“Figure you’d be better at this by now,” Jo grumbled, her voice rough but not unkind. The edge in her tone held a reluctant warmth, shaped by the fierce affection she carried despite the hardened shell life had forged around her. Raised under a father whose love was a relentless push to survive, she had learned early that mercy was a luxury in this frozen world. That world had been twisted into a harsh tundra the moment the rift tore open in the north—an endless cold that swallowed hope and left only bones and frost behind.

Whatever the world had been before, whatever stories the old survivors clung to like talismans, those days were long dead. They were ghosts in the fog of memory, faint echoes swallowed by the relentless winter. First came the chill—an unforgiving frost that turned the earth brittle and black, dragging the sun itself down into a permanent dusk. From that dark came the monsters. Not just fables but flesh and blood and nightmare—creatures with teeth sharper than steel, with hunger deeper than the void. The rift was a door, and through it poured terrors that no one was ready for.

Werewolves were only one kind of predator among many, but they carried a dread all their own. What could be more terrifying than a beast that could walk unnoticed among the living? Their strength was their deception, their greatest weapon the ability to wear the face of a friend or neighbor. If Jo’s father had lived to see her traveling with one of those monsters, he’d likely have ended both their lives with a silver bullet—mercy in his eyes, maybe, or cold duty.

Jo had nearly done the same when she found you. You were slumped in the snow, a predator wounded—half-shifted and barely clinging to consciousness. She’d been bleeding and frostbitten herself, the wounds of a brutal fight fresh on her skin. The two of you were broken shadows, circling the edge of death, the line between hunter and hunted blurred. With gun raised, she almost ended it all right there, but you didn’t fight. No growl, no lunge—just eyes that held a quiet acceptance, like you had already faced the end and found nothing worth fearing.

Maybe it was the cold that stole the fire from her trigger finger. Maybe it was the strange peace in those still eyes. Whatever it was, she lowered the gun and collapsed a short distance away, close enough to watch, far enough to run. She never expected mercy from a werewolf, certainly not from one as fierce as you—but you spared her life. And in the slow, silent days that followed, as wounds healed and fires burned low against the endless dark, something took root between you. A fragile trust, forged in vulnerability and hardened by shared survival. Where there had been strangers, companions grew. Where there had been fear, something stronger than it bloomed.

You had been traveling north together, cutting through frostbitten wastes toward a rumored stronghold in what was once Vermont. The south had grown dangerous beyond reckoning—monsters multiplied like shadows—and despite Jo’s stubborn protests, you insisted the two of you had to leave it behind. The promise of safety, or at least a chance at it, had driven you forward.

“It still ain’t too late to turn back, you know,” she said, stretching her legs toward the fire’s dying glow. The sharp scent of burning wood mixed with the earthy aroma of the rabbit you’d skewered and turned carefully over the flames. She nudged you with a boot, eyes sharp and serious. “You know out here, strangers can be just as deadly as the beasts we hunt. Ain’t no promise we’ll find welcome up north, either. What if it’s all a lie? What if we go all that way for nothing?” Her voice softened, just a shade. “I can keep us safe where we are. I can keep you safe.”