. He pressed the moonstone against the hammer's head and struck. The stone cracked along one vein and a thin light bled out, soaking into the silver until the metal hummed under his palm. The hammer was warm now. It was his. Then something heavy hit the shed wall behind him. The bark-covered planks bowed inward. A second blow split the small window above the door, and through the gap Maxwell saw one wrong eye, close, patient, waiting for him to come out.

The shed wall shook once more, then went still. Maxwell held the warm hammer against his chest and listened. Something heavy dragged along the outside boards, then moved off into the trees. He waited a long count before he lifted the bar and cracked the door. Cold air came in. The big eye was gone. He knew a glancing swing at that hide would only wake its rage, and he did not know where to strike. He needed to learn the animal before he met it again. He stepped out with the hammer ready. Ten paces from the shed he found something small crouched in the pine needles. It was a pup, no bigger than a cat, marked with the same wrong colors as the thing that had hunted him. Pink swirls ran down its back. One eye was green, the other pink. It grinned at him with a mouth full of small sharp teeth. Maxwell froze. The pup wagged its tail and rolled onto its side. He understood then. The adult had a young one, and the young one had wandered close. He crouched. The pup let him touch its belly. Under the bright fur he felt the ribs, and he counted them the way he had counted ribs on a cadaver in his first year. He pressed along the sternum until the pup yipped and jerked. Soft there, between the third and fourth rib on the left. He pressed the throat and felt the pulse jump under thin skin. Soft there too. He turned the pup over and ran a thumb along the base of the skull, where the spine met the bone. The pup went quiet under his hand, trusting. Soft there. He noted each place the way he used to note them in a notebook, only now he wrote them in his head. He let the pup up. It shook itself and trotted a circle around his boots, tail high. Then it lifted its snout and made a thin howl, high and glad, the sound of a child calling a parent. Maxwell stood fast. Somewhere past the pines, something answered. The answer was low and long and much closer than he wanted. He backed toward the shed with the hammer raised. He had three soft spots now: ribs, throat, the notch at the skull. He had a weapon that hummed in his hand. He did not have time. The pup sat in the needles and watched him go, still grinning, while its mother came through the trees to collect it and to finish what the wall had interrupted.