The Copper Kettle was everything a Lake District café should have been: wooden floors worn smooth by decades of walking, walls the colour of dark honey, a counter running the full length of the right side with glass display cases showing cakes and sandwiches and the kind of savoury pastries that had been warmed just long enough to stop being cold without ever becoming properly hot. Rain ran down the windows in uneven sheets. The heating was on too high, or the outside temperature was too low, and the result was a warmth that pressed against my skin like a hand.
I had been changed into clothes that were not mine: a dark green jumper that Mateo had produced from somewhere in the back of the car, and jeans that were slightly too long in the leg, and a coat that smelled of woodsmoke and something I was beginning to associate with the wolves — that warm animal scent, layered now with the particular variation that belonged to whoever owned these clothes. They weren't Rafa's. They fit me well enough.
Damon had gone outside to make a phone call. Mateo was at the counter ordering something, his body language loose and familiar, the posture of someone who came here often and was expected. Mrs. Fairweather — the woman who ran the Copper Kettle — took his order with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had been doing this for decades and was not remotely interested in surprises.
There were perhaps eight other people in the café. A couple near the door, sharing a pot of tea and a slice of lemon drizzle cake. An elderly man with a walking stick and a tabloid newspaper, making no pretense of reading it. Two women with wet hair and running shoes who were talking about the weather with the particular intensity of people for whom bad weather was a shared burden. A man in a suit with a briefcase, eating a sandwich alone, checking his phone between bites.
Each of them had blood moving through their bodies. Each of them was warm, alive, metabolising, bleeding. My eyes kept finding the pulse points without my permission — the woman's wrist as she lifted her teacup, the elderly man's temple where the vein was visible beneath papery skin, the running woman's neck where the blood was moving fast from exertion. I looked away each time. I looked back. I looked away.
The hunger was not pain. It was more like pressure — a building force in my chest and throat, an ache that was also a want, a need that had teeth. I could feel it changing the way I perceived the room: colours seemed slightly brighter, sounds seemed slightly sharper, and the smell of the café had separated into its component parts, each one distinct. Coffee. Rain. Wool. The sharp clean scent of the cleaning product they'd used on the wooden floor. And underneath all of it, the human smells — skin, sweat, the milk in the tea, the blood moving beneath it all.
I put my elbows on the table and pressed my hands against my face. My palms were cold. My forehead was warm. The contrast felt grounding, something I could hold onto.
Mateo came back with a tray. On the tray: a large white mug, a small glass of something red, and a plate with a cheese toastie cut into triangles. He set the mug in front of me and sat down across from me, and the smell that came off the mug was not coffee. It was something creamier, richer, with an undertone of something mineral that I couldn't immediately place.
"Goat's milk," Mateo said. "Rafa's idea. It's the closest thing to what your body needs that we can get without going to a butcher. Drink it."
I lifted the mug. The milk was warm — not hot, warm — and when I brought it to my lips I could smell it properly: a clean animal smell, slightly sweet, with a richness that was different from cow's milk. I drank.
It was not the hunger. The hunger was still there, coiled and waiting, but the goat's milk slid down my throat and hit my stomach and was absorbed immediately, like water into dry earth, and I felt something shift — a small steadying, a slight easing of the pressure, not an ending but a beginning of something that might become manageable.
I drank the whole mug. Mateo watched without comment. When I set the mug down, there was a thin white line on my upper lip where the milk had touched it, and I wiped it away with the back of my hand and felt slightly foolish.
"The red one is for later," Mateo said, nodding at the small glass. "When the hunger gets worse. It's a Bloody Mary — tomato juice, vodka, spices, and animal blood in a proportion that's just enough to take the edge off without — " He paused, choosing his words. "Without making you want more. Rafael makes them himself. It's his recipe."
I looked at the glass. The liquid inside was the colour of dark amber, and there was a stick of celery resting against the side, and I could smell the vodka from where I sat — sharp, alcoholic, with the backing warmth of whatever else was in there. The blood was not visible but I could feel it, the way you can feel a third presence in a room even when you can't see it.
"Why is he doing this?" I asked.
"Rafa?" Mateo picked up his own cup — coffee, from the smell of it — and took a sip. "Because that's what he does. He finds things that are lost and he brings them home. It's not a choice for him. It's more like a compulsion. If something is wounded and on his land, he can't leave it."
"I might be dangerous."
"You are dangerous. That's not in question. But danger isn't the same as threat, and Rafa can tell the difference." Mateo's eyes were on me again — that same quick, assessing gaze, taking in details and filing them away. "You're afraid of what you might do. That's not how predators think. Predators aren't afraid of themselves."
"I'm not a predator."
"You are. You just don't know how to be one yet." He set the coffee down. "That's fine. We have time."
Outside, through the rain-blurred window, I could see Damon standing at the edge of the car park. He was on the phone, his posture tense, one hand running through his hair in a gesture that looked like frustration. He was speaking but I couldn't hear what he was saying — just the rhythm of it, the rise and fall of a conversation that wasn't going the way he wanted.
"Rafa is on his way," Mateo said, following my gaze. "He was at the far end of the territory when we called — a pack run on the high fells. He'll be here in about an hour."
"An hour."
"Give or take. He runs fast when he wants to."
I thought about an hour. Sixty minutes of sitting in this warm café, surrounded by human blood that was getting harder to ignore with every passing minute. The goat's milk had taken the edge off but it hadn't erased anything — the hunger was still there, still pressing, and it was going to get worse before Rafa arrived, and Mateo knew this, and Damon knew this, and the only person in the room who didn't fully understand what was happening was me.
"There's a woman," I said. "At the table by the door. The one with the running shoes."
Mateo glanced over. "What about her?"
"She's been looking at me since we sat down. Not obviously — she's good at pretending she's not — but she keeps turning her head when she thinks I'm not watching." I paused. "She smells different from the others."
"Different how?"
"Cleaner. Less human. Like she's been around things that aren't human and hasn't washed the smell off yet."
Mateo's expression didn't change but something in his posture did — a subtle tightening, the way a dog's ears go up when it hears a sound that might be nothing or might be something. He lifted his coffee cup and took a long sip and set it down, and in the small ritual of that action I saw him think.
"Keep watching her," he said quietly. "Don't stare. Don't let her know you've noticed. Just keep watching and tell me if she does anything else."
The woman at the table by the door was now very focused on her tea. She had a cup in both hands, and her hair was falling forward, and she was not looking at me at all, which was itself a kind of looking — the deliberate avoidance of someone who knows they are being watched and doesn't want to be seen watching.
I drank some more of the goat's milk. I ate a triangle of the cheese toastie because Mateo had put it in front of me and it seemed rude not to, and because the act of chewing and swallowing felt normal, felt human, even if the food tasted like cardboard and I couldn't wait to be done with it. The hunger didn't want the toastie. The hunger wanted what was underneath the toastie, the red supply line that ran through every warm body in this room, and it was getting harder to remind myself that those bodies were not food.
Damon came back in. His face was tight. He didn't sit down.
"Rafa's coming," he said to Mateo. "But there's a complication. One of the pack found something on the road where they think Wren was hit. We're going to have to deal with that before the night is out."
"What kind of complication?" Mateo asked.
Damon looked at me, then back at Mateo, and something passed between them — a communication I wasn't part of, a shared understanding built on years of running together and fighting together and knowing each other the way the wolves knew each other. Then Damon pulled out a chair and sat down, and the chair scraped on the wooden floor in a way that made the woman at the door look up, and for a moment her eyes met mine across the café, and in that moment I saw something that made my skin go cold despite the over-heated air.
Recognition.
Not the recognition of having met before. The recognition of knowing what I was before I'd known it myself. She looked at me the way Mateo had looked at me in the hospital room — like I was a puzzle she'd been waiting to solve, or a question she'd been sent to answer.
Then she looked away, back at her tea, and Damon was leaning forward and saying something to Mateo about the road and the pack and what they'd found, and I was sitting very still in my chair with my hands around the warm mug and my heart doing something it hadn't done since I'd woken up in the hospital — beating fast, not from hunger but from fear, because I had just been looked at by someone who knew exactly what I was, and I didn't know who she was, and neither did the wolves.
The rain kept falling. The café kept filling with the small sounds of people living their lives — cups clinking, chairs scraping, the low murmur of conversation. And underneath all of it, the hunger kept building, and the woman kept drinking her tea, and somewhere on the fells, an alpha was running toward me through the dark, and I had no idea whether he was coming to save me or to stop me, or whether there was even a difference.
The clock on the wall said quarter past five. Rafa would be here in forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes of sitting in this room, surrounded by blood and watched by a woman who shouldn't have been watching, and the hunger building, and the wolves arguing quietly about things I wasn't allowed to hear.
I finished the goat's milk. I set the empty mug down on the table. I put my hands flat on the wooden surface and pressed down, feeling the grain of the wood against my palms, and I waited.
