Free Werewolf: Impossible Love by Emily Neily

  The snowflakes turned to tiny starbursts as they spun out of the darkness and caught the beams of the headlights. When she was younger, Serenity had liked to imagine that they really were stars, and that her mom was a brave space pilot on an important mission for the Rebel Alliance.
                  There was no time, no energy for imagination tonight. Serenity’s hands shook on the wheel, knuckles white and palms sweaty. She had fled into the mountains precisely so she could get past the reach of radio signals; there was no sound to cover up her tense breathing and the quiet sobs that still came with it.
                  She squinted at the winding road ahead of her, struggling to discern icy patches from plain snow with her left eye nearly swollen shut. The pain was irrelevant. The tears, though unstoppable, were irrelevant.
    The fear was relevant. It was 2 AM on a lonely highway deep in the Beartooth backcountry, and the snow wasn’t even close to letting up. This was the price of fleeing at midnight. This was the price of fleeing past the reach of an FM signal. This was the price of freedom, of safety, of—
    A strange calm came over Serenity as she realized that the car was no longer responding to the steering wheel, no longer responding to the skid-stopping motions that she’d practiced on suburban streets.
    She realized that she was airborne—then realized that this was what it felt like to truly give up. She thought she’d done that already, but no. You hadn’t really given up until your only response to your car flying off the road in a blizzard was to drop your hands from the wheel, take a deep breath, and wait.
    The impact either knocked her out or woke her up. Maybe it did both, one after the other. As Serenity lay on her back in the snow, her mind began to flood with things that suddenly mattered: the pain in her left eye, the new pain in her right leg, the razor-tipped cold of the snow melting against her bruised and broken skin, the stink of fr ee-burning gasoline, the hiss of snow melting on hot metal. These things mattered , and for a brief moment Serenity thought that she might have the willpower to stay alive after all.
    As she struggled to her feet, that illusion faded. She could not see the road. The smell of burning gasoline came, not from an inferno of twisted steel, but from a weak red flame that was already choking on the snow that had drifted in through the car’s broken window.
    Serenity did not come up with a reason to start walking, her bleeding hands stuffed down in her parka’s pockets and her right leg dragging behind her. It briefly occurred to her that something was sprained or broken. She wondered if she was bleeding. She kept squinting into the darkness ahead. Kept limping forward.
    A memory crept into her head of the summer her cousin gave her all his Tolkien books. He’d dog-eared a story in The Silmarillion about one of the heroes of mankind facing down a whole army of trolls and orcs and fire demons all by himself. It did not have a happy ending. The hero knew it was not going to have a happy ending. But as the orcs and trolls and balrogs dragged him down, the hero never once stopped shouting Aure Entuluva! Day will come again!
    All these years had gone by, and Serenity had thought that story was about hope. Every brittle, pained step through the snow reminded her how stupid that was. There wasn’t any hope here, at the bottom of her willpower and the end of her fight. If the blizzard and the forest and the night didn’t kill her, then Marshall would.
    Serenity would be fucked if she was going to let Marshall do it.
    Beneath the snow, her foot slipped on a rock. She went crashing to the ground on her injured leg with a ragged, pained cry. Serenity lay there for a moment, wondering if she’d gotten far enough from the car that she could die without any help from Marshall. The smell of burning gasoline told her that she wasn’t.
    “Aure entuluva,”