The first drag always tasted like betrayal.
The cigarette hissed as I drew in a breath, its ember flaring like a dying star. Smoke seared my throat, a scalding thread unraveling down to my lungs. I welcomed the burn, the way it scraped raw edges into numbness. The cold had teeth tonight, gnawing through the thin fabric of my coat, but the smoke coiled warm in my chest before I exhaled, watching it twist into phantom shapes against the bruised sky. Sundra's winter was a slow poison, seeping into brick and bone. By midnight, frost would lace the windows. By dawn, the gutters would bleed icicles.
I shifted in my place, readjusting my stance, almost tired of waiting, but I had to. I had a family to feed, after all. It could take me all night this way though, the only two rabbits I had managed to kill were both useless. Worse than useless. Finding anything that the rattle hadn't infected was a miracle these days. I couldn't take the risk to end up like Micah's family who had, in their starvation, eaten an infected deer. They claimed that the infection had just begun and the legs were perfectly fine to feast upon. Only for them all to be cremated in just three days. A family of five, dead, just like that.
Here in Sundra, so close to the border, the rattle was the worst. Despite all the precautions, there was still some way the disease crawled into the skin. No matter how many garlic wreaths we hung or silver charms we buried at our thresholds, the sickness slithered in. Through cracks in the mortar. Through a neighbor's careless cough. Through the single drop of tainted blood on a butcher's blade.
My fingers brushed the lone coin in my pocket—a relic from last month's earnings training snot-nosed brats at Lorraine's archery school. Most went to Flynn's tuition, the rest patching our ancient crumbling house's latest tantrum. Just yesterday, the east wall had spat out its mortar like rotten teeth. I half hoped the roof would finish the job of killing me before the rattle did. Crushed bones seemed quicker than liquefying lungs.
A sharp and sudden rustle snapped through the underbrush and the forest held its breath. So did I. My fingers found the bowstring before my mind caught up, arrow nocked and drawn in the brittle silence. Moonlight carved shadows into shapes that lied. Every stump became a crouching beast, every branch a claw. But this movement was real. It was alive.
I tracked the sound, muscles coiled. A flicker of gray darted between skeletal ferns. Too fast for a fox. Too small for a deer. My pulse thrummed against the bow's grip. Not infected, not infected, please—
The arrow sang.
For a heartbeat, the world hung suspended. Then, almost as quickly, came the thud I was waiting for.
I approached like a trespasser, breath shallow and knife already in hand. The creature lay sprawled in the dirt, arrow clean through its neck. No time for suffering. My blade hovered, ready to slit the throat if it spasmed, if its eyes clouded black, if the telltale rattle began beneath its ribs.
But the fur was soft. Unbroken. No lesions. No veins spiderwebbing with rot. Just a hare, plump and ordinary, its eyes still glassy but clear as creek water. Its paws were clean. No tremor in the limbs. No hum of disease beneath the skin.
A laugh escaped me, brittle as autumn leaves. Safe. Flynn would eat tonight. Properly. No broth made from boiled bark and guilt. I crouched, cradling the hare's still-warm body into my arms and sniffing it once, for one last check. The infected smelt the ugliest, like rotten everything, but this once, the flesh smelt fresh and warm and nice.
"Thank you," I whispered—to the forest, to the moon, to whatever cruel god hadn't yet cursed this scrap of mercy. My brother's face flickered in my mind, his too-sharp cheeks, the way he'd pretend not to stare at the pot while I stirred nothing into nothing. This time, I'd sear the meat crisp. Salt it with the last grains from the jar. Let him lick grease from his fingers and believe, for one night, that the world wasn't crumbling.
But as I slipped the hare into my satchel, I paused. My hands trembled. What if I missed a sign? The rattle was patient. It hid. It chewed through marrow while you slept.
I shook my head, teeth gritted. No. The kill was clean. The forest knew it too—crickets resumed their song, wind combing through pines. I stood, knees popping, and turned toward home.
The hare's body swayed against my hip as I hurried through Sundra's skeletal streets. Market stalls lay abandoned, their wooden ribs stripped bare. Only the butcher lingered, scrubbing dark stains from his block. His eyes flicked to my satchel—hunger or suspicion?—but I ducked my head and walked faster.
A cluster of women whispered by the well, their voices thorned with fear.
"—dragged him through the square, half his face already black—"
"—should've known when his dog went missing. The suckers always take the animals first—"
I clenched my jaw. Superstition. The rattle didn't need dogs to spread, it slithered through blood, through the suckers' cursed whispers carried on the night wind. They'd infected our lands with this plague, their pale lords laughing from across the border as we burned our own. The vampires, they called themselves but we called them suckers. And the Wolves—our only blade against them—were too few, too bound to their rituals. They only took warriors who could bond with the volanema wolves, those ghost-eyed beasts that hunted suckers by scent. Without that bond, you were just cannon fodder for the regular army.
Flynn's voice pulled me from the thoughts. "Iris!"
He stood on the leaning platform of TheStaggering Hart, Kisa at his side, Lorraine's kid. Her face was pinched, fingers worrying the wolf-tooth pendant at her throat—a crude carving, but everyone wore them these days. Tokens to ward off the rattle. As if trinkets could stop a sucker's curse.
I climbed the steps, the crowd below buzzing like flies on rot. "What's happening?"
"Another execution," Kisa said. Her gaze slid to the far end of the square, where two guards dragged a thrashing figure toward the charred pole. "They caught him trying to flee the quarantine house."
The raw and guttural screams of the man hit me first— familiar. Then the crowd shifted, and I saw his face.
"Viktor?" The name escaped like a flinch. He lived two streets over, closer to Kisa's, taught Flynn how to mend fishing nets after his sons died in the first border skirmish. Now his skin was marble cracked with black veins, eyes weeping oily tears. The rattle trembled in his chest, a sound like bones in a tin can.
Flynn stiffened. "Don't look."
Too late. Viktor's head snapped toward us, jaws unhinging with a wet pop. The crowd recoiled. A guard drove a boot into his ribs, and something cracked.
"They'll say he hid it," Kisa muttered. "But the suckers' curses don't let you hide. They want us to see. To fear."
She was right. The suckers weaponized despair. The rattle's final stage turned victims into feral, twitching things—puppets for the vampire lords to scout our weaknesses. The infected turned into mindless beasts, the lowest in the hierarchy of the suckers. And the Wolves… The Wolves were supposed to stop it. To hunt the suckers in the dark where the army couldn't go. But they were shadows, rumors, their bonds with the volanema wolves as rare as untainted flesh.
The torch touched Viktor's feet. His howl curdled the air.
I shoved Flynn toward the stairs. "Go home. Now."
He resisted, nostrils flaring. At seventeen, he was all sharp edges and smoldering defiance, his wild curls haloing a face that still hadn't shed all its boyish softness.
Sometimes, looking at him, I could see exactly how different I was from the rest of our family.
Both my brothers had inherited Mother's deep auburn curls and the piercing blue of her eyes. And then there was me—pale as frost, with hair so light it bordered on platinum, and eyes that couldn't seem to decide on a color, shifting somewhere between green and honey.
Mother used to say I got them from my father. But I wouldn't know. I've never seen him.
Where I was grounded, always weighing logic before impulse, Flynn had fire in his veins. Always chasing the next chance to prove he wasn't the boy who still kept a lantern glowing by his bedside.
"I'm not a child," he snapped, fists clenched at his sides. "I can fight—"
"You can't." I gripped his arm, my voice low. "Not unless the Wolves choose you. And they won't. They don't." The unspoken truth hung between us: Without the bond, he'd be just another body thrown at the border. Besides, however sporadically the bonding trials occurred, the requirements were clear. You had to have a letter of referral or a proof of being worthy, some gallantry or bravery award, or have military experience of at least two years and you had to be above twenty to enlist and Flynn would only turn eighteen in a fortnight.
Kisa yanked him down the steps. "Your sister's right. Come on."
We didn't speak as we fled the square, Viktor's screams chasing us like a dirge. The hare in my satchel felt obscene now, a mockery of the feast I'd imagined. I'd salt the meat. Try and preserve it. Pray it lasted the week.
As we turned into our street, the horn shattered the dusk, the one that made all our hearts run erratic, three jagged blasts, and a shuddering wail.
Kisa froze. "The western woods."
Suckers in the woods.