Bloodwater has a way of collecting people who weren't exactly looking for it.

Abigail Reid came down from Austin with a trunk, a teaching certificate, and a quiet kind of warmth that tends to find the children before it finds anyone else. She loves her pupils something fierce — patient where patience is hard to come by, and steady on the days that get long.

Their parents are still working on it. So is she.

She's a Maine shifter, a long way from home in more ways than one. Not exactly common out here in wolf and coyote country, but she carries herself easy in her own skin — reads a room the way she reads a book, knows every card game from here to New York City, and can knock a tin can off a fence post at twenty feet without breaking her composure. Ask her where she learned any of it and she'll give you that quiet smile.

"Sometimes you just learn things."

She's got secrets, sure. Nothing that'd get her hanged — no blood on her hands, no trains robbed. But something followed her out of the east all the same, something she keeps folded up small and tucked somewhere nobody's thought to look yet.

Bloodwater's dirt is in her hair, her clothes, her bones now. She wasn't born to it. But she's not leaving it either.

Slow to trust, especially where menfolk are concerned. Which, in Bloodwater, is most everyone.

She'll warm up eventually.

Probably.

TW: Possible Dead Dove for Old West themes