The Werewolves of Nyxryn

Chapter 4-the human realm

My chest still felt like it was being hammered from the inside when I finally forced my fingers to unclench from the steering wheel. My whole body trembled, legs heavy as lead, but sitting here wasn’t an option. Whatever I hit, it was real — the sound, the force, the way the car shuddered — all of it was too sharp to be a dream.

I swallowed hard and reached for the door handle. My hand shook so badly I almost missed it the first time. The cold air rushed in as I cracked it open, and I swear for a second I almost slammed it shut again.

You can do this, Veyra.

Just look.

Just… look.

The gravel crunched underneath my shoes as I stepped out of my car. The night pressed in on all sides, thick and suffocating, every shadow shaped like something waiting to pounce. My breath fogged in the cold, loud in the silence. I edged forward, heart thundering, scanning the stretch of road.

Nothing.

Just trees, black as ink, stretching high above me. But there was no body. No animal. Not even a blood trail where the light caught.

I walked a little further, the night too quiet, every instinct screaming that I shouldn’t be out here all on my own. My skin prickled with that crawling sensation you get when you know someone’s watching you, even if you can’t see them.

Still nothing.

By the time I turned back toward the car, my lungs ached from holding my breath. Relief should’ve hit me, but instead, unease settled deeper, like the air itself was hiding secrets.

That’s when I saw it.

Not the road.

Not the trees.

My car...

I stopped dead in my tracks.

The front looked like it had been chewed up by a monster. The hood was crumpled inward, one headlight completely shattered, the bumper hanging low enough to scrape the ground. It looked like I’d plowed into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour, not clipped some animal on a back road. My throat tightened. The exhaustion I’d been carrying all day welled up with the sight of it, and suddenly it was too much. I pressed a hand to my mouth, blinking hard against the tears burning my eyes.

No. No, no, no.

There was no way I could afford this. Not even close. My paychecks barely stretched as it was — rent, food, bills, shoes. This car was our lifeline, the only way I could got to work, the only way I could keep things afloat. And now it sat there mangled, like some cruel joke the universe had decided to play on me.

I leaned against the driver’s side door, shaking, trying not to sob. Crying wouldn’t fix the car. Crying wouldn’t fix anything. But God, right then, I wanted to. Because whatever I had hit tonight, whatever had torn up the front of my car like that, it wasn’t lying in the road. It wasn’t anywhere. And the not-knowing gnawed at me almost as much as the ruined metal in front of me.

The sensible thing—what any sane person would do—was to call for help. Tow truck, insurance, somebody with a clipboard and a kind face to tell me how this was all going to work out. The honest thing was: I didn’t have enough sense to call anybody who would charge money I didn’t possess. I didn’t have insurance that covered weird things that sprint across roads and then disappear like bad dreams. I had rent and grocery lists and two faces that would be disappointed if I told them I’d wasted our lifeline on something inexplicable. So I did what I always did. I made a plan that involved denial and a lot of pretending.

I climbed back in the car. I took a deep breath and turned the key. The engine coughed, coughed again, and then settled into a reluctant, angry rumble. One headlight fought to put out half a bulb’s worth of light like it was trying to wink at me. The bumper scraped the asphalt when I pulled away. Every inch of the car felt wrong, as if I were driving a beast with a broken leg.

I kept glancing over my shoulder as I reversed onto the road, just to make sure whatever had fled into the trees wasn’t sneaking up behind me to come and get his revenge. Traffic was nonexistent; the road felt like a stage lit just for me and my wreck. I drove slow—agonizingly slow—half on autopilot, half on instinct. The damaged headlight threw one lopsided beam that made the trees on the side of the road resemble giant, silent people leaning toward me, judging me for crashing something I couldn’t even describe. Every time another shadow moved, my pulse jumped. My knuckles were white where they gripped the wheel.

I pulled the radio off after ten minutes of the static-prone station, trying to be helpful, and switched to nothing. The silence was worse at first—louder in its own way—but it let me listen to the world, in case the world decided to tell me what the hell I had hit. I listened to the tires whisper over seams in the road, to the faint rustle of animals far off, to the distant hum of an industrial light. Mostly, though, I listened to my own breathing, shallow and ragged.

And then, undeniably, I felt it again: the sensation of eyes on me. Not the polite eyes of passing cars—there were none—but something that settled on the small of my back and never left. It was a feeling like the skin of the night had pressed up against the glass. The streetlights couldn’t promise anything useful; their halos fuzzed in the distance. I tried to pinpoint the feeling, to tell myself it was tiredness or the adrenaline still knotting my gut.

When I turned down our street, the car protested, a grinding, low sound that vibrated through my bones. The headlight fogged with the effort, throwing a watery beam that made the potholes look like craters. I parked as close to the curb as I could manage and turned off the engine. The silence slammed into me like a physical thing. For a moment, I just sat, forehead resting against the wheel, the world drifting slowly and unimportant at the edges.

I climbed out and, even before I reached the back of the car, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to hide what I’d done. The bumper scraped something—a small rock or the curb—and made a sound like a crow cawing in my ears. The neighborhood was asleep; the only moving thing was the dull glow from one upstairs window where a neighbor probably had a cat and an earnest late-night show.

The apartment smelled like reheated dinner and detergent. Mom was still gone, so the couch looked like a crime scene that had been abandoned mid-argument. Malrik was at the kitchen table, head bent over a textbook like the world could be untangled with algebra. Elira was playing with her phone. When they looked up, their faces were the ordinary miracles that kept me glued to this life.

“Hey,” Malrik said without looking up.

“You OK?”

I forced a laugh and slid my car keys onto the counter, keeping the story small.

“Yeah. Just… had a little trouble on the way back. Ran into something.” The sentence felt cheap and brittle, not enough to explain the dented hood or the hollow in my stomach. Elira bounded over without being asked, eyes curious and unafraid.

“Did you get a monster?” she asked, hopeful and literal in a way that made my chest ache.

“No monsters,” I said, leaning in to give her a hug.

“Just a very rude squirrel.” I didn’t like lying, but this was the kind of lie that kept small people sleeping soundly at night. Malrik’s eyes studied me, then flicked toward the window as if he too had felt something wrong about the world, something he wasn’t ready to name just yet.

I washed my hands in the sink until the water ran cold and my fingers went pruny. I counted out what I had in my wallet again—thirty-eight dollars, if I didn’t count the crumpled five Malrik had slipped me earlier for safekeeping. Not nearly enough. Not even close. Malrik slid his chair back, stood, and for the first time tonight, his hesitation looked like worry instead of attitude.

“I can go check the car,” he offered. He kept his voice level, but his fingers twitched at his sides like he wanted to do something big and useful.

“No,” I said too quickly.

“It’s fine. I’ll… I’ll deal with it in the morning.” The words were a promise and a lie rolled into one. He didn’t push. Instead, he came over and set his hand on my shoulder, a quiet, steadying weight.

“You sure?”

I nodded, but the movement felt flimsy.

“Yeah. Go to bed, you two. Mom’s still not back, but you two should have gone to bed hours ago. I don’t care that it’s the weekend.” The sentence felt both protective and cowardly. I watched them walk down the hall, feet making thin, ordinary sounds. When their bedroom door closed, the house breathed in the hush of children asleep.

I went to the window and looked out at my car under the streetlight. The headlight cast a pale, wounded eye across the pavement. For a long time, I just stood there, feeling small and entirely unprepared for how to fix any of it. The night outside seemed to hold its breath, the trees like a gallery of dark shapes that had once, for a moment, been something alive and inexplicable. I thought of the thing that had run across the road and disappeared, of my dented hood and the impossible absence of a body.

I had to be up in a couple of hours. I had to be at the grocery store by noon, back at the coffee shop by evening. I had to be everything my brother and sister needed. The list was mechanical, necessary, inevitable. Somewhere between that list and the rustle at the window, between the dent in my car and the money I didn’t have, there was a small, stubborn ember that refused to go out. It wasn’t bravery. It wasn’t hope so much as a kind of worn-out determination—a promise to keep breathing until the morning told me otherwise.