Chapter 3. The Clearing

Beyond the gates the settlement was nothing like I had imagined.

I had expected something grim — earth dugouts, open fires, animal skins for doors, mud and blood. Something that matched the forest, the night, and the man with the glowing eyes. Instead, what opened before me was neat, almost idyllic.

Small houses with tiled roofs were scattered across the clearing in no obvious order, yet somehow correctly, leaving space between them for lawns, wooden benches, even flower beds. I didn’t notice the flowers at once — at first they melted into the dark — but then the moonlight picked out pale foxgloves, the yellow heads of low-growing plants, the dark green of clipped shrubs. In some of the windows a warm yellow light burned, almost cosy. Somewhere a dog barked. Somewhere a door slammed, and I caught a scrap of a woman’s laughter.

I walked and could not believe my eyes.

In this place, deep in a forest that no proper road reached, where there was almost certainly no mobile signal, where even the air felt thicker and older, people lived. No — not people. Werewolves. But they lived like people: in houses, with flowers in the beds, with domestic animals and the sound of children. I tried to picture them in daylight — women baking bread, men mending fences, children kicking a ball. I couldn’t. There was too much darkness, too many shadows, too many questions I had no answers for.

We did not go deep into the settlement. The man ahead of me kept to the central track and did not turn off. I followed, trying to walk quietly. I failed. My sandals crunched on the gravel; every few steps I trod on a dry branch, and the sounds seemed deafening in the silence.

No one came out to meet us. No one looked from the windows. No one asked who I was or why I had come.

That unsettled me more than hostility would have. It was as if this happened every night, and no one cared.

I tried not to stare, but curiosity was stronger than fear. I studied the houses — small, solid, with simple wooden frames around the windows, with chimneys from which thin threads of smoke still rose in places. Outside one house a pair of large, mud-caked wellingtons stood on the step. Outside another a child’s bicycle leaned against the wall, one wheel bent, the paint peeling. A third house stood out — larger, more solid, with a porch supported by plain posts and a front garden where something was still flowering even in the night. Whose house was that? The Alpha’s? Or simply the most important in the pack?

The man in front never looked back, but I felt he knew I was looking. And that he did not care.

On the way we passed two wolves. They sat at the entrance to one of the houses — large, grey, heavy-headed, their yellow eyes glowing in the dark. My heart skipped a beat, but they did not even stand. They watched us pass, then turned their heads away.

Then a girl. Young, dark braid over one shoulder, long skirt, plain light jumper. She was carrying a large metal basin from which steam rose. She saw us, stopped for a second, glanced from the man to me — and immediately looked away, quickening her step. Not a word. Not a question. It seemed to me she was afraid. Or not afraid. Simply unwilling to look at something that was not her concern.

I wondered again where he was taking me.

And then the space around us opened.

The clearing appeared suddenly, as if the trees had deliberately parted to let us in and closed again behind our backs, cutting off the way back. It was round, covered in short, trampled grass, and ringed on every side by ancient pines so old that a grown man could not have spanned their trunks with his arms. Branches laced high overhead, hiding the sky, yet moonlight still filtered through — pale, scattered, almost ghostly.

In the centre of the clearing torches burned. Driven straight into the earth, they threw leaping, sinister shadows that moved when I blinked and froze when I stared at them. The flame was yellow, almost orange, and the air above it shimmered.

I stopped at the edge of the clearing.

Because there, in that uncertain, dancing light, I saw him.

At first I did not understand that it was him.

At the foot of a thick pine, beside a solitary post driven into the ground, a man sat on the earth. He was naked — completely, down to the last scrap of cloth — and in the yellow torchlight his body looked unnaturally pale, almost luminous. He sat with his back against the trunk, head bowed on his chest, arms hanging loosely at his sides.

Around his neck was a collar. Wide, dark leather, the kind put on large, dangerous dogs so they cannot break free. From the collar a chain ran — heavy, with large links — fastened to an iron stake driven deep into the ground. The chain was not long. Three metres, perhaps four. He could take a few steps and no more.