Maymont park was less a park and more a rich person's estate that had been turned into a park as some sort of vanity project. On several acres of land, most of it was open fields, with a manor, nature center, barn area, and a few themed gardens and a rescued animals section. Overall, none of it felt particularly real these days as either a park or estate, but it made for a good place to walk around for a few hours to clear your head.

  Misha and I had been here for almost an hour now, and slowly made our way through the various sections. With a leisurely pace and often stopping to rest for a bit and look out over the various sights, neither of us wanted to move too fast. In the late August morning, things were still burning hot and it was almost oppressive in my leather jacket, even with a cover of clouds slowly coming over the area.

  We’d walk through the barn section for a long time, and even gotten a cup of feed to give some of the animals as I got tired of them complaining. Once we’d finished there we’d gone through the rescued birds and watched the bear exhibit for a while, where I needed to hear them complain about the weather. Not much for having been there an hour, but we’d spent most of that time talking about nothing in particular as Misha gossiped about other covenant members and stories of The Lady’s former lovers.

  At the moment, we’d ended up getting a couple bowls of ice cream from a small trailor, and sat on a bench in the Japanese gardens for a long time.

  The Japanese gardens neither felt like a garden nor authentically Japanese, and as Misha told it was a 1920s rich white person's idea of a Japanese garden. There were structures and designs that looked like Japanese ones, and a large koi pond we sat next to, but it all felt very artificial. The smells were still of the city and any other part of the park, the sounds of rushing water from an artificial waterfall felt wrong, and the people walking through barely cared for their surroundings. In the light of day I could barely see any ghosts, except a few shades that occasionally appeared in shadows, and the koi were thankfully inaudible through the water.

  Overall, it was about as quiet and peaceful as I possibly could have hoped to receive.

  “So, Elizabeth's meeting you here?” I asked through a mouthful of rocky road, poking at the cheap tasting ice cream with my spoon.

  “Nature center,” the man corrected, tapping his backpack and already half through his own ice cream, “you just looked like you could use some time to clear your head, beautiful. Used to bring…well, someone I knew here all the time, and I consider it something of a comfort to just come and sit.”

  “Yeah, I needed something like this,” I admitted, furrowing my brow at the thought. I was wasting time eating fucking ice cream, I had fourteen days to figure out what the fuck was going on with that note and the locket. I still didn’t even know if it was a threat, or some sort of badly delivered message of comfort, as easy as it would have been to check.

  “I’m always here if you need to talk,” the man offered, giving a small smile, “I know you haven’t made a lot of friends yet. I don’t want you to feel like you don’t have anyone to talk to about anything.”

  “I have Lord,” I countered before realizing how that fucking sounded.

  Misha chuckled at what he assumed was a joke at least, sounding genuinely amused as he shook his head and told me, “you can’t just talk to the cat, sometimes you need some human contact.”

  He wasn’t wrong, and it did genuinely sound nice to get to talk to people some more than I did. Vergil was nice, but he was busy a lot and it always felt weird hanging out around him for more than a day or so every few weeks. I vaguely knew Elizabeth, but it was pretty much exclusively through interactions she had with Misha. Other than that, I just met up with The Lady once every few months and occasionally had run-ins with members of the covenant or dealt with small talk during cleaning days.

  “Maybe I need to get out more,” I admitted, sighing at the idea, “I…maybe I’ll do something after my birthday. I wouldn’t mind going somewhere or something, but might be a little weird.”

  “Most people do stuff for their birthday,” the man pointed out, giving a small smile to the idea.

  “My birthday’s complicated this year,” I half-lied, even as I wasn’t sure how much was the truth. The fourteen days note lined up with my birthday as the final day, which felt like it wasn’t a coincidence but who knew what it meant. Was Hunter really fucking bad at announcing he was giving me a present then? Even that aside though, my last birthday had…well, it’d created more than a few complicated feelings. “I’ll think about it, but probably not much point. It’s not like there’d be much in the way to celebrate.”

  “I think we could come up with something,” Misha reassured me, half-missing my problem, “just you and me if it comes down to it: get drunk out on the town, get in a few fights, and see how much trouble we can cause before The Lady calls us complaining. I’ve been to more than one birthday that went along that way, long as it doesn’t end with someone dying. My old mentor, Alfred, the day after my twenty-first birthday he took me to this white supremacist bar and helped me start a fight — he always said you don’t need to feel bad about breaking noses when you do it there.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, not sure if I was lying or not. “Honestly, I just wish I could at least make a few friends. I feel like everyone in the covenant either hates me or is uncomfortable talking to me.”

  Misha nodded, and we sat in silence for a long time as he sat there staring at the koi pond in front of us. It wasn’t until a little later he broke the silence and admitted to me, “if it makes you feel any better a lot of the people in the covenant don’t like me either these days. You at least have a clean enough slate I think you could make some pretty good friends.”

  “I was starting to pick up on it,” I admitted, not sure what else to say, “what, were you a Purist too?”

  “God, no,” the man snapped in disgust, his face twisted in anger. I jumped slightly at the passion, and he looked over to me with a softening gaze as he continued, “sorry, really bad experiences with them. Mostly it’s just…they didn’t approve of how I grieved for Annabelle when she died.”

  “Is that what the argument was about this morning?”

  “Sort of,” he drew out, rubbing the back of his head, “Annabelle, she…she died almost five years ago now. Knives and I, we were both dating her at the same time for a few years there beforehand. We’ve kept a lot of her stuff still in her room, and I recommended we donate it to charity, since it’s what Annabelle would have wanted. She had so many clothes, was her vice, but every time her closet got full she donated a bunch outfits to somewhere. Knives wants to keep everything in her old room, like it’s doing anyone any good that way.”

  I nodded, furrowing my brow at the thought as I took it in and tried to think it over. Honestly, as much as Misha was right it probably would have done some good, I could get where Knives was coming from. I still had too much of Hunter still in my possession, and we’d broken up in our own way.

  “And that’s why everyone’s weird about you?” I asked, not getting that part of the problem though. “Knives made it sound like you’d end up hurting me or something.”

  “Sadly not everything,” he admitted, giving me a sad smile as he leaned forward in his seat. “When Annabelle died I…I was having trouble being alone for a while there. I ended up taking a lot of women back to the covenant house and not really having many repeat visits. One of my old pack mates I slept with got the wrong idea about everything, I maybe gave her the wrong impression or she just assumed it was more even with how I was acting. I barely remember anything from those first few months, I was drunk for half of them, but she said I led her on and wasn’t interested as I acted. A lot of people see me like some kind of womanizer, and I assume they think I’m just trying to get in your pants.”

  “If you are, I’d assume you’d want some better material than calling me beautiful,” I chuckled softly, smiling sadly at the explanation. That honestly made a lot of sense, and there was only a small part of me that had some doubt as I asked, “you’re not trying to get in my pants are you?”

  “Well let’s see,” the man exaggeratedly muttered with a click of his tongue, “I’m nearly twice your age, even if I don’t look like it. I’m technically your mentor, and I’m in charge of keeping you out of trouble. I’m the only werewolf you really get to talk to regularly. It’d be more than a little irresponsible for me to push for anything like that on my end…also we’re certainly different sizes, I could never work those jeans like you do.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” I admitted for him alone with a forced chuckle, shaking my head as I settled back and ate my ice cream.

  I didn’t see the issue with any of what he’d said, ironically, though my time in the Purists was probably affecting that more than anything. None of the issues he’d listed were really things the Purists thought much about or I’d experienced as a problem. Hunter had been as much my mentor as my actual one, Chaser, and no one had questioned us being set up as mates. Hell, he’d even been older than me, only two and a half years but still decent sized for our age, and I knew age gaps of twenty or more weren’t uncommon among werewolves.

  Honestly, I probably needed to consider him giving him a fucking chance if I didn’t want to die alone.

  No one really liked me among the werewolves, and I doubted anything would be changing in the near future. Vergil and his crowd seemed to be halfway okay with me, but I wasn’t sure any of them were supernatural or if I could actually stand them. I probably would have fucked The Lady if she asked, just on morbid curiosity, though that probably would have had a good chance of killing me.

  Well, it was unlikely to kill me, but no matter what it was a risk to just think about it.

  I was still considering my terrible list of options when Misha’s phone rang, and he answered it with a small sigh. The man made a few replies, and I did my best to zone him out to try and give at least a little privacy. Instead I focused on the koi pond in front of us, wondering how they would taste if I plucked one from the water and bit into it.

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  Fish always tasted more inconsistent when it was raw, with each type having its own flavor and consistency. Some fish tasted good straight from the water, others would be sour or have a strange bitterness to them. It made sense, I’d never been a huge fan of most fish when I was a half-one, I probably was just having a similar reaction to that. Koi looked good though, and a part of me thought they’d taste sweet like candy.

  I was actively resisting the urge to swipe one, despite the busy park, when Misha finally spoke up and declared, “alright, we need to meet her in the nature center.”

  I nodded, and we rose to our feet as we started along the trails and roads through the park and toward the center. A simple walk, Misha kept a hand on his backpack the whole way we walked.

  A short while later, we reached the nature center, an in door area where Misha paid for two tickets to walk through while I felt an old sense of nostalgia for everything. It’d been years since I’d been here, not since my dad would bring me on occasion so we could walk around the park and look at the various animals and fish.

  I’d forgotten how good it felt to actually be looking forward to something small like that.

  I was barely able to hide my smile as we walked into the area, slowly walking through as we looked at various local animals. Snakes, fish, turtles, even bats and the like in various tanks and containers throughout. Alongside them were various displays and charts explaining the watershed, ecological impact of animals, and all of those things that affected the region.

  I’d loved it all as a kid, and honestly up until the night I’d become a werewolf I’d thought it’d be a career to pursue. Become a marine biologist, work in the Chesapeake Bay of Virginia and practically live on a boat or deep in the water. I wanted to handle all the animals I could, learn everything I could about them, and wanted to make the world a better place for them.

  Even now just being in the center made me feel like a kid again, and my ability to properly speak with the animals made me have that feeling even stronger than before. Maybe I could have somehow talked The Lady into letting me go to college for that sort of thing. I was sure she could have had some use for someone in that field, and it’d give me something more to do.

  No.

  That wasn’t worth it.

  That was a dream for normal people, not me, not someone who wasn’t even sure what they fucking were. I just needed to focus on not seeming like a complete monster first, and then I could think about playing with fucking dolphins or whatever.

  I sighed, and stepped away from a copperhead display and walked to join Misha in the otter room. Once my favorite room, two of the walls were sheer glass that looked out into five feet of water and an otter play area. The mustelids spent almost all day laying about the stone and swimming around and against the glass, even now doing so with a few wisps of ghost otters joining their living friends. It was beautiful, and I’d once spent hours just sitting on one of the benches watching them with my dad while I worked on homework.

  It almost made me tear up, and I barely held myself together as I sat on the bench next to Misha and looked up to them. The glass was too thick and tightly sealed for me to properly hear them, but I could tell the otters were happy and that was beautiful. Misha seemed to not care, and sat with his backpack at his feet while playing on his phone.

  We sat there for a while, until eventually a woman sat next to us and sat a large thermos on the ground next to Misha’s backpack, which had a rune meaning sleep painted on. She was tall and older, almost looking skeletally thin with her black hair freely around her waist. Her long black dress was half made of lace, and she wore a wide brimmed sun hat of a matching color. She smelled strange, like roses and vanilla, with no honest human scent underneath, a fact I’d still not grown used to.

  “Alright, potion’s in the thermos, it’ll last you several months,” Elizabeth chirped softly in a much too thick southern accent to be real, smiling as she watched the otters, “you have the components?”

  “Silver shavings harvested under a full moon,” Misha confirmed with a nod, giving her a small glance. “This’ll help with the nightmares?”

  “Mix a spoon in with a drink thirty minutes before bed,” Elizabeth confirmed, giving us a comforting smile. “You’ll…sleep if you can get there yourself, and it’ll be restful, but keep in mind it’ll be dreamless. I hear it takes a while to get used to.”

  “That’s all I need,” Misha admitted, smiling slightly at the thought, “I haven’t been sleeping well lately, memories are coming back a lot more.”

  “They tend to do that,” the witch agreed, clicking her tongue at the thought, before looking past the man to me, “what about you, wild child? Do you need some potions or spells for anything?”

  “Not really,” I admitted, rubbing the back of my head awkwardly. I barely knew the witch, and while I knew her services were used by a lot of people I wasn’t fully familiar with what she had to offer. “I don’t even know what I’d ask for, I’m still not a hundred percent sure what I’m doing.”

  “Ah, take your time,” the witch chuckled, “I can do anything. Make you look better, heal silver wounds, stop you getting pregnant for a while, help you want to take advantage of that fact, even change your hair color. First one’s always on the house, I always like to make sure people know I’m not some illusionist posing as a proper witch.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I admitted, even as Misha picked the thermos off the ground and rose to his feet.

  “I’m going to get some air, meet up with me outside when you’re ready to go,” the man muttered, walking out of the nearby exit with a suddenly annoyed look.

  I nodded, and went back to watching the otters even as I knew I needed to get up to leave soon. It was wrong to leave Misha waiting, even if I probably could have sat there for a long while more just enjoying the sight in front of me. Even Elizabeth seemed to like watching them as she slid closer next to me and rested her chin in her hands.

  After a few minutes, I got my answer as to why, as she asked me, “who taught you to read runes? I saw how you looked at the thermos.”

  A shiver ran down my spine at the question and I looked down for a moment. It was one of the things I’d learned in the Purists, and not sure how else to answer I admitted that, “I learned it in the Purists. My first mentor was trained in Purist theurgy, I just learned the known runes important to the Wolf Gods and how they worked.”

  “Explains why I couldn’t pick up the scent of a witch on you,” the witch agreed with a small nod, “different principles, you’re doing warlock shit. You don’t actually know anything proper or logical about magic do you?”

  “Silver Moon, Creeping Shadow, Endless Sleep,” I listed, furrowing my brow as I tried to picture the runes for each, “I don’t have a working relationship like some people do, I could basically only get small favors if I wasn’t making a good show of it.”

  “You can’t do it anymore?” the witch inquired, seeming overly curious by the thought.

  I hesitated to answer, looking down at the ground as I admitted, “I don’t know. I haven’t tried since I left the Purists. I’ve made some prayers and offerings, but…worried about tempting them. I abandoned most of their ways, they’d have no reason to answer and if they still did…it’s just something I’m holding off. Besides, no one would trust me if I was any more Purist than they think I am now, and the last thing I need is them knowing I follow those gods.”

  “Interesting,” Elizabeth admitted, giving a small smirk as she rose to her feet, throwing Misha’s backpack over her shoulder. “Like I said, little wolf, let me know if you ever need any help. I’d be willing to trade knowledge for services with what you know, no one I know has practiced theurgy with the Wolf Gods in some time, and the few I’ve known refuse to give me that knowledge.”

  I nodded, and watched as the woman left before rising to my own feet and leaving through the exit. Misha was just outside, leaning hard on a stone railing overlooking the park and seeming frustrated about something. The man tapped a finger against the railing in a rhythmic pace as he seemed ready to throw up about something I knew he wasn’t going to tell anyone without prodding.

  He was the only one who I could trust, as little as I was showing that off, but I also had a feeling I was the only one he could.

  Misha didn’t even seem to notice me until I was right next to him and I asked, “so, you’ve been having nightmares?”

  “On and off for a while,” Misha admitted, rubbing his eyes a moment as though the reminder made him more tired, “they used to be constant, then Annabelle helped some, then she died, and…well, it got pretty rough, but it’s picked up again the last year.”

  “Need to talk about it?” I asked hesitantly. Maybe this was my chance, we could bond over this, and I could trust him just enough to get his opinion on what the fuck was going on with the package.

  “No,” he said, his tone final as he pushed away from the railing, “just…this job, Purists. They’ve taken a lot from me over the years, and the less I have to deal with them the better..”

  “You gave me a chance though,” I said hopefully, even if I didn’t need to as I felt a knot forming in my chest. He hated Purists, he gave me a chance, what did it mean?

  “You’re not like the rest of them,” Misha answered, forcing me to hide the pain that hit me at the thought.

  I wasn’t different, I fucking knew that. Fuck, some of the other Purists had used to worry about me going too far or about how I acted. I…

  I was alone on this.

  No, not alone.

  There was one person I could still count on, and as we began to walk back to the truck I hung back just far enough to slip my hand in my pocket. My fingers ran along the locket, feeling the face with my thumb pad, knowing the surface well, and then crept to the bracelet there.

  Slow enough Misha didn’t notice I pulled my mate’s bracelet from my pocket and clipped it onto my left wrist. With the click of the clasp a new feeling crept through my body, my mind returning to a feeling it hadn’t had in almost a year. My thoughts remained and I was still myself, but a distant noise rang on the edge of my mind. Hunter’s thoughts were chaotic, feral, and yet comforting despite it all, and even if I couldn’t completely hear them currently I had a sense of what was happening.

  He was sad, and yet that was buried deep under an urge to hunt, to kill, to feel blood on his teeth. Those thoughts only lasted a few seconds, before they turned to curiosity, intrigue, and a loving comfort. His thoughts like a pet dog excited for its owner coming home, wrapping around me in warm comfort so I too could pull his mind close, and the wolf desired to act the same. He’d noticed me, and a single thought rang out loudly as he focused on me, Bloodhound?

  Hunter, I responded, my mind straining as I tried to remember how hard I had to think the words. Briefly starting, it’s actually Mary now, before deciding to not drag things out, I got a package, was that from you?

  I wouldn’t have even known how to reach you, my blood-stained huntress, the man responded, immediately sensing the bit of concern that came alongside that, what can I do?”

  I need your help. Can you meet me tonight?

  Always, just tell me where to go, the man responded, luckily not sounding angry about how I’d left him.

  The Diner, I answered, even as I climbed into Misha’s truck and pretended nothing was going on. The pet name had sounded so sweet after a year, and so I responded with similar tenderness, Tonight at nine, Moon of my Night?

  I’ll be there, Hunter agreed, even as I lightly gripped the bracelet on my hand. I was about to leave it on, welcoming the comfort I had long ago forgotten, before he asked me, how’re you doing, Bloodhound?

  The bracelet came undone with a click, and subtly as I could I slipped it back into my pocket alongside the platinum locket there. The presence faded away, and I was back to being alone in my own mind, no Hunter and no distant feeling of admiration.

  I’d consider leaving it on later, for now I couldn’t bring myself to explain all I wanted to say. Not even allowed to rest, I was still racking my brain around what was said when I finally took my phone out for the first time in a few hours, surprised to find a text waiting for me. An unknown number, it was a simple text, just three words with no sign it even cared who had sent it.

  Remember your sin.