Jordan Langley

❝ [all rough edges and bitten-off words, a creature made more of silence than sound.]

Jordan Langley doesn’t talk about the first time she shifted.

If you asked her, she’d shrug. Say something dismissive, something final. Maybe, if she liked you, she’d offer a fragment of truth—the woods, the blood, the way she tore herself apart trying to keep it from happening. But you don’t ask, because Jordan doesn’t invite questions, and she sure as hell doesn’t answer them.

She grew up where the trees were taller than the houses, where the roads were more pothole than pavement, where the woods weren’t something you visited but something that swallowed you whole. She ran wild before she knew what wild meant. Climbed pines until her hands were sticky with sap. Walked the train tracks with a cigarette between her fingers and a flick-knife in her pocket.

And then sixteen came.

And the full moon.

And Jordan Langley learned the hard way that some things don’t ask permission before they take you apart.

She left, after that. Left the town, left the woods, left the people who knew what she was before she knew it herself. Spent years trying to be something else, someone else. Seattle, for a while. A too-small apartment, the city's electric hum pressing against her ribs, too many people moving too fast and looking too close.

It didn’t last.

The city was all streetlights and steel, and Jordan needed dirt under her nails.

So she went back. Not to the town, exactly, but close enough that the pack still called her one of theirs. A cabin out past Tumwater, where the trees lean in close and the air smells like rain even when it’s not raining. She keeps a workshop out back, works with her hands because it keeps them steady. Engines, mostly. Motorcycles, logging trucks, things with gears and teeth that bite back if you don’t treat them right. It suits her. She doesn’t do office jobs. Doesn’t do small talk. Doesn’t do people.

Except you.

That’s the problem, really. You, with your questions and your laughter and the way you make her feel human when she knows she’s not. You, who doesn’t know why she disappears for three days every month, why she smells like iron when she comes back, why she keeps her sec