Chapter 4

Fabrice does not move from where he lies on the ground. I do not either, not at first. We stay like that for a long, strange moment, him staring up at a shape that used to share his bed, me staring down at a man I broke a jaw for once, in a different life, before I understood what breaking meant.

Then the forest reminds me it is still burning.

A rogue howl cuts through the clearing from the tree line, and I feel my body answer before my mind catches up to it. Whatever is wearing my skin tonight does not wait for permission. I turn from Fabrice and move toward the sound, and the ground eats the distance faster than my legs should be able to cover it.

The rogues that scattered his warriors across the ridge are still out there, three, four, more than I can count in the dark, tearing through what is left of our defenses like the pack never had teeth to begin with. I reach the first one before it sees me coming.

I do not remember choosing violence. I remember it choosing me, the same ancient thing that opened its eyes in that first clearing now moving my claws, my jaw, my whole body, like a rider who has waited a very long time for a horse this strong. The rogue goes down in seconds. I do not linger over it. I am already moving toward the next one, and the next, my silver fur soaked black in patches by the time the fourth rogue finally understands what it is facing and turns to run.

It does not get far.

Somewhere in the middle of it, I stop feeling like myself. Not gone exactly, more like a passenger riding behind my own eyes while something older drives. I catch pieces of it. The weight of a body thrown clear across the clearing. The sound of my own voice, that same layered, impossible sound, rising into something that is not quite a howl and not quite a word.

When the last rogue falls and does not get back up, the clearing goes silent in a way I have never heard a forest go silent before.

No wind. No birds, though there were none to begin with tonight. No warriors shouting orders, because every warrior close enough to see what just happened has stopped shouting anything at all.

I stand in the middle of the wreckage, chest heaving, silver fur catching the last red light of the Blood Moon, and slowly, slowly, I feel my own mind settling back into place behind my eyes. The passenger steps back. I am still tall, still clawed, still wearing a shape no wolf in this pack has a name for, but it is my hands again. My breath again.

I look around at what I have done.

Rogue bodies litter the clearing, more than I killed, I realize slowly, more than any single wolf could have killed in the time it took me to cross from Fabrice's side to here. The ones that survived have already fled into the dark, and even from this distance I can feel it, the fear rolling off the tree line like heat off a fire.

Warriors from our own pack are emerging from where they scattered, torches raised, faces pale in the moonlight. They do not run toward me the way warriors run toward a victory. They stop at the edge of the clearing, weapons half raised, uncertain whether the thing standing among the rogue dead is something to celebrate or something to kill.

I understand the question in their eyes because I am asking it myself.

"It's her," someone says, low, disbelieving, and I cannot tell from the voice whether it is meant as relief or as warning.

A young warrior steps forward first, one of the boys who used to salute me a little too formally at feasts, and instead of raising his blade, he lowers it. Then he lowers himself, one knee pressing into the bloodied grass, head bowed.

I do not understand at first. Then another warrior follows him, and another, the motion spreading through the clearing the way fear spreads, except this is not fear moving through them now. Or maybe it is. Maybe it always was, only aimed somewhere new.

One by one, every warrior standing in that ruined clearing sinks to their knees.

I turn slowly, my own breath loud in my ears, and see it is not only the warriors. Healers who followed the fighting out from the ring stones. Old wolves too tired to have run from anything in years. Even the young ones, pups who should not be anywhere near a battlefield, kneel in the dirt beside their parents with wide, frightened, worshipful eyes.

They are not looking at me the way they look at a luna.

They are not even looking at me the way they look at an alpha.

I have seen this look exactly once before, carved into old stone in a story my grandmother used to tell before she died, about wolves so ancient the pack stopped repeating their names generations ago. Gods, she called them. Not rulers. Something the pack once knelt to because the alternative was to be destroyed by it.

I turn in a slow circle in the middle of that silent clearing, blood cooling on claws I do not yet know how to control, and every single face turned up toward me wears that same expression.

Not fear of a monster.

Reverence for something they thought their pack had lost a very long time ago.