Two years later, the Pacific Northwest felt like a different world, or perhaps it was just that the lens through which Clara and Reid viewed it had finally cleared. They had settled in a small, nameless town on the edge of the Bitterroot Mountains a place where the trees were tall enough to hide in, but the people were far enough apart that a man's secrets could stay tucked inside his collar.
Their house was a modest thing, a fixer-upper made of river stone and cedar that smelled of the linseed oil Clara used to treat the old beams. It sat on the edge of a wide, glacial lake that reflected the sky like a sheet of hammered silver.
Clara sat at the oak table in the sunroom, her fingers moving with practiced precision as she applied a thin layer of wheat paste to the spine of a nineteenth-century ledger. She was no longer restoring her father's ghosts; she was a freelance conservator for university libraries, a job that allowed her to work in the quiet hum of her own home.
The back door creaked open, and the scent of cold air and pine needles followed Reid inside.
He didn't look like a man haunted anymore. His frame had filled out, the gaunt, feverish hunger replaced by a steady, quiet strength. He wore a simple flannel shirt, and the scars on his hands once jagged and raw had faded into thin, silver lines that looked like a map of a life survived.
"The lake is starting to freeze at the edges," Reid said, setting a basket of wood by the hearth. He walked over to her, resting a hand on her shoulder. His touch was no longer scorching; it was a steady, radiating warmth.
"The cycle is coming up, isn't it?" Clara asked, not looking up from her work, but leaning her head against his hand.
"Tomorrow night," Reid said.
He didn't head for a cellar. He didn't look for chains.
In the first year of their new life, they had discovered that the "rage" of the shift was tied to the resistance of it. In Oakhaven, Reid had fought the wolf like it was an intruder, a demon to be exorcised. Here, under Clara's watchful eye and the steady rhythm of their shared life, he had learned to move with it.
They had built a "sanctuary" a fenced acre of deep woods behind the house. When the moon grew full, Reid didn't go into a hole in the ground. He went into the trees. He ran until his lungs burned and his paws were stained with the earth, and when the sun rose, he would return to the back porch, curled in a heavy wool blanket Clara left for him, waiting for the coffee to brew.
He was still a monster once a month, but he was a monster that knew where home was.
"I saw a hawk today," Reid said, sitting across from her. He began to sharpen a small carving knife. He had taken up woodworking, turning the fallen limbs of the mountain into intricate, beautiful bowls. "It watched me for a long time. It didn't fly away. It just... recognized me."
"Nature has a better memory than people," Clara murmured.
They rarely spoke of Oakhaven. It was a bruise that had healed, though the skin there would always be a little tougher. They had heard through a letter from Miller who sent them a Christmas card every year with no return address that Silas had vanished. Some said he'd moved north into the Yukon; others said he'd simply become more wolf than man, a legend told to tourists to keep them off the ridge.
The town itself had moved on, finding new things to fear, new secrets to bury.
Reid reached across the table and took Clara's hand, his thumb tracing the wedding band she wore a simple gold hoop they'd bought in a pawn shop in Spokane.
"Do you ever regret it?" he asked. It was a question he asked once a year, always when the moon began to fatten. "The library? The city? The life where the windows don't have to be reinforced?"
Clara set down her brush and looked him in the eyes. The gold ring around his pupils was still there, a thin halo of light that made him look like a saint in a cathedral of shadows.
"I used to think my job was to stop things from changing," she said. "To keep the paper from yellowing, to keep the glue from cracking. I thought the best things were the ones that stayed the same."
She squeezed his hand.
"But you taught me that the most beautiful things are the ones that break and find a way to grow back. I don't want a life that's preserved in a glass case, Reid. I want this one. The one that smells like woodsmoke and sweat. The one that's a little bit dangerous and entirely real."
Reid leaned forward and kissed her. It was a slow, deep breath of a kiss a promise kept.
That night, as the moon rose over the Bitterroot peaks, the world was silent. There were no guns, no mobs, and no screams. There was only the sound of the wind in the pines and the steady, synchronized breathing of two people who had found a way to bridge the gap between the wild and the human.
Reid walked to the back door, pausing to look at the woman who had saved him not from the wolf, but from the loneliness of it.
"I'll be back by dawn," he said.
"I'll have the tea ready," she replied.
As he stepped out into the silver light, Reid Blackwood didn't look like a man with a curse. He looked like a man with a purpose. He ran into the darkness, his body shifting with a fluid, natural grace, a shadow moving through shadows.
Inside, Clara picked up her pen and opened the back of the cedar box Miller had given them. She began to write their own chapter, her handwriting steady and clear.
"We are not the stories they tell about us," she wrote. "We are the choices we make when the light goes out. And in the dark, we chose to stay."
The house was quiet. The hearth was warm. And for the first time in a hundred years, the legacy of the Blackwoods wasn't written in blood, but in the simple, enduring peace of a Tuesday morning.