Chapter 3

The rogue backs away from me one slow step at a time, ears flat, tail low, every line of his massive body screaming a message his throat cannot form. Wrong. I am something wrong to him now, something that should not exist in a clearing this small.

I do not chase him. I cannot move at all, not yet, caught somewhere between the woman I was an hour ago and whatever is trying to climb up out of my spine.

My hands are shaking, and when I look down at them the shape is not right. My fingers are longer than they should be, the nails darkening at the tips into something closer to claws than nails have any business being. Pain rides up through my wrists and into my shoulders, not the clean pain of a wound but something deeper, like my bones have decided they are the wrong size for my body and are trying to fix the mistake all at once.

Somewhere farther into the ruined camp, past the burning tents, I hear a sound that stops my heart cold.

Fabrice's voice. Not giving orders. Screaming.

I have never heard him scream before. Ten years of watching him command a hall, humiliate a wife, laugh at threats that would send other men running, and I have never once heard fear in his voice until this moment, carried to me on smoke and Blood Moon light.

Whatever is happening to my body, it does not matter anymore. I run toward the sound.

The path through the trees is chaos, healers dragging wounded toward the ring stones, rogues moving between the fires like shadows given teeth. I do not stop for any of it. I run until the trees open onto the wide clearing where the Hunt party made camp, and what I find there drives the breath out of me.

Fabrice is on the ground, pinned beneath a rogue easily three times the size of the one that found me. This one is no ordinary wolf. Its shoulders alone are as wide as a horse, fur the color of old iron, eyes burning a shade of red that has nothing to do with reflected moonlight. It is not hunting him. It is playing with him, one massive paw pressing down on his chest while he claws uselessly at the ground, warriors scattered too far away to reach him in time.

I do not think. I do not plan. I am already moving before any part of me decides to.

"Get away from him," I hear myself scream, and my voice does not sound like mine anymore. It carries across the clearing with a weight that should be impossible, low and layered, like more than one throat is speaking at once.

The huge rogue's head snaps up. For half a heartbeat it looks at me the exact way the smaller one did, that same flash of animal fear, and something in me that has been silent my whole life finally understands what that fear means.

It is not afraid of me.

It is afraid of what I am about to become.

The change hits before I reach him.

Pain does not describe it. My spine arches backward, further than any spine should bend, and something tears loose along the length of it with a sound like green wood splitting. I hear myself scream and the sound is not human anymore, is barely animal either, something older than both, dragged up from wherever it has been sleeping for twenty six years.

Silver fur erupts down my arms, across my shoulders, faster than any shift I have ever witnessed in this pack, no slow transformation, no gradual change of shape. One second I am a woman running across scorched grass. The next I am something else entirely, taller than any wolf in this clearing, taller than the rogue crushing Fabrice beneath its paw, my claws catching the Blood Moon light like knives forged from the moon itself.

The rogue releases Fabrice and turns to face me fully now, iron fur bristling, red eyes narrowing.

It should be the more dangerous thing in this clearing. It is not.

I do not remember crossing the distance between us. I remember the impact, my claws finding its throat before it can so much as snarl, the shock of my own strength as I throw a creature three times my old body's weight sideways into the trees like it weighs nothing at all. Wood splinters. The rogue does not get back up.

Silence falls over the clearing in pieces, one scream ending, then another, then the clash of steel going quiet as every remaining wolf, rogue and pack alike, turns to look at the thing standing over Fabrice's body.

I look down at my own hands and do not recognize them. Silver fur, claws longer than daggers, a shape that belongs to no wolf story I was ever taught as a pup. Something ancient looks back at me from behind my own eyes when I catch my reflection in a puddle of blood soaked water, and it is not afraid at all.

Fabrice stares up at me from the ground, chest heaving, blood running from a gash along his ribs, and for the first time in ten years I watch an expression cross his face that has nothing to do with pride or command.

He looks at me the way the rogues looked at me.

He looks at me like I am the thing to fear.